Fage Lecture 2025: Professor Karin Barber

What print made possible in colonial Lagos

A new wave of research on the history of the press in Africa and South Asia has emphasised the need to look at the texts themselves – their format, style and point of view – rather than treating them as transparent sources of information for research on other topics. It has drawn attention to the fact that in  British colonial print cultures, English often co-existed and interacted with one or more local print languages, and could act as both irritant and stimulant to new local-language creativity. Against this background, I want to ask what the local producers and readers of print themselves thought print could do. How did linguistic cohabitation in the press relate to their conception of their place in the Empire, and their construction of print as civic space and site of innovation?

In 1920s Lagos, political ferment, challenges to the colonial government and competition between the conservative and radical sections of the elite had led to unprecedented press activity, including a new effort to address a potential public that could read Yorùbá but not English. English and Yorùbá were consciously juxtaposed and intertwined. At every level, their parallel co-existence was made evident, and each language quoted or translated key expressions from the other.

Exploration of this dynamic field suggests that participants in the Lagos print sphere were highly alert to the formal potentialities of the medium. The format of the printed page or volume made it possible to juxtapose languages – and by extension poems, personages, topics – in homologous spaces that brought to the surface their equivalence, if not equality. But while the Lagos literati treated English as a public resource, available to anyone who could read it, they maintained that there were deep registers of Yorùbá that could not be translated or appropriated. These conceptions of equivalence and inequality informed their conception of the place of Lagos (and Nigeria) as a distinctive constituent of the Empire alongside other parallel entities. The idea of uniqueness-in-equivalence also informed their idea of the print sphere as an enlightened civic space of their own construction. To them, envisaging such a print sphere and affirming its value was not mere wishful thinking. By writing about it, and into it, they were helping to bring it into being.

About our Fage lecturer

Karin Barber is Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham and Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on Yoruba oral and written genres, and she has also done wider comparative work on popular culture and the anthropology of texts. Her work on Yorùbá oral praise poetry (I Could Speak Until Tomorrow, 1991) and on popular travelling theatre (The Generation of Plays, 2000) has continued to inform her current research on Yorùbá-language print culture. Print Culture and the First Yorùbá Novel (2012) presented a translation and contextual analysis of a key text, an epistolary narrative first serialised in a Yorùbá weekly newspaper. Her new book on Yorùbá print culture in early twentieth-century Lagos, to be published by Ohio University Press, looks in depth at the producers and publics of printed texts and investigates their experiments with language, genre and styles of address in a distinctive political and social context.  

Dame Karin Barber