The Public Sphere

Jurgen Habermas has argued that a bourgeois space emerged in the eighteenth century to “mediate between society and state, in which the public organized itself as the bearer of public opinion.”Footnote ¹⁸ This “public sphere,” according to Habermas, is a nonhierarchical setting convened within the spaces of coffee shops, salons, social clubs, and printed materials such as novels, periodicals, and pamphlets. Within these spaces, compromise and unanimous decisions were reached by means of unfettered, logical, and critical deliberation among bourgeois citizens freed from the feudal hierarchies of early modern Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ However, this vibrant public sphere waned after the nineteenth century because of the intrusive meddlesomeness of the state and private corporations.Footnote ²⁰ Habermas’s public space differed from colonial space in fundamental ways: while one is constituted by equal, rational individuals, European colonialists defined colonial space as an environment of purportedly irrational and sub-human colonial subjects. Bart Cammaerts separates “Habermas’s exemplary citizens” from colonial subjects and argues that while Habermas’s citizens were “stripped of status” and “the strength of their rational arguments more important than their position in society or personal wealth,” African subjects of the colonial era were widely regarded by their rulers as incapable of reason or civility, requiring intervention and tutelage from men of modernity and enlightenment.Footnote ²¹ Cammaerts’s dichotomy allows one to see how the colonial newspaper’s definition of the public could not conceive of the idea of a colonial citizen across racial boundaries.Footnote ²²

Habermas used the public sphere to explore the emergence of the bourgeoisie and nation-states in the eighteenth century, a model that deviates significantly from the public discourses in precolonial and colonial societies.Footnote ²³ While Newell suggested that “newsprint introduced an anonymizing function” whereby “members of educated elites, school-leavers, clerks, men, women, and youth could participate in the formation of public opinion,” thereby “masking the markers of social identity,”Footnote ²⁴ I contend that the newspaper obituary transcended anonymity through self-naming and the cultivation of celebrity to exclude certain classes of Africans from, while enlisting others into, the hierarchical colonial public sphere. In other words, obituary publications were one of the means through which Africans staked a claim to prestige and status in the public sphere engendered by both African and European-owned newspapers.

Lagosians’ assertion of their upper-class status through newspaper obituaries reflected both the persistence of local traditions in the public honoring of the dead as well as the wider global rise of privileged middle classes, even under colonial conditions. For example, Emma Hunter shows how the new African elite who emerged during the height of colonialism in East Africa used print media as a platform to express and spread their political visions. Hunter contends that the advent of modernity, the development of nationalism, and the global dissemination of Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial movements gave impetus to the formation of these ideas. Hunter argues that the print media produced the public sphere not just as a site of communication but also as a site of struggle and contestation over the meaning and practice of democracy, citizenship, and freedom in colonial East Africa. Footnote ²⁵

Further, Emma Hunter and Leslie James have offered a useful model to understand these processes as a space produced through a combination of multiple diverse forces.Footnote ²⁶ They argue that the colonial public sphere is constituted through the infrastructure for communication, through the addressivity of cosmopolitan and local public spaces; the performativity inherent in the colonial text, and the periodicity of the printed material.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, the public sphere can become a powerful arena of social change, where diverse groups can challenge the validity of existing norms or serve the rationalization of political domination and the agency of instrumental governmentality.Footnote ²⁸ Mrinalini Sinha has provided a counternarrative to Habermas by defining the colonial public sphere as one that produced visible differences of race and whiteness deployed to engender social inclusion, social ineligibility, or subalternity. Drawing on Sinha’s work, I argue that the newspaper obituary served as a central space where the social statuses of colonial elites were further reinforced and advertised and where different educated African elites sought visibility for their families.Footnote ²⁹

