100 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Although newspapers in all the African colonies had low circulation, their
significance should not be underrated. On the whole they were a force for
establishing a sense of community. In all of the colonies, newspapers were
more than mere mouthpieces of colonial administrations, which they often
criticised in the name of settlers, the local business community and local
organisations and interest groups with whom they had close ties (Osterhaus
1990: 148–54; Pöppinghege 2001: 158, 161). Accordingly the newspapers
sometimes campaigned for settlers’ rights in order to ‘activate, to check or
to promote certain developments’ (Osterhaus 1990: 474). Often newspapers
were indeed able to influence events and thus participate in the administrative
process: whether in decisions relating to personnel, the infrastructure (such
as the resumption of railway construction in East Africa) or the expansion
of racialist ordinances, especially in South West Africa. It was precisely these
demands for stricter measures against the natives that demonstrate how the
establishment of the ‘Fourth Power’ did not necessarily lead to a more liberal
order.
Parallel to this development, the first newspapers published by Africans
appeared during the nineteenth century. These, too, were at first primarily
English-language papers. The first founders of these papers were former slaves
with close ties to early African-American emancipation movements in the
United States. According to some studies, the former slave Charles L. Force
printed the Liberia Herald in Monrovia in 1826 as the first paper produced
by an African, with a manually operated printing press he had brought from
the United States (Bourgault 1995: 154). Since no documented evidence for
this exists, the first African newspaper has recently been dated at 1830 and
credited to John B. Russwurm, who had published Freedom’s Journal, the first
newspaper by an African-American, three years before in the United States
(Burrowes 2004: 49, note 2).
There was also the odd African-language paper, originally edited by mis-
sionaries but later developed into a mouthpiece of the natives – like the Imvo
Zabantsundu (‘Native Opinion’) in South Africa. By printing in native lan-
guages, the missionaries raised the status of Africans to that of an autonomous
readership. Furthermore, working for the press as well as doing translation
work was an important road to social advancement.
The Gold Coast and Sierra Leone evolved into germinal cells of African
journalism. Titles like African Interpreter and Advocate (after 1867) and West
African Liberator stressed the aspiration of these journals to articulate and
translate the natives’ interests. In Gambia as well, complaints against colonial
masters led to the establishment of an African newspaper that vied with a paper
founded by an English businessman who considered The Times too critical of
colonial conditions (Grey-Johnson, in Wittmann and Beck 2004: 18f.). These
newspapers cultivated the English language among the African elites and were