Due to the dearth of indigenous publishing houses in colonial Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania), the Swahili press became an integral part of the local public sphere. Limited factual reporting and a well-established practice of public verbal exchange made letters to the editor and rhyming poems (mashairi) largely composed by amateur poets the key medium through which African writings circulated in the 1930s–50s. Contributors used the press to express communal values, articulate personal views and engage in dialogic exchanges. This chapter claims that the print space offered readers-turned-writers, here described as ‘pioneers of the popular’, a space to experiment with language and refashion local poetic canons by assigning pre-eminence to content over form, thus performing novel subjectivities and altering shared beliefs. This in turn sparked further textual experimentation. After locating press poems within the local cultural repertoire, the chapter turns to letters to the editor, showing that they reproduced key poetic features.

This chapter draws on original data on church activism in defense of democracy to test various theories of why churches engage in democratic activism. It demonstrates that churches with more involvement in providing education are more likely to speak out in defense of liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, independent of country-level or denominational trends. In contrast, the data provide limited support for alternative explanations.

This chapter outlines the rise of Arabic Islamic print in the British-BuSaidi protectorate of Zanzibar c. 1880–1940. It argues that the availability of printed Arabic material set off two processes: The emergence of a new public of specialised readers who read primarily silently and alone (individual readers, often associated with modernist Islamic ideas) and mass distribution of texts primarily intended for communal reading and/or performance (often associated with Sufi practices). It traces the rise of local print enterprises such as the Government Press and the rise of Arabic-language journals. Furthermore, the chapter traces the publishing habits of Zanzibari authors, whose didactic works were printed locally while religious tracts were primarily printed in Egypt. Finally, this chapter outlines the circulation of texts from printing presses abroad, primarily India and Egypt, highlighting the availability of cheaply printed devotional texts primarily meant for local usage.

This chapter analyses the epistemological overhaul of genres and ideas of textuality that took place in Ethiopia between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and that prepared the grounds for the rise of Amharic print culture. Gäbrä-Əgziabher Gila-Maryam is generally credited with producing the first Amharic newspaper. His poetic newssheets readapted the genre of the awaj, or imperial proclamation. Most of these newssheets were handwritten, but Gäbrä-Əgziabher also pioneered the use of print to clandestinely circulate a longer type of awaj in prose. Through an analysis of Gäbrä-Əgziabher’s genre innovations, the chapter argues that the emergence of print in Ethiopia should be understood as part of a broader transformation of the oral/written interface – itself a result of the resignification of notions of ‘the public’ in the context of the new global dimension of politics.

This chapter makes the case for a genealogical, periodical-centred approach to the study of African literature. It argues that the overlooked genre of the newspaper column provided a convivial space for literary experimentation and the generation of alternative literary forms in colonial African contexts. In particular, it highlights the emergence in the periodical press of satirical street literature, a genre that takes African street life as its subject matter and registers its unique dynamics in aesthetic form. Reading two influential examples – R. R. R. Dhlomo’s ‘Roamer’ column and Alex La Guma’s ‘Up my Alley’ – this chapter argues that periodical street literature can be understood as an alternative mode of literary world-making in relation to dominant teleologies and narrative templates. The chapter asks how the inclusion of this ephemeral literary archive reframes understandings of Black city writing in colonial contexts and traces a possible genealogy of afterlives and echoes in the wider world of letters

To understand the place and role of Gakaara Wanjaũ in the development of a print culture in Central Kenya, it is useful to start with a contrast between the story of the small press that he set up in the provincial town of Karatina in 1971 and the familiar, sometimes apocryphal stories of how the printing press arrived in Africa and the aura that surrounded it. In general, the arrival of the missionary printing press in Africa was seen as the triumphant arrival of a technology which, to borrow the words of Michel de Certeau, writing in a different context, was capable of ‘reforming society’, transforming ‘manners and customs’ and ‘remodeling whole cultures and nations’ (1984: 166). For example, when the missionary John Ross conveyed a printing press to the Lovedale Mission in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1823, he had no doubt that the machine would create new Christian subjects – it was God’s gift to ‘the world of readers, who become the men of action, for evil as much as for good’ (Shepherd 1940: 400).