Christian Rhetoric in Obituary Reports

One dimension, among others, in which Lagosians asserted their presence in the colonial sphere was through Christian obituaries in the newspapers. The Lagos Christian community dealt with the exigency of death through their belief that death was simply a pathway to heaven rather than an everlasting parting from loved ones. The notion of salvation made accepting death as a peaceful end easier. Publicly advertised obituaries, such as newspaper obituaries, helped reinforce the notion of religious camaraderie necessary for the eternal salvation of the departed. In this manner, many obituaries were deemed to elicit greater interest from the Christian community than the adherents of African religions and thus were preoccupied with Christian sentiments. Reporting the obituary of Chief Okenla, the Lagos Observer (LO) of 14 September 1882, wrote, “The Christians of Abeokuta and ourselves have sustained an irreparable loss in the death of their hero, Chief Okenla.”Footnote ³⁰ Here, the Christians of Abeokuta were mentioned as the first bearer of the irreparable loss of Chief Okenla. In this way, the newspaper suggests that Christians were first positioned to suffer the crushing pains of loss and were privileged in the hierarchy of public emotions in obituary reports in Lagos.

Likewise, reporting the obituary of Miss Elfrida Esther Thomas, the Lagos Observer of 13 September 1883, carefully analyzed how Thomas discharged her duties: “it is well known that in the performance of her duties as a Sunday School Teacher, before her departure for Europe and after her return, she acted always with energy, self-denial, and devotion.” The introduction of “Sunday school,” “self-denial,” and “devotion” may underline the preponderance of Christian rhetoric and its attendant sympathy in most obituaries of these periods.

Even while narrating the roles played by the deceased in traditional institutions, languages that subtly implied Christian virtues were introduced. Efforts to evangelize and convert the locals were part of the colonializing missions and were often seen to interject most colonial correspondences not just in obituary reports but in other endeavors of life. The Lagos Observer wrote: “John Owolotan, or Okenla as he is called, was made a Chief Warrior of all the Abeokuta Christians in 1960.”Footnote ³¹ The use of “Chief warrior” seemed to mimic the prevailing description of individuals notable for leading wars quite prevalent in Yoruba land during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was fashionable to describe specific individuals as “great or chief warriors” to capture their outstanding roles in these Yoruba wars.Footnote ³² The import of war slogans into obituaries was to foreground the impactful Christian life of the deceased and emphasize why it is more significant than any other narrative. Reporting the death of Chief Okenla, the Lagos Observer wrote, “From all accounts he died of heart disease, not as is being circulated by the superstitious and ignorant, that his death is traceable to the diabolical machinations which they suppose resulted from his bold defiance of the heathen Chief Ogudipe, in his late attempt to persecute the Christians.”Footnote ³³ From this report, it was evident that the LO was opposed to the purported “heathenism” of local religious beliefs. The tensions seen in such clashes between Christianity and traditional beliefs were even disseminated through obituaries. It is possible to conclude that newspaper obituaries were vehicles of evangelism deployed by the elite converts to oppose local thoughts they often perceived as rooted in “idolatrous” practices, “paganistic” backwardness, and superstition.

Reporting Obituaries as Social, Civic, and Public Health Interventions

While obituary reportage in colonial newspapers of Lagos was a space to express sorrow and dispel beliefs deemed harmful to the Christian faith, it was also an ideological publication that problematized social and civic challenges confronted by the colony.Footnote ³⁴ During the colonial period in Lagos, obituaries were unusually obsessed with the causes of death. By mentioning and extensively dwelling on the causes of death, the intention was not to separate death from its causal significance but to establish the consequences of such causes. The Lagos Weekly Record of 16 March 1895, wrote, “Death of Mr. George Nicholas Hoare.”Footnote ³⁵ The first sentence of the obituary opened with the cause of his death: “With deepest regret, we have to chronicle the sad death by drowning of Mr. George Nicholas Hoare, eldest son of Mrs. G. N. Hoare of Lake Street, which occurred last Saturday afternoon.”Footnote ³⁶ The newspaper went ahead to provide a detailed account of how the boat mishap occurred:

This detailed account of his death suggests that reporting obituary in the nineteenth-century Lagos newspapers was necessarily gossipy to prove that certain deaths were inevitable or avoidable. Narrating how Hoare managed to clutch onto the fishing stakes but was failed by his own weight subtly reveals the immediate cause of his death. In effect, a connection to the remote and immediate causes of death must be established. By mentioning his weight as a significant hindrance to his last struggle for life, the newspaper indirectly informs the reader of Hoare’s immense physical size. By occasionally digressing to peripheral topics, obituary reports in colonial newspapers served multiple purposes: to report deaths and provide informative news on the precarious nature of lives in the colonies. One of the most salient aspects of such precarious existences was tropical diseases such as malaria.

