Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's Work for the Empire Marketing Board

Detail from Gerald Spencer Pryse, A Street in Kano, 1927 (plate 10). The posters commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), ‘a departmental advisory committee’ established by the British government in 1926 to promote and stimulate trade within the empire,1 ‘gave no space’, recent scholarship claims, ‘to anti-colonial criticism or to any other inconvenient truths that may have detracted from their message’.2 The records of the EMB's Poster Section, held at the National Archives, gives merit to this claim, as they confirm that imagery produced by the Board's commissioned artists was indeed in many instances stringently regulated, its content requiring committee approval before final publication to ensure that the EMB's message was expressed in the manner they desired.3 This article, however, argues conversely that some EMB imagery may be read as negatively critiquing aspects of Britain's imperial vision in the late 1920s.4 Until its abolition in 1933, the EMB sought ‘to create in the public mind a convincing picture of imperial realities in every corner of the world’.5 Amongst its activities, the Board financed scientific research into increasing the production of empire food, but its most publicly visual attempt to convey ‘imperial realities’ was through the posters it displayed on purpose-built hoardings across Britain that projected the empire as a unified trading entity whose members actively and willingly participated in a modern imperial economy. This configuration of empire was, however, only one of a number on offer in the late 1920s and in other visual mediums – painting, film, photography, and product advertising – other imperial identities were forged. This article reflects specifically upon the formation of identity in Britain's West African colonies in the 1920s, but its main focus falls upon images of the region created for the EMB by the established poster artist Gerald Spencer Pryse (1882–1956) in 1927/28.6 In the context of the EMB's output these are significant works for they reveal colonial West Africa as a site of industrialized modernity; a region more typically represented by the Board as technologically undeveloped.7 But their greater significance is that pictorially they reveal tensions concerning the construction of West Africa's imperial identity in the 1920s; tensions that revolve around coexisting configurations of the region as indigenously exotic, but also as imperially and indigenously modern. In the early 1920s the newspaper West Africa issued a call for Western cultural producers – both painters and writers – to visit Britain's tropical colonies in West Africa and draw upon their life and atmosphere as material for their work.8 A series of articles, including a front page editorial eulogizing the natural features of Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) run under the banner, ‘The Most Picturesque Colony in the Empire’, was published in September and October 1921. The editorial informed any potentially visiting artists of the subject-matter to which they should attend, and it listed an extensive array of picturesque natural scenes – deemed to be ‘the true field of the artist’ – that awaited depiction: ‘the rolling surf’, ‘the black luminous darkness of the starlit night’, and ‘the forests with their sombre depths broken by shafts of sunlight’.9 Krista Thompson, in her analysis of touristic photographs of the Caribbean dating from the early twentieth century, outlines the differing criteria that deemed whether images were identified at the time as picturesque or tropical. She details that ‘more tamed and ordered’ views were considered picturesque whilst images that ‘reinforced the idea of … wild, overly abundant, and even uncontrolled … nature’, that expressed traits of ‘fertility’ and ‘exoticism’, were defined as tropical.10 West Africa’s choice of ‘picturesque’ to convey West Africa's tropicality, suggests, however, that such terms also had a more fluid, perhaps less ideological, quality when used to evoke the aesthetic characteristics of imperial landscapes and cultures in the 1920s. Indeed, when Spencer Pryse described West Africa he did not define it specifically as ‘picturesque’, ‘exotic’, or ‘tropical’, but considered only that there ‘aesthetic perceptions predominate to an astonishing degree’.11 In this instance it therefore may be less fruitful to search for any ideological subtext in the terms employed to describe West Africa in the 1920s. Instead, it is perhaps safer to argue that articles such as the West Africa editorial helped facilitate the tropical empire's decontextualization by permitting it to be perceived as uncontaminated by history, reduced to a mere assemblage of timeless aesthetic views to which artists could selectively respond. In the view of the editorial, it was, however, not just landscape that served this purpose, for, artists were alerted, the indigenous population in their ‘brilliant Native costumes’ are also prized for their picturesque value. Moreover, the editorial's comparison of Ghanaian male dress to togas worn in Roman times, alongside talk of ‘sword bearers’, had the potential to inflict the same sense of stasis upon the population as it imposed upon the natural environment.12 Many of Spencer Pryse's images of West Africa echo the configuration of the tropical empire as an exotic entity. His deployment of the exotic constitutes a manifestation of exoticism, defined by Chris Bongie ‘as