The Quiet Before, page 11
But if the newspaper’s form—more a message board than a one-way conveyor of information—was largely a function of economics, it also served Zik’s purpose. Much like Danquah’s earlier effort, Zik imagined The African Morning Post primarily as a place for conversation, where Accra’s literate population, its aspiring intelligentsia, could come together. Its centerpiece section was dubbed “Grumblers’ Row” and was intended for debate and complaint. The quality of the writing here was surprisingly loose and unguarded. It’s not that contributors had forgotten their British overlords but that almost all submissions were anonymous or pseudonymous (attributed to portentous names like A. Native or ridiculous ones like Lobster). This gave people a chance to speak their mind, unhindered, to test out higher degrees of daring. Danquah had opened the door to this possibility, but Zik was now barging through, every day bringing another argument or counterargument about the nature of their existence as colonial subjects and the need to see beyond their fractured state as a collection of tribes.
In one of the paper’s first columns Zik wrote that the New Africa he envisioned “must consist of Africans and human beings, not just Fanti or Ga, Temne or Mende, Yoruba or Ibo, Bantu or Tuareg, Bubi or Hausa, Jollof or Kru.” Danquah, with his vision of a modern West African, would have agreed. But whereas he had worked toward self-improvement and British recognition, Zik wanted Africans to see themselves differently—a point he and his reader-contributors reinforced in every issue—as proud and worthy, at this moment, of running their own affairs.
Zik set the table every day with his column, “Inside Stuff,” and editorials. But any number of writers could then take over, usually disguised, to advocate for or condone or contradict on any topic, from the scourge of unemployment, to the pros and cons of egalitarian marriage, to the increased, possibly nefarious trend of cinemagoing among young people. The African Morning Post became the closest thing to a public sphere that had yet existed on the Gold Coast, at least as it would later be defined by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. For Habermas, the public sphere was where citizens could show up as individuals, independently, outside government control and any allegiance to clan, and deliberate together about the news of the day, forming collective opinions that could then act as a countervailing political force. In his account of the public sphere’s birth, this unique environment first came together in the coffee shops of England and France in the seventeenth century, facilitated by newspapers, which provided a focal point for discussion. Habermas’s vision has come to be seen as blinkered and utopian—for one thing, despite writing his formative work in the 1960s, he failed to acknowledge all the people left out of those coffeehouse conversations. The public of his “public sphere” signified a very specific slice of society, which was true as well for Zik’s readers, a minority amid the illiterate masses. But the concept helps us see just what was being created on the pages of “Grumblers’ Row.”
In 1937, for example, British companies formed a cartel, or “Pool,” to set a lower price for the cocoa they were buying from African farmers. Their alliance seriously compromised the livelihoods of powerless Gold Coasters, who depended on the cash crop. Soon enough, The African Morning Post erupted with dozens of pseudonymous columns from readers, including one that lamented how the cartel would “let down the African into a state of distress” and another that argued the next day that the farmers themselves were guilty for not pushing back enough: “I must say that whatever may be the case against the Pool, the European is not solely to blame. When he sees that we are up for our own rights, he steps back a little. It is our own kith and kin.” Five thousand cocoa farmers eventually joined a boycott and managed to hold a united front, bringing the sales of cocoa down by 90 percent and refusing to buy European goods—except for essentials like sugar, kerosene, matches, and tobacco—until the buyers accepted a deal on their terms.
It was more than just solidarity that the quarreling voices on the page built. Being able to see differences of opinion also established common ground. Each writer was equally invested in the same project of creating a new relationship to the land and to their oppression at the hands of the British. It was the arguing that allowed them to peek over the dividers of tribe or social status and establish new allegiances, to create “indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship,” as Benedict Anderson, the political scientist and historian, put it. Like Habermas, Anderson saw newspapers as the nucleus for these newly politically awake publics and would have understood exactly what was happening in the pages of The African Morning Post. “These fellow-readers,” Anderson wrote, “to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”
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A TYPICAL ISSUE: Tuesday, June 4, 1935, a day of “fair sky” over Accra. The front page touts some news, both extremely local (“Christiansborg Youth Earns His B.A. Degree”) and international (“Socialist Party Forms New Cabinet in France”), but the inside pages are where things get interesting. A reader named “Angelina” fills one column with her thoughts on life insurance, a novel concept for her, which she learned about from a purloined copy of Time magazine. “Angelina” urges African women to “induce their husbands to take an insurance policy” so they can protect themselves in case of any tragedies. Another piece, headlined “A Disclaimer,” is by a reader responding in “this popular and highly respected daily” after he was accused in a different newspaper of assaulting a woman (“Victoria Mahney is not my wife and was never brought by me from Sierra Leone and starved”). Alongside ads for the new 1935 Chrysler Plymouth Six and Satab blades (“The blade that will laugh at any beard”), most of page 6 is taken up with a political screed from someone using the byline Gump. Under the headline “What Is Civilization?” he attacks white superiority and calls Christianity itself a hypocritical religion for preaching equality but keeping the African subjugated. “They speak bitterly of the Negro; they say the Negro is mentally unfit to rank with the white man. Missionaries and non-missionaries have a bitter hatred against the Negro, yet the former is persistently promulgating the principle of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ” Gump ends by exhorting his fellow Gold Coasters “to extinguish tribal differences and silly whims if our nation must progress on our own lines.”
