The Power to Name

A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa

Stephanie Newell

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780821444498
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers.

The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.

PART I

Newspapers in Colonial West Africa

1

The “Fourth and Only Estate”

Defining a Public Sphere in Colonial West Africa

In his work on the evolution of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas identifies a brief utopian moment in European history. In the early eighteenth century, he writes, a bourgeois space emerged that “mediate[d] between society and state, in which the public organize[d] itself as the bearer of public opinion.”¹ Comprising coffeehouses, salons, and social clubs and including printed materials such as novels, periodicals, and pamphlets, this “public sphere” is defined by Habermas as a nonhierarchical environment in which consensus was built through processes of free, critical, rational dialogue between bourgeois citizens as they emerged from feudal hierarchies in early modern Europe.² By the early nineteenth century, however, this liberal public sphere had waned, a victim of increasing state interventionism and the intrusion of private corporations into the dynamic space between state and society.³

Whether or not this idealistic assessment accurately reflects the beginnings of modern bourgeois cultures in Europe and whether or not an emergent class can ever be status free in the manner described in the foregoing précis, one exception to the rule of bourgeois reason stands out immediately. Nothing could be further from Habermas’s notion of democratic public dialogue than European imperial expansion. If the eighteenth century spawned the idea that individuals of reason could produce civil society and the common good, it also spawned reactionary, evolutionist myths of non-European irrationality and tribal subhumanity epitomized by “aboriginals” and Africans.

Unlike Habermas’s exemplary citizens who were “stripped of status . . . the strength of their rational arguments being more important than their position in society or personal wealth,”⁴ Africans for much of the colonial period were widely regarded by their rulers as incapable of reason or civility, requiring intervention and tutelage from men of modernity and enlightenment.⁵ Interestingly, however, as this chapter will suggest, nothing could be closer to West African newspapermen’s definitions of the role of the press between the 1880s and World War II than Habermas’s utopian model of the public sphere. Unlike other types of local publication, such as ethnic histories, missionary periodicals, and town histories, which were often anything but egalitarian, newsprint made possible the imagination of a new type of public, conceived as anonymous, detached from personal and familial affiliations, and capable of expressing public opinion for the first time in the new public space constituted by African-owned newspapers.⁶

AFRICAN-OWNED NEWSPAPERS AND WEST AFRICA’S PUBLIC SPHERE

In April 1905, the proprietors of the Gold Coast Leader were prosecuted for publishing a defamatory article by a correspondent using the common pseudonym “Veritas,” in which police superintendent Isaac Emmanuel Quist of Kumasi was accused of the double rape of a pregnant woman. Quist was well known to the Leader. Only the previous year, his marriage to Regina Azu was announced in the columns, and in July 1904, the editor had wished him a “speedy recovery” from illness.⁷ But by October 1904, allegations of Quist’s professional misconduct had started to surface on a regular basis in columns by contributors such as Veritas, “Scrutineer,” and the popular Attoo, to the extent that he became known in the press as the “lawless lord” and the “god of Kumasi.”⁸ On an almost weekly basis, pseudonymous staff on the Leader started to allude to rumors of Quist’s use of terror tactics and violence, taking no care to avoid the publication of libelous and defamatory material. In particular, Quist’s European bosses were said to have taken no action to control their officer’s all-too-public misdemeanors. Here was an African colonial official who, to the pseudonymous Attoo at least, was “worse than a lunatic with a firebrand in his hand.”⁹ The Quist case was a time bomb waiting to explode, testing recent colonial newspaper regulations designed to deter editors and proprietors from sheltering behind others’ pseudonyms when charges of defamation or sedition arose.

In the wake of their victory against the Crown, the managers of the Leader published an editorial entitled “Our Fourth and Only Estate,” in which they triumphantly inscribed the trial into posterity as “The Great Criminal Libel Case” of 1905.¹⁰ Rather than reinforcing their faith in the freedom of the West African press, however, or in the fairness of the colonial judicial system toward pseudonymously authored disclosures, the victory in the libel case highlighted another matter: the peculiarly distorted and unreasonable relationship that arises in colonial settings between governments and the “native” press.