a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited … the space of [the] Other [as] outside or beyond the confines of a “civilization” that, by virtue of its modernity, was perceived … as being incompatible with certain essential values’.13 Although a late florescence of exoticism (apropos Bongie's definition), ‘the exotic’, as Peter Mason has argued, ‘is always up for renegotiation [and] always open to reinvention’; a conception that grants it a more enduring centrality when used in historical analysis.14 Thus, the exoticized images of West Africa that Spencer Pryse produced fit within an exoticist discourse that, in the 1920s and 1930s, idealized and positively contrasted the authenticity of some non-Western societies with their contemporary European and North American counterparts.15 Consequently, as manifestations of the exotic, Spencer Pryse's images are, as Frederick Bohrer generally argues, ‘about … the Western societies in which they circulate at least as much as any extrinsic culture they claim to represent’.16 The one hundred watercolours Spencer Pryse painted during a three-month tour of Gold Coast and Nigeria financed by the EMB, ‘went’, as he acknowledged, ‘beyond the immediate needs of the Marketing Board’.17 Exhibited in the late 1920s and early 1930s in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Copenhagen, and Toronto, the paintings highlight West Africa's intrinsic aestheticness; an aesthetic that Spencer Pryse believed was derived not only from the natural landscape but also from the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population for ‘whom living remains an art’ and from whom ‘an industrialized world has possibly something to learn’.18 It was an aesthetic that some contemporary commentators saw as potentially threatened by the industrialization that had been introduced into West Africa under British imperial rule and which Spencer Pryse recorded. For example, the Manchester Guardian, when reviewing an exhibition of his watercolours in Manchester in May 1930, described some as ‘rather grim pictures of Western industrialism impinging on the primitive’.19 Comments such as those contained in the Manchester Guardian review would have undermined the EMB's positive projection of empire as a unified ‘family’ of modernizing, trading nations; a conception adopted by the Board to dispel notions that Britain selfishly exploited her colonial territories. It was a vision of empire that the EMB promoted through the use of slogans such as ‘The Empire is One Large Family’ and ‘Keep Trade in the Family’,20 and it was part of a wider attempt in the 1920s to redefine empire as a peaceable and cohesive trading union, and distance it from its late-nineteenth-century more militaristic characterization.21 Significantly, the exoticism that imbues many of Spencer Pryse's watercolours also permeates his posters of West Africa: deemed by the EMB to positively convey imperial modernity.22 This, perhaps, was not unsurprising. Images depicting indigenous West African exoticism existing alongside imperial modernity may have reinforced a belief held by the imperial authorities that the empire's West Africa colonies had sustained their authentic character despite a period of major social and economic upheaval. So when Spencer Pryse depicted native chiefs exotically dressed in traditional robes of Kente cloth in an EMB poster, Native Chiefs in Palaver (plate 1), there was more invested in the picturesque or exotic than merely its role in the production of aesthetically pleasing, timeless images, as West Africa had proposed in 1921.23 In this instance the exotic served wider imperial objectives by pictorially validating an aspect of Britain's administration of its West African colonies: the system of Indirect Rule through traditional local chiefs.24 For here, as James Epstein has argued, the British authorities found a ‘hierarchically ordered society’ that mirrored their own ideological identification of ‘a ruling elite … with landed wealth’.25 Photo: © Manchester City Galleries. Spencer Pryse's representation of the exotic indigenous culture of Gold Coast as not only continuing under British administration, but, furthermore, being accorded respect (he portrays an equally exotic figure dressed in the white ceremonial uniform of a colonial Governor meeting native chiefs), meant that his poster would have suited the EMB's promotion of Britain's imperial rule as respectful and ‘non-destructive’ of existing indigenous cultural practices.26 In this instance, though, his imagery fails to fully convey the complexities of the region's life; West Africa is imagined only through a limited exotic indigenous/imperial binary. Although such a conception served the purposes of the EMB, the contemporaneous presence in colonial West Africa of locally produced modernities – and the pictorial neglect of them by Spencer Pryse – means images that project the region primarily as an exotic entity in the 1920s need to be considered not only in the light of whose purposes such a construction served, but whose identity it denied. By the 1920s an authentic – effectively, unmodernized – and exotic characterization of colonial West Africa had been undermined by modernities imported by imperial powers, but also by those produced indigenously. By this date, a British university-educated West African elite operating within a public sphere that incorporated London and Accra, the capital of Gold Coast, had forged, or were developing, modernities that appropriated and rejected certain aspects of imperial modernity. Their