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6 w The Strange Toleration of Stuart-Young in the AfricanOwned Press of Nigeria Stuart-Young used his status as an author and local personality to enter West African newspaper culture center stage. For two and a half decades between the 1910s and late 1930s he occupied numerous spaces in Africanowned newspapers, including letters pages, poetry corners, occasional columns, and columns of his own.1 A turning point in his writing career occurred between 1921 and 1923, when he left his thriving palm oil business in the hands of Igbo staff and spent sixteen months lodging with African friends in Tinubu Square, Lagos, as a full-time writer.2 His output increased so dramatically in this period that every English-language Nigerian newspaper, and most Ghanaian newspapers, received a large volume of submissions on an almost daily basis, and a political voice emerged in these articles that reached far beyond the walls of the aesthete’s ivory tower. So pervasive was his presence at this time that on several occasions letters from the more politically engaged and confrontational palm oil trader Odeziaku appeared side by side with letters signed by Stuart-Young in his capacity as poet, philosopher, and intellectual.3 Indeed, Odeziaku seems to have had a rather ambivalent relationship with J. M. Stuart-Young, referring to him in one letter to the Nigerian Eastern Mail as “the little J. M. of Onitsha,” author of “clinching couplets.”4 Much of this work, however, expresses racially derogatory views about Africans. Probing the reasons why so many of these articles and poems were accepted for publication by African editors, this chapter considers StuartYoung ’s role in the newspaper culture of the period and the reasons why this white man was able to carve out a niche market for himself in the West African press. How did his writing mesh with, or stand apart from, the burgeoning anticolonial journalism of the 1920s and 1930s? 108 In his descriptions of local communities in the 1920s and 1930s, StuartYoung ’s writing abounds with negative Eurocentric stereotypes of Africans: “For they are children, / Frank children one and all,” he wrote in the poem “I Love the Forest.”5 Changing his viewpoint very little over the years, he commented in 1937, “I might best compare the Black man’s realm of the unconscious to a child’s money-box. That many of the coins are base metal, we know too well—[they reveal] hideous forms of superstition and juju, and all the horrors of fetishism.”6 An early poem, “African Nights,” which was reworked and reprinted many times in succeeding decades, described African dancers as “Poor dusky children! Moving to the beat / Of clam’rous tom-tom and the heated song.”7 Requiring the poet’s paternalistic moral intervention for their improvement rather than the palm oil trader’s cheap imports, these dancers “chant the lust of gain, / Clap hands for baubles and to dross propend.”8 Another anthropological poem that Stuart-Young republished regularly was entitled “The Great Ju-Ju of Ibo” (also published as “The Great Fetish of Ibo, Southern Nigeria”), whose opening lines were “Look upon this loathsome Thing, / Hideous in its Grovelling!”9 “Afric, awake! Awake!” the poet cried repeatedly ,10 dismissing the very ceremonies and dances West African cultural nationalists worked so hard to accommodate in the newspapers that carried Stuart-Young’s verse. Stuart-Young remained on the side of Englishness and empire in much of his newspaper writing, firmly believing in Africa’s need for “the benevolent supervision of European Government,” over and against what he referred to as the “satanic” fetishism of precolonial Africa.11 The lands under British control are “all for the mere ‘taking,’” he wrote, seeing the empire from a typical trader’s perspective as containing “undreamed of wealth of Nature’s Bestowing !”12 Showing little sense of Europe as a repressive force in West Africa, he believed in the ideal of a cosmopolitan empire and that “our rule has brought peace and security, where once there was unrest and war.”13 These negative representations of precolonial Africa are informed by Stuart-Young’s belief that “individually, the Negro is eminently tolerable. In the mass . . . he becomes primitive man at primitive man’s worst. He may then be devilishly cruel, and he may take fire at a spark. Lacking leadership, there is a genuine Negro menace in West Africa.”14 Many of his poems and articles describe the backwardness and childlike qualities of African communities...

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