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Journeys to the Hinterland: Early Twentieth-century Nigerian Domestic Travel Writing and Local
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Jones, Rebecca |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | In colonial Lagos (in south-western Nigeria) in the 1910s and 1920s, a handful of Yoruba-speaking intellectuals published travelogues in the local Yoruba- and English-language newspapers. The writers described their travels in the new colonial nation of Nigeria, a region that had been amalgamated in 1914 by the British colonisers, bringing together a vast number of different ethnic groups and languages. The travel narratives discuss the writers’ adventures on steamers, on lorries and in cars, and their attempts to communicate with fellow Yoruba-speakers in the Yoruba hinterland, with Itsekiri- and Igbo-speakers along the south-eastern coast of Nigeria, and with migrant networks of colleagues, friends and relatives on the way. The writers of these serialised travel narratives (written mostly in Yoruba but also occasionally in English) were in some cases newspaper editors travelling on newspaper business, as well as other newspaper writers and intellectuals. Some were important figures in the Yoruba and English print culture of Lagos in the early twentieth century, including I. B. Thomas: proprietor and editor of Akede Eko, a bilingual YorubaEnglish newspaper, and author of the first Yoruba novel. 2 Some of these newspaper travel writers sought to convince their readers of the localness of the Yoruba-speaking hinterland, of its intellectual, social and political significance to Lagosian readers. Others sought to make sense of their relationship with places farther afield in Nigeria, where they encountered “civilisation” in the form of Yoruba-speaking, Christian Lagosian migrants, but also strangeness in the form of local people who spoke different languages and with whom they felt they had little in common. However, though they travelled within its boundaries, the newspaper travel writers engaged very little with the idea of Nigeria as a nation, instead focusing intently on the local, translocal and regional networks they depicted and fostered. Underlying this article is a concern with how post-colonial travel writing criticism might theorise local heterogeneity and the adventures in their own Nigerian or Yoruba “hinterland” that these Lagos newspaper travel writers describe. I suggest that reading these Lagos newspaper travel narratives of the early twentieth century, particularly their focus on translocal and regional networks within the colonial nation, offers a way to re-imagine the centres and peripheries produced and replicated by travel writing, distinct from the colonial metropole |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/download/1754/1776 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
