By Steph Newell

Funded by a British Academy Research Development Award (BARDA), Oct 2010 -
Oct 2011

The history of reading and authorship in West Africa is inseparable from the rise of locally owned newspapers, but newspapers have been neglected in studies of colonial and postcolonial print cultures. Similarly, literary studies of the history of anonymity remain exclusively European in focus (Griffin, 1999; North, 2003; Mullan, 2007). Funded by a British Academy Research Development Award (BARDA), this project asks: how does West Africa’s long history of invented, pseudonymous and playful articulation relate to or challenge contemporary theorizations of (post)colonial authorship and identity? Given the ways in which pseudonymous contributors to the West African newspapers drew power from print and playfully engaged with colonial identity, the project also examines the ways in which practices of anonymity inform the cultural histories of (post)colonial societies.

A History of Anonymity in West Africa examines the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1930s, and the rise of named autobiography in the period of anti-colonial nationalism (1940s-60s). While the primary focus is on West African print cultures in the period of British colonial rule, the project also includes attention to uses of naming in African oral genres, and the politics of naming in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave societies. Present-day anonymous and pseudonymous activities in Africa will also be considered, including print forms such as blogging, textiles and popular magazines, in order to contextualize and compare the shifting dynamics of naming practices.

Overall, the objective of the project is to bring together two hitherto distinct fields of study – broadly defined as ‘book history’ and postcolonial theory – into a scholarly monograph that will expand and historicize theories of colonial subjectivity, and account for the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity. The project also examines court cases in which African editors were prosecuted under libel and sedition legislation for refusing to remove the protective cloak of print from their contributors. Not only do court cases contain unusually detailed accounts of printing materials and newspaper production processes in the early twentieth century, filling a vital gap in the material history of colonial cultures, but they also highlight the ambiguous role of printers/compositors as witnesses and in-between figures.