Media Across the African Diaspora

Content, Audiences, and Influence

Omotayo O. Banjo, Omotayo O. Banjo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351660198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de los pueblos negros

This volume gathers scholarship from varying disciplinary perspectives to explore media owned or created by members of the African diaspora, examine its relationship with diasporic audiences, and consider its impact on mainstream culture in general. Contributors highlight creations and contributions of people of the African diaspora, the interconnections of Black American and African-centered media, and the experiences of audiences and users across the African diaspora, positioning members of the Black and African Diaspora as subjects of their own narratives, active participants and creators. In so doing, this volume addresses issues of identity, culture, audiences, and global influence.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Contributions to Mainstream Media Culture

1 The Early Black Press in Canada

Tokunbo Ojo

Historically, Black media have always been important sites of discursive activities and public engagement in the wider sociocultural contexts of political struggles and community building. For instance, in the 19th century, Black newspapers were at the forefront of antislavery and emancipation movements. They fostered critical deliberations and civic dialogue on issues that were of common concerns to Black publics. In the contemporary era, Black media still remain important sociocultural and political institutions in the contexts of Canada’s mosaic of multiculturalism (Ojo, 2006). Through their hybridized form of civic and cultural journalism, they chart the connections between notions of citizenship, public service ethos, and communal identities in the mediated context of the Canadian nationhood. In addition to being alternative subaltern public spheres, they have been strategic training ‘grounds’ for many young and veteran Black Canadian journalists. Among the veteran journalists that have crossed from the Black news media outlets to the mainstream national news outlets are Tom Godfrey (investigative reporter for the Toronto Sun), Hamlin Grange (retired celebrated print and broadcast reporter for outlets such as Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), and Royson James (award-winning reporter and municipal affairs columnist for the Toronto Star). The young journalists include Maya Johnson, Quebec City bureau chief for the CTV Montreal since February 2016.

But, quite strikingly, within the broader discussions of Canadian journalism history and evolution of news media, the role and contributions of Black press are conspicuously absent. This neglect or lack of consideration in the scholarship is not limited to Black media alone; it also extends to other nonmainstream media such as Aboriginal and native press in Canada. This is also reflected in many journalism programs’ curricula and course syllabi where the social history of journalism mainly begins from the era of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and ends with web 2.0, social media and Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Facebook media’ with minimal or zero attention to nontraditional mainstream media that are not in the canon of the “elite journalism.” As articulated in Osler’s (1993) seminal work on the evolution of journalism in Canada, newspapers such as the Globe and Mail and Le Devoir exemplified the elite journalism in the Canadian context.

In radio and television, elite journalism is narrowly restricted to some news and public affairs components of such state-owned or sponsored organizations as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the provincial educational television authorities … and the news and public affairs contents of virtually all North American privately owned broadcasting organizations.

(Osler, 1993, p. 78)

Against this backdrop of the scholarship gap, this chapter examines the development of Black press in Canada. It provides an analysis of the multifaceted roles of early Black newspapers and their contributions to journalism as a cultural act. Of particular interest is these early newspapers’ journalistic orientation of public service and social responsibility, albeit ideological lens of Black political consciousness.

Development of Black Press in Canada

Historically, the evolution of Black newspapers in Canada began in March 1845 in Toronto with The British American newspaper (Winks, 1997). But, in the historical rendition of the evolution of Black press in Canada, The British American newspaper is not often included because it only existed for less than a month. Consequently, the Voice of the Fugitive, which was established almost six years after The British American newspaper, is often regarded as the first Black newspaper in Canada. While The British American indeed folded prematurely and was ephemeral in the historical contexts of Black press in Canada, it still remains the first Black newspaper in Canada. However, in terms of the historical impact and legacy, both the Voice of the Fugitive and the Provincial Freedman were the standard-bearers for the Black expression and concerns in the 19th century, despite the existence of other Black Canadian newspapers that included The Voice of the Bondsman (ran by J.J.E. Linton, a Presbyterian abolitionist), The British Lion, and Windsor-based The True Royalist and Weekly Intelligencer that Reverend A.R. Green of the New British Methodist Episcopal Church published. Both newspapers remain the bastion of advocacy community journalism, as far as Black communities were concerned in the 19th century.

The sociopolitical contexts of the era made them an important institution for the Blacks in Canada as well as those on the south of the border. Socially and politically, Blacks were considered “outcasts” in the Anglo-Saxon modern nation-state of Canada. Like Jews, Asians, and Native people, they did not fit into 19th-century Canada’s national visions, which were codified around Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage and allowed for a deeply entrenched moral racial superiority in the political discourse and rhetoric of every prime minister that ran for office between 1870 and 1940 (Mathieu, 2010). Up till 1940, “every prime minister, whether running on the Liberal or the Conservative ticket, insisted that the Dominion of Canada would be a White man’s land toiled by brawny Europeans and Americans, without elbow room for people of color” (Mathieu, 2010, p. 14). The divisive political rhetoric of racial supremacy of White Canadians also fueled derogatory and racist commentaries about Blacks in the mainstream White-owned newspapers such as Kent Advertiser, Toronto Colonist, Hamilton Spectator, and Brantford Expositor, especially with a new wave of migration of Black entrepreneurs and professionals from the United States to Canada from 1877 onward (Cooper, 2016; Mathieu, 2010; Silverman, Bellavance, & Rudin, 1984). In the backdrop of all these were ongoing legal and illegal transatlantic slave trades in which several Blacks were forcefully taken from Africa and sold as slaves across Quebec, Atlantic, and Central Canada, in particular (Mensah, 2010; Winks, 1997).

