Third World Historical: West African Worlds
Musab Younis
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
I am looking at the front page of the 11 January 1919 edition of the Sierra Leone Weekly News. Though rarely read beyond the slim ranks of specialists on Sierra Leonean history, this newspaper—along with many others that flourished across the Black Atlantic during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s—is part of an exceptional repository of thinking about world politics from the perspective of the colonized. I admit that the cover of this edition does not look propitious. As you can see, it is almost completely covered with an advertisement for the self-described “colonial outfitters,” Isaac Walton & Co. Ltd., who are trying to find a West African market for their mail-order suits. But for the Sierra Leonean reader, newspapers like this one (which, once you turn the front page, bristles with densely packed columns) illuminated a world beyond the borders of the British-occupied colony. The Sierra Leone Weekly News described in 1938 (in “1937: A Retrospect”) what it felt like to be in print-enabled communion with people across impossible distances: “As the papers come into our hands from day to day and week to week we are enabled to follow the doings of the restless human family in Germany, in Japan, in China, in America, Egypt—everywhere; and in our armchair we seem to be partakers of the Joys and Sorrows of people we shall never know and of places we shall never see.”
When I began reading the Sierra Leone Weekly News in the British Library, where it is held—like other colonial newspapers, it was carefully monitored by the colonial authorities—I was struck by the intricacy of its prose and the radicalism of many of its ideas. I did not immediately realize the precarity under which it had been produced. Histories of the region explain that West African newspapers in English developed a mass readership only in the 1930s, pioneered by Nnamdi Azikiwe’s African Morning Post. In 1919 they were still aimed at relatively elite audiences. The Sierra Leone Weekly News, we learn from historians, was the organ of the colony’s coastal Krio/Creole elite, described by one scholar as “a settler people repatriated to Africa from Great Britain and various parts of the New World,” who considered themselves to be culturally distinct from the inhabitants of the hinterland. For some time, people defined as Krio/Creole dominated not only Sierra Leonean politics but also, as the historian Joseph J. Bangura has recently explained, its historiography, crowding out other elements of Sierra Leonean society.
Front Page, The Sierra Leone Weekly News. (Freetown, Sierra Leone, January 11, 1919)
But to be a Black political figure in Freetown during the 1920s was nevertheless to contend with a system premised on a racial distinction between colonizer and colonized. A closer look at the Sierra Leone Weekly News gives us a sense of the precarity that existed even for elites in colonial Sierra Leone. The newspaper had been founded in 1884 by a Sierra Leonean, Joseph Claudius May, and the Caribbean-born pan-Africanist E. W. Blyden, who had emigrated to West Africa. May’s father had been enslaved as a child by a Brazilian ship, the Dois Amigos, in Yoruba-speaking Nigeria, before being “recaptured” by a British vessel and resettled in Sierra Leone, where he became a Methodist missionary. He still bore the branding scars inflicted by the Brazilian enslavers when he died in 1888.
By 1919, the newspaper’s editor was Joseph Claudius’s brother, Cornelius, a figure with considerable power: he was a prominent businessman, the mayor of Freetown, and a member of the colony’s Legislative Council. Yet he could not protect himself from the backlash against urban elites that took place in colonial West Africa as the British authorities turned towards “indirect rule.” In 1926, when he was sixty-nine, Cornelius May was convicted—after a dubious legal process—for the embezzlement of 160 sheets of corrugated iron. He was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with hard labor. He died soon after his release, his last months spent disconsolately trying to obtain a royal pardon. When we look again at the Sierra Leone Weekly News cover with the history of the newspaper in mind, its aura of businesslike confidence acquires a different connotation. Their elite status notwithstanding, the May family was profoundly insecure. As with the generation of African newspapermen that came to prominence during the 1930s, such insecurity fuelled a confrontational approach to the colonial authorities and a desire to understand how the colonisation of West Africa had led to its disadvantageous integration into global order. A few years after May’s death, a young man who would later be Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, decided to become a newspaper editor. He was reminded, as he later wrote in his memoirs, “‘that in West Africa an editor had only one foot in his office; his other foot was always in prison’.”
Musab Younis is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. His first book On the Scale of the World: Anticolonialism and Global Order, is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2022.