Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: "How to Play the Game of Life" (review)

Stephanie Newell's Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana is a historical investigation of the ways in which Western-style literacy as a missionary and colonial institution functioned in colonial Ghana (and British West Africa) in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriching Newell's account is a critical cultural analysis of the colonial Ghanaians' by no means passive reception of, and responses to, an Anglo-Western practice exogenously added on to—hence obliged to interface and dynamically interact with—pre-existing local practices. The author's purpose is to show how, through literacy's institutional mediation across dispersed sites in the colonial formation—mission and government schools, literary and debating societies, newspapers, booksellers—specific sociocultural imaginaries emerged within the colonial order. These imaginaries shaped by and in literacy in turn invested and transformed local cultural practices: "the book [became] an 'agent of change' and transformation" (2).

Under the colonial order, literacy was conceptualized by its disseminators and its recipients alike in terms of "how to play the game of life" (1). And for both, the game of life demanded that literacy be invested in the production of affects, styles, moral personalities, and communities adequate to a colonial society in the throes of modernizing change. The colonial dissemination and reception of English literature (by Charles Dickens, Marie Corelli, etc.), canonic English social criticism (e.g., John Ruskin's), and metropolitan self-help discourses (e.g., Samuel Smiles's) are central to Newell's account and analysis. Her analytic posture suggests that the imagined, moral, and behavioral worlds proffered by English literary, social-critical, and self-help discourses are not to be confined to a rarefied realm of private and individualized consumption in the colonial Ghanaian/West African setting. Rather, the experiential, psychosocial, moral, attitudinal codes, and the linguistic idioms and styles offered by these discourses are to be analyzed in their collective actualization by colonial readers in and as living social practices.

Newell contends, however, that these social practices were not the efforts of mere copycats, men and women caught in an endless cycle of mimicking—and hence dominated by—Anglo-European originals coming to them from "elsewhere." On the contrary, they were themselves agents of origination, actively appropriating the elements coming from elsewhere in adaptation and re-invention, and thus subordinating the metropolitan originals to their own reformist and locally validated agendas of self-fashioning, moral rearmament, socioeconomic uplift, and social reconstruction. Newell is careful to name the Ghanaian/West African agencies that appropriated, and the activities that adapted, "paracolonial," the idea being that these agencies and their adaptive activities were not strictly subordinate to the will of the colonial order but had a quasi-autonomous existence "alongside" it.

Newell is careful to differentiate these paracolonial practices according to location, in accordance with her understanding of colonial Ghana as a social formation—i.e., a social whole that is an articulation of variable elements and interests, competing as much as they converge. We see this competition in the contestations over the uses and the linguistic modalities of literacy that developed between colonial state actors and the social actors for whom they shaped their policies. For instance, the colonial authorities appear to have recognized the political threat posed by the cosmopolitan, internationalizing and pan-Africanizing forms of activist (anglophone) literacy that invaded colonial Ghana in the 1920s and 1930s, and hence they sought in a policy of vernacular education to police and depoliticize literacy by localizing it. Colonial Ghanaian actors, however, vigorously and successfully resisted this. Then, again, if colonial policy-makers and mission educators sought to impart a simplified functional English to their colonial wards, these wards ignored their mentors and evolved a homegrown florid and flamboyant variant of English, attuned to their own need to command local prestige.

When...