First appearing as a series of letters to a local newspaper, “The Life Story of Me, Segilola” caused a sensation in Lagos in the late 1920s. The lifelike autobiography of a repentant courtesan, it regaled the reader with risqué escapades, pious moralising and vivid evocations of urban popular culture. The narrative and the commentary that sprang up around it in the Yoruba press offer a unique view of life in colonial Lagos. Today it is recognised as I.B.Thomas's work and hailed as the first Yoruba novel in a major African literary tradition. This volume presents the edited Yoruba text with translation, selected newspaper correspondence, and an introductory essay showing how the text emerged from the Yoruba print culture of the time. Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel has won the Paul Hair Prize 2013!

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2020 'Honorable Mention' for the ALA FIRST BOOK AWARD - SCHOLARSHIP 2021 A path-breaking contribution to the critical literature on African travel writing.

Over a decade ago, when Nigeria's migratory digital elite in the United States pioneered a newfangled form of citizen online journalism that disrupted the professional certainties of domestic legacy journalism, the country's professional journalists held out hope that the disruptive effect of this insurgent, non-professionalized, non-routinized but nonetheless transformative form of journalism would be transitory. But diasporic citizen online journalism is not only now an integral part of Nigeria's media ecosystem, it has also inspired successful homeland digital-native emulators and is challenging, even supplanting in some cases, traditional domestic media formations as sites of consequential democratic discourse. With Nigeria's frenetic and deeply engaged social media scene, diasporan citizen journalism, homeland news, and social media activism are merging to create the most energetic moment in Nigeria's media history. This book chronicles the emergence and transformation of Nigeria's diasporic citizen journalism from the margins to the mainstream of the country's journalistic landscape and draws parallels with the mainstreaming of alternative media formations in other parts of the world. Farooq A. Kperogi is Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA. He is a columnist for the Nigerian Tribune and blogs at https: //www.farooqkperogi.com/

Digital Media and the Preservation of Indigenous Languages in Africa: Toward a Digitalized and Sustainable Society presents cutting-edge epistemological debates, academic case studies, and empirical research from African scholars on the intersection of digital media technologies, artificial intelligence, and the preservation of Indigenous languages in the continent. This edited collection provides a methodology for African researchers, practitioners, and marginalized communities to integrate digital technologies into their lives to foster innovation, advance the documentation and preservation of underrepresented languages, and promote African-centered epistemologies. Contributors to this edited volume argue that African societies should acknowledge and embrace digital media platforms. Despite these platforms’ potential as sites of epistemic colonialism, they are essential for promoting ways of life that reflect the diversity and importance of Indigenous cultures. For Indigenous languages and local epistemologies to flourish in this rapidly evolving technological era, African communities must employ a variety of contemporary practices and strategies to document, protect, and preserve ways of being that have formerly been relegated to the periphery.

The text celebrates the academic achievements of Professor Olasope Oyelaran. It brings together over 20 papers by an international group of scholars on African diaspora languages, literatures and culture, representing four generations, all of whom have been influenced by Oyelaran’s work in one way or another. Edited by three African scholars in the USA, UK, and Nigeria, the volume presents current research on topics in applied- and socio-linguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, oral and written literature, and Yoruba language and culture in African diasporas in Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad. The constellation of topics presented here will enlarge the reader’s understanding of a number of issues in the field of African and African diaspora languages, literatures, and cultures today. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the expanding work on the linguistic and cultural interface of Africa and its Brazilian, Cuban, and Trinidadian diasporas.

This study of the state of media law in Nigeria contains analyses of the interplay of law, politics, the economy and other social factors on the state of freedom of expression. Juxtaposed are the regime of media law and regulations, judicial interpretation of these laws, the existing environment for the realisation of freedom of expression and the associated general political, social and economic environment. Critical attention is given to the various enactments regulating freedom of expression and the provisions on freedom of expression in the 1963, 1979 and 1999 Constitutions of Nigeria. How national media laws compare with international treaties and how regulators influence media contents, are also examined. The book is addressed to a wide audience: mass communication and law students, lecturers and teachers in tertiary institutions offering relevant courses, legal practitioners, journalists and those working in the field of mass communication, human rights and political activists, politicians and party bureaucracies, policy makers, researchers and experts in think tanks.

Agbese examines the role and agenda of the Nigerian press in the democratization process, highlighting the grave challenges the Nigerian press faced in pushing for democratization in Nigeria.

The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view. The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.