The efforts by the colonial government to control malaria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Lagos resulted in expedient sociological and political decisions that impacted lives in the colony.Footnote ³⁸ Relying on its medical knowledge, the colonial state in Lagos attempted to colonize the body and appropriate obituary spaces of the newspaper to essentialize the African environment as a thriving port of dangerous diseases. Reporting the obituary of Captain Cyril Hammond Elgee, Lagos Weekly Record of 13 and 17 October 1917, wrote,

By mentioning “tropical disease,” it was assumed that it was among the major causes of death. This narrative was brought into several obituary reports and used to characterize the Lagos colony as intrinsically and endemically prone to disease and potentially unsafe for the colonial authorities. In fact, colonial officers saw most West African colonies as the epicenter of one of the most dangerous malaria-carrying organisms.Footnote ⁴⁰

During this period, the safety of colonial officers and other Europeans was held paramount and often considered the primary reason for most anti-malaria campaigns while Africans were victims of institutionalized racial policies.Footnote ⁴¹ Each failed attempt to safeguard the health of colonial officers was sensationalized in the newspapers as an implication of the African climate. For example, a detailed description of Captain Cyril Hammond Elgee’s obituary in Lagos Weekly Record of 13 and 17 October 1917, insinuated that the “damp” Amazon aided the deterioration of his health: “He suffered greatly as a result of sleeping in the damp on the Amazon, and it was there that he first took drugs.”Footnote ⁴² The introduction of the Amazon serves to paint a “jungle” picture of the colonial outpost of Africa where Elgee “first took drugs.” The report’s mention of “malaria,” “Amazon,” and “drugs” exemplify the triple existential threat of the colonial mission in Africa. To further heighten this vulnerability to the tropical climate and the consequent precarity of colonial sojourn in the colonies, the newspaper noted that “he had lived in tropical climate for 20 years” and that

The above instantly suggests that sleeping “on the floor in the damp of the Amazon” was the immediate cause of his death. The emphasis on the number of times Captain Elgee slept on the floor in the damp Amazon makes one ponder how the curious innuendo convincingly implies that sleeping in the damp Amazon induces illness and eventual death.

Obituary reports were full of gossipy anecdotes deployed to, among other things, present the African environment as an incubator for malaria. It also presented the African climate as a space where public health posed a greater critical challenge, leading to dangerous diseases such as dysentery. For example, reporting the death of Henry W. George, brother-in-law to the Hon. J. Thomas C. M. G. at Onitsha on the 16th Inst, the Lagos Standard of 17 January 1908 notes, “We understand that the deceased succumbed to an attack of dysentery.”Footnote ⁴⁴ On the same page, another death was reported without any cause: “It is with regret that we record the death of Mrs. Isabella Meredith, wife of Mr. Peter O Meredith, which occurred last Thursday. We extend our sympathy to the bereaved.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is possible to suggest that in some of the newspapers, the cause of death assumed a political stance such that deaths by natural causes were not sensationalized, while deaths caused by tropical diseases were highlighted and overstated. These deaths (and the connected obituaries) became political because they allowed the authors to criticize public health conditions in the colony; deaths of frail white bodies thus served as a warning and condemnation of government inactivity.Footnote ⁴⁶

