African Print Culture Research Articles

African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944–1945

The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944–1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American–West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their Americans’ visit had a significant impact in wartime West Africa and was widely documented in the African press. This article examines the NNPA tour geographically, before analyzing American reporters’ interactions with West Africans, and assessing African responses to the tour. Drawing on both African American and West African newspapers, it situates the NNPA tour within the history of World War II West Africa, and in terms of African print culture. It argues that the NNPA tour became the focus of West African hopes for future political, economic, and intellectual relations with African Americans, while revealing how the NNPA reporters engaged African audiences during their tour.

Unsettling the Ranks: 1930s Zulu-Language Writings on African Progress and Unity in The Bantu World

ABSTRACT While much of the extant scholarship on The Bantu World has addressed the English language content, this article shifts the focus to previously unexplored 1930s Zulu-language writings on African advancement and unity. It makes an intervention into the study of African explorations of the possibilities and limits of progress amidst the abiding challenges and paradoxes of colonial modernity, in a setting characterised by increasing segregation. The Zulu pages, the article claims, enhance our understanding of contributors’ involvement in shaping and expanding the very constituency the editor, RV Selope Thema, sought to create. In particular, Zulu-language letters to the editor, often written in response to editorials and articles, convey ideas neither fully anticipated by Thema, nor fully articulated in the more restrained English pages. Located in the rich body of work on African print cultures, the article first discusses the ideologies behind this multilingual weekly newspaper. It then foregrounds the key place of Zulu-language usage in The Bantu World, as well as the (male-dominated) networks, publics and communities of readers created through the vernacular, which flourished despite attempts to marginalise African languages. An examination of key 1930s controversies over the notions of advancement, entrepreneurship and unity shows that the Zulu pages partly destabilised prevalent elite ideas of progress as intertwined with white patronage.

African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century

Book Review| September 01 2021 African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century. DEREK R. PETERSON, EMMA HUNTER, and STEPHANIE NEWELL. Niklas Hultin Niklas Hultin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of West African History (2021) 7 (2): 140–143. https://doi.org/10.2307/48642064 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Niklas Hultin; African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century. Journal of West African History 1 September 2021; 7 (2): 140–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/48642064 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal of West African History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 Michigan State University2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Book in Africa: Critical Debates, Edited by Caroline Davis and David Johnson

Reviewed by: The Book in Africa: Critical Debates ed. by Caroline Davis And David Johnson Aditi Paul The Book in Africa: Critical Debates EDITED BY CAROLINE DAVIS AND DAVID JOHNSON Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xii + 280 pp. ISBN 9781137401618 cloth. In 2012 at the Institute of English Studies, London University, "The Book in Africa Symposium" was held. Some of the presentations made in that symposium coupled with new case studies from across Africa on the manuscript tradition led to the publication of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates. In addition, this book is part of Palgrave Macmillan's series titled New Directions in Book History that is exploring, [End Page 251] documenting, and reassessing the neglected global history of print, script, and post-print cultures from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The Book in Africa is an invaluable overview of the marginalized body of African scholarship that has been a by-product of European missionaries, colonial administrators, and traders. The book is divided into three sections and each chapter interconnects sociohistorical circumstances and literary scholarship: (1) the printing of oral manuscripts in different African contexts, (2) the relationship between the book and African politics and economics, and (3) the production, circulation, and reception of literary texts in Africa. In the first section, Archie L. Dick examines reading culture from 1780 to 1840 in the Cape of Good Hope. He notes that the circulation of copied texts was widespread among the Cape inhabitants. Whether it was newspapers, religious scriptures, political propaganda leaflets, or schoolbooks, reading materials before the advent of the printing press were copied texts and reflected religious, social, class, and language divides. The author then claims that in the early 19th century, when print capitalism emerged, the motive for reading and circulating printed text changed to economic gains. Fawzi Abdulrazak charts the advent of the printing press in Morocco. He analyzes four phases of the government involvement in publishing: (1) 1865–71, when printing, finance and marketing, and quality control was under government jurisdiction; (2) 1871–97, when the government abandoned direct supervision but used printing for propaganda purposes and private citizens bore the responsibility; (3) 1897–1908, when publishers sponsored books for both charitable and profitable purposes and the government assumed the role of censor; and (4) 1908–12, when the government applied stringent controls over printing and exploited it for political drives. Likewise, Alessandro Gori, in his chapter, explores different phases in Ethiopian history that shaped Islamic printing. He argues that due to the intervention of the Emperor, print culture in Ethiopia had slower progress as compared with the countries wherein printing under Christian missionaries was flourishing. Shamil Jeppie captures the oral, written, and print tradition in Timbuktu. He discusses Ahmad Bul'araf, who turned Timbuktu into a repository of books through his collection of manuscripts. In the second section, David Johnson challenges Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined community and questions the possibility of print culture contributing to postcolonial South African nation-building. He argues that despite the reality reflected and realization among citizens, print literature lacked ideological influence on nation-building and, therefore, had a negligible impact. Carol Davis traces the history of the African print culture of a British publisher: Longmans. Davis argues that Longmans circulated linguistic, historical, and anthropological knowledge about Africa through London-based publications and the African education system, while indigenizing staff and publications and allowing governments, African authors, and educational institutions to establish alliances with Longmans. But what remains a mystery is the failure to keep Longmans publishing ventures and profits in Africa on record. Davis concludes by stating that the fragmentary remnants of Longmans' commercial business in Africa is unbelievable and could be a conscious veil over the company's history with reasons unknown. On the other hand, Giacomo Macola and Jack Hogan's chapter discusses Lozi thinkers and how they used books as tools for propagating Lozi ethnicism. The authors argue that while histories and ethnographies of Lozi were [End Page 252] reflected in vernacular ethnographic works, upon the advent of electronic material, the trend drifted away from postcolonial literature. Elizabeth Le Roux explores Witwatersrand University Press (WUP) and narrates how sociopolitical, economic, and ideational factors exert pressure...

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords: R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality

Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell, African Print Cultures: newspapers and their publics in the twentieth century. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press (hb US$95 – 978 0 472 07317 7; pb US$34.95 – 978 0 472 05317 9). 2016, 460 pp.

Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell, African Print Cultures: newspapers and their publics in the twentieth century. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press (hb US34.95 – 978 0 472 05317 9). 2016, 460 pp. - Volume 88 Issue 4

Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell (eds), African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century

Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter and Stephanie Newell (eds), <i>African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century</i>

African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell

<i>African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century.</i> Edited by Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell

Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline

African print culture has not been widely studied from a historical perspective. Many studies focus on the present, without interrogating the historical developments that led to the present situation. We do find information available on what has been published over time, but little attention has been paid to the material forms of texts, their distribution, marketing, readership, or impact. Much earlier work is also largely descriptive. It is only recently—in the past ten years or so—that theoretical models of book history have begun to influence studies in this field. This essay is the first attempt to organize book historical studies in an African context. While this survey cannot be considered comprehensive, given the scope of the continent and its research, it presents a sampling of the most significant work and highlights trends.