The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa by Stephanie Newell (review)

Rather than excavating historically to expose the biographies and intentionality hidden beneath the many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions in British West Africa’s newspapers, Stephanie Newell looks at what anonymity and pseudonymity themselves meant in this historical context between the 1880s and 1940s. In other words, The Power to Name does not focus on discovering the true gender, ethnicity, race, or political affiliation of a given writer. This is what allows Newell’s excellent book to succeed as literary sociology. Because she refuses to reimpose the fixed identity categories dispensed with by the dozens of writers she examines, she can steer clear of the preoccupation with personalities that controls other books on anonymous writing; those categories as well as the refusal to claim them she takes as performances that, in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s use of the word, signify on dominating discourses. And in these performances, the written word is powerful enough to summon readers, calling them into being as a new kind of public; this is the same kind of summoning examined in works by Karin Barber and Michael Warner, scholars Newell draws on appreciatively.

Newell suggests that the view of anonymity as nothing more than a way of masking is Eurocentric and particularly unsuitable to her African context. (Unfortunately, she gives little space to comparing her findings with scholarship on anonymous writing in other colonized contexts, or even in the metropole, but her mastery of the scholarship on British West Africa and its texts is extraordinary.) Certainly anonymity is used by many of the writers Newell considers in order to avoid censure, just as anonymity has been used by political dissidents since the dawn of writing. And a common conviction among newspaper editors was that West African colonial subjects, lacking democracy or suffrage, had only the newspaper as a means of airing their political opinions (often anonymously) and building political influence. Indeed, the newspaper helped create a public sphere in much the same way as Jurgen Habermas describes, but because colonial power prevented the development toward democracy, the newspaper itself became a “parallel government” (41). Meanwhile the colonial administrators, whose correspondence Newell examines in the third chapter, were exasperated by the contradiction between their public espousal of the liberal value of press freedom and the exigencies of forcibly controlling a subject population that was—thanks in part to these newspapers—increasingly restive. This contradiction is highlighted in Newell’s accounts of colonial legal action pursued against Nnamdi Azikiwe and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson for newspaper articles published in the Gold Coast.

But in colonial West Africa, anonymity and pseudonymity had dimensions not found in Europe. They meant resistance to the colonial obsession with eliminating the elasticity and mobility of West African naming practices. They also made possible continuities with African oral genres. Thus Newell explores, for example, how writers attributed praise-names to themselves and took on the role of the trickster that figures in so many West African folktales. Later chapters demonstrate how, just like African traditions of oral performance, folktales and pseudonymous autobiographical narratives mobilized newspaper audiences’ interpretive participation and invited the implementation of moral principles. The fifth chapter, on articles and stories written under female pseudonyms, shows how female pseudonymity itself as well as the issues raised in the writings engage critically with the colonial obsession to regulate gender and sexuality in ways completely foreign to precolonial norms.

Throughout, Newell emphasizes anonymous and pseudonymous writers’ confidence in the absolute publicness and efficacy of their words, despite their own blurred identities. If in British West Africa “public opinion was regarded as a new type of discourse synonymous with newspaper writing” (43), then what Newell has illuminated is a utopic, nonhierarchical (though bourgeois) space for the formation of political and national consciousness at least as fecund as the European space two hundred years earlier that inspired Habermas’s work on the public sphere.