Literary activism in colonial Ghana: A newspaper‐novel by “A. Native”

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Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
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Literary activism in colonial Ghana: A
newspaper‐novel by “A. Native”
Stephanie Newell
To cite this article: Stephanie Newell (2001) Literary activism in colonial Ghana: A
newspaper‐novel by “A. Native”, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 13:2,
20-30, DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2001.9678102
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CURRENT WRITING 13(2) 2001 ISSN 1013-929X 20
Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana:
A Newspaper-novel by “A. Native”
Stephanie Newell
The African-owned press played a central, unparalleled role in supporting
the political and literary culture of the colonial period in Ghana.1 Regular
readers in the 1880s could compile proto-libraries from these publications,
which contained serialisations of works of West African history, reprints
of government legislation, versions of folktales and long-running debates
between local correspondents on issues such as girls’ education, public
morality, Christian marriage, British colonial policy and the school syllabus
(Jenkins 1985). Future leaders of political opinion in the country, such as
J E Casely Hayford and J Mensah Sarbah, were known to have collected
entire print-runs of Gold Coast newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s, from
which they quoted articles and legal findings in their own full-length
publications. These intellectuals also found their own first outlets in the
press, which provided Africans with the means of generating counter-
positions to the policies of the colonial state. James Hutton Brew’s
newspapers – known as the ‘Brew press’ – in particular served as a nursery
for many later activists, who found in journalism “a weapon in the arsenal
of present and future protest”, attracting readers in the Gold Coast, West
Africa and London (Jenkins 1985:239).
This short article discusses one instance of local literary activism in
Ghana, unique in the fact that it is written in the form of a novel. On 20
January 1886, the first instalment of what is probably the first West African
novel in English was published in the Western Echo by a male author using
the pseudonym “A. Native”. Preceded by a proud editorial which welcomed
the arrival of this “work of ‘local effort’” by “a native gentleman”, Marita:
or the Folly of Love was serialised in 40 episodes, ending two years later
in January 1888.2 It describes the disastrous consequences for African men
of uniting according to the colonial Marriage Ordinance of 1884: this

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Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana
ordinance enshrined the Christian, Victorian ideal of marriage as a
monogamous and lifelong union, and is shown in the story to transform
peaceful, well-behaved women into shrews and termagants who are bent
upon seizing domestic power from their husbands. The story proved to be
so popular that it survived the closure of the Western Echo in December
1887 and found a new host in the Gold Coast Echo, before disappearing
from the press, unfinished, in February 1888.
As the novel demonstrates in vivid and extensive detail, local men saw
the end of masculine power in the legal protection afforded to ‘ordinance
wives’. The narrative explores the theme of masculine disempowerment at
the hands of uneducated African women who, in league with the Wesleyan
Methodist Church, ensnare innocent men into monogamous unions and
then terrorise them within the home till death do them part; it portrays the
domestic conflicts and contradictions experienced by Christian men in
coastal areas of the Gold Coast; and, from the title onwards, it asserts the
“folly” of the new marriage system.
‘Marita’ is not used as a woman’s name in the novel, like ‘Martha’ or
‘Maria’, but as an unconventional yet recognisable Latin word for ‘wife’:
marita is the feminine form of maritus (husband). The “folly of love” and
the folly of the Marriage Ordinance are thus encapsulated in a feminine,
wifely form. The central male character, Quaibu, is pushed towards a
Christian wedding by the illiterate Miss Wissah, his beloved ‘country’ wife
of eight years’ standing. She, in turn, has been bullied into marriage by
Methodist Church officials who refuse full religious membership to
‘country’-wed converts. “Marriage where the contracting parties, the man
as well as the woman, have the power to dissolve it at will is in the
estimation of the church no marriage at all”, the wife of a reverend tells
Miss Wissah in the story (Western Echo 24 March 1886:7).
When Quaibu finally succumbs to an Ordinance marriage, he walks up
the aisle with his eyes wide open to the appalling implications of such a
union for male-female domestic relations: “Defects in my wife which are
dormant in our present life I can plainly see will be roused up like a roaring
lion to devour poor me”, he realises prior to the marriage (Western Echo 24
Feb 1886:7). The consequences are indeed disastrous, for Wissah surpasses
Quaibu’s worst imaginings and has to be reined in, domesticated and
remoulded until, finally, she obeys his command submissively as an ideal
Christian wife. “Poor Quaibu”, the narrator comments repeatedly as the
hero succumbs to the “heart burnings, misery, inquietude and life of

