Nation as Grand Narrative: the Nigerian press and the politics of meaning by Wale Adebanwi (review)

In 1991, Benedict Anderson argued influentially that newspapers produce and reflect a national consciousness among readers who have no visible, tangible relationship with one another. In Nation as Grand Narrative, Wale Adebanwi introduces politics, power and the political power of narrative into Anderson's–and others'–more benign assessments of the role of newspapers in the postcolonial public sphere. This ambitious book offers a wealth of analysis of Nigerian newspapers' central role in decolonization in the 1950s through to the outbreak of the Biafran war in the late 1960s, the collapse of the Third Republic in the early 1990s and the Ogoni protests in the Niger Delta in the 1990s. Adebanwi charts a clear pathway through Nigerian press history, using the centrality of ideas about the nation for reading other types of power struggle since the 1950s.

Given that the press predated the independent nation state by more than a century, Adebanwi argues that, to a large extent, Nigeria is the conception of its press. Modern-day Nigeria was forged in and by newspapers, which generated complex stories about nationhood, patriotism and identity. As a consequence, newspapers have a great deal to answer for politically and ethically. From their inception in the 1850s, he argues, the country's newspapers have always projected the 'vested interests' of 'marginalized groups in their battles against dominant interests', offering space for minority discourse across the country's diverse cultures and representing 'the voice of the disadvantaged' (p. 264). This is not an idealistic representation of the press as a vehicle for representing powerless and voiceless minorities, set over and against a dominant colonial and postcolonial state. Adebanwi's point is that the nation comprises precisely these congeries of 'ties, loyalties, and preferences' between marginalized members of civil minorities seeking to represent themselves–in the full sense of representation as political enfranchisement and textual visibility (p. 266). Newspapers, like the nation state itself, stage political struggles between competing 'masters', whether they be masters of narrative or of politics. (Adebanwi's examples and terms are exclusively male, but he does not discuss masculinity as a form of 'master narrative' or political meaning-making.) The modern Nigerian nation state cannot be understood without this 'media–nation interface' (p. 7).

Press campaigns to realize non-'Nigerian' identities are regarded as wholly negative in the book, exacerbating conflicts such as the Biafran war and fuelling other types of animosity (p. 108). Yet Adebanwi also recognizes that Nigeria comprises a plurality of minorities, including those sub-national, nearly national and proto-nationalist groups that, encouraged by the press, contest and contribute to current 'grand narratives' of Nigerian identity.

Adebanwi explicitly locates his study in hermeneutic theory rather than in more obvious media, communications and postcolonial frameworks such as public sphere theory or Fanon's description of the emergence of national culture in anti-colonial struggles. While this means that his antagonistic models of discourse and politics are not debated in the book, his turn to hermeneutic theory (explained in detail in the second chapter) allows him to meticulously examine the ways in which Nigerian newspapers have mediated national identities over time. The book offers a wealth of historically specific assessments of the ways in which Nigerian public opinion, prejudices, self-understandings, and global and regional identities have been shaped by the press.

Adebanwi reinstates a national–but not in any ordinary sense a nationalist–historiography in his analysis of Nigerian newspaper history. His book continues the outstanding project started by Fred Omu, whose Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880–1937 (1978) remains a vital resource for newspaper historians of the earlier period. Nation as Grand Narrative challenges those of us who focus on the ordinary and minor narratives through which West African non-elites and sub-elites signal their social (if not political) emergence in the elite-owned press. Stretching across the full period of Nigerian independence...