Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan

The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies of print culture, the small magazine is notable for the ways in which its flexible form and sometimes eccentric modes of circulation trouble what have come to be seen as ‘orthodox’ or received wisdom as to the nature of self-fashioning and modernity on the African continent. While the ‘smallness’ of its form underlines its context as a site-specific platform of cultural production, it’s networks of circulation and the audiences and publics it convenes point to a wider and much more ambitious intention which cannot be reduced to simplistic or one-dimensional systemic models of understanding. As ‘form’ and therefore a ‘genre’ in the long twentieth century of African cultural production, the small magazine has convened various platforms for the articulation and intersection of various projects, often in intersectional logic; anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism, Anti-apartheid imagination and broader project(s) of decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. This project seeks to examine how small magazines are able, through the networks they create scale up and scale down their visibility through various strategies of curation and self-fashioning which evolve and transform over time and space. It is the specific nexus of scalability, in tandem with the curatorial potentiality of the small magazine through various models of formal juxtaposition and intellectual patterning, we argue, which has lent it its importance as an archive of the present with respect to African models of intellectual production. Such strategies account for the longevity, political and cultural potency of the form which has had a significant footprint in the long twentieth century of political and cultural organization and the imagination of identity in the continent. The project draws from example in magazines such Transition, Black Orpheus, Nexus/Busara, Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani? amongst many others, exploring how media, platform, visibility, publicness, form and genre come together in the small magazine to produce new understandings of African models of modernity, coalition and solidarity.

The Evening News was established by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party in 1948 and served as a vehicle to expose Ghanaians and Africans to Pan-African Consciousness. As the mouthpiece of the CPP, the paper spoke directly to three main constitutes‒members, the public and fellow freedom fighters. As the center of revolutionary activity in Ghana the paper is a resource that linked the leadership of the CPP to the masses. Campaigns, key decisions and shifts in strategy were reported in the Evening News. In 1950, the paper announced the launch of the Positive Action Campaign. The campaign was comprised of acts of civil disobedience aimed at destabilizing colonization and concretizing the larger populist.

In 1957, Ghana gained independence and the Evening News’s focus expanded to include articles, editorials and illustrations that interrogated the benefits of Socialism, highlighted ongoing Liberation struggles, and debated the absolute necessity of Pan-Africanism. The liberation struggle in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the role of Patrice Lumumba were regularly featured in the Evening News. Particularly the assassination of Lumumba was covered extensively to display solidarity, express outrage, and directly confront those responsible. The paper also covered key Pan-African conferences and programmes that were essential to the movement. The All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) the first Pan-African conference held on the African continent was hosted by the CPP in December 1958. The AAPC attracted over 300 delegates including freedom fighters, leaders of governments and Pan-Africanists. The AAPC was a watershed moment in the history of independence in Africa and ushered in a forward march towards Pan-Africanism. It was at the opening ceremony that Kwame Nkrumah said, “This decade is the decade of African Independence‒Forward then to Independence‒to Independence Now‒Tomorrow the United States of Africa” (Nkrumah, 1958).

This project will analyze on the role of the Evening News in the success of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference. It will examine articles, illustrations, and editorials on this conference between November and December 1958. The study contends that the Evening News as a state apparatus supported the CPP’s strategy to politically educate Ghanaians and Africans to expedite the actualization of the United States of Africa. The coverage of the AAPC is no exception and the tested the limits of the paper’s reach. As a site of resistance and focal point for knowledge production and distribution this research argues that the CPP newspaper was instrumental to Ghana’s success a as Pan-African nation. In thinking about the use of popular education as a source of political education in the 21st century the Evening News is situated as a foreground to contemporary manifestations of Revolutionary news.

