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

For many years, Stephanie Newell has enlivened the field of African studies with several highly original and intriguing books. This volume, which looks at authorial anonymity in the West African press, is yet another significant contribution to our understanding of how West African intellectuals saw the world and, in this new book particularly, how West African intellectuals chose to be seen by others. Many scholars have taken advantage of the rich resource provided by the innumerable newspapers, pamphlets, and books written and produced by West Africans ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, the sheer quantity of writing produced from the 1880s to the 1940s, the period on which Newell focuses, is itself extraordinary. Before the mid-twentieth century, literacy was both relatively new and possessed by limited numbers of people. But the numbers of publications and writers continue to amaze. It isn’t just the scale of literary output that is noteworthy. Literacy was more than just a practical tool that facilitated the keeping of serial records or granted access to the texts of the new religions. It was also a portal through which the cultures of others could be grasped, mastered, and played with. The discernible ludic quality of the literary works, as well as the serious pleasure offered by reading and writing, is exhilarating.

With her characteristically sharp eye for the illumination derived from interrogating things that, because they are so commonplace, get ignored, Newell notes and then questions the frequency with which African authors deployed pseudonyms, or pen names. Many scholars have read works by authors who used pseudonyms and have been inquisitive enough to try to track down their “real names.” None of us has asked, as Newell does, why anonymity was so frequently adopted by writers as a preferred presentation of self; without Newell’s prompting, we might have continued, at worst, to remain uninquisitive. or at best, to have simplistic solutions.

Newell sensibly—and usefully—covers all four of the British West African colonies, not least because the writers with whom she engages were themselves intellectual, if not always physical, “frequent fliers” among those noncontiguous territories. One of the intriguing aspects of those sometimes described as “nationalist elites” was just how internationalist they were. The period she covers is equally generous—from the dawn of the colonial moment, through the “high tide of Empire,” up to imminent independence. As a consequence, the writers she considers differ because of their shifting contexts every bit as much as their strikingly contrasting intellectual personalities. While Newell is interested in the “real” identities of those who adopted pen names, she is much more interested in the intentions that lay behind decisions to sign work with a name other than one’s own. Sometimes the motivation was obviously that of concealment. But as she elegantly shows, there is much more to the practice than seeking to fool the colonial state and evade its sedition laws or to avoid the censure of the church elders for social or spiritual radicalism. She argues vigorously and plausibly that the practice of anonymity was among “the ways in which colonized subjects … [sought to] alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity” (181). Accordingly, this consideration of the experience of, and at least the attempts to manage, colonial subjectivity add an exciting theoretical dimension to the older tradition in literary criticism that focuses upon the largely psychosocial conflicts between the “real” self of the author and encoded “secret” self of the pseudonym.

Her acute—and warm—grasp of history as well as literature gives the book an unusual energy. The empirical material will often be new to the reader and the analysis is charged with her perceptive, challenging originality. If I have criticisms, they lie with the non-comparative nature of the volume. The book is too unconcerned with the bulk...