The Quiet Before, page 10
The manifestos had created an opening for the Futurists, allowing them to envision a world that would be violently propelled toward the new, creating rubble and ash without a thought for what would come next or what might be lost on the way there. It was an alluring opening for Mina as well, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t walk through it. And, in any case, her mind was fixed elsewhere. While the man who had “invigorated” her was heading off to war, and she was forced to stay in Florence, she told her agent in a letter, “What I feel now are feminine politics, but in a cosmic way that may not fit in anywhere.”
With her “Feminist Manifesto” unpublished and tucked away in her suitcase, Mina set off for New York the following year, leaving Marinetti, Papini, and now Mussolini to encounter their future without her.
Chapter 4
DEBATE
Accra, 1935
THE BRITISH IMAGINED themselves benign imperialists, and when it came to freedom of speech, they wanted to believe that the same liberal ideals that guided their own society prevailed even for their subjects. The officials who ran colonial policy were mostly smart enough to understand that controlling a population through censorship could easily backfire. “On general principle, legislation interfering with the liberty of the Press is highly undesirable and provides an effective target for public criticism of the Administration,” is how one 1934 memo put it. Better for the colonized to have at least some opportunity to vent. As a result, in Accra, the capital city of the British colony known as the Gold Coast, local newspapers had existed from the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth as places where respectful yet scant disagreement with the colonial authorities could be found. This was tolerated.
The smudged newspapers of West Africa, produced in tiny batches on ancient printing presses and issued irregularly, functioned as another sort of loophole—much like petitions in nineteenth-century England, an exception allowing a bit of voice to the voiceless. In the newspapers, there was a chance at least for those literate West Africans to set their own agenda despite their subordinate roles. This was how J. B. Danquah saw it when, in 1931, he brought his ambition to bear on the creation of the Gold Coast’s first African-owned daily, The Times of West Africa. Danquah was a star of Accra “society,” the minuscule African elite, children of rich coastal families, who in the years after World War I had begun studying in Britain, becoming doctors and lawyers, and then returning to the colony highly educated and restless. Indirect rule, divided between the capital’s white colonial administrators and a few trusted and unthreatening traditional chiefs in the agricultural hinterland, left little room for agency on the part of this elite, and also benefited the colonial power by preventing the formation of any true national identity that might transcend tribe.
It was this logjam that Danquah hoped to break with his newspaper. Accra itself had experienced a profitable cocoa boom in the 1920s, and the city was now home to a new class of locally educated Africans, the first in their families to go to public schools or those run by missionaries, becoming literate Anglophones—teachers and accountants, police officers and mining clerks, telephone exchange operators and midwives. Together with Danquah’s own small community of professionals, this was a growing population that wanted to do more than just subsist. They congregated at the new Palladium on Saturday night to watch films like Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 or browsed at the Methodist Book Depot (which sold English novels, transistor radios, maps, and pens) or gawked at the Accra Race Course, where elites gathered on the weekend in their hats to watch the horses. Self-improvement clubs guided these newly literate Accrans through the works of Shakespeare. And Danquah’s newspaper provided the forum for shaping a common sensibility about the future. Those who had experienced life in England wanted a fast track to modernity, to discover their own analogues to European nationality and society. The locally educated meanwhile were still attached to the old ways. An issue like polygamy, for example, could become highly contentious, and The Times of West Africa was where the debate could take place. At bottom these were arguments about what independent African identity might look like, released from British domination.
London, grasping that the newspapers had become a space of true ferment, quickly realized the limits of its liberalism. At the end of 1932, a new governor arrived in Accra, Sir Shenton Thomas, intent on cracking down on what he saw as too much discussion and agitation in the local papers. “A greater measure of control is now necessary,” he insisted to his superiors, “in view of the irresponsible and misleading matter which is continuously appearing in the local papers and which is readily believed by the half-educated classes.” The governor’s inspector general of police agreed, adding, “There is not a single editor of repute or sense of responsibility on any one of the local newspapers.” As long as the elite remained a small and select group, their airs were tolerated. But the “half-educated classes” were now joining in the conversation. Thomas was explicit on this point: “It is the illiterates who are affected most, and young semi-educated men. They have the paper read to them and lap up all they hear.”
A set of restrictive bills was announced in early 1934 to quiet the cacophony. The owners and editors of these newspapers, Governor Thomas told senior officials at the Colonial Office, “could hardly be described as civilized.” The proposed rules were met with an unprecedented public protest at the Palladium. The newspapers were offering these colonial subjects an outlet they had never had before. Banning the press (“a harmless organ and the only means through which our cries are sometimes heard”) would constitute a grave injustice “meted out to a very helpless people.” The papers themselves were filled with letters and commentary. Many writers, as if they were in their last days of freedom, mocked Governor Thomas mercilessly, using the newspapers in precisely the way the Colonial Office feared.