LO complained about how the colonial officers, under the guise of the African climate’s adverse effect on their health, extended their leave in England without any official authorization. As LO argued, “In some instances, an officer had previously been in the commercial service, without inconvenience, for three or four years, yet as soon as he becomes an official; he discovers that his health requires that he should have frequent changes in England.” LO maintains that for Europeans to become acclimated and “suffer least from the effects of the climate” that they must remain in the country “for a considerable time.” LO was convinced that “withstanding the peculiarities of the African climate” posed a greater challenge for European colonial officers than it did for Africans if spending “a considerable time” in Africa was a criterion to acclimatize to the African climatic conditions. LO further scapegoated the Abeokuta climate in other death reports. For example, in its 27 October 27 and 3 November 1888 editions, the late surgeon-Major of Lagos, Samuel Rowe, was reported to have died “owing to his severe sufferings and the inadvisability of proceeding in that state to a more trying climate,”Footnote ⁴⁷ while Miss Elfrida Esther Thomas, daughter of Rev. J. B. Thomas, Wesleyan Minister at Abeokuta, was reported to have died of a cold. The report notes that “while she was on a visit to Abeokuta, she contracted cold, and this increasing on her return, she went to, according to the advice of her medical attendants, Gbologun where she died.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Here again, the Abeokuta climate was labeled either as a “more trying climate” where it was foolhardy for Samuel Rowe to venture into under his health conditions or one where Elfrida Esther “contracted cold” that lead to her death.

Similar obituary reports were recorded in other colonial newspapers. For example, reporting the death of Rt. Rev. Joseph Sidney Hill D. D. Bishop of Western Equatorial Africa, “on Thursday at 4:35 o’clock after three days of severe illness” and his wife, Mrs. Lucy Hill, wife of Bishop Hill, “this morning at 12:30 o’clock,”Footnote ⁴⁹ LWR notes that “in each case, death was due to a malignant type of malaria fever” and that “both were apparently in good health on Monday but during the night their health failed them, and on the following morning were protracted with fever; which grew more and more intense and to which they finally succumbed.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The mention of “after three days of severe illness” is a ubiquitous slogan that associated three days with the duration of malaria symptoms. For example, LWR reported that “Prince Adejumo of Oyo succumbed to fever after an illness of three days.”Footnote ⁵¹

One would assume that the manner the newspapers reported the death of the Bishop and his wife or Adejumo was intended to paint a scary picture of a malaria fever that was “malignant.” There was also an attempt to prove that malaria was an instant killer such that one can be “in good health” in the morning and contract malaria in the evening and succumb to death after “three” days. The deployment of terrifying words such as “malignant” and “protracted” seemed part of the discreet agenda of stereotyping the tropical environment as an endemic abode where recovery from malaria fever could not be guaranteed.

In the nineteenth century, the use of sensationalism seemed a popular journalistic strategy of obituary reportage – not just in the colonial newspapers but also in that of the Western colonialists. A tone of scandalous objectification has been noted in the nineteenth-century obituary reportage of American newspapers, which has been described by Janice Hume as “the use of sensationalism to tell stories of the deaths of citizens” whereby “editors believed information published in obituaries benefited the public and served as lessons or warnings.”Footnote ⁵² Hume examined how obituaries of 1818 in America tried to help readers come to terms with the specter of death through the framing of death imagery, noting essentially how death imagery in obituaries of 1818 was primarily religious in nature.Footnote ⁵³ This is similar to the religious imagery I noted earlier in colonial newspapers of Lagos. From the above, it becomes evident that lay writers used the medium of newspaper print to memorialize loved ones and insert them into the public sphere convened by these newspapers. Obituaries were either presented in the form of short announcements, poems, or lengthy biographical writing where names of surviving relatives were mentioned to give social worth to the deceased’s life.Footnote ⁵⁴

While obituaries could raise alarm about dangers to the bodies of white colonizers, they could also become an avenue to criticize European racial policies against Africans. Reporting the death of Rowland Cole, the Times of Nigeria (ToN) devoted almost a full page to chronicle his life’s journey and how he rose to the highest rank as Postmaster General in the Gold Coast Colony. However, ToN reported that in 1898 Cole “fell a victim to the pernicious and unscrupulous policy of ousting every black man from their positions as heads of departments as well as of high trust and responsibility.”Footnote ⁵⁵ ToN named Joseph Chamberlain as the European colonial minister who introduced the “unconscionable policy” that is “immoral in principle.”Footnote ⁵⁶ ToN chose to reproach Chamberlain for “this policy which he initiated in the West African administrations for the suppression of the black race and for stifling their aspirations and national growth.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The death of Cole, therefore, became an opportunity to condemn the racist policy of Chamberlain, which saw to the unjust retirement of the late Cole from the service “against his will and in spite of his protestations that he was still strong, able and willing to continue his work.”Footnote ⁵⁸ ToN further remarked that Thomas Deacon, the European who succeeded Cole, was unable to cope with the enormity of work Cole handled effortlessly, noting that Chamberlain could not spend many months in charge “when he had to requisition for the services of two assistants from England.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The newspaper suggested that the colonial office had to pay triple times the salary of Cole to service the same function Cole handled singlehanded while he was in charge. This type of obituary was a common practice in many colonial newspapers. Perhaps, deploying an obituary to critique racial stereotyping and condemn anti-African policies was a rare opportunity for certain writers who were denied a voice in the public sphere of newspaper columns. Obituaries thus became a type of column for public affairs commentary and critical engagement.

