Cecil King, the Press, and Politics in West Africa

Abstract

Therewas a close and continuing relationship between the press and nationalist politics in colonial British West Africa which acquired a new dynamic towards the end of World War II. As the imperial impluse faltered, a younger, more radical African leadership appeared which saw newspapers as a means of carrying their message to a wider political class than that addressed by the relatively conservative pioneers. It had for some time been true that ‘The spontaneous expression of grievances, against this tax or that bureaucratic decision, was built up by a handful of…journalists into a generalized protest against the fact of British authority.’¹Now movers and shakers like Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria and Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast began to use the press in a frontal assault on their colonial régimes. Couched in terms ‘verging on joyful vituperation’, newspapers reached out beyond the elite of the cities to rural opinion leaders and the urban poor.²