22
Stephanie Newell
annoyance and irritation” inflicted by his new “Mrs” (Western Echo 29 July
1886:7). As this brief synopsis reveals, the author takes a particular,
‘masculine’ standpoint on the recent Marriage Ordinance and enters
enthusiastically into the debate about the wisdom of undertaking Christian
unions.
Marita is far more than a masculinist tirade against shrewish wives,
played out through a rejection of the Christian marriage vows (although it
most certainly is that). Through the novel, we gain access to a critique of
the entire Christian missionary project in West Africa, as well as a
comment on the manner in which the colonial bureaucracy, only a few
years old when Marita appeared, propelled into the statute books a host of
new ordinances based on English law without local consultation or African
representation on the governing body. The novel commanded great public
interest amongst the relatively small newspaper-reading community of
Cape Coast.3 Marita: or the Folly of Love is a story told from “the educated
native’s” perspective, helping us understand the attitudes and values of
elite West Africans in the 1880s and the contradictions they experienced in
attempting to uphold European alongside African values. It is a treasure-
trove which sparkles with literate men’s aesthetic and interpretative values
and assumptions from the early colonial period.4
In one of the few discussions of the story, Roger Gocking describes it as
“long, rambling [and] inconclusive”, filled with repetitions and
“melodramatic excesses” (Gocking 1999:90-1). Yet Marita contains a
great deal of information about how literacy was put to use by the coastal
elite in the mid-nineteenth century. While the narrative cannot be regarded
as a conventional historical ‘source’ for scholars, being a deliberate work
of fiction in contrast to other narrative genres such as journals, testimonies,
autobiographies and letters, it does yield extraordinary information about
the attitudes, values and socio-economic expectations of the educated elite
in early colonial Ghana. The story contains rich layers of cultural detail
about coastal Fante society at a time when the anglicised African elites –
the “Euro-Africans” (Jenkins 1985) – of West Africa were experiencing a
deterioration in their relations with the colonial government after a long
period of economic success as merchants and administrators. The narrative
offers a gateway into one set of responses to these political and social
transformations. Perhaps most importantly, it shows us the way in which
prose narratives functioned in readers’ lives, for Marita is constructed as
a series of lessons, or rather, as the same lesson told repeatedly in the form

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Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana
of multiple stories, proposing strategies for resolving domestic conflicts
and establishing a stable home life.
The first episode of Marita appeared in the thick of the newspaper debate
over the Marriage Ordinance of 1884: this debate surrounded it on all sides
in editorials, letters pages, articles and reprints of government papers, and
the narrative represents a definite intervention in that argument. In subject
matter and preoccupation, it echoes the polemical style of these newspaper
articles and participates in the marriage debate to the same extent as the
surrounding material. “Marita will no doubt be found entertaining by the
reader”, the editor, James Hutton Brew, comments in his introduction to the
first instalment. He emphasises that, unlike newspaper articles or editorials,
“Marita is a story, however, which in process of development, stage by
stage, will be found of more than commonplace interest to the newspaper
reader” (Western Echo 20 Jan 1886:1). By emphasising the “interest” of
“story” to “the newspaper reader” here, the editor makes the point that
novelistic discourse is relevant to the current affairs of the day. The
question remains, however, as to why “A. Native” decided to write fiction
rather than a journalistic article or a historical narrative. Did fiction offer
possibilities that other genres could not fulfil?
By choosing to participate in the debate through story rather than
through other types of prose, “A. Native” helps us to find out more about
the African elite’s attitude towards narrative fiction – their literary aesthetic
– for this story is presented as a “cultural dilemma-tale” centred upon the
issue of masculine authority within the home. It is a creative intervention
in the marriage debate. “A. Native” uses the story to offer men strategies
for controlling unruly, bossy wives. After each of the didactic tales that are
set into the main narrative, he offers readers lessons which are drawn from
the narrative. “I will tell you a story ...from which you will gain wholesome
lessons and valuable advice”, the narrator informs readers prior to these
inset stories (Western Echo 7 Aug 1886:8); and, after telling each tale, he
states: “Let this be a lesson to those who are living in ‘single life’ or in the
happy marriage of their country” (Western Echo 29 July 1886:8). These
multiple stories function as tributaries which feed the main narrative and
tell the same moral tale.
Written in a formal style which might be described as ‘Victorian
drawing-room English’, Marita contains a plentiful supply of ‘thou arts’
and ‘hast thous’; in this it reveals the way in which the English language
was appropriated by mission-educated Africans in the colonies. The narrative

