Introduction

Summary

The local that is at issue here is not the ‘local’ in any conventional or traditional sense, but a very contemporary ‘local’ that serves as a site for the working out of the most fundamental contradictions of the age.

(Dirlik [1998] 2018: 85)

In the first half of the twentieth century, African newspapers were sites of intense literary activity in the colonies that made up British West Africa. Newspapers provided the chief – and in most cases the only – outlet for local creative writers and intellectuals to send short pieces for publication. Newsprint gave diverse writers and readers access to spaces for imaginative expression alongside, but untethered to, the colonial education system, and local writers relished and exploited the platforms for creativity offered by the press. As a result, these newspaper archives contain a vast reservoir of original creative writing by local authors in genres ranging from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, as well as other types of non-news text such as philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues, reviews, and prose forms that defy generic classification by today's literary standards. These are surrounded on all sides by editorials, news reports, cinema listings, sports fixtures and shipping news, as well as advertisements for commodities and services from foreign and local businesses. These, in turn, sit cheek by jowl with creative materials from further afield, such as pan-Africanist essays and poems by African American intellectuals, as well as poetry and fiction by Europeans in West Africa and West Africans in Europe.

This vibrant newsprint creativity, as it is termed in this book, forms a neglected corpus of West African literature that connects newspapers with the pamphlet literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa investigates the literary worlds constituted by newspapers and pamphlets written in English and printed on newsprint – the cheapest, lowest-quality paper – in the early to mid-twentieth century. The book asks how current approaches to anglophone African literature on the one hand, and African cultural history on the other hand, might be extended by the inclusion of this vast, unwieldy and under-studied archive of imaginative writing that falls outside contemporary transnational understandings of literary genres and anglophone world literatures.