Imperial Networks, African Publics: Telegraphy and News Making in Colonial Nigeria

This article reinterprets telegraphy in colonial Nigeria not as a precursor to modern communications but as a media infrastructure that reshaped how news circulated, authority operated, and publics formed. Histories of African media have largely overlooked the telegraph, leaving the relationship between telecommunications and mass communication underexamined. Drawing on archival and press sources, the article traces how submarine, inland, and wireless telegraph networks became intertwined with newspapers, radio broadcasting, commercial information, and anti-colonial politics. Rather than treating the telegraph as a singular imperial technology, it approaches telegraphy as a technology-in-use whose meanings emerged through everyday practices, institutional conflicts, material breakdowns, and struggles over access and control. By foregrounding African journalists, technicians, readers, and political actors, the study challenges diffusionist histories of communications technology and argues that colonial media infrastructures were coproduced through imperial ambitions and African forms of appropriation, negotiation, and resistance.