Importing Fleet Street? Editorship, journalistic practice, and a West African ‘pressman’
As West African nationalist movements made the case for self-government in the 1940s, newspapers set up parallel but in no way pliant ideas about the function of the press in modern society and served as a crucial site for debates about the disjuncture between British civil liberties and colonial rule. Within this context, the West African ‘pressman’ became a means of asserting a distinct identity while also proving the colony’s capacity for independence within the framework of Britain’s model of democracy with the ‘Fourth Estate’ at its head. This paper will explore how West African printing culture in the 1940s attempted to develop specific journalistic practice that cultivated their own identity outside the rubric of a quintessentially ‘British press.’ To do so, newspaper editors, journalists, and type-setters traveled to Britain and to the United States to learn the trade. West African editors set up their own network of ‘pressmen’ with Caribbean and black American newspapers, while at the same time celebrating the best of English broadsheets and rhetoric. By reprinting articles that championed the British local press, however, the vital link between a free press and a functioning democracy was not simply transferred, but transformed.