The politics of portrait photographs in southern Nigerian newspapers, 1945–1954

Abstract

This paper focuses on the increasingly important role played by pictorial journalism in the struggle for Nigerian self-rule. From the late 1920s onwards, daily newspapers printed portrait photographs with a pro-colonial slant: members of the colonial administration, international heads of state, foreign ministers and, occasionally, the highest-ranking Nigerian politicians. To challenge a dominance of pro-colonial depictions, the anti-colonial West African Pilot introduced a new style of printed portrait photographs in 1937 that became a role model for other newspapers in the 1940s and the 1950s. This article focuses on the use of these portrait photographs for the political propaganda of party-affiliated newspapers, such as the Daily Service, the West African Pilot and the Southern Nigeria Defender, which were published in the southwest of Nigeria. The technological difficulties of printing photographs in newspapers in the 1940s meant that editors had a limited choice of which portrait photographs to include (mainly photographs of politicians, businessmen and chiefs were available). The editors were further constrained by the scarcity of photographs of ordinary people. In addition, photographs depicting the colonial administration’s personnel or edifices were not in line with the editorial policy of the anti-colonial newspapers. In the 1950s, when Nigerian newspapers were able to afford the technological equipment to reproduce their own photographs, a representative cross-section of Nigerian society was still rarely included in the portrait photographs. The photographs that were printed showed the self-fashioning of Nigerian leaders of democratic parties, ahead of the emergence of a new style of democratic and charismatic leaders in Senegal. Although these anti-colonial images were more democratic than the old colonial images in pro-colonial newspapers, they replaced the imperial hierarchies which editors rejected, with the new social hierarchies of local Nigerian elites foreshadowing the politics of independent Nigeria.