Although Quist was arrested after the hearing and subsequently found guilty of the rapes, staff on the Leader felt that the hand of luck, rather than the hand of justice, had brought about the positive result.¹¹ During the trial, some British commentators had raised the possibility of strengthening press censorship laws in the Gold Coast to prevent potentially defamatory material from appearing in newspapers in the first place.¹² In a similar spirit of suppression, two colonial magistrates in the case, Dr. Tweedy and Major Davidson-Bouston, obstructed evidence of Quist’s misdemeanors by dismissing complainants without taking statements from them.¹³ Even the presiding judge in the case, Mr. Justice Smith, allegedly made “rude remarks” about the Gold Coast Leader in summing up the evidence in court.¹⁴

For staff on the Leader at the conclusion of the trial, these various negative official reactions to the role of African newspapers carried at least as much weight as the fact that the supposedly libelous story was found to be accurate by the judge. In other words, the newspapermen experienced the trial as an instance of the frustration or prevention of the emergence of a genuine public sphere in Britain’s colonial territories.

Two types of public men were at loggerheads in the trial: first, government officials or colonial civil servants such as Quist and his managers, who were exposed for having abused their authority under the protection of the state; and second, journalists as citizens, who were setters of public opinion in the space between state and society. The locking of horns between these two groups typified West African press relations throughout the colonial period, creating political effects that are discussed in several chapters of this book. In reflecting on the case in “Our Fourth and Only Estate,” the editor of the Leader pointed out that in England, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, there “[are] parliaments and other assemblies wherein the people give effective voice to their wants and have the means of securing them.”¹⁵ In colonies such as the Gold Coast, by contrast, “the people . . . have only one Estate, and that is the Press.”¹⁶ In a pointed quotation from the liberal republican philosophy of the European Enlightenment, the editor continued on to note that “the reign of might over right [dominates]” people’s lives in Britain’s West African colonies and that except for the press, “we have not the instrument that cries halt! to tyranny, oppression and wrong.”¹⁷ If there was no social contract and if indigenous political representation was absent from or partial and compromised in the other three estates, this editorial demanded that readers ask about the function of the fourth estate in colonial settings. What happened to the notion of the fourth estate and to the wider concept of the public sphere if the other three estates actively discriminated against those who take ownership of the fourth?

This notion that the press was West Africa’s only estate was not unique either to the Gold Coast Leader or to English-language newspapers in the region. Although this view appears to ignore other types of public space such as clubs, unions, customary forums, and associations, West African editors and proprietors insisted again and again that the citizens of the colonies only had access to one sphere for self-expression: the newspapers. In contexts where governments did not represent their citizens through a consensual social contract, Africans had “no other means of defending our rights,” as Gold Coaster James A. Busum wrote in the covering letter to his petition against the Criminal Code (Amendment) Ordinance of 1934, an act that proposed severe penalties for the reproduction and possession of seditious publications in colonial Ghana.¹⁸ “The Press,” Busum continued, “a harmless organ, is the only means through which our cries are sometimes heard, and if our only and last armour for harmlessly voicing our grievances to the public [is curtailed], it is felt that a great injustice is being meted out to a very helpless people.”¹⁹

These sentiments from the mid-1930s reverberate with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century African views of the press as holding power to account in a public sphere distinct from the state. As the Nigerian politician Hon. C. A. Sapara Williams stated in his opposition to the Ordinance for Regulating the Printing and Publishing of Newspapers, or Newspaper Ordinance (no. 10), passed in Lagos in 1903, the press was “the only medium for the people to express their grievances.”²⁰ The press, West African editors and readers concurred, was the sole force through which British political authority could be monitored and colonial power held to account, in the absence of internal governmental checks and balances: it was, as Busum insisted in a contradictory metaphor, a “harmless weapon” for Africans “in defence of our rights.”²¹ In the words of the editor of the Sierra Leone Weekly News thirty years earlier, “No Governor can get Native opinion from his Council (where the Native Members are, as a rule, from a wealthy class) as fully as from the local Press.”²² Newspapers, he added, “seek to improve the measures submitted to Legislative Councils.”²³

