Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (review)

Comprising an insightful introduction and fifteen richly textured essays, Africa's Hidden Histories is an important contribution to standing research on a range of topics in twentieth-century African studies. Literary scholars, educationists, and social, political, and intellectual historians will draw particular benefit and pleasure from the unhurried, penetrating studies—incorporating an abundance of engrossing illustrations and photographs—that mark the volume's status as a major archival and theoretical project.

The volume's three parts explore specific meanings and transformative capacities attributed to writing, reading, and the circulation and collection of texts by African individuals and groups negotiating an array of volatile ideological and material tensions in colonial Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. As promised in Karin Barber's introduction, each section generates a distinct set of insights into "the complexity and contingency of social orientations and affiliations in colonial Africa" (6).

The seven essays of part 1 ("Diaries, Letters, and the Constitution of the Self") disclose a remarkable range of functions performed by seemingly commonplace forms of personal writing. Each of the essays examines individuals' attempts to deploy writing to clarify the nature and extent of myriad external factors shaping their lives. In some cases these factors emanate directly from the authoritarian nature of the colonial state. More often, however, the challenges documented and interrogated are shifting and overdetermined, mediated by a range of traditional and emergent pressures reconfiguring individual and collective understandings of ideal African personhood. Each of the contributors underscores the emotional poignancy of specific expressive moments in letters and diaries—moments constituting invaluable windows on the complex nature of self-fashioning and interpersonal relationships amidst unstable sociopolitical circumstances. At the same time, the contributors effectively depict the unique transformative capacities of writing as a tool for creating and exchanging novel understandings of local history, for illuminating patterns of change within African and European societies, and for imagining practices and institutions that could accelerate Africans' quest for spiritual enlightenment and political autonomy within and beyond the colonial yoke.

The five essays of part 2 ("Reading Cultures, Publics, and the Press") generate a series of noteworthy insights into the place of literacy and literature in emergent anticolonial cultural politics. These chapters will prove particularly interesting to scholars developing humanistic approaches to the rise and trajectories of distinct "imagined communities" and nationalisms across the continent. While assertions of the centrality of print media to nationalism are far from new, such intimate portrayals of their specific interrelationships in specific contexts among particular sets of African elites may be unprecedented. Bhekizizwe Peterson's and Isabel Hofmeyr's studies of the complex interplay of mission pedagogies, elite youth cultural visions, and new educational and political formations within black South African society are particularly rich. The three essays of part 3 ("Innovation, Cultural Editing, and the Emergence of New Genres") further extend the breadth of the volume's insights into the fraught dynamics of culture change, continuity, reflexivity, and conflict across Anglophone Africa during and after colonialism.

The possible values that contemporary teachers and students in different domains of African or colonial/postcolonial studies might discover in Africa's Hidden Histories certainly reach far and wide. No reader will close the volume without an enriched or revised notion of histories of pedagogy, self-fashioning, and cultural politics across the continent. Barber states that the aim of the project "is not the reconstruction of a sealed-off compartment of colonial history but the probing of a past that is still living, in the sense that its potentials—those taken up and those still latent—are with us today" (21). The project is audacious and haunting in the best of senses. It is decidedly worth the time of all humanists concerned with Africa—past, present, and future.