From the above, it is clear that obituary reportage constituted a political discourse in the colonial newspapers of Lagos because it encapsulated not just information about the deceased but also, more importantly, information about the African climate, which bordered on the stereotypical imagination of the colonies as an unsafe space for Europeans.

Obituaries and Nuances of Class and Status

The vibrant intellectual atmosphere ignited in the Lagos colony by these newspapers came with a new definition of the public sphere. This was a commodified form of the public sphere, dependent on payment, that constructed a certain class status in the editorial pages of most of the newspapers. For example, a select public for obituary was included under the strict terminology of “Advertisement.” On page 3 of the Lagos Times of 23 February 1920, there was a rubric titled “Advertisement” where the price of subscription for various advertisements was published. It reads, “Twelve lines and under, 5s,. Every additional line 6d, In Memoriam 4s, Birth 5s, Thanks for Sympathy 4s, One single column 25s, one-half column 15s, One-quarter column 10s, One-eight column 5s.”Footnote ⁶⁰ On another edition of The Times in 1915, a different subscription rate was provided for advertisements: “Advertisers scale – Five lines and under 2s. 6d., and 6d per line afterward for one insertion. Births, Marriages. Deaths, Thanks for Sympathy, for one insertion, 2s. 6d. rates for Contract Advertisement which can be arranged for.”Footnote ⁶¹ 6d was a day’s salary of a carpenter, a low-income government employee, or a blacksmith.Footnote ⁶² The newspaper itself sold for 3 pence. It was assumed, therefore, that publishing five lines of an obituary cost 2 shillings in 1915, while twelve lines cost five shillings in 1920.Footnote ⁶³

What this means is that anyone publishing more than five lines in 1915 would have paid an additional fee of 6 pence. The newspapers thus created a prestigious and class-exclusive public space for the dead. One way newspapers constructed this space was through longer poems to remember the dead. There were longer poems that were also published in the “In Memoriam” columns to remember the dead. While these poems were sometimes too long, and their subscription considered unaffordable due to their exorbitant subscription fees, they were thought to be published at the discretion of the editors who had a personal acquaintanceship with the deceased. The reading public was furnished with citations of poetry about death and loss from verses and lines from hymns such as “Brief Life Is Here Our Portion,” “The Saints of God, Their Wanderings Done,” and “For the Soul[s] Thou Holdest Dearest, Let Prayers Arise.”Footnote ⁶⁴

A close study of the newspapers suggests that the length of the obituaries strictly adhered to the newspaper’s subscription rates. Thus, it was thought that only the wealthy could afford such prices to either publish or be published in the “In Memoriam” section. Because of this overly constraining financial factor, the less affluent restricted their obituaries to only a few lines. Even though many obituaries were defined by textual brevity because of financial constraints, within these few lines, the essential elements of the dead’s social class were highlighted. For example, the Times of Nigeria reported these obituaries: “Dissu Martins: Prosperous merchant of Martins Street, died at his farm, Yaba Road, Wednesday, 11th Instant. Member of the Ansaru-un-Deen, famous Muslim Society of Lagos. Aged, about 60 years.”Footnote ⁶⁵ ToN would employ similar prestigious wording in narrating the obituary of the late Rowland Cole, the Sierra Leonean who was the former postmaster General of the Gold Coast. ToN described Cole as “a successful man of business” whose wife assisted in “conducting a very prosperous trade while he was in the public service.”Footnote ⁶⁶

