This chapter considers the political effects of church activism in support of liberal democracy, contrasting the effects of church activism in Zambia and Tanzania between 2016 and 2021. Drawing on interviews, survey data, and combined endorsement/conjoint candidate experiments in both countries, I show how churches in Zambia have galvanized international actors, domestic elites, and public opinion in support of democratic institutions, while churches in Tanzania have had more limited success.

Print creates frames and slots in which equivalences between genres, texts and languages become visible or imaginable. The iterative and segmented character of newspapers, in particular, lends itself to the perception of equivalences. In 1920s Lagos, the public culture of the literate elites was bilingual, and it was in the weekly bilingual newspapers that the interface between Yoruba and English was most consciously signalled and creatively explored. Contributors in both langauges deliberately enriched their texts by working across the linguistic interface — quoting, recycling, translating and answering back. The Yoruba-language writers were especially inventive. Taking as an example Yoruba obituaries and ‘In Memoriam’ pieces, this chapter shows how they fluidly combined elements of traditional orature, translations of sentimental Victorian verse, and local popular nicknames and anecdotes. In the formal print sphere this moment of creative intertwining has long passed, but today, comparable experiments can be seen in popular song genres

This chapter frames African print and printing in a diasporic context, since most major African cities are or were home to a rich array of printing traditions. In coastal cities in southern and East Africa, one was likely to encounter Muslim printers from Bombay; Africans tutored at Protestant evangelical presses; Indians (and Britons) trained in mission, state-run or commercial printing concerns in South Asia; British printers as well as print workers from diasporic locales. This chapter investigates these presses and the literary forms associated with them. The chapter discusses three literary texts connected with three printing presses (or printing traditions) in Durban. Thereafter the focus widens to consider the characteristics of a range of diasporic printing presses. The conclusion returns to the three literary texts and speculates on how placing them in proximity to the print shop shifts our understandings of African literary genealogies.

Focusing on the proliferation of independent African-owned presses in eastern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter discusses the popular pamphlets known as Onitsha market literature. The chapter asks how the upsurge in local publishing shaped readers’ ideas about literary languages and contributed to authors’ social prestige as intellectuals. The chapter describes the practicalities of pamphlet production, as well as the ways pamphleteers offered fresh conceptualisations of literary inspiration outside dominant western frameworks for works of the imagination.

This chapter provides a historical overview of church–state relations and church education provision in sub-Saharan Africa. It also demonstrates that churches have not had partisan coalition partners with closely aligned interests in this context, necessitating alternative approaches to ensuring political representation of their interests.

African popular intellectuals in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced public writing in which they lamented the danger of reading ‘like a European’, or quick and mechanical reading practices, which they argued led to the degeneration of the ‘African mind’. This chapter’s case study of Orishatukeh Faduma’s 1919 Sierra Leone Weekly News column, ‘How to Cultivate a Love For Reading,’ reveals how contributors in Freetown reimagined transatlantic public anxieties about race, nationhood, and madness to encourage local readers to ‘read like an African’, which meant slowly, selectively, and critically. Through public writing, Faduma and other popular intellectuals turned globally popular understandings of racial madness on their head to generate the ‘right’ kind of African reader. They used the press to produce a distinctly African literary culture in between the local and the global, and thus used literacy as a social vehicle of colonial self-making.

In colonial West Africa, where the level of literacy, in European language, was low, movies served as an accessible means to convey attitudes, ideas or stories. This chapter addresses the dialogue between movies and the written text (posters, advertisements, etc) to explore the ways in which African film spectators made sense of foreign images brought to them on screens. Urban movie goers read newspapers to look for schedules or film reviews, and the general public depended on posters displayed in front of movie theaters and also on word of mouth for information about movies. Sometimes posters were printed locally but most of them came with the movies, conveying foreign cultural messages which passers-by had to decipher according to their own cultures and cinematographic knowledge.

The periodical The Nigerian Teacher conceived to provide African and European colonial teachers with useful information and a forum in which to exchange views. However, as a result of colonial educational policies prevalent in the 1930s and the editor’s will to cultural and institutional power, the notion of equitative knowledge exchange in The Nigerian Teacher and its successor, Nigeria magazine, was bound to be a mirage. This chapter argues that their imitation of colonial models of ethnography notwithstanding, the magazine’s African contributors were cognisant of these problems, but still saw the magazine as a medium through which to impress European members of the Education Department favourably. African contributions to the magazine thus cannot be taken at face value, but as a self-impelled and dynamic engagement with colonial culture.

When Magema M. Fuze published his seminal book Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona in 1922, he could not have anticipated that one hundred years later, he would be an iconic writer; a representative of nineteenth-century black letters; a Kholwa intellectual and a remnant of the bygone era of mission stations and mission schools. This chapter will re-visit Magema Fuze’s readers and readings in light of this centenary and re-evaluate the extent to which his contribution to the study of African print cultures has enriched our understanding of the role played by the arrival of the printing press in Southern Africa. His pioneering work of history, ethnography and oral lore will be re-examined from the perspective of his journalistic texts and newspaper columns. The objective will be to show how a century of readers and readings have accrued to create a legacy; and, how such a legacy continues to challenge and be challenged by ever more increasing archiving practices and textual analysis.

Before the twentieth century, to be literate in the Western Sahel meant to be literate in Arabic—or in other African languages written with the Arabic script. Yet works by West African Muslim scholars, composed largely in Arabic, are often overlooked in discussions of West African literature. This chapter highlights this gap by reconstructing the history of the region’s ‘Islamic literature’ and its relationship to print. Focusing on the literary production of two of the region’s major Sufi orders, the Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, it shows that printed works of Islamic erudition became increasingly important elements of public life across the twentieth century and continued to serve as one of the most frequent and readily available means of experiencing ‘literature’, even alongside the expansion of colonial and postcolonial educational institutions that employed European languages of instruction. Comprising some of the most common forms of reading material in West Africa today, they are the fruit of an encounter between a well-established Sufi literary tradition and newfound access to the affordances of print.

In many parts of Africa, the mass production of printed texts began with Christian missions. Missionaries’ descriptions of African languages and their compilation of dictionaries were essential for the emergence of print cultures. However, missionary linguistics mirrored missionary politics. Two Protestant missionaries in Central Africa, one in Congo and the other in Malawi, differed in their views on both African languages and the European presence in Africa. Where Walter Henry Stapleton’s dictionary took an interest in colonial rule, David Clement Scott advanced dialogue in a radical vision for race relations. Both worked with widely spoken language forms, but the missionaries were driven by disparate motivations. Between them, the two dictionaries indicate considerable variation in the nineteenth-century missionary contributions to African print cultures. They, and the missionaries who compiled them, convey sharply divergent visions for African languages as contributions to human knowledge and imagination.

This chapter considers the history of the introduction of printing presses in northern Nigeria and demonstrates how changes in technology facilitated change both within the world of manuscript culture and within roman script book culture in Hausa. Developments in the reproduction of one form of written expression, roman script, had a radical effect upon the other, ajami (Hausa written in the Arabic script). The move from letterpress to photo-offset printing opened up a new field of reproduction for handwritten ajami and Arabic language manuscripts. The chapter traces the establishment from 1910 of the earliest letterpress in northern Nigeria, a Christian mission press. The education department of the colonial government made use of the mission press until the establishment of the Gaskiya Corporation in Zaria, intended as a training and collaborative enterprise for the production of roman script Hausa literature, along with literature in other languages of northern Nigeria.