‘His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute’: Azikiwe’s spectacular self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACTNationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe won international acclaim through his support of Nigerian workers during the 1945 General Strike, but the important role of Azikiwe’s sophisticated textuality has rarely been acknowledged. Although he was already an accomplished writer and poet, Azikiwe’s success in 1945 is instead vaguely assigned to his charisma and oratory; this refusal to analyse Azikiwe’s textuality leads to the unsatisfactory contention that Azikiwe’s massive support was largely inexplicable. Countering such widespread assumptions, this paper will demonstrate that Azikiwe’s 1945 writing must be understood as the textuality of an elite African writer. Rather than regarding his writings as functional and evidentiary, we must attend to their discursive structure, their stylistic qualities, and their elaboration of a flamboyant authorial persona. In doing so, we will connect Azikiwe’s intervention, often understood purely from the standpoint of labour or political studies, with a growing literature on ‘tin-trunk’ non-elite writers studies of authorial self-fashioning in colonial Africa, and colonial pamphleteering. Ultimately, we will find that questions of personal credibility and cultural references from across the Black Atlantic are critical in Azikiwe’s efforts to secure the trust of his readers.