political ambitions in Gold Coast thwarted by an administrative system that left them marginalized, this elite instigated alternative, independent forums that included student organizations formed in London, newspapers published in West Africa, and debating and social clubs established in Accra through which they could express their own ideas regarding political modernity.27 Also part of West Africa's elite in the 1920s was an established mercantile class described as ‘the first capitalists of West Africa in the sphere of industry’.28 In March 1923 West Africa published a photograph of two of its affluent members – a Mr and Mrs E. K. Adisi – pictured, standing alongside their children, on the steps of their impressive home in Accra, in front of which is parked Mrs Adisi's luxury car (plate 2). A week after its appearance West Africa published a reader's letter that complimented the newspaper for giving ‘both in its reading matter and more particularly in its pictures, a reliable account of what is happening in West Africa’.29 For the correspondent, the photograph showed a continent where Africans now ‘carry on great enterprises, have fine houses, and use some of the most expensive makes of British motor-cars and other articles’.30 Yet for other commentators in the 1920s, Westernized Africans, such as the Adisis, were viewed more negatively. Hugh Wyndham vindictively described the Westernized African ‘as a highly trained mechanic, dancing in evening clothes, and in the intervals whispering pan-African politics’, but whose ‘mental and spiritual being is all the time in its primitive state.’31 Photo: © British Library Board, LON148, p. 305. The colonial authorities in West Africa did not consider elite West Africans ‘primitive’, but neither did they place great value on a group whose principal professional occupations as barristers, journalists, or traders meant they were often regarded by the authorities as disruptive, or non-beneficial, to the imperial project.32 For colonial governments, seeking to construct an imperially modern West Africa on, what it considered, traditional cultural foundations, a Western-educated elite, guilty in the view of some imperialists for breaching ‘clearly definable boundaries’,33 ‘could no longer claim an authentic African identity and culture’.34 Unsurprisingly, some elite West Africans railed against an imperially imposed notion of ‘authentic African identity’. In West Africa in May 1924, C. F. Hayfron-Benjamin, educated at Kings College, London and then President of the Society of Students of African Descent, offered an alternative version of West African identity in the 1920s. Describing the West African Section of the British Empire Exhibition then being staged at Wembley, Hayfron-Benjamin considered that a ‘casual visitor … is introduced to only one side of African life … the tribe gathered around their chief, arrayed in Native dress … [and] would hardly gather that the African is quite accustomed to the use of such amenities as the motor-car, telephone, [and] electric light.’35 He hoped that the modern technology of the cinema would produce a correspondingly modern conception of colonial West Africa.36 And indeed a film shown in an on-site cinema at Wembley, the Greville brothers’ The Gold Coast Today, shot in the colony in 1923, went some way in achieving this as it included a scene of an African barrister at work in Accra interviewing clients and leaving for court in a car.37 As representations of West African identity in the 1920s, the photograph of the Adisi family, Hayfron-Benjamin's account, and the Greville brothers’ film stand in stark contrast to an imperially designated authentic identity, exotically conveyed by Spencer Pryse in Native Chiefs in Palaver. It was, though, not only through mediums such as film and photography – ‘vested with a particular authority … to see and record’ – that an alternative conception of Britain's tropical West African colonies emerged: their limited, exoticized configuration was also challenged in some British art.38 A portrait exhibited by Beatrice Bright at the Daily Express Women's Exhibition at Olympia in 1922, which was reproduced in West Africa on 26 August 1922, also offered a differing account of colonial West African identity. The subject of the painting, Miss Dove-Edwin of Sierra Leone, was studying in London when Bright portrayed her in ‘African costume’ of ‘vivid colourings’.39 The casting of Dove-Edwin as a generic ‘exotic’ African is, however, somewhat mitigated by the fashionable Western ‘bob’ haircut that she also wears, which firmly positions her as an African woman familiar with the cultural minutiae of metropolitan life. The portrait thus reveals evidence of the cultural intermingling that had long constituted the life of elite West Africans, and it highlights that imperially produced conceptions of the ‘authentic’ West Africa as a timeless entity were both limiting and inadequate; failing, as they did, to take account of the ‘autonomous spaces’ in which West Africans constituted modern cultural and political identities at this time. Yet for all the attempts of a West African elite to define and declare their modernity, and despite that modernity being on occasion visually acknowledged in photographs, film, and paintings, visual constructions of West African identity remained, in the 1920s, multifarious. Bongie has argued that with the spread of colonialism, Western purveyors of the distantly located exotic were faced with a dilemma. They could either honestly record the ‘new world of