Individual Voices: Journalistic Records

Abstract

Black journalists writing in their own journals helped to build in London a small but significant colour-based press industry. Press publishing by Claude McKay, Duse Muhammed Ali, Felix Hercules, and Taylor and their interaction with American thinkers such as Garvey and DuBois is discussed. Newspaper articles and the nature of publishing in the African Telegraph, The African & Orient Review, Crisis, Negro World are analysed. These are contrasted to negative comments on race in Britain’s mainstream media and the colonial office—for example in writing that relates to financial issues—in order to fully appreciate the difficult context within which black publishing operated. The Pan-Africanism of Hercules and his call for ‘Unity of the Coloured Race’ is elaborated through his literary skills and erudition in the pages of the African Telegraph, whilst simultaneously emphasising to the West the need for the education of Africans and presenting readers with in-depth political analyses. Duse Muhammed Ali’s journalism in The African & Orient Review, as the voice of ‘coloured people in the world’ was equally well informed and opinionated, but published with distinctive and surprising forms of commercialism. Clearly pioneering, but short lived, Britain’s black journalism during the aftermaths of the First World War articulates new forms of self-reflexivity in periodical publishing.