In 1955 the Trinidad newspaper the Clarion reprinted the classic 1921 essay on journalism by Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott, in which Scott extolled the virtues of a wide range of independent newspapers with “a soul of [their] own.” The number of newspapers in circulation was not inconsequential to debates about the democratic role of the press in the Caribbean and West Africa during the 1950s—or to debates in Britain itself, where the smaller “provincial” English newspapers were withering away. Having a good number of newspapers in print mattered to representative systems of government because it ensured that a range of opinion could be publicly articulated. But the revival of Scott’s essay in the Clarion was a virtuous signal flare. Just over a year later the Trinidad Labour Party, the political affiliate of the Clarion, lost the general election and the paper itself stopped printing.
By the late 1950s the press in Ghana, Jamaica, and Trinidad consolidated into a smaller number of papers. There were two general reasons for this consolidation. First, the small artisanal papers that did not or could not professionalize could not compete. Second and relatedly, these papers tended to be affiliated to unions, or to political or social associations. Their fate was yoked to how these groups fared in the political landscape of the 1950s. Nigeria was an exception to this pattern of decreasing titles, because Nigerian political parties did not consider their newspapers to simply be political mouthpieces but instead built them into strong professionalized newspapers.
In both West Africa and the Caribbean, the press also began a fractious relationship with the emergent independent governments that replaced colonial rule. Ghana is the starkest example of this pattern, and the only real example of state-controlled media. But everywhere the tone of the press shifted, as many newspapers became increasingly affiliated with political parties. These parties, in turn, staked claims in the expanding electoral system that was being propelled toward parliamentary government.
Postcolonial pessimism assessed mass media in the Caribbean and West Africa as being endemic to the failures of state politics. A 1977 assessment of Commonwealth Caribbean mass media concluded that the “chief mission” of most mass media was “serving political goals.” Because postcolonial governments were “still immature and unstable,” they were sensitive to criticism and thus would “swing to authoritarian governmental practices concerning island mass media.” In 1962 Enoch Waters of the Associated Negro Press observed “widespread dissatisfaction with the press in Africa among those who own it, those who run it, and those who read it.” Waters toured twenty-two African countries on a four month journey, assessing the potential to build the ANP’s network across the continent. “Most of the confusion,” Waters concluded, “arises from the attitude that the press is an arm of government.”
These assessments rightly point to political antagonism as a key dynamic in how the press functioned by the end of the 1950s. M. O. Ijere, in a 1973 article on Nigerian mass media in Présence Africaine, criticized the manner in which “the same press which had castigated the imperialists” transferred that spirit to internal political opponents after independence, engaging in “mud- slinging, personal acrimony and tendentious propaganda.” But some assessments also simplified the history of the press. The clamor in the early 1960s for journalistic training, noted by the ANP, made it easy to stamp the home press scene as professionally empty rather than previously restricted. To produce their newspapers editors and proprietors faced increasing numbers of seditious ordinances in the 1930s and then wartime censorship after 1939. They also held neither the funds nor official favour to subscribe to wireless services. Instead, they practiced the clipping and exchange system, gathering content from connections with Black Atlantic networks and even clandestine circulation of material deemed “undesirable” by the colonial administration. This method for gathering content was a well-established newspaper practice. But its informal tentacles allowed editors to circumvent colonial bureaucratic channelsand source their content from texts and regions that administrators would prefer be avoided, if not outright censored. In doing so, this collaging practice cultivated readers and listeners adept at inferring between the lines and staking their own positions.
But to many outside eyes the press in colonial West Africa and the Caribbean had looked like deficient copies of Western modernity, missing the experimental and syncretic aspects of these newspapers. Media studies experts argued that in the Caribbean, media did not “conform to modernistic informational systems” and that political commentary was “hostile and unconstructive, probably a carryover from pre-independence days when editors felt that their main task was to attack the colonial authorities, no matter what they said or did.”
This verdict, that hostility was simply a holdover from the campaigning journalist era, missed more about this dynamic than it captured. Newspapers of the earlier era expressed ideas well beyond a simplified anti-colonial antagonism. They articulated African diaspora organizational and intellectual history and criticized class and gender politics in local communities. Rather than launching indiscriminate assaults on colonial authorities, newspapers presented pointed analysis of colonial machinery and imperial objectives. For many editors and contributors, critiques of colonial rule were at the heart of the content, as well as the rationale, of the press in colonized society. But this came from the dynamic of disfranchisement combined with the ideal of the Fourth Estate, rather than uncomplicated animosity. Postcolonial government insecurity and sensitivity to criticism mirrored, rather than departed from, the angst of colonial governors and their spasmodic censure of the press.
In sum, it was a mistake to describe the postcolonial press as floundering because it didn’t understand the relationship between press and governance. The colonial press historically had a sophisticated view of that relationship. Newspapers were leaders in the extensive, lengthy, and productive debates about the role of the press in society that preceded 1960. They served as fertile ground for combined analysis of international relations, resource extraction and wages, civil liberties and the colonial state, and the incongruities of all these conditions for Black peoples. The analysis of these issues incorporated a spectrum of socialist, liberal, and conservative political affinities. In the 1950s, as we saw in Chapter 8, newspaper style and content came to reflect newspapers’ own socioeconomic goals as well as political calculations.
In this chapter I take up the postcolonial assessment of a fractious and unhealthy “political” press, revealing how this emerged out of the historical dynamic of 1950s processes that led toward self-governance. Because constitutional negotiations were colony-specific, and because there were heterogeneous opinions about the role of the press, changes to the press in the 1950s can only be explained with careful attention to local dynamics. Therefore, as I did in Chapter 1, in this chapter I zero in on each individual territory in turn – Ghana, Nigeria, Trinidad and Jamaica – identifying how the local sociopolitical landscape drove changes to the press in that region.
The explanation for the demise or durability of a particular newspaper may be singular, but the broader changes to the press do express the political stakes of the 1950s and the transfer of pan- African contact to new venues. Conceived as a criticism of colonial rule, the West African press’s claim to be the “Fourth and Only Estate” held new meaning by the late 1950s. The institutions of the state were increasingly wielded by political parties. The claim of the press to a foundational political role now filtered through contests for electoral legitimacy. The fate of many newspapers followed their electoral allegiances. More importantly, anti-colonial political claims slid easily into the framework of demonstrating “responsible” and recognizable institutions and values for self-government. The collaged, heterogeneous intellectual and political debate that thrived upon informal networks of Black printing and sharing around the Atlantic did not serve the case for self-government.
From The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960 Used with permission of the publisher, Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Leslie James.
