A long prehistory brings the story of journals voicing and connecting the expressive cultures of Africa and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth, to Présence Africaine, a distinctive model and influential force by mid-century, and beyond. This chapter surveys their sources, examines some major texts, links these periodicals to the black world’s urgent public issues, and assesses the genre’s condition as the twenty-first century begins.

The early African precursors came from European mission churches that published oral narratives and some secular poetry and prose as adjuncts to religious texts. These were most notable from the Xhosa when a press opened at Lovedale in 1823 and the Yoruba as Samuel Crowther’s similar evangelism emerged in the 1840s and generated a print culture of some diversity. The next phase, more secular, included newspapers created by publishing writers like Edward Wilmot Blyden and John Tengo Jabavu. Then came twentieth-century works like Nigeria Magazine, regularly funded and produced by colonial authorities with a scholarly style, “finished” look, and commercial appeal; there were 40,000 copies of its 1960 independence issue.

“Independents,” however, dominated twentieth-century periodical literature. Secular and nonofficial reviews with creative and critical writing in diverse formats from small presses, these were started by individual or collaborating writers themselves, drawing on local practices and interests. Site by site, genre by genre, adding nonprint idioms, they privileged indigenous voices. Their composite role after the First World War (whether or not by conscious policy) was of great historic magnitude, spreading multi-ethnic, multinational, Negritude, and pan-African works, feeding and sometimes leading the politics of self-determination that emerged on the continent and in the diaspora by mid-century.