African print cultures have myriad origins. There is no clear timeline for an evolution, or ripple effect, caused by the introduction of presses in one place and their spread to other regions. Nor, indeed, are printing presses in the same region necessarily connected with one another through a shared public sphere. Printing activities on the continent extend over five centuries, are dispersed across many languages and readerships, and include documents as dissimilar as publications on hand presses and small jobbing presses, mass-produced newspapers, and school books and bulletins produced by churches and governments.1 As the chapters in this volume show, with the massive intensification, acceleration and expansion in printing activities from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the texts put into circulation by these multifarious operations offer a rich, disorderly archive for thinking about the literary ramifications of print on the continent.
This book enters African print history in medias res, focusing on a century of publishing activity in a period that includes the rapid expansion of Islam and Christianity, the consolidation of colonial rule and the inception of African-owned newspapers and local book publication. Our purview extends up to the period of African independences when a new phase of literary creativity gathered strength and a new wave of interest from international publishers shaped what counted as African literature. Our starting point is the materiality of print: the printing presses themselves, the people who owned and operated them, the innumerable decisions they had to make every day and the manifold relationships they entered into in the course of producing and distributing a printed text, including decisions about language and audience, as well as about economic challenges and legal constraints. We open, therefore, with five snapshots of printers and printing presses at work in East and West Africa.
In the century we focus on, contributors have drawn attention to the way religious institutions instigated the production of new textual forms through print. Christian missions, for example, seeking to reach new congregations through devotional and instructive texts in African languages, paved the way to a new print sphere through the production of dictionaries, grammars, standardised orthographies, translations of the scriptures and provision of new types of reading material for converts (see Englund, Chapter 2; Furniss, Chapter 5 in this volume). The activities of missionary presses provided an influential platform for a new class of intellectuals who had been educated in mission and government schools. Similarly, Islamic organisations stimulated the publication of devotional texts in Arabic and in Swahili and other African languages, expanding a reading sphere in which manuscript and print production coexisted and interacted for many decades, and in which texts printed in Bombay and Cairo mingled with those printed in Sub-Saharan Africa (see Bang, Chapter 17; Raia, Chapter 18; Dell, Chapter 20 in this volume). Religious initiatives were soon followed by the interventions of colonial governments whose presses published official gazettes and reports for a notionally secular public sphere, and whose interventions in school education helped to stimulate the production of African literature through textbooks, school magazines and writing competitions aimed at educated Africans (see Furniss, Chapter 5; Ochiagha, Chapter 12 in this volume). Missionary and government presses also trained generations of compositors who subsequently went to work for independent publishers or set up their own printing works.
From obtaining spare parts, replacement type and paper supplies through to making decisions about which fonts and languages could be used in their newspapers, independent African presses were bound into these broader institutional relationships. But they existed in what Simon Gikandi powerfully calls ‘the afterlife of print cultures outside the colonial institutions that had created or enabled them’. Unofficial and positioned outside, African-owned presses played a pioneering role in fostering literary creativity on the continent from the late nineteenth century onwards: they were ‘hubs of local literary culture’, to use Maria Suriano’s phrase, that contributed to the development of written African languages and offered uniquely paracolonial spaces for the publication of poetry and fiction in the colonial period.
At the granular level prioritised in this volume, African printing presses and the publics they shaped are shown to be inherently more plural and less coherent than allowed for by broad statements about world religions, colonial governments, the press and the public sphere. They were characterised by what James Brennan terms ‘colonial polyglossia’. Whether in Amharic, Arabic, Gujarati, KiSwahili, Yoruba, isiZulu or one of the many other print languages discussed in this book, diverse expressive possibilities were offered by local presses on the continent. Sometimes these possibilities coexisted within a single text, such as the bestselling Muslim prayerbook from 1936 described by Annachiara Raia, printed in four languages using three different scripts: Arabic, Arabic in Roman script, Swahili in Arabic script, Swahili in Roman script, Urdu and English. As Brennan suggests in his study of language-switching between English, Gujarati and Swahili in colonial Tanzanian newspapers, social hierarchies could be asserted through the use of loanwords from other languages. The existence of these multilingual literacies raises questions about the institutional and political pressures that enabled one language to emerge as dominant over another in particular times and places, and about the way languages coexisting in print functioned as irritants or stimuli to one another (Barber, Chapter 11 in this volume).
