ASCL Seminar: Imagining the world - Swahili-language print media in early twentieth-century Tanzania

This event will take place online. Registrees will receive a link to the online platform one day before the start of the event.

Global histories of East Africa have often focused on economic relationships. But engagement with the wider world also took place in the domain of ideas, increasingly, from the late nineteenth century, through the medium of print media. With rare exceptions, mainland Tanzania’s Swahili-language print media in the first half of the twentieth century was missionary and government owned, at least until the rise of the nationalist press in the 1950s. For this reason, it was once thought to be of less interest to intellectual historians than the independent press of neighbouring countries. But a growing body of work has begun to explore the diversity of content and the richness of the thinking which took place in the pages of these newspapers, albeit within very circumscribed limits. In this talk, which is part of a wider project exploring Tanzania’s modern history in a global context, Prof. Emma Hunter (University of Edinburgh) will explore Tanzania’s Swahili-language print media as a space in which writers reflected on their place within an increasingly unequal world.

Read the web dossier on Early African Press.