Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, the British protectorate of Northern Nigeria was rocked by a series of scandals over judicial flogging. Fueled by stories in African-owned newspapers, the scandals most often involved the flogging of women or of men with relatively high levels of western education who came from other parts of West Africa. While such violence had been meted out from the start of the colonial period, the period of scandals seems to have been enabled by the maturation of a network of newspapers, which joined the West African coast to African-owned periodicals in London, and with African-American and Afro-Caribbean newspapers as well. As such, their concerns involved both the corporeal violence Africans experienced at official colonial hands and the daily humiliations of British racism, as educated men found themselves punished for failing to prostrate before white British officials. This newspaper coverage therefore provides a compelling window onto an early twentieth-century politics of personhood, as writers describe the quotidian experiences of race, religion, and ethnic origin in Northern Nigeria and begin to frame a politics of personhood through their critique of the colonial state.