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ABSTRACT
Commentators on Europe’s colonial archives often highlight the lack of coherence to be found in official and national repositories. Even within a single file, the archives do not simply, or only, yield evidence about imperial intentions and colonial subjects in Europe’s diverse territories. Focusing on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), this article argues that Colonial Office archives reveal the tensions between imperialism as a hegemonic ideology and the diverse practices of individuals, including colonial governors, civil servants in London, and their critics in the colonial public sphere. The article shows how Azikiwe’s biography was produced by spies and informants in Nigeria, and by civil servants at the Colonial Office, but that Azikiwe himself cleverly exploited the meticulous record-keeping procedures in Whitehall to insert his political autobiography into the files for posterity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Stephanie Newell is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow in International and Area Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the public sphere in colonial West Africa and issues of gender, sexuality and power as articulated through popular print cultures, including newspapers and pamphlets. She has published widely on the cultural histories of printing and reading in West Africa, and the spaces for local creativity and subversive resistance in colonial-era newspapers. Her most recent book was The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Ohio UP, 2013).
Notes
1. The ways in which Azikiwe and other anti-colonial activists in the 1930s thwarted colonial legal processes through their use of pseudonyms is analysed in S. Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Ohio, 2013).
2. Other radical pressmen in 1930s and 1940s ‘British West Africa’ included Kobina Sekyi, Benjamin Wuta-Ofei, Kobina Kwaansa, Ernest Ikoli and Joseph Ocquaye. See F. Omu, Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880–1937 (Atlantic Highlands, 1978); see also K. E. B. Jones-Quartey, A Summary History of the Ghana Press, 1822–1960 (Accra-Tema, 1974).
3. For a discussion of the ways in which the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere was complicated by colonialism, see Newell, The Power, 29–43.
4. James describes how the Colonial Office Information Department sent Harold Cooper to Lagos in 1947 as a Public Relations Officer with a remit to establish cordial relations with the local press, part of an ongoing policy to improve public relations in the colonies.
5. This is not to suggest that Zik remained out of court: in 1938, his continuous confrontations with Mr H. C. M. Bates, editor of the Nigerian Daily Times, led to a series of court cases and counter-cases for libel, as well as an accusation from Bates that Azikiwe stole type from the Times, an accusation that, although proven true, led the police to suspect the type had been planted by Bates at Zik’s premises (CO 875/13/5, 16 Nov. 1941).
6. See Azikiwe, My Odyssey, 402–26 for an account of Zik’s participation in sporting activities.
7. ‘Youth’ was a key category in other West African political movements in the period before decolonisation and was often used to refer to men aged between 15 and 35.
8. See especially the raft of oppressive measures adopted in Sierra Leone in order to contain Wallace-Johnson in 1939. L. Spitzer and L. Denzer, ‘I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League, Part II: the Sierra Leone period, 1938–1945', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 6:4 (1973b), 565-601.
9. For Azikiwe’s account of this, see My Odyssey, 321.
10. Known as ‘Aggrey of Africa’, Dr. Aggrey (1875–1927) was a popular teacher and scholar from colonial Ghana, who was educated in the USA and returned to Ghana to take a leading role at the colony’s top school, Achimota College. Aggrey was not an anticolonial nationalist in the manner of the pressmen of the 1930s and 1940s. He was a passionate advocate of African education and ambition, who gained enormous local prestige for his educational initiatives, scholarly success and pithy sayings. Ironically, a large proportion of the top secret information gathered by the spies was gleaned from Zik’s own autobiographical writings, published and widely circulated in the newspapers.
11. ‘Owelle’ is an eastern Nigerian chieftaincy title.
12. In his autobiography, Azikiwe notes the complexity of gathering ancestral and genealogical information about his family: ‘I have had to make a number of inquiries in order to ascertain my ancestral origins … [s]ince the information obtained is based on oral tradition, I cannot vouch for its accuracy’ (1).
13. The extent of Azikiwe’s involvement in the beliefs and activities of the Communist Party is a field of debate in its own right. See I. H. Tijani, ‘Communists and the Nationalist Movement’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), Nigeria in the Twentieth Century (Durham USA, 2002), 293–313; H. I. Tijani, Britain, Leftist Nationalists and the Transfer of Power in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (New York, 2005); and H. I. Tijani, ‘Britain and the foundation of anti-Communist policies in Nigeria, 1945–1960', African and Asian Studies, 8 (2009), 47–66.
14. Not all documents achieved posterity in the Colonial Office archives. Numerous items listed in the index of classified Colonial Office files on Wallace-Johnson were ‘destroyed under statute’.
15. British-based African newspapers also provide an important resource for researchers, including Duse Mohamed Ali’s African Times and Orient Review in London (1912–1920), the influential and long-lasting West Africa (1917–2005) in London, E. D. Morel’s African Mail in Liverpool (1903–1917) and Wásli, the journal of the West African Students Union (WASU) in London (1926–1947).