The Memory Process in the Commemorations of the Dead in West African Newspapers

Abstract

This chapter considers the memory process in the commemorations of the dead in a sample of newspapers from Nigeria and Liberia from the 1940s to 1960s. At its centre are the obituaries and in-memoriams of middleto upperclass citizens published by family members and the state. The chapter homes in on how a number of journalistic processes, from “signalling” to “masking” to “controlling,” were used to capture specific elements of the past and, more significantly, to guide the present and future self-fashioning of the African elite. As a fitting part of this Gedenkschrift, itself a technology of death culture, this chapter explores practices surrounding death as performed in West African newspapers of the 1940s to 1960s. We examine the printing of death notices and obituaries both as a historically dynamic process and as one of multiple interrelated modes of (both textual and non-textual) social communication and memory-making in Africa. With its emergence in the nineteenth century, the West African press has been at the forefront of forming and reinforcing identities, helping both individuals and institutions to present themselves to a wider audience. In recent times, studies of the practices of self-fashioning in print culture have attracted much attention in Africanist historiography and beyond.1 This chapter explores the social and political signalling accompanying announcements of death in newspapers. Herein we compare two forms of publicising death, namely in-memoriams and obituaries. In line with Jan-Georg Deutsch’s interest in the study of social relations in shaping history, we demonstrate the commemoration expressed in these West African advertisements of death as promoting the solidification of sociopolitical relationships. For the purpose of this examination of print media, we draw evidence from Nigerian and Liberian newspapers. After the Second World War, both states en Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell, eds., African Print Cultures: Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Mamadou Diawara, Bernard C. Lategan, and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Context (New York: Berghahn