24
Stephanie Newell
is turgid by modern-day standards. Within a few pages of the first episode,
however, the reader is drawn into a compelling story in which Gold Coast
Methodism is subjected to a searing critique and the position of the “native
gentleman” is defended against colonial, Christian and African female
incursions against his authority. Intricately drawn African characters are
set against one another; layers of entertaining stories-within-stories are
narrated to illustrate the author’s main argument against Christian marriage
practices; and a detailed portrait of gender politics in elite African households
in the late nineteenth century is presented to readers. For all of these
reasons, Marita is a fascinating historical resource, capturing within its
pages a flavour of the attitudes, opinions, anxieties and ambitions of ‘Euro-
African’ men in the Gold Coast during the critical years in which colonial
rule was formalised.
Ghana’s earliest readers developed shared political interests through the
local newspapers, which served as a forum for literary protest by members
of the intelligentsia (Jenkins 1985:189). Over the decades, readers benefited
from the atmosphere of discursive freedom nurtured by the African-owned
press, writing to editors and engaging in debates. Thus developed a literary
culture in which written interventions were the norm: through the press,
readers would have developed shared aesthetic expectations and opinions
about the function of reading, for the individual reader would have joined
one of the communities of readers – the readerships – which emerged in
and around titles such as the Gold Coast Times, the Western Echo and the
Gold Coast Aborigines.
The reading culture implied by this aesthetic model is anything but silent
and solipsistic, as in European models of post-Enlightenment literacy.
Reading was not a passive activity in the Gold Coast, undertaken in
isolation from others. African perspectives on the ‘marriage question’
varied of course but what is highly visible in this early Ghanaian print
culture is the vehemence and self-confidence with which male members of
the literate community, living in and around Cape Coast, composed their
arguments and sent them to the newspapers for publication.
“A. Native” wears his anonymity like a mask for the duration of the
story. Hiding behind his generic Africanness, he satirises, criticises and
exposes the effects of Christian marriages on African domestic relationships,
displaying his knowledge of Fante cultural values and practices and yet
remaining aloof: here is “a native” whom it is impossible to ‘know’.
Indeed, the identity of Marita’s author is not disclosed by the editor at any

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Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana
point in the novel’s two-year development. No reference is made to the
narrative in surrounding columns, nor does it attract comment in readers’
letters to the Western Echo. No contemporary reviews mention the narrative
and subsequent writings by Gold Coast authors contain no reference it.
When increasing numbers of West African histories and essays started to
be published after the 1890s by local authors such as S R B Attoh-Ahuma,
J Mensah Sarbah and J E Casely Hayford, no-one claimed responsibility for
the novel, despite the long lists of previous works accompanying, and
adding authority to, these authors’ new publications.5 Such a silence
demands explanation. Why should an African author write under a
pseudonym in early colonial Ghana, and why should no contemporary
reader comment publicly on the novel or appear curious to discover the
identity behind the name?
Given the narrow, elite nature of the literate community in late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Ghana, it is possible that the newspaper-
reading public of Cape Coast was so limited, so visible to one another
within the community and so un-imagined, to invert Benedict Anderson’s
formulation (1991), that readers knew an author’s identity without needing
to ask or be told.6 It is possible that pseudonyms such as “A. Native”,
“Proton”, “Fanti”, “Prospero”, and “Dick Carnis”, all of which appeared
regularly in the newspapers, were already transparent to local readers,
standing as nicknames for well-known personalities rather than pseudonyms.
Perhaps, also, readers respected the rationale for upholding anonymity in
early colonial newspapers, for as James Hutton Brew put it in an editorial
for the Western Echo: “we are your organ of expression; do not fear to
speak through us...no one need fear that his name will be given up as the
writer of any letter or article; we will not be guilty of any breach of
journalistic etiquette” (Western Echo 18 Nov 1885). Such “journalistic
etiquette” allowed African authors to be as ardent and critical as they
wished, without fearing reprisals from the British authorities.
An additional reason for the lack of curiosity about “A. Native’s”
identity is that the concept of the individual named author, or the solitary
creative genius, was not of paramount importance to readers in the Gold
Coast. Detailed empirical and archival information about readers from the
early colonial period is sparse and fragmented: without this information, it
is impossible fully to understand the ways in which literature in West
Africa was interpreted in the 1880s. From the information that is available
about later Ghanaian readerships in the 1920s and 1930s, however, it is