An analysis of these lines indicates that while the obituary announcement of the late Martins is just five lines, it captured his most prestigious attribute and framed his social capital with such phrases as “prosperous merchant,” and “famous Muslim Society of Lagos.” These words of admiration immediately identified Martins’s social worth. On the same page of the newspaper, the obituary of James Alfred Agbaje, which is just seven lines, identified him as “a prominent citizen of Lagos” and father of “Dr. Savage and Mr. Spencer Savage” who “retired after a long and flourishing business career.”Footnote ⁶⁷ While the space is constraining to allow for an expanded narrative of Agbaje’s social worth, the insertion of his educated son, Dr. Savage, ascribes that flair of class and social importance to his persona. He would immediately be associated with a class of what is known as “Baba Dokita” in the Yoruba language, meaning “Doctor’s Father.” In the African context, the social worth of parents is often measured by the success of their children, while children are often considered wealth in certain local parlance. Yoruba popular thoughts have reinforced “the superiority of children over wealth,” such that “success or wealth, without children among the Yoruba, is either incomplete or devalued.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Among the Igbo, local idioms such as nze bu na nwa, means the “child exudes chiefly authority,” while Nwakaego translates as “the child is worth more than money.”

The importance of wealth and power in colonial Lagos is evidenced by the omission of the poor and powerless who are not connected with the newspaper publishers and editors from the public sphere convened by obituary pages in most newspapers of the eras under study. Where the obituary publication of an individual exceeded certain prescribed subscription lines, it was assumed that the individual was wealthy or may have a certain familial relationship with the editor or publisher. However, some obituaries were obviously published out of the discretion of the publisher or editors, perhaps because of the position the individual occupied among the elite circles. This editorial preference for some obituary publications, according to Sawada, is sometimes informed by the African custom of paying homage to deceased heroes and “great men.” Editors deployed poetry and sensationalism to define their subjective meanings of heroism in the obituary while moderate-income Lagosians seized the opportunity offered by the cheaper, short-verse-subscriptions in the “In Memoriam” section to inscribe their late wives, parents, spouses, and Western-educated Africans into the public sphere. Authors drew on poetry printed in hymn books, religious pamphlets, or other academic texts to memorialize loved ones and family members who were not public figures.Footnote ⁶⁹

On Saturday, 24 December 1887, The Mirror reported the death of Mr. Martins, the keeper of the Jubilee Restaurant under the “News Item” section. The report mentioned Mr. Martins as only the keeper of the Jubilee Restaurant without mentioning anything about his family; nor did it mention his father, mother, or siblings or any other information that would identify and accord him that social recognition. The report only stated that “he had been assisting in serving out refreshments to those who attended the conversations at Phoenix Hall up to within few minutes of his death.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The obituary did not provide any significant family information that would elevate his social standing. This obituary was published under the “News Item” section of the newspaper rather than the “Advertisement” section, where most obituaries were subscribed with money. This suggests that it might have been published at the discretion of the editor and could not have emanated from Mr. Martin’s relatives – a logical reason why no name of any of his family members was included. The “News Item” section contains short news deemed less weighty as to be given sustained attention by the newspaper editors. There are other short news contained in this section. The brevity of Mr. Martins’ obituary announcement may not constitute the condescending tenor of the obituary as reported by the editor but the omission of his social accomplishment. The style of reportage, therefore, seemed consistent with his social class (he was a bartender in Phoenix Restaurant). Its terseness could not capture salient aspects that were given attention in the shorter obituaries subscribed for in the “Advertisement” sections, such as his children, parents, or a brief sensational remark on the cause of his death and his life’s accomplishments. Perhaps, he was not married and had no child, but the omission of his parents’ names may be interpreted as a sign of social anonymity in the African context, while the absence of his obituary in the “Advertisement” section indicated that it was not subscribed. The meaning of subscription here suggests that families used money to negotiate for presence in the public sphere.

