The Flying Newspapermen and the Time-Space of Late Colonial Nigeria

INTERVIEWER: What is the background of this research paper and why is it important?

LESLIE JAMES: The background to this first paper is a set of newspapermen and newspaper articles who are publishing in Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s. What I found is that these are newspapers telling the news but doing it in an extremely absurdist, futurist way: flying around and turning themselves into different creatures. I wanted to use these materials to try to figure out what was going on in this historical moment.

INTERVIEWER: What methods did you use in this research?

LESLIE JAMES: I placed a strong emphasis on method in this research because what I want to suggest is that by paying attention to the different genres that are employed by these authors, we can understand the social, intellectual and economic sphere in which they were functioning.

The method I used was to read these articles, comparing them and reading across the page in newspapers, while looking at how they were playing with other news items.

Part of my methodological intervention is to argue that we need to take newspapers seriously as intellectual sites, and also to pay attention to the way they address their audience and the way they use different genres at different times — to understand what was going on.

INTERVIEWER: What were the key findings of this research?

LESLIE JAMES: The key findings were as follows. Across the different periods, these columnists — who wrote pseudonymously, hiding their names and identities — created an absurdist reality to make sense of an absurd colonial situation.

They completely disrupted time and space in order to demonstrate and expose the failings of colonial administration.

INTERVIEWER: What is the conclusion of this research and what recommendations can you give?

LESLIE JAMES: My conclusions and recommendations are as follows. Historians are currently very interested in visions of decolonization and how various intellectuals tried to imagine futures different from the ones that actually existed.

Frederick Cooper has famously argued that we need to look at alternative languages of claim-making in the period of decolonization.

However, what I found is that historians and scholars have mainly focused on the variety of competing ideas and haven’t paid attention to the ways those ideas are actually expressed in the language they use.

My conclusion is that we also need to find ways of understanding not only alternative ideas but also the alternative ways in which people make those claims.