People – rather than institutions – are at the heart of this book: we encounter editors, proofreaders, compositors, correspondents, authors, readers and intellectuals as they participated in, and often led, discussions about reading, literary form, knowledge, interpretation and language (see Keegan, Chapter 8 in this volume). Print was not simply a tool for the delivery of texts. From the stories about independent African presses that open the volume to the longer chapters that follow, contributors offer details about the people whose lives were bound up with printing presses, and the political and social factors that shaped their ambitions. Whether for moral, political or creative reasons, all were impelled in one way or another by what Sam Naidu describes as the ‘urge to publish’.
The absence of a printing press did nothing to stop some local intellectuals from carving out spaces for the public circulation of written documents.2 It was as if the desire to create a reading public anticipated the technical means to implement it. Sara Marzagora describes how Ethiopia’s first journalist, Gäbrä-Əgziabher, produced a handwritten single-sheet newspaper comprising poems aimed at the country’s political elites, fifty copies at a time, making a public space for print in the absence of access to a printing press and, in the process, creating what might be described as a ‘beforelife’ for print in late nineteenth-century Ethiopia. By the mid-twentieth century, African print entrepreneurs had presses of their own throughout the continent. Many combined the function of jobbing presses, printing assorted documents in small print runs for customers, with publishing books and other works intended to last and to reach a wide, as yet unknown public.3 Many also published local newspapers. For Kenyan author Gakaara Wanjaũ in the late 1960s, the acquisition of a printing press removed the delays and expenses caused by his reliance on Indian jobbing presses as well as allowing him the intellectual freedom to stimulate public interest in creative, imaginative literature in Gĩkũyũ (Gikandi, Chapter 1.1 in this volume).
No matter how brief its existence or how ephemeral its publications, each of the presses described in this book created a community in its orbit for the duration of its operations. Some were set up deliberately as a collective with ethical or political overtones, as in the case of Gandhi’s International Printing Press at Phoenix, Natal (Hofmeyr) and the Gaskiya Corporation press established by Rupert East and Abubakar Imam in northern Nigeria (Furniss). Printers, publishers, writers and readers were connected into a force field constituted by their ideas about print. In creating texts for public circulation, writers and publishers opened up fresh social spaces and webs of affiliation as they used print to attempt to build networks, some of which grew into literary, religious or political movements, while others fizzled out, extinguished by financial hardships or political constraints (see James and Osborne, Chapter 21 in this volume).
The tenacity of one particular group – African newspapermen – is repeatedly emphasised throughout this volume. Even when newspapers were relatively short-lived, as in Harry Thuku’s Kiswahili Tangazo or Henry Muoria’s Gĩkũyũ-English Mumenyereri, described by Phoebe Musandu (Chapter 1.2 in this volume), educated intellectuals shared an ongoing commitment to print for the way it materialised ‘the power of information as well as the discourse that emerged from it’. For the educated elites who owned presses in the colonial period, printed matter had the potential to inform readers of alternative standpoints and to challenge flows of ideology and knowledge.
Owners of presses had to raise substantial sums for investment in printing equipment, and they often struggled to secure skilled labour, type, spare parts and supplies of paper. Some of the people described in this volume resorted to ingenious, even manipulative tactics to get around these obstacles: Katharina A. Oke (Chapter 1.3 in this volume) describes Herbert Macaulay’s non-payment of staff salaries while securing their labour for the next issue of the Lagos Daily News in the early 1930s. As a celebrity editor and renowned anticolonial nationalist, Macaulay relied on the loyalty of his staff who supported the paper’s public mission even while they pleaded desperately with their employer to advance them at least a portion of their salary arrears.
The different printing activities described in this book inspire questions that reverberate through the volume as a whole: What – if any – new conceptualisations of the public and of sociality were instigated or facilitated by the availability of print? What new genres, and what kinds of cultural transformation, can be attributed directly to printing presses in African contexts? Can specific literary styles be identified in publications produced on African printing presses, and how did these textual materials migrate between different regions, languages, literary genres and readerships? How did authors, printers, editors and booksellers conceptualise print in different historical periods?
