This chapter examines the policy influence of churches under autocratic and democratic regimes. The main analysis focuses on Zambia and Ghana, both of which have undergone numerous periods of democratization and autocratization. The chapter shows how liberal democratic institutions improve the ability of churches to accomplish their educational policy goals in these two countries and, suggestively, across sub-Saharan Africa more generally by giving churches greater influence over policymaking and protecting their agreements with the state.

African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

George McCall Theal’s early career in an emergent South African print industry was fragmented, contradictory and ambiguous. Reflecting the volatility of his environment, he strategically shifted careers, voices and readerships. This period in Theal’s career reveals a profound instability that induced the young migrant to occupy a variety of public spaces and to immerse himself in a range of writing and print endeavours. Obscured by his later racist ideologies, Theal’s initial success is based partly on his collaboration with and reliance on African sources for his first major international publication on Xhosa folklore and ethnography. This chapter is primarily concerned with the significance of this collaborative process for Theal’s career and for early print culture in South Africa. Theal’s urge to publish resulted in a mode of writing and publishing that was undeniably ground-breaking, and as history would show, devastating, in its inscription of a racist ideology.

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.