The role of newspapers in bringing news stories to light was therefore seen to be coterminous with the struggle for political representation. Print was the crucial medium for this process, making possible new ways of imagining the public. African intellectuals repeatedly asserted their belief in the liberties and social equalities made possible by newsprint. Half a century ahead of Habermas’s utopian conceptualization of emergent bourgeois cultures in Europe, West African newspapermen seemed to adopt his model almost verbatim in their descriptions of the role of the press as a vehicle for status-blind debates. Editors repeatedly insisted on the position of their presses as what newspaper historians John Hartley and Alan McKee term “the locus of the public sphere,” as “primary and central institutions of politics and idea-formation,” with correspondents serving the pursuit of “freedom” and “democratic politics” in the manner or European and North American journalists.²⁴ “Our columns are open to all, irrespective of creed, colour, or race,” declared the first editorial of the Western Echo of Cape Coast, Ghana, in 1885, setting the tone for numerous future newspaper initiatives: “Do not fear to speak through us; we will not fear to make generally known your wants.”²⁵

Adhering to classic liberal definitions of the freedom and impartiality of the press, popular since Thomas Jefferson described American republican ideals in the late eighteenth century, West African newspapermen demanded their right to occupy the same type of public sphere as that inhabited by European and American journalists. This was rather different from the mode of authority asserted in the other types of printed literature circulating in colonial West Africa between the 1880s and 1940s, such as missionary publications, official reports, pamphlets, and local histories, in which named authors made use of print to assert authority and expertise on a range of issues.²⁶

Life in Britain’s colonial possessions was anything but egalitarian and consensual, but from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and Ghana and from African-language to European-language newspapers, editors articulated a strikingly familiar model of rational press citizenship alongside ideals for democratic public participation, regardless of race, gender, or social status: “Our motto is ‘TRUTH WITHOUT FEAR,’” read the “Prospectus” column in the first issue of the Western Echo: “We shall endeavor to preserve through each series a firm and free tone. . . . A newspaper is a worthless institution if it is afraid to speak out.”²⁷ Decades later, an editorial in the Gold Coast Leader on the “high calling” of journalism declared, “The object of a newspaper writer should . . . be that of a fair-minded impartial judge of facts and affairs, and to set forth his considered views upon them without malice and without fear or favour.”²⁸

The African-owned newspapers thereby explicitly attempted to produce an egalitarian public sphere and to generate a form of civil society on paper that was activated through participation and debate and, crucially, through print. African-language newsprint culture was no different from English-language print culture in this respect: as Karin Barber demonstrates in her study of Yoruba print culture in the early twentieth century, Yoruba newspapers in 1920s Lagos played an essential role in the project to convene a progressive citizenry, equal in status on the printed page.²⁹ Similarly, with reference to Yoruba and English pamphlets published by Lagosian elites between the 1880s and 1920s, Nara Improta comments: “Debates transcended barriers of language and genre (and also media, place, social class etc). Many debates crossed over the two languages with no interruption in the line of reasoning. The pool of intellectual production, even with some differences that have to be pointed out relating to language and audience, was the same pool” (personal communication).

Anonymity and pseudonymity were vital to the imagination of an egalitarian public sphere. Under pseudonyms, members of educated elites, school-leavers, clerks, men, women, and youths could participate in the formation of public opinion. With a print bias typical of editors and examined in more detail in the next chapter, readers were informed that only through print could they engage in free dialogue between equals. From the 1880s onward, editors protected their contributors from exposure to surveillance or assimilation by the state: “Do not for a single moment doubt us when we say that no one need fear that his name will be given up as the writer or any letter or article,” they reassured correspondents.³⁰ “In a country like ours, where one is not at liberty to say what he pleases in the Press,” w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and the Question of Agency in Colonial West African Newspapers
• PART ONE NEWSPAPERS IN COLONIAL WEST AFRICA
• PART TWO CASE STUDIES FROM THE COLONIAL OFFICE
• PART THREE CASE STUDIES FROM WEST AFRICAN NEWSPAPERS
• Conclusion “New Visibilities”
• Appendix I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson in Court
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index