At their most basic, these questions boil down to topics that recur in print culture scholarship around the world: What was print, what was it for, what could it do, how did it relate to manuscript and oral communication, and what kind of changes could it bring about? Classical European theories about the inherently democratising power of print cannot, however, simply be transposed to print cultures in Africa. As the story has been told in Europe, the rise of print displaced oral cultures and reshaped human experience – including people’s perceptions of self, time and society – around critical, reflective forms of consciousness made possible by mass-produced documents, giving rise to civil society. A recent application of this model to Africa can be found in an article entitled ‘The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in sub-Saharan Africa’, where economists Julia Cagé and Valeria Rueda (Reference Cagé and Rueda2016) argue that democratisation is inextricable from Protestant missionary printing activity in Africa, and that ‘proximity to a mission with a printing press increases political participation at a local level’ (70). As in other colonised regions, however, the impact of print in Africa was always more ambiguous and multi-levelled than this account might suggest. Print was part of the cultural project of colonialism, a means by which colonial knowledge of the colonised was constructed, normalised and shared; at the same time it was a ‘powerful, often revolutionary force’ by means of which colonial power could be contested (Ballantyne Reference Ballantyne and Alcorn Baron2007). There were different evaluations and uses of print but little sense that it was inherently ‘Western’: rather, it had the potential to be both local and international in multiple contradictory or mutually supporting ways.
If printing presses are ‘agents of change’, as Eisenstein (Reference Eisenstein1980) famously argued, their agency involves a great deal more complexity and bias than implied by any simple model of social progress. Print was inextricable from cultural struggles and regional political histories. If large-scale ‘transitions’ from A to B – such as oral to written, scribal to printed or localised language varieties to more widely shared European or African forms – are identifiable in different parts of the continent at different times, the chapters in this book establish the plurality – and, in many cases, contingency – of these processes, arising from individual printers’ circumstances and personal networks as well as from broader shifts in power.
Many of the printers and writers described in this volume shared an assumption that the printing press was a vehicle for what they termed ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘enlightenment’. But as Khwezi Mkhize shows, these terms should not necessarily be interpreted as signs of the hegemony of imperialist assumptions about the ‘civilising’ impact of education and reading in Africa, nor of a lack of civil society outside the orbit of the press. Many local intellectuals turned to the press to preserve African systems of knowledge in the face of shifts in power and the reduction of customary authority under colonial rule. Hlonipha Mokoena’s study of Magema Magwaza Fuze’s isiZulu book on the origins of ‘the black people’, Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922), illustrates how colonial rule led educated Africans to fear an erasure of African history, and to turn to print in the attempt to retrieve and record received stories of the past. Many other local intellectuals feared the erasure of African histories unless they were preserved in written form (Hofmeyr, Chapter 3; Mkhize, Chapter 7).
These fears were grounded in an idea of print – especially in the hands of colonial institutions – as a force capable of displacing ‘weaker’ (because oral) forms of memory and knowledge. But numerous chapters in this book describe how printing presses were situated in the thick of robust oral cultures, from which they drew inspiration and into which printed matter was absorbed. In his account of the transregional circulation of the ‘complete gentleman’ folktale, for example, Tobias Warner (Chapter 22 in this volume) shows how oral and printed literatures zig-zag in and out of one another, making use of different forms of memory and textual preservation. Meanwhile, both Anne K. Bang and Jeremy Dell dismantle myths about the anti-print bias of Sufi Islam in Africa and show how printing presses played an important role in bolstering established Sufi structures of authority without displacing the Sufi emphasis on song and chant as intense devotional channels. As Maria Suriano (Chapter 14 in this volume) observes of amateur Swahili poetry in the colonial Tanzanian press, the metaphor of osmosis is perhaps more suitable than either displacement or transition to describe the way printed verse ‘bent the canons of an existing genre and experimented with the Swahili language’.