Danquah joined a small delegation to go to England and confront the colonial secretary in person. The meeting was a disaster. Thomas, who had quit his post as governor in the middle of the protest, was waiting for the group and had attempted to prejudice the secretary in advance of their arrival. Danquah, he wrote, was “a dangerous man in conversation” who was also “pronouncedly Anti-White and Anti-Government,” and The Times of West Africa was “renowned for its venomous and scurrilous attitudes towards the Government and the European race generally.” The delegation was treated like a rabble of troublesome children. They barely got a word in, and when the lunch hour began to approach, “the Colonial Secretary kept on looking at the clock as if to say, ‘Oh, get on with it and be done,’ ” Danquah wrote in his published report. The meeting was all the proof Danquah needed to conclude that the supposedly gentle reign of the British, which seemed to offer the possibility of eventual self-rule, was a sham and the idea of gradual autonomy one they should consider “dead.” It was the newspapers, Danquah could now see, that had made the British aware that “the Colonies are dangerously, perilously becoming self-conscious.”
Just as they were boarding their ship back to Accra, dejected, one of the proposed ordinances was shoved through the Gold Coast’s legislative council. Sedition was now illegal in the colony, a criminal offense, a blade that could drop at any moment. A publication deemed seditious could be shut down. Editors were liable and could be locked up in prison and fined. Danquah had had enough. He soon closed The Times of West Africa and decided to remain in London, where he set to work researching the history of the empire called Ghana, which lasted until the thirteenth century after hundreds of years of rule. When he returned to Accra two years later, it would be with the name he hoped to give his country, if it ever managed to free itself.
But in his tenure as editor, Danquah had shown what a small newspaper, bursting with many loud voices, could do for a disempowered community, how it could be a place to work out their differences and debate their identity. And just as the respectable Danquah, always in a tailored suit and striped tie, left the scene, a new editor—a radical-minded transplant from Nigeria who had spent the past few years in America—was sailing into Accra harbor, looking to go further, to create a newspaper that would be the crucible for producing the New African.
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WHEN NNAMDI AZIKIWE arrived in Accra on October 31, 1934, he gave little thought to the new law or what it might mean for his plans. He wanted to change how the continent saw itself. Next to that, what was the pronouncement of some British official? He had swerved away from the comfortable life and academic career on offer to him in America to fulfill a promise he had made to himself, typed out and sworn “before God and man” on the last day of 1933, when he was still teaching political science at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. “I shall dedicate my life to the emancipation of the continent of Africa from the shackles of imperialism, and to the redemption of my country from the manacles of foreign rule,” he wrote. He wanted to coax out a “new Africa,” bursting with self-respect. And the only tool available for fulfilling this mission was the new daily newspaper he was about to helm: The African Morning Post.
For Azikiwe (or Zik, as his reading public would soon come to know him), this was a return. The last time he had seen the Gold Coast was as a tired and hungry nineteen-year-old stowaway ten years earlier. He and two friends, all dreaming of America, had paid a sailor to hide them under a lifeboat on a ship headed from Lagos to Liverpool, where they planned to work for passage across the Atlantic. But one terrible bout of seasickness sent them ashore farther up the West African coast, not far from Accra, and soon Zik’s mother, having traveled all the way from Nigeria in pursuit, was kneeling before him, tears in her eyes, begging him to return home.
It was an ignominious beginning to his life’s adventures. But Zik did soon make it to America, and his years there had shaped him. He had arrived clutching a well-worn biography of James A. Garfield he’d been given as a teenager in the Nigerian province of Onitsha. It told the story of a poor boy, born in a log cabin, who had pulled himself up through education and hard work to become the twentieth president of the United States. The actual country, however, when he finally encountered it in all its messiness, knocked this sweetly naïve preconception out of him. At moments, he felt the promised freedom and possibility. He was present for FDR’s first election win and the New Deal. He’d visited Harlem and seen the Sugar Hill neighborhood, where the strivers lived in large brick town houses. But from his first moments in the country—arriving at a preparatory school in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of the abolitionist John Brown’s ill-fated raid—he’d been equally affected by the near-constant news of lynchings. He was lonely and poor, doubly alienated as a Black man and a foreigner. One summer in Pittsburgh he lived on lemonade and bread, working on a ditch-digging gang. He felt so depressed that he tried to kill himself, lying across train tracks late one night. A stranger pulled him off just as the conductor hit the emergency brakes. He captured his state of mind in a blues-tinged poem: “Friendless, dejected, / Sorrow fills my mind, / All hope is gone, and now: / I want to die.”
From there, his situation improved. He began studying at Howard University, where he took classes with some of the greatest African American minds of that generation—political science from Ralph Bunche and philosophy from Alain Locke. In his anthropology courses, Africa, his home, was presented as the cradle of the human race. He tapped into the ferment of the late 1920s and the 1930s—the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey, the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and George Padmore, the Trinidadian-born anticolonialist. Always in need of scholarship money, he transferred to Lincoln University in 1929 (where his classmates included Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes) and received a master’s degree there in religion and then a second in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and was preparing to start a PhD at Columbia University, in political science.
