Africa, Empire and Fleet Street: Albert Cartwright and "West Africa" Magazine by Jonathan Derrick (review)

West Africa was an institution in the life of generations of expatriate colonial servants and business people working in West Africa as well as a steadily growing and increasingly vocal African readership. Appearing weekly, in more or less the same format, for nearly a century, it captures the changing political, economic and social preoccupations of its times. This meticulously researched study focuses only on the first thirty years of its existence, from its inauguration in 1917 to the retirement of its founding editor, Albert Cartwright, in 1947. The author acknowledges that the magazine only reached its peak, in terms of influence and ability to reflect the concerns of West Africans themselves, in the thirty years after Cartwright's retirement—during the mobilization leading up to independence and the first post-independence decades. But as he points out, the British-owned, Africa-oriented press of the earlier period has been generally neglected. This study shows, with an absorbing wealth of detail, just how rewarding attention to this overlooked archive can be.

West Africa contained shipping news, produce prices, reports on colonial policies, book reviews, humorous anecdotes, notes from a correspondent based in London, sports news, reviews of gramophone records, information about political and social events in all four British West African colonies (the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria) and a tremendous amount of commentary and editorial opinion. During Cartwright's tenure, it maintained a restrained, pro-Empire but also pro-African stance, and, unusually for its time, championed educated Africans instead of romanticizing the "unspoilt tribesman." Some of the fascination of this book lies in Derrick's patient effort to trace the contradictions and hesitations in Cartwright's thinking over this long unbroken period of prolific public writing. In his younger days Cartwright had edited and worked as a journalist for several periodicals in South Africa, during which time he had spoken out against the Boer War and been sent to jail for seditious libel as a result. After his return to Britain he became a staunch supporter of E.D. Morel's campaign against Leopold II of Belgium and his regime in the Congo. On other issues his position appeared more uncertain and in some instances he appeared to have forgotten, or quietly revised, what he had earlier stated in print. Derrick untangles Cartwright's changing configuration of relations with powerful political patrons, some of whom were at daggers drawn with each other, and his successful maintenance through all this of an independent editorial line and—perhaps more remarkably in an era of numerous short-lived special interest publications—a healthy circulation.

The exploration of thirty years of West Africa under Cartwright is richly contextualised against a background of biography, press history and political and economic change. Indeed, only two of the six chapters focus directly on the magazine. One chapter is devoted to Cartwright's career before he became editor of West Africa; another presents valuable research on the British-owned Africa-oriented periodicals that came and went in the nineteenth century, and a third documents West Africa's immediate precursors in the early twentieth century. This careful retrieval of sources provides rich material for a discussion of the changing conditions of periodical publishing and the possible reasons for success and failure—as some of the precursor titles lasted only a year or two while others survived for decades. This is not a question Derrick addresses directly, but he has provided documentation that suggests the question and possible ways of answering it.

A challenge that faces any scholar plunging into the inexhaustible pleasures of periodicals research is one of architectural design. How to navigate this sea of fascinating, incrementally unfolding, multi-sided detail? Newspapers and magazines, by their very nature, invite radial reading, lateral trains of thought. Each article coexists with other articles within the same issue, links to related articles in previous and subsequent issues (often in serial format...