The concerns and opinions of readers of all sorts made it into the pages—the first priority being to fill them—but Zik clearly chose submissions to bolster his own project of raising up a New African. That June 4 issue has an unsigned lead editorial titled “African Mentality” that echoes Gump: “That the brain of the African is capable of accomplishing and, at times, surpassing, the achievements of other races, is being vindicated day by day.” In Zik’s own column, which he penned under the name Zik, he writes at length about the “Gold Coast scholar” touted on the front page that day for graduating from Lincoln University, Zik’s own alma mater. “The African is essentially a fighter. He believes that what is willed can be,” he writes.
The other regular column besides Zik’s was “Men, Women, and Things,” by the pseudonymous Dama Dumas. In that day’s column, Dama Dumas, who had a playful, scolding tone, pushed the need for education, reprimanding young urban women who “despite their Parisian chic and flair for intrigues are totally illiterate.” Dama Dumas was Mabel Dove, the daughter of a prominent lawyer who had attended finishing school in England. She was at the very center of Accra’s tiny high society and had been briefly married to Danquah. It was in his Times of West Africa, in a column called “Ladies’ Corner,” that she first perfected the judgmental but droll and clever voice that became a perfect foil for the paper’s readers. Her opinions, on everything from the chicness of certain frocks to the need for young women to resist premarital sex, were never predictable and always elicited either angry or approving responses. She was a feminist who also urged cultivation, with suggestions on which Dickens novel to read. Her elitist sensibilities, aimed at lifting up the newly educated class, were largely gleaned from her time in England but were balanced by deep African pride. Most columns would land on a question: “If an Indian lady of rank could appear at Buckingham Palace in her own national costume and look perfectly appropriate and in good taste, what is to hinder us women adopting a similar attitude?” And the pages of the newspaper often turned into a forum on positions she had taken, such as when the Young People’s Literary Club held a debate on the question, “Is the European form of marriage beneficial to the African?” The initial vote was no, but she disagreed and thought “native marriage,” by which she meant polygamy, to be “old” and “primitive” and “a trifle distasteful to us modern women.” For weeks, the opinions of readers and her rebuttals filled the pages.
This printed back-and-forth was good for keeping readers hooked, but it also allowed for a reconciling of different visions of independence. What would that New African be like? How much of traditional culture and practice would have to be thrown off to seize upon a modern national identity? These questions snaked through every column and reader response. A figure like Zik had already crossed the Rubicon. A Nigerian, educated in America and living in Accra, he saw himself as embodying something much larger than tribe or even colonial territory. He wanted a future of independent African countries, on equal footing with a France or a Germany, each state held together by a set of common values as much as a rootedness to soil.
Mabel Dove was much closer to being a New African, which is why one of the biggest debates she ignited, when she was still writing as Marjorie Mensah in Danquah’s paper, was about whether she actually existed or, more precisely, whether a woman could really be behind her column. Many readers saw her as an aspirational fiction, created by the elites. They were dubious that a woman with such sharpened wit and intelligence could be real and, if so, whether this would even be desirable. The argument began with a contributor claiming that “the diction and firm grip” that she possessed as a writer were impossible to imagine in a Gold Coast woman. Another man speculated that she might just have had a lot of training in Europe. Underneath the surface controversy about who really wrote the columns was a debate about future gender roles: If Africans embraced independence and modernity, would they have to contend with equality of the sexes as well? These attacks were parried in the column, of course, with Mabel defending all women. “What do you think of us, after all? You, and a good many others like you, have the most peculiar notions of women—especially Gold Coast women—that I have ever heard of. Do you really think that none of us is capable of writing up a column in a Newspaper?” The controversy was so intriguing—“Print her picture!” was the demand in many letters—that there was even a local cabaret show featuring a man in drag as “Miss Marjorie Mensah” in the skit “Of Course I Am a Lady.”
Though it might not have felt like it to the many readers who were writing in and choosing grandiose pen names to voice their opinions, they were creating a public sphere and one that Zik understood to be doing significant work. These debates in the pages of the Post were sometimes serious—one forum straightforwardly asked the readers, “Is the Gold Coast a Nation?”—and sometimes trivial, but they were the only way to move an anti-imperialist movement forward. As long as the British set the terms of identity, exploiting tribal divisions to keep the nation fractured and precluding any kind of national consciousness or civil society from taking shape, they could argue that there was no leading, educated class prepared to grab the reins. It was the act of wrangling with each other on the pages of the newspaper that not only built that class but provided the proof that it existed.