At the same time, some Africans invoked prestigious pedigrees to posthumously make up for marginalization in the colonial sphere. In the obituary of Africans, there seems to be a tendency to mention the highly placed children, parents, or relatives of the deceased to pronounce their social worth. For example, the Nigerian Times (NT) of 5 April 1910, reported the death of Charles Randall Cole on 28 March and identified him as a native of Yorubaland along with his wife Berky, as well as his parents, who were also noted as “natives of Yorubaland.” NT mentioned Cole’s siblings and noted that his parents were enslaved in Sierra Leonne but later returned to Lagos in the 1860s. The newspaper reported that all six members of the family have died, leaving only an elder daughter of Charles Randall Cole “who survives them all and who is mourning the irreparable loss of members of her kindred.”Footnote ⁷¹ The obituary took a historic leap into Cole’s life’s journey, how he was ill for four months and eventually “succumbed to his illness.”Footnote ⁷² The need to capture the family genealogy was in line with the tendency of Africans to launder the family’s history in eulogies. Naming all deceased relatives allows Africans to reexamine and reconnect with ancestral genealogy and advertise the family’s long-forgotten glories and credentials. Michael Jindra and Marleen de Witte see the listing of surviving family members as an indication of social success, for the names reveal a network of dependents and influence.Footnote ⁷³ Sometimes, it serves to recall the gift of longevity.

While the manner and narrative of the obituary reportage of the less affluent Lagosians may convey an idea of unfortunate brevity, certain elements were introduced to poignantly foreground their social class. The Lagos Weekly Record (LWR) of 18–25 June 1921 reports, “Not lost but gone before. The Home call came to Miss Caroline Adenike Fashanu at 1.30 PM on Tuesday the 21st instant, daughter of Mr. J. A. FASHANU, of 30 Martins Street, Lagos.”Footnote ⁷⁴ J. A. Fashanu was an important member of the Lagos colony who was also an active member of the Lagos Branch of the National Congress of British West Africa and a committee member of the West African National Conference.Footnote ⁷⁵ By mentioning the late Adenike father’s name, it is assumed that the family placed emphasis on the humanizing attribute of Adenike’s obituary and strongly articulated it through her father’s name. One assumes that a mention of late Adenike’s other family members would have been possible if space were sufficient. For example, in the Lagos Standard of 20 February 1895, the publication of the death of “Madam Martha Meroke on Wednesday the 13th instant,” mentioned that she was the grandmother of Mrs. Mojola Agbebi of Bamboo House, Race Course, and great-grandmother of Rev. E. M. Lijadu, Agent of the C. M. S., at Ode, Ondo.Footnote ⁷⁶ Meroke’s longevity marked a salient component in the public memory of her death, as seen from the conscious attempt to canonize her centenarian status. To underscore Meroke’s longevity, the newspaper deemed it necessary to notify the public that her daughter, Grace, passed on before her (Meroke) at 70. The mention of Meroke’s daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter seemed a deliberate editorial choice to emphasize the nature of social status that progeny can bestow upon the deceased. In this instance, the three generational progeny foregrounds not just Meroke’s age and social worth but suggests how her children value progeniture.

Even while reporting obituaries in a very short, single-line sentence, the social worth of human life was squeezed in. For example, on page 3 of the Nigerian Chronicles (NC) of 2 December 1910, even though the obituary of Hon. J. Mensah Sarbah B. L. C. M. G., was reported in just a single line, the social worth of his life was captured by mentioning that he was “an unofficial member of the Gold Coast Legislature.” To underline the importance of class and to prove that the sole mention of the “Gold Coast Legislature” was not satisfactorily socially elevating for Sarbah’s social class, on 9 December 1910, the NC singled out J. Mensah Sarbah’s death, among the three reported in the previous edition, for a detailed, lengthy elucidation. Titled, “The Late Hon J. Mensah Sarbah,” the article notes,

The above indicated that NC had initially treated Sarbah’s obituary scantily, alongside others, “last week” because the news arrived belatedly as they were “about to go to press.” However, in the subsequent edition, it was extracted from the seemingly less newsworthy obituaries and given sustained attention. Of course, not all obituaries were published in colonial newspapers. It is assumed that those obituaries that made it to the newspapers were deemed important and recognized. In another example, NC of 2 December 1910, articulated the social worth of Mrs. Sarah Abraham’s obituary through a mention of her son, Mr. I. E. Abraham of Broad Street.Footnote ⁷⁸ This suggests that the son may have placed the obituary advert. The above two obituaries seem to underscore either their subjects’ class, wealth, status, or affiliation with an important institution in the Lagos colony.

