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Newspapers, New Spaces, New Writers: The First World War and Print Culture in Colonial Ghana
- Research in African Literatures
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2009
- pp. 1-15
- 10.2979/ral.2009.40.2.1
- Article
- Additional Information
The article focuses on a memoir, “My Experience in Cameroons during the War,” by J. G. Mullen, published in the Gold Coast Leader between 1916 and 1918. This memoir is unique for its status as a first-person narrative by an ordinary African clerk. Mullen’s narrative furnishes us with many insights into the educated, non-elite man’s imperial identity in the early twentieth century. Through it, we can discover precisely how a Ghanaian “native clerk” articulated his imperial subjectivity, his race-consciousness, his perception of social class in the colonies, his “patriotism,” and his need for existential (if not political) freedoms during the war.