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.

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.