Accompanying the Dead to the Obituary Public Sphere

I have attempted to identify instances where the elite public sphere was constituted by individuals who possessed the financial means to “advertise” their deceased in colonial newspapers. In her study of Yoruba print culture in the early twentieth century, Karin Barber has demonstrated how Yoruba newspapers in the 1920s Lagos convened a progressive citizenry, equal in status on the printed page.Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast, I argue that Lagosians displayed wealth and social status through references to progeny and social connections.

Similarly, Jindra and de Witte have employed the concept of “wealth-in-people” to illustrate how the numerous names of people displayed on funeral posters could be used as a mark of achievement.Footnote ⁸⁰ Dependents are powerful criteria to measure social responsibility and clout in Africa. The dependents of the big man, and other recipients of his benefaction, more often than not constituted the followers of the big man, and listing them in newspaper obituary seems a subtle strategy for announcing one’s social accomplishments. Therefore, the newspaper obituary unveils a fruitful interplay between the social conspicuousness of the wealthy and the surrounding gaze of eulogizing adherents.Footnote ⁸¹ The bereaved see the public sphere of the newspaper as a space that can bestow prestige upon the deceased and their families while the narrative style and length of the obituary serve as a means through which this prestige could be exhibited and articulated.

Thus, colonial newspaper obituaries highlight the versatility of African societies in adapting to the colonial modernity of the print while safeguarding and continuing their most cherished cultural institutions. Despite the adoption of a seemingly new medium (the newspaper), African/Yoruba practices of wealth in people remained largely unchanged. The concept of wealth in people may provide ample room for further critical interrogation of the concept of the crowd and wealth in Yoruba cosmology. Jane Guyer deploys the concept of “wealth-in-people” to encapsulate the nature of studies of wealth in precolonial African societies. Some studies on wealth in precolonial Africa have touched on “the techniques by which pre-colonial war-lords built up, motivated and remunerated their followings” especially given the fact that the concept of followership is broad enough to apply to, for example, “wives, children, clients, political followers, religious acolytes, titled associates, occupational apprentices and so on.”Footnote ⁸² Whether living or dead, the Yoruba concept of the big man is measured by the number and rank of the individuals who associate with the big man and particularly who accompany him wherever he goes.Footnote ⁸³ The names of surviving relatives who accompany the deceased in the obituary publication reflect the cultural and social completeness sought in the public sphere of the newspaper obituary. In this way, obituaries in the media would surpass the mere act of chronicling facts. Rather, they might disseminate a particular ideology to their mass audiences. In Yoruba cosmology, the prestige of the elite is measured by the size of the dependent crowd.Footnote ⁸⁴ Patrick Cole noted that “emphasis was placed not only on how much an individual had but also on how much of it he was ready to redistribute as largesse among his followers and others around him.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus, when certain individuals die, they are immediately perceived in the light of a dignifying, transcendental, and heroic persona. Like an ancestor who is spiritually ubiquitous, such deceased individuals must also make a ubiquitous presence through many spectacular public avenues. Newspaper obituaries thus may become one of those avenues seen in this context as an extension of the Yoruba cultural belief in the physical and spiritual transcendence, expansion, and heroization of the dead.Footnote ⁸⁶

The above narratives are quite expository of new understandings of visibility, especially through the rituals of newspaper obituaries. These obituaries were strategically conditioned to participate in the political discourses of the public sphere. In Yorubaland, part of the political discourses of the public sphere revolves around procreation, wealth, and the heroic attributes of the advertised persona. Heroic tendencies are underscored by their association with the capacity of the families to prove that their deceased was a hero. Newspaper obituaries became a means of achieving this.