English-language Newspapers in Colonial West Africa

In the decades between Europe's ‘scramble for Africa’ in the mid-1880s and the end of the Second World War, increasing numbers of educated professionals and local entrepreneurs secured investment and capital to import printing presses and newsprint into the territories that made up British West Africa. Numerous English-language newspapers came into existence in this period, as well as bilingual and African-language titles (Omu 1978, Jones-Quartey 1975). They were owned and edited by men who, at least in the earliest decades of newspaper production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earned their main incomes as businessmen or lawyers and ran newspapers as a sideline.

West African newspapers in English date back much earlier to the Royal Gazettes in early nineteenth-century Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, and missionary newspapers in mid-century Liberia and Nigeria (Jones-Quartey 1967, Burrowes 2004). These publications contained shipping and commercial news for European and African merchants, government and missionary reports and occasional poems and short stories, and they were read alongside British newspapers, Christian journals and trade journals in both Britain and West Africa.

By the mid-1880s, anglophone African newspapers were largely owned, managed and edited by African intellectuals and businessmen. Often belonging to migrant communities from towns along the West African coast, these elites articulated regional and global interests and, depending on their political persuasions, connected with British trading networks in Liverpool and London or pan-African networks in Europe, North America, Africa and the Caribbean, as well as with anticolonial movements further afield (Mann 1985, Gocking 1999). By the early 1900s, when the material selected for this chapter was published, West African newspapers had become hubs of political activism and literary creativity. They were a significant part of the public life of educated West Africans as local professional elites and, in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, newly educated sub-elites sought space for the expression of opinions and arguments.

From the earliest days of West African newspaper production, editors imagined the circulation and impact of their discourse in global terms. Often using the humanistic logic of anti-racism alongside the language of press freedom, newspapers demonstrated local elites’ mastery of the logic of post- Enlightenment rationalism.