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Stephanie Newell
clear that rather than viewing the text as the product of a particular individual’s
pen, Gold Coast readers regarded it as a force-field which set the limits
around a public space: that space was then available for public debate and
written interventions by readers (Newell forthcoming). For later colonial
readerships at least, novels were seen to contain congeries of characters,
themes and references which invited readers into an active engagement with
particular issues. Similarly, Marita: or the Folly of Love is written in a style
that pulls readers into its ethical world and, in the process, generates an
involved relationship between the text and the reader in which the author
exists as one voice amongst many.
The few scholars to have written about Marita: or the Folly of Love have
attributed authorship to J E Casely Hayford (1866-1930), the great political
leader, lawyer, newspaperman, historian and novelist. Ray Jenkins originated
this idea, applying his wide knowledge of intellectual culture in nineteenth-
century Ghana to the text and suggesting that, “while there is no ‘hard’
external evidence to confirm the authorship of this serialisation, internal
evidence strongly suggests that it was the work of Casely Hayford”
(1985:490). The “internal evidence” alluded to here is, first, that Quaibu
resembles the protagonist of Casely Hayford’s novel Ethiopia Unbound
(1911) in his status as “a classical scholar”; secondly, that both Ethiopia
Unbound and Marita: or the Folly of Love exhibit “a strong degree of
consistency”, both being novels and both being influenced by classical
texts; finally, that Casely Hayford’s “strident” anti-Wesleyan sentiments
and “strong animosity” towards Methodism, which emerged in the mid-
1880s and infused Ethiopia Unbound, are vented to the same degree in
Marita: or the Folly of Love (Jenkins 1985:490-2). Following in Jenkins’s
footsteps, the historians Kofi Baku (1987) and Roger Gocking (1999) also
argue the case for Casely Hayford’s authorship of Marita, and both
scholars cite Jenkins as their authority on this matter.
If Casely Hayford is indeed the author of Marita, then the novel fills a
vital gap in his early literary career and assists scholars in their assessment
of the development of his writing, religion and politics. Casely Hayford
would have been barely twenty years old when the first episode of Marita
appeared in the Western Echo, which he sub-edited for his uncle, James
Hutton Brew. Newly graduated from Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone,
Casely Hayford arrived back in Cape Coast in 1884 to find the town
afflicted by a trade depression, economic uncertainty, and a fear of
imminent war with Asante. At the same time, the Methodist Church was