It was just as he was about to make this move to New York City that he decided to stop and take stock. He had learned how to play football and was even initiated into the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, but he was, emphatically, not of this place and never would be. His fate was always to return to his people eventually. There was one problem, though: he was now overeducated and too Americanized for British authorities, who would surely bristle at his independent mind and his ambitions. What meaningful work could he possibly find in colonial West Africa? His ideal was to return to Nigeria. Zik’s mother was Igbo royalty, and his father was a functionary in the British administration, a job that had taken Zik all over Nigeria in his youth, so that he was fluent in Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo—all three of the country’s major tribal languages. But his queries for jobs back home were ignored. The civil service did not want him. Neither did the mission schools.
Newspapers were a last resort; he had dabbled as a journalist in America, writing, among other things, about sports for The Philadelphia Tribune. In one of his letters to various editors, Zik presented his political philosophy as more “pragmatist” than “radical” (or, rather, a “sane radical,” as he put it). “I am returning semi-Gandhic, semi-Garveyistic, non-chauvinistic, semi-ethnocentric,” he wrote. This was met with silence. There were few job opportunities for a self-described “budding leader.”
Then he tried Alfred J. Ocansey, a Gold Coast businessman who in a short time, through trading cars, trucks, and other goods, had become one of Accra’s most successful African merchants. Ocansey had branched out as well to entertainment, opening his hugely popular Palladium movie house and music hall (inspired by his visit to the London Palladium). He saw opportunity in the new, educated middle class of civil servants and clerks: here was a market in need of amusement. The Palladium became their center, a place where musicians pioneered highlife, the unique blend of fox-trot and calypso that made for a twangy guitar-heavy African version of big band. Accra’s high society lined up in evening dress, top hats, and tails to hear bands like the Jazz Kings and the Cape Coast Sugar Babies, while schoolteachers and nurses sat in the balcony and Ocansey, the impresario, made money.
Zik had a proposition for the entrepreneur: fund a new newspaper and let him, Professor Azikiwe, be the editor. He even promised he could make the venture profitable. To Zik’s surprise, Ocansey said he liked the idea, and on the day of Zik’s return he was waiting for him onshore. As Accra harbor came into view, from the white fortress of Christiansborg castle to the clock tower of the new Achimota School, opened only a few years earlier, Zik’s head was filled with his hopes for what he could do with his newspaper. “I whispered to myself that, one day, I would be in position to guide the public opinion of the country whose capital was then before me,” he later wrote of that heady moment.
Accra had no landing facility, so passengers climbed onto surfboats manned by Ga boatmen, who sang as they rowed, stopping to take bites of kenkey, corn dumplings. Zik got in one of the bouncing boats. He was the only African, projecting seriousness with his owlish glasses and a stylish part shaved into the side of his head, all just barely compensating for his soft boyish face. As the surfboat neared the shore, the boatmen lifted each passenger on a chair over the waves the last few feet to the customs wharf. One by one they picked up the white passengers, and it soon dawned on Zik that he would be last. When he protested, a bare-chested young man looked him in the eyes with surprise and indignation. You have to wait, he told him. We first have to serve the “masters.”
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THERE WAS A LOT of work to do. And, in early 1935, as soon as Ocansey set up the presses and Zik, now installed at the Trocadero Hotel, hired a small staff of half a dozen secondary school graduates, The African Morning Post began rolling. Its print was often smeared, and readers complained about the typesetting, which left individual letters and sometimes whole words off the page, but the Post quickly gained a circulation of two thousand in just a few months, matching the four or five other city papers. Zik’s purpose scrolled across the top of every day’s front page: “Independent in all things and neutral in nothing affecting the destiny of Africa.” It was easily the most stridently political of the Accra papers, shaped by Zik’s anticolonialism, his nationalism, his exposure to socialism, his deep African pride, and his cerebral sensibility.
An African newspaper at this time was nothing like the professionalized and well-staffed publications that existed in the United States or Europe. The author Richard Wright, who visited Accra more than a decade later, reported that the offices of newspapers were “tiny and cluttered; many of the presses are hand-powered; the staff, in terms of quality, is extremely poor; and the salaries of the reporters are unbelievably low.” These were not newspapers, he wrote, “in the sense that the West uses the term.”
But there was something else that truly defined the paper as different from the Western press. A newspaper like The African Morning Post was made up almost entirely of contributions from its readers. It contained some hard news—a combination of wire copy from Reuters and local reports about weddings and dances. But mostly it was filled with letters and opinion pieces and freelance articles by its small community of educated English-speaking readers. This was partly out of necessity: Zik simply didn’t have a budget to fill the pages with original reporting from his own journalists. “We shall be happy to place as much space in this journal as we possibly can at the disposal of the contributors,” one editorial declared. The staff also solicited these contributions to encourage personal investment on the part of their readership. If they saw their own words on the page, they might be more inclined to remain loyal buyers of the paper. Often this meant coaxing reluctant writers, shaky in English, to enter the fray, advising them, as The Gold Coast Leader, one of the other local African-owned papers did, to “be yourself, imitate no one, say what you wish to say in your own way and leave it there: you need not ransack tomes of dictionaries for words to suffocate your readers with.”