Such harsh sociocultural realities and political climate led to the formation of these newspapers as both key communicative infrastructure for civic consciousness and also a counter-hegemonic vehicle of political engagement for social justice. At the 1850 Sandwich Colored Convention, a mutual resolution passed for the establishment of Black press in Canada. As Cooper (2016) documented, the resolution from convention delegates stated:

Whereas, We as a people, have a great work to accomplish and we have no instrument that we can use with more effect than the public press – as we struggle against opinion, our warfare lies in the field of thought, embodying ourselves to field, we need a printing press – for the press is the vehicle of thought – the ruler of opinions. We need a press, that we may be independent of those who have always oppressed us – we need a press that we many hang our banners on the outer wall, that all who pass by may read why we struggle, and what we struggle for.

Resolved, that we make immediate effort to have a newspaper established in our midst, which shall be the advocate of the colored people of Canada West.

(p. 137)

The following year, Henry Bibb¹ and Mary Bibb established the Voice of the Fugitive as a bimonthly newspaper for audiences in Canada, the United States, and England. In 1853, Mary Ann Shad Cary founded The Provincial Freeman, a weekly newspaper. As was the norm at the time in the newspaper industry, it was a four-page broadsheet newspaper. Both newspapers had their own printing press platforms. In fact, the Provincial Freeman’s became the official printing press² of the town council of Chatham, Ontario (Murray, 1959). They published a variety of news stories that were specific to the Black communities as well as general national and international public affairs news stories. They were also repositories for public knowledge, banal lists of community events, information, and concerns of everyday life.

Unlike in the United States where there were at least three daily Black newspapers and scores of weekly Black newspapers between 1827 and 1860, there was no single Black daily newspaper in Canada (Simmons, 1998; Winks, 1997). Combined, Canada had less than 12 Black newspapers, which were published weekly, biweekly, monthly, or even quarterly between 1827 and 1860. The absence of Black daily newspaper was primarily due to the limited financial resources³ to support such an enterprise. Second, with a low Black population in the country at the time, the readership base was small and scattered across the country. As an example, out of Toronto’s population of 50,000 in early 1850s, only about 1,000 were Black (Bearden & Butler, 1977; Rhodes, 1998). In Montreal, there were also about 1,000 Blacks among the city’s population in 1840 (Austin, 2013). Based on multiple accounts from government and nongovernment sources, the aggregated population of Blacks across in places such as Chatham, Halifax, Windsor, Charlottetown, Newfoundland, Pine Creek, Vancouver Island, and St. John’s was estimated to be less than 100,000 out of Canada’s population⁴ of about 4.1 million in the 1860s (Krauter & Davis, 1978; Mensah, 2010; Williams, 1997; Winks, 1997). In addition to all these, the literary level was also low across country.

Nonetheless, newspapers were still important outlets for opinion and public debates for Canadian Blacks, many of whom were freeborn Black Canadians, African-Americans who fled the United States during the slavery trade era, indentured laborers from Britain, and Canadian Pacific railway workers/porters. In particular, newspapers were influential forums for community debates on slave trade abolition as well as on the socioeconomic and political empowerment education of Blacks in Canada. As an integral platform of the communal communication ecology, the Voice of the Fugitive and the Provincial Freeman drew on contributors and writers from Canada, the United States, and across the Atlantic Ocean to sensitize their readers to structural inequality of the period. Though varied in style, length, tone, and expressed points of views, all were related in different ways to the specific set of lived relations, or what Raymond Williams (1977) called “structure of feelings,” that underpinned the broader “Black transnational antislavery awareness and culture, in respect not only to Canada and the United States, but beyond” (Cooper, 2016, p. 136). The collage of contents on the transnational Black experiences not only animated discrete interests and viewpoints that were part of constitutive voices of the civil publics of broader Black communities, but these contents also alluded to a shared sense of urgency in the struggle for equality and Black freedom in Canada and other places that spanned the frontiers of Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean.

Both newspapers through the community activism of their publishers/editors linked up with other Black institutions such as churches and community-based activist groups to press for social justice, equality, and Black empowerment in Canada. These community-based activist works included intense lobby for access to education and schools for Blacks.

To many Blacks, education was key to freedom, a privilege denied in slavery. It served as a way to combat charges of racial inferiority and would produce a generation of skilled men and women who would, leaders hoped, foster the development of a self-reliant community.

(Rhodes, 1994, p. 65)

In the same vein, both newspapers also aligned with White abolitionists such as George Brown (editor of the influential Toronto based Globe newspaper) and William King in the...