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WITHIN A YEAR, Zik had kept his promise to Ocansey and had increased circulation far past the point the businessman thought possible. By 1936, the Morning Post had ten thousand daily readers, some subscribing from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the Cameroons. With a small, inexperienced staff, the work was never ending for Zik. He would wake before dawn and rush from his room on the top floor of the Trocadero Hotel to the office, where he’d take a magnifying glass to the proofs of each day’s paper. He would then make his way to the dusty printing workshop, where he would yell orders at the workers manning old presses that often broke mid-printing. Zik could be aloof and dictatorial with his staff, who never seemed to live up to his standards. He felt himself a professional, a man of the world, working in an environment that continuously sabotaged him.
Because of his education and his bearing, Zik had been accepted by Accra’s high society, playing tennis every other day at the Rodger Club with members of the elite and even a few white colonial administrators. But he was never truly comfortable there and remained a largely solitary, driven figure behind his glasses. As his assistant editor at the paper put it, Zik was “ill at ease in this society in which he was still both a ‘stranger’ and also something rather special. He was admired and cheered by thousands, but most people stood in understandable awe of him when in close, personal contact. They flocked around him smiling broadly and shaking hands after his lectures, but that is different than intimate small talk on equal terms.” His was the loneliness of the New African, as he saw it. In his mind and in the pages of his newspaper, he lived in the future, but day to day the old allegiances and power structures, reinforced by tradition and the gun, still seemed to dwarf him.
There was, however, some proof of his success, that he was moving people in his direction, if only in the irritation of a growing number of detractors. Despite the chummy tennis matches, Zik had a harsh opinion of what he thought of as the old African establishment, both the elite he felt were too passive and the tribal leaders who were complicit in British rule—they had become too comfortable with the way things were. Or perhaps they benefited too much? In his lexicon, all of them represented the “Old Africa” that he repeatedly insisted in his columns “must be destroyed because it is at death grips with the New Africa.” He opened up his pages to the frustration of a younger generation who saw no prospects for themselves and resented the status quo and anyone, Black or white, who seemed to profit from it. Zik even successfully used the Morning Post to promote a new populist political party, the Mambii Party (from the Ga word for “people”), against the establishment party, vying for seats on the colony’s legislative council, a largely ceremonial body meant to offer the illusion of political participation (its constitution guaranteed a British majority and gave final word to the governor).
To the chiefs, who had gained most from indirect rule and wielded even greater power than they had before colonialism, Zik was nothing but an outside agitator. At a session of the legislative council, one of the most respected chiefs in the Gold Coast, Nana Sir Ofori Atta (also, coincidentally, Danquah’s half brother), spoke of Zik without mentioning his name. “We have heard so much of a ‘New Africa’ coming to birth,” he said. “The protagonists of the New Africa are spreading doctrines which can only tend to cause trouble in this country.” He saw real danger in the way the young were being “educated to disrespect and show open contempt to the Chiefs and Elders.”
Zik liked what was happening in his pages, the way it seemed to be building up the self-esteem of Accrans and challenging the elite to think more expansively. If it meant that sometimes his readers expressed themselves bombastically or with too much violence—criticizing administrators, condemning colonialism, embracing Pan-Africanism (and sometimes even Communism)—it was all part of the healthy friction he was hoping to create.
So free and lively were the Morning Post’s pages that Zik could be said to have forgotten the threat that hung over him from the very first issue: the ordinance passed through the legislative council (even though it was opposed by all the African members), which gave the governor the right to determine whether a publication had “seditious intention” and then impose fines and jail time on writers and editors. It left wide open to interpretation exactly what was meant by “seditious.” This could be anything from inciting rebellion against colonial rule to simply provoking “hatred or contempt” and “disaffection against the administration of justice in the Gold Coast.”
The reviled governor Shenton Thomas had been replaced by Sir Arnold Hodson, who had a very different approach to his role. Hodson had gained the nickname Sunshine Governor at his previous post in Sierra Leone, and his governing philosophy soon became clear. He would give the press some room to do its thing. Aside from blasting pro-British propaganda over the state radio, he would practice benign neglect. He was confident that a venue like “Grumblers’ Row,” with all its jostling argumentation and passionate opinion, was simply too clamorous to present a real threat. “It is well known,” he wrote shortly after taking over as governor, “that overstatement and exaggeration eventually defeat their own ends and exert little influence on the great mass of public opinion.”
With Hodson installed, there were very few reasons to worry that the bubbling disquiet in the Morning Post would create any problems for Zik. Into the second year of the paper’s life it seemed he was able to do just what Danquah had done and much more, with no real pushback. Zik had even struck up an acquaintance with the new governor, and in April 1936, when Zik got married to Flora Ogoegbunam, a young woman from his city of Onitsha, Sir Arnold was in attendance. Underneath the redbrick clock tower of Accra’s Methodist church, with Zik dressed in black tails and striped pants, the governor handed him a gift: the gathered speeches of Britain’s Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, in a book titled This Torch of Freedom.