These patterns of exchange complicate the idea that modern African printed fiction is legitimised by an oral folktale ancestry. Indeed, oral-to-print models of cultural transmission are reversed in some of the print cultures described in this volume. Leslie James and Myles Osborne (Chapter 21) capture this reverse flow in their study of the ways printed material from West Africa ‘percolated through oral debates’ in the Caribbean as poetry and newspaper articles by West African nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe were carried to Trinidad and Jamaica through anticolonial activists’ personal networks in the 1930s and 1940s. These printed materials influenced and infused Caribbean oral cultures, surfacing in local proverbs, verses and supplications. Similarly, Odile Goerg highlights the appeal of printed film advertisements in 1930s Senegal, where people without access either to schools or cinemas were able to interpret film posters displayed in urban public spaces. Print, for them, was a signpost that led them to the oral and visual pleasures of film.
In other cases, no oral traditions whatsoever underlay printed African literature. For the young men in 1930s Egypt described by Lucie Ryzova (Chapter 9 in this volume), new forms of print enabled expressions of subjectivity that were unthinkable without the commercial Arabic press. Ryzova shows how imported magazine fiction, with its emphasis on contemplative writing from the ‘heart’, was a vehicle for ‘major changes in social authority’ as young men used sentimental literature to rebel against their fathers’ values. For Corinne Sandwith (Chapter 13 in this volume), too, print made possible modes of expression that were unique to the printed page: in English-language South African newspapers between the 1930s and 1950s, R. R. R. Dhlomo and Alex La Guma played with familiar newspaper genres such as letters to the editor and society gossip columns to ironise and ridicule the logic of the racist state and to insert Africans as a visible urban presence. Publicly circulating in the press in ways that were prohibited in the flesh, Dhlomo’s and La Guma’s writings offer ‘a meticulous counter-narrative of black mobility, alternative city routes and an implacable Black urban presence’.
Wherever and whenever one drops into an African print shop in this volume, one finds expectant readerships and reading communities in formation, keen for what Mokoena describes as the ‘intellectual stimulation and the aesthetic appeal’ of printed literature, especially in African languages. Some of these reading communities were too small to support a press for more than a few months; others were assembled within institutional settings such as armies, schools and churches, from where they made their demands for particular kinds of reading matter known to the authorities, as in the case of the Nigerian soldiers described by Ngozi Edeagu, who demanded supplies of the popular nationalist newspaper, the West African Pilot, from the British army. In turn, in their letters to the editor, homesick soldiers illuminated the affective ties connecting – and constituting – communities of readers through the medium of print. Some readers required the continuous labour of editors to draw them into publications, while others seemed to spring into existence fully formed, eager to purchase locally published literature and engage with its contents, as with the Nigerian pamphlets described by Newell (Chapter 16 in this volume).
One obvious feature stands out in the case studies presented in this volume: whether in the orbit of governments, missions, mosques, newspapers or private publishers, men dominated African print cultures in the century of activities described in this book. Printing presses were inextricable from the social values and cultural struggles of the people who made use of them, and inequalities in men’s and women’s access to education, finances and technology, as well as gender–power relations and ideas about rights of access to the public sphere, mean that print cultures seem ostensibly to have been men’s cultures before the 1960s. Print, modernity and the public sphere were tacitly gendered as masculine in this period to the extent that, as Ryzova and Newell argue in their respective chapters, one of the ways in which educated young men asserted their ‘modernity’ was through commercial forms of print, contesting the authority of their fathers by writing stories for mass readerships.
Women were present and active in the print communities described in this book. African print cultures are peppered with women writers, from Nontsizi Mgqwetho, who took on the mantle of praise poet to write more than a hundred poems for Umteleli wa Bantu in the 1920s (Mkhize), to the numerous women who came forward with novels for publication when Hausa commercial literature started to be published on private printing presses around Kano in the late 1980s (Furniss) and the women who, over the decades, repurposed the ‘complete gentleman’ folktale (Warner). One of the earliest ‘Onitsha’ pamphlets in Nigeria, Cecilia D. Akosa’s Stirring of a Heart (1950), no longer extant, was written by a woman (Dodson Reference Dodson1974: 118). As Mkhize points out, the lack of critical attention to Letitia Kakaza, the author of one of the first novels in isiXhosa, Intyatambo yomzi (1913), speaks more to ‘the masculinist assumptions about foundational figures and discourses’ within African literary studies than to the absence of women from early South African literature.
