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).

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.

Newspapers were essential to African engagements with the problem of colonial modernity in South Africa. This chapter focuses on Tiyo Soga’s writings in Indaba and how they inflected the discourse of the nation with an assemblage of African experiences. Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s praise poems in Umteleli are also considered for the way they combined publicness with an emphasis on the ethical bonds tying the (female) poet to the utterance of truth. The chapter highlights the connections between print, gender and the preservation of the conscience and memory of the people.

This chapter puts world literature and African print cultures into conversation by exploring a widely circulating tale of desire, deception and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The Palm-Wine Drinkard brought the folktale known as the ‘complete gentleman’ story to an international audience in 1952, but the scale of this narrative phenomenon was already massive. Since 1860, more than 450 versions have been printed in over a hundred languages across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The story also inspired dozens of adaptations across a variety of media, including many by renowned creative writers. This chapter explores what this traveling tale can teach the study of world literatures and African print cultures. It includes an overview of the phenomenon, a discussion of methodology, and an analysis of adaptations by Amos Tutuọla, Efua Sutherland and Ousmane Socé.

This chapter discusses hitherto neglected Swahili pocket literature that reflects the joint efforts of East African welfare associations, mosques, publishers and authors. In the children’s booklet Muallimu wa watoto, in Swahili typed in Arabic script, and the multilingual prayer booklet Namaz, published in late ’30s Pakistan, we can see the entangled history of the expansion of the British colonial economy and Swahili print culture, and how the latter evolved under the influence of the former. The presence of Urdu alongside Swahili in the Namaz sheds light on the two-way character of Asian-East African transregionalim. From the 1940’s onwards, however, Swahili print culture sees the shift from a transregional to a vernacularised phase. The creative poetic admonition of the Wasia wa dini, embedded within the prose text of the Dini ya Islam, or the different renditions of Kisa cha Miraji, aptly show the editors’ and authors’ own creative book projects and spiritual agendas in adapting and making Islam not merely portable, but also genuinely comprehensible to the masses through a simplified vernacular and/or transliterated mediality.

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.

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.