27
Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana
entering a critical period arising from the missionaries’ on-going refusal to
accommodate local customs. Casely Hayford absorbed all these currents in
his later writings, calling for equality between black and white in the
Wesleyan Church and respect for African traditions. In the 1890s and
1910s, Casely Hayford went on to publish important works of cultural
nationalist historiography and a novel in which the African past, polygamy
and customary marriage were offered as alternatives to European political
and social institutions (Casely Hayford 1911). If written by Casely Hayford,
Marita provides a captivating example of his youthful gender politics,
which developed in later years into a sophisticated cultural nationalism in
which polygamy was defended as a wholesome customary institution.
In several important respects, however, Casely Hayford’s profile and
literary voice do not fit “A. Native’s” mould. Indeed, the strong “internal
evidence” referred to by Jenkins turns out to be rather weak, for the hero’s
status as “a classical scholar”, mentioned once at the start of the narrative,7
cannot be equated with the Socratic model and immense range of classical
citations underpinning Ethiopia Unbound. Marita contains few classical
references, models or quotations of this nature and thus lacks the stylistic
“consistency” suggested by Jenkins.
As a member of the younger generation of educated Africans, Casely
Hayford was born and brought up in the 1860s and 1870s, a time of political
and economic transformation in the region. Authors such as he, along with
Mensah Sarbah and Attoh-Ahuma, were the young radicals of their age,
who engaged in a process of selecting aspects of the past to promote in the
present, finding models which would “provide them with a politically
‘usable past’” (Jenkins 1985:155). Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound
exemplifies this process: it is remarkable for its utopian, dream-like visions
drawn from the ‘traditional’ past.
“A. Native”, by contrast, has less radical and more immediate and
practical objectives, relating to the present sense of crisis generated by
government legislation. Marita proposes reforms to the Marriage Ordinance
which are anything but ‘traditional’, combining Methodist ideals for
monogamy with the customary system of relatively easy separation.
Additionally, in Marita the majority of Africans are labelled “uncivilised”,
incapable of conforming to the rigid standards of European marriage
practice. “We are a people just emerging from a state of barbarism”,
Quaibu states repeatedly in the narrative (Western Echo 16-30 Sept 1887:8).
Given his ardent retrieval of the African past in the 1890s, would Casely

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Stephanie Newell
Hayford have endorsed this position in 1887? Was he capable of labelling
the majority of uneducated Africans “barbaric”? In this and other areas,
one gets no sense that the author of Marita wishes to retrieve and promote
a pristine African past. Rather, “A. Native” seems to follow the ‘third way’
or ‘middle way’ that was characteristic of the older generation of African
intellectuals.
Besides Casely Hayford, a second prime suspect for authorship of
Marita is James Hutton Brew (1844-1915), the father of mass-produced
newspapers in the Gold Coast and political activist in the 1860s, 1870s and
1880s. Unlike the inexperienced, newly-graduated Casely Hayford, Brew
was a mature man in 1885, of a similar age and house-holding status to the
protagonist of Marita who is described as having “just entered his fortieth
year” (Western Echo 30 Jan 1886:1). Brew was sensitive to issues of female
power in the Gold Coast and suspicious of the new legal rights conferred
upon women by the Marriage Ordinance (Gocking 1999). In addition, his
editorials in the Western Echo expressed concern about the effects of the
new law upon the “heathen” and “uncivilised” majority of Africans.
There is insufficient space here for further enquiry into possible authors
of the novel, except to add that a further complication is that several
different “A. Natives” seem to have been active in the Gold Coast press
between the 1870s and 1910s, spanning both Casely Hayford’s and Brew’s
journalistic careers. The pseudonym first appeared in Brew’s newspaper,
the Gold Coast Times, at a time when Casely Hayford was still an infant,
incapable of more than childish babble. Many years later in 1916, it
appeared in Casely Hayford’s Gold Coast Leader, one year after Brew’s
death in London. The latter “A. Native’s” article closely mirrors the themes
and perspective of Marita in its defence of the “divine institution” of
monogamy while arguing that church marriage is “a great mistake and
misconception” in the Gold Coast (Gold Coast Leader 20 May 1916:5).
“Our native women are not trained for such matrimonial life”, the author
insists, echoing the author of Marita. “All they know is having become thus
married, she has been invited to enjoy wealth – She has been created a
‘lady’ and need not toil again” (Gold Coast Leader 20 May 1916:5). It is
possible that this “A. Native” is the same “A. Native” to have composed
Marita – neither Casely Hayford nor Brew, but another man – whose
opinions on the “marriage question” remained consistent over the decades.
At the very least, these articles suggest the persistence of a masculinist
ideological line about the ill-effects of church marriage upon African
women.