Description of periodical

Mensagem.  Printed 1948–1964 in Lisbon (and circulated across Portugal and in Angola and Mozambique). Published in Portuguese and appeared intermittently. Produced by students at the Casa Dos Estudantes do Império – literally, the ‘House of the Students of the Empire’ – a centre founded by the Portuguese government after World War Two with the intention of preparing overseas students studying in Lisbon for future imperial duties. It became a crucial anti-colonial nexus. Many protagonists of later independence movements met there, thrust together by their shared interest in decolonization as well as the particularly uncompromising response of the Portuguese fascist Estado Novo regime to the anti-colonialism growing throughout European empires in the 1950s. Mensagem ran on and off for sixteen years under extremely difficult conditions. Writing in Portugal was highly policed, and anti-colonial writers faced censorship and imprisonment. The regime surveilled Mensagem, which was run by successive generations of students. When the Estado Novo finally shut down the Casa and Mensagem in 1965, it was after years of mounting anxiety about the subversive politics the Casa and Mensagem were fostering. Some editions of Mensagem are available here.

Paper abstract: redefining political poetry

This paper asks what aesthetics of political writing Mensagem proposes. Critics have emphasised the influence on neo-realism on anti-colonial writing in Portuguese, and indeed the few statements of aesthetic intent printed in Mensagem emphasised the need to disavow decadence and to write with clarity. Yet in the period 1960-4 Mensagem also printed much oblique, intractable poetry. This paper considers how to parse those poems in the context of their surrounding literary critical discourses that disavow the detachment from political life the poems seem to figure. I argue that under the weight of censorship, African poets writing in Portuguese writing in Mensagem sought to reinscribe the question of what aesthetics could be politically powerful.

I also read Mensagem poets as taking up and taking forward debates about socialist realism in the USSR. Taking this genealogy seriously allows us to see Mensagem poets’ theoretical contribution to histories of militant aesthetics in re-emphasizing individual, artistic liberty within a defence of collective social and political freedoms.

The history of Mensagem helps us configure the place of creative expression as part of anti-colonial visions of freedom. It can help us understand the conditions of possibility the journal form produced for associative and comparative thought. Finally, it can help us understand the place of African writing in Portuguese in multilingual anti-colonial histories.

La Ruche, ‘Organe de la jeune génération,’ Journal Hebdomadaire Littéraire et Social, began in late 1945 as a cultural, literary and political revue produced by left-militant youth would go on to become some of Haiti’s most important intellectual and political actors. Members of La Ruche, such as poet, René Depestre, future novelist, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and photographer, Gérald Bloncourt, published forty-two French-language issues between December 7th 1945 and December 9th 1946. Amidst the length of the journal’s run, Haiti would experience a popular uprising led by members of the La Ruche editorial board in January 1946 (also known as Les Cinq Glorieuses), coinciding with the incendiary lecture series of the surrealist poet, André Breton, in Port-au-Prince. The pages of La Ruche bear witness to the political conjuncture of a Black Jacobinist anti-imperialism and a Popular Front antifascism imported into the literary scene by intellectuals with connections to Spanish republicanism and the French Resistance. The amalgam of these two different traditions appears perfectly blended in the political imaginaries of the ’46 generation. My paper will consider the events of the 1946 revolution in relation to La Ruche, and the mobilization of a Haitian surrealist antifascism legible in its pages. Their signature imbrication of Atlantic World anti-colonialism and Third World anti-fascism, with its robust vision of liberation through both poetic and practical means, is an important precedent for analyzing opposition against ascendant far-right authoritarian regimes in the Global South.

The production and circulation of newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets by members of the Anti-CAD, All-African Convention and the Non-European Unity Movement (as well as the Teachers’ League of South Africa and the Cape African Teachers’ Association) during the 1940s and 1950s should be understood as part of a wider system of alternative education and public knowledge. Indeed, I suggest that the entire institutional edifice of the AAC and Unity Movement can be understood as a massive initiative in public education, which saw the creation of a body of symbolic expressions, rhetorical strategies, methods of analysis and an entire repertoire of research, knowledge creation and dissemination.​

Through the Anti-CAD Bulletin, The Torch and other newspapers as well as a regular programme of pamphleteering, political mobilisation through the reading, talking and listening became a means to circulate a set of concepts and ways of knowing that formed the basis of the creation of bonds of solidarity and a way of knowing South African society. However, this cultural order also reinforced the distinction between writers and readers and speakers and listeners in which the hierarchies of the school were transferred to the political movement. This is how words and concepts were central to political mobilisation and unity, but also to the formation of internal contradictions and political dissidence.

The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier