Stephanie Newell

Corresponding with the city: self-help literature in urban West Africa

Contemporary West African self‐help literature is preoccupied with the theme of marriage. The reader’s correct choice of marriage partner and subsequent happiness in the home are fundamental concerns of the genre. This article asks about the extent to which locally published self‐help literature – and popular literature more generally – is inseparable from urbanization in West Africa. Do these pamphlets arise as a direct consequence of urbanization in the late 20th century? What kind of “self” is produced to be “helped” in this literature? In addressing these questions, the article situates locally published self‐help literature in relation to recent theorizations of urbanization and popular culture in Africa, and in relation to the fierce current debate about the usefulness of “modernity” as a term to describe postcolonial urban cultures. Popular misogyny is also addressed, and the controlling role played by God in West African discussions of marriage and relationships. The article suggests that the authors of self‐help pamphlets in West Africa can be regarded as “urban correspondents”, corresponding with the city as its writers, its products and its cultural echoes.

Postcolonial masculinities and the politics of visibility

When, in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon witnesses a white child’s terrified reaction to the sight of his body – “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened” (112) – he too experiences a form of terror as the effects of colonial history spread across his skin and mark him permanently. Centuries of “ways of seeing” contribute to this moment of social recognition in the child. In an instant, Fanon is positioned inside an archive of colonialist images, and his plural self fills up with the “realities” of others’ beliefs and perceptions (see Read). Fanon shows how each racially (re)marked body is abducted from its own distinctive time and place, forced to stand in for all the rest. While the whiteness of the mother and child lingers behind them like a shadow, failing to mark them, the black man’s colour fills the entire frame. Upon realizing this, “Fanon” falls apart (112). His specificity as a human subject is replaced with a different type of specificity, a racial identity produced within a visual economy that dissects and classifies its objects. Bodies, Sara Ahmed writes, are capable of remembering “histories, even when we forget them” (111). Our bodies proceed through particular historical trajectories and identifications, sometimes in spite of our “selves”. As if trying to flee from this realization, Fanon looks around in panic and asks, “Where shall I hide?” (113). Produced as a “black man” by the encounter, a subject-turned-adjective, his new identity is shared with millions of other black subjects worldwide. Freshly raced, Fanon emerges from the encounter laden with “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’” (112). His response – a yearning for invisibility – conveys his impossible desire for a society composed of people without “the only real eyes”. This powerful scene is frequently discussed by postcolonial scholars, for it dramatizes how, on the one hand, face-to-face interracial encounters call upon long histories of violent colonial representations and relationships, and how, on the other hand, modes of gazing at and labelling people (such as “the Negro”) connect particular bodies with one another worldwide, in positive as well as negative ways. Versions of Fanon’s encounter can be found in several postcolonial literary texts, including Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001), where one of the two main protagonists narrates an incident on a London street in which “an older man in a heavy and expensive black coat, not tall, shoulders slightly hunched [ ... ] said, ‘You grinning blackamoor’. [ ... ] It made me feel hated, suddenly weak with a kind of terror at such associations” (72–73). For Fanon, at such a moment, there was no positive “black” identity and no shelter from “all

Paradoxes of Press Freedom in Colonial West Africa

This article describes the shifts and contradictions in British approaches to the control of print media in colonial West Africa between the 1920s and 1940s. Well before the Colonial Offices post-war interventions to create an ‘enlightened and educated’ West African citizenry through mass education, decades of independent newspaper production in the region helped to shape independent and critical readerships. For the British, however, an upsurge in African nationalist journalism in the mid-1930s coincided with a perceived Communist infiltration of ‘British West Africa’ to make censorship and surveillance more palatable than before to colonial officials in London, in spite of the new emphasis on public relations.

Something to hide? Anonymity and pseudonyms in the colonial West African press

This article examines the wide range of anonymous and pseudonymous naming practices to be found in West African newspapers between the 1880s and 1930s, and asks about the shape of a West African history of anonymity as compared with recent histories of anonymity in European literature. The article also discusses the ways in which colonial West African uses of anonymity and pseudonyms challenge postcolonial scholarship on agency, subjectivity, resistance, authenticity and identity.

Local Cosmopolitans in Colonial West Africa

Historians of imperialism and postcolonial literary scholars have inherited a series of derogatory categories from colonial discourse, labels that were kept firmly in place by local elites in their anti-colonial cultural nationalism. In particular, in the colonial period the category of “mimic” was frequently used to keep distinctive social classes (and also ethnic groups) out of the political sphere. By continuing to recognize and debate mimicry, we indirectly inherit this negative bias. This article debates the ways in which cosmopolitan theory can help us to see the ambivalent mimic-man in a slightly different light from received opinion. If we re-classify colonial “mimics” as cosmopolitans or, more accurately, as local cosmopolitans, an array of new cultural and historical questions comes to the fore highlighting the relationships between elites and sub-elites, and the politics of representation in local contexts.

Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity (review)

is performed are quite informative. Udje, the production of rival communities who utilize seeing—the sight of bright attires—to accentuate their utterances, is usually enjoyed at seasonal festivals as a crucial part of a ritual event. Some songs are passed from generation to generation and learned through rote memorization and others are created spontaneously in emergency situations that often arise when a composition causes a backlash. Udje songs are therefore made with clear purposes in mind by performers often anticipating adversarial response; thus, the udje dance-event is both highly-structured and dynamic. While the introductory parts carefully present information on the relevant aspects of Urhobo culture, the history, range, and character of the udje, the main body of the study focusing on the subject matter and themes, poetic resources, and analysis of the songs needs some serious attention. Here, Ojaide is less interested in the udje dance as spectacle per se than the udje dance as event providing the participants an opportunity to tell stories about how they view each other and themselves. From his perspective, the udje dance and the songs that accompany it are fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns. As texts, the songs are powered by polished literary devices of poetic composition, and the delivery is well-facilitated by sophisticated theatrical skills deployed by the singers. The writing is uninfl ated and accessible, but the presentation is not quite as stimulating as it could be, primarily because all of it requires more explanation, elaboration, and development. Although the analytical sections of the book lack the depth and sophistication of a major study (a demanding review process at the Carolina Academic Press would have quite easily eliminated some of the embarrassing organizational muddles, incoherence, awkward grammatical constructions, and superfi cial readings that characterize the main body of the study), Ojaide in this book establishes the importance of the udje dance-songs quite powerfully, albeit indirectly. His book presents extremely good translations of the udje dance-songs. His translations are among the best that have ever been attempted in African oral literature; there is therefore so much material in his book for a really illuminating essay on the udje as an illustration of the widespread phenomenon in many parts of Africa where criticism is tolerated in song where it would not be elsewhere, that I see many ways in which others (an anthropologist, for example) can use his data.