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Literary Activism in Colonial Ghana
Despite the best efforts of scholars to date, the identity of Marita’s
author remains sealed behind his pseudonym. Whoever was responsible for
the authorship of the novel, the essential point is that “A. Native” was not
an isolated individual crying “foul” against the colonial government for its
unpopular Marriage Ordinance. His was a particular masculine perspective
on the situation, a standpoint which remained popular for many decades in
newspaper debates and Ghanaian fiction. Whether Brew or Casely Hayford
wrote the novel – or some other author altogether – the sheer number of
African men to write articles about the “marriage question” between 1880
and 1940 reveals the extent to which Marita expressed the masculine
zeitgeist of the colonial period. The narrative belongs within a shared,
oppositional discourse, standing in line with numerous other articles and
commentaries which are critical of the new colonial legislation.
The African-owned newspapers in colonial West Africa contain a core
of public writing and African initiatives that serve as a vital resource for
contemporary scholars. The extensive critical output in the local newspapers,
of which Marita was just one part, demonstrates the existence of a vocal
group of ‘public intellectuals’ in coastal areas of Ghana in the 1880s. What
is special about Marita is the author’s choice of genre, for few of “A.
Native’s” contemporaries chose to intervene in the “marriage question”
through the medium of fiction. In this important respect, “A. Native’s”
work differs from that of the other “A. Natives” and marks out our author
from the other literary activists in the Gold Coast. Written in a decade much
neglected by scholars, the decade immediately before cultural nationalism
became the dominant ideology among the African intelligentsia, the
narrative reveals the delicacy and subtlety with which educated Africans
tried to negotiate with European culture and, for that reason, it demands
closer scrutiny.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Bernth Lindfors for alerting me to the existence of Marita and sending
me his photocopies of the novel.
Notes
1. I have tended to use the colonial label ‘Gold Coast’ to describe the southern
territory that has become part of modern Ghana. When offering historical or
literary overviews of the colonial period, however, ‘Ghana’ is often used.
2. Marita will be appearing for the first time in the form of a book published by
Brill, Germany, in January 2002 (“A. Native” forthcoming 2002). References
to the ‘newspaper-novel’ are cited only in the body of the article.

30
Stephanie Newell
3. The reading public in colonial Ghana was a great deal wider than a literate,
newspaper-buying minority. To the frustration of newspaper proprietors, who
depended upon subscriptions, one newspaper would pass between many hands,
and stories and debates would circulate orally between literate and non-literate
audiences, who often lived under the same roof.
4. I use ‘men’ deliberately in this article, for among the coastal elite women
tended to be less well-educated than men until the 1920s. Indeed, a primary
theme of Marita is the difficulty experienced by elite men in obtaining an
educated wife. In consequence, a certain gender exclusivity attached to reading
and writing in the early colonial period, for women were unable to participate
in the written debates to the same extent as the men.
5. For example, an exhaustive list of publications - including newspaper articles
– precedes the first instalment of Attoh-Ahuma’s short story, “Cruel as the
Grave”, published posthumously in the Gold Coast Times between 5 January
and 23 February 1935 (see Gold Coast Times, 5-12 January 1935: 11).
6. In contrast to the lack of interest in “A. Native’s” identity, by the early 1930s,
when a far larger reading public had emerged in the colony, immense curiosity
surrounded the identity of “Marjorie Mensah” who wrote the Women’s Corner
of the Times of West Africa.
7. In fact it is another character, Bonsue Penin, rather than Quaibu who is
described as a Latin, Greek and Hebrew scholar.
References
“A. Native” (pseud). Forthcoming 2002 (1886-1888). Marita: or the Folly of
Love, A Novel. Edited and Introduced by Stephanie Newell.
Germany: Brill Publishers.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Baku, Daniel Kofi. 1987. An Intellectual in Nationalist Politics: The Contribution
of Kobina Sekyi to the Evolution of Ghanaian National
Consciousness. PhD Thesis. Sussex: University of Sussex.
Casely Hayford, Joseph Ephraim. 1969 (1911). Ethiopia Unbound. London: Cass.
Gocking, Roger S. 1999. Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities
under Colonial Rule. Maryland: University Press of America.
Jenkins, Raymond G. 1985. Gold Coast Historians and their Pursuit of the Gold
Coast Pasts: 1882-1917. PhD Thesis. Birmingham:
University of Birmingham.
Newell, Stephanie. Forthcoming. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: ‘How to
Play the Game of Life’. Manchester and Indiana: Manchester
University Press and Indiana University Press.