Women also appear in logistical roles in the vicinity of presses. Oke describes how, in the late nineteenth century, Emilie Blaize served as a compositor at the Lagos Times and Gold Coast Colony Advertiser (1880–1883), and how the wife of the Sierra Leonean master printer, William Coulson Labor – a woman whose name is not recorded – was a printer at the Aurora (1914–1917) in eastern Nigeria. In her first published poem, South African poet Mgqwetho makes a point of acknowledging Charlotte Maxeke alongside Marshall Maxeke, Charlotte’s husband and editor of Umteteli wa Bantu, ‘praising their work for the people’ (Mkhize). In the 1920s and 1930s in West Africa, women worked as ‘cashiers, sales clerks, statisticians and couriers’ in the offices of the Lagos Daily News (Oke). Meanwhile, in Kenya in 1945, in the absence of a distribution system for the first edition of Henry Muoria’s newspaper, Mumenyereri, his wife, Judith Nyamurua, helped to sell copies at Nairobi municipal market (Musandu).
These examples of women’s pervasive presence in African print cultures demand further attention. Women are among the groups most often overlooked in print culture scholarship. To restore their visibility, as Oke points out, an expanded conception of print cultures is required beyond the biographies of prominent printers and press-men, alongside an appreciation of the structural constraints preventing women from participating at the forefront of print cultures before the 1960s.4
The genres and texts that took shape in the African presses of 1860–1960 were significant both for their continuity with what has now become canonical African literary tradition, and – conversely – for their discontinuity, for the efflorescence of textual experiments which were not subsequently taken up, but which revealed what was regarded at the time as possible, desirable or worthy of attention. Many African-language genres, from written poetry to short stories and novels, which were forged on the pre-independence printing presses, subsequently became major literary forms. In some cases, such as Zimbabwe and Tanzania, these both preceded and greatly outnumbered the more internationally visible English-language works produced alongside them. Other local popular genres produced on small presses, such as Onitsha market literature in Nigeria, were partially drawn into African literary tradition as canonised by international imprints such as Heinemann’s African Writers Series: Cyprian Ekwensi, one of the recognised fathers of the anglophone Nigerian novel, wrote pamphlets for circulation around Onitsha market before his international success.
What is recognised as ‘literary’ is historically and culturally specific, expanding and contracting over time and reflecting conceptions of textual value that vary from one social context to another. Today, texts recognised as literary may tend to conform to a globally accepted definition and scale of values. But these works inhabit a field of print out of which they emerged, from which they draw materials and inspiration, and into which they feed back. These fields of print, these ‘print cultures’, are locally formed but often interconnected, since it is in the nature of printed texts to travel. They include genres and works that were significant and locally valued, whether they were identified as ‘literature’ or not.
The chapters in this book include discussions of dictionaries, letters, film posters, biographies, works of jurisprudence and religious scholarship, autoethnographic essays, transcriptions of oral literatures and many other genres that rarely feature on the radar of literary scholars because they do not obviously fit into current definitions of imaginative or creative writing. By attending to local concepts of literature and literary value in different times and places, and shining a spotlight on neglected authors, genres and styles from past decades, contributors identify influential textual traditions on the continent, highlighting how these stimulated ‘intense literary fascination not only for adherents to the traditions that produced them, but for outsiders as well’ (Dell). As such, the chapters in this volume offer grounded case studies for thinking about regional and transnational African literatures. Like the ‘complete gentleman’ stories studied by Warner, the stories about African print cultures assembled here ‘challenge us to think the whole and the parts together’. As Warner points out for the ubiquitous, migratory folktale, the inaccessibility of the whole is ‘perhaps the part that has the most to teach’ about the incompleteness of world literature. In a similar vein, the chapters in this volume offer a gateway into a generative space of incompleteness that does not necessarily, or exclusively, point towards contemporary understandings of African literature: rather, this is a space that suggests, in Gikandi’s words, ‘an influence that informs and haunts’ the pages of modern African literature. As such, the aim of this volume is not to produce a definitive overview of a century of African print cultures. It is to invite readers to explore their own sources in the light of the issues our contributors have raised, and themselves contribute to this ongoing project.