colonialism’ to be found in locations previously configured as exotic, but which to a greater or lesser extent was a version of the ‘old world’ whence they had come, or they could continue to disingenuously conceptualize these sites as exotic but only ‘by relying on by-now clichéd visions’.40 Evidence of the continuing imagining of West Africa as a purely exotic entity is found in work shown in London less than two years after Bright's hybridized portrait of Dove-Edwin was seen there. In March 1924 an exhibition of paintings of Sierra Leone by a French artist, Rose Chicotot Stinus, opened at Brook Street Galleries. Stinus’ paintings were reviewed in The Times and, based upon this account, the exhibition comprised landscapes, judged to ‘convey with intensity the glow and the luxuriance of Africa’, and studies of the indigenous Sierra Leonean population, which were praised for evoking ‘the subject of place’. One of the from (plate was considered by the ‘a of and from a of is in the two the could in 1924 equally have been viewed more as exotic Africans the exotic tropical Photo: © British Library Board, p. such were the visual constructions of West African identity then in that Stinus’ exhibition of work in London offered an alternative account of life in the As part of its at the British Empire the colonial government of Gold Coast exhibited paintings that it had commissioned from a British artist, which depicted aspects of the economic and social In Gold Coast the of imperial was often to visually such as on (plate a of one of the trade established by the colonial government to in This have served the of the Governor of Gold Coast, in to a British evidence of Britain was to the For in to the trade had a They and were to traits of and respect for and that may be to the seen in the The however, also be read as an less the open of the – an of the of space in which into … and – a number of and They a the and landscape – an of imperial modernity – and the native that in the of the and which an and, potentially exotic though, the of the exotic merely as in [and] In painting, an imperial vision of modernity has exoticism as the of British colonial West Africa in the 1920s. Photo: © Society Although would have limited of West Africa's held value for He he for her to a subject in as a but considered that her of the in the great in the what he was subject-matter into the of ‘The on and at the they had were all – Miss has a upon the exotic in that an of an exoticized tropical empire significant cultural the of that exoticism it was for an such as to for political and economic that conveyed a notion of a it was as for needs of historical – what the artist and cultural has ‘the of – that this was Bohrer has the role that the has in the of of the on would potentially have challenged an established and configuration of the tropical empire as exotic – a configuration to which Stinus’ work – but the exotic that of imperial modernity in Gold Coast the for he for other a of cultural have long of from and their on in with a great at his have seen them in the white African against the have of in for their of to be and sombre that in have seen with the of all up and the when a has been … images as these have what with to In those of it is to the and of the in this account, have a of the exotic material that awaited Spencer Pryse's But as an artist commissioned by the EMB his was to produce posters that a contemporary political has argued that the representation of Africa was but … on the political of any historical and in this instance the imagining of West Africa upon a contemporary political need to promote a modern empire less to Spencer Pryse, in the of imperial modernity in West Africa, faced the of to of often more the and that were a landscape and often perceived in Western as with the same had it by the exotic, it to an For Spencer Pryse, though, by the aesthetic that his account, years after the exotic could not be for it to define West His EMB from with the Poster Section that in 1927 when he with the of a from the Board ‘to visit Africa with the of a series of for In August this was and he was offered a of up to to two of colonial and West that he a of for two of depicting scenes in West Africa that were to be derived from a Gold Coast was for in March or and by by two The and Native Chiefs in by In with other artists employed by the EMB, Spencer Pryse's was to posters that the Board's aesthetic and ideological as as the was an ideological representation of the tropical colonies as ‘the empire's a of and but, to their also as the of British Indeed, a of posters by for an early EMB series of the Empire is in the to this ideological of posters the by of and whilst within its a of that the trade Britain and her tropical African and to the notion of – an imperial vision dating to the late and Although the of and to the configuration of the colonial empire in EMB posters as a they are by their of a tropical modern and The of colonial produce – the of – may have been by the EMB as subject-matter for Spencer Pryse to the the colonial authorities to the construction of the at which opened on just as the posters were on in when reviewing his as had the of the the construction of a at that this would ‘the of … and thus of – the of for of and the representation of the production may have been to a of its imperial – by the was some of a to Britain where it was used in the production of – and its use of modern technology – when Spencer Pryse the was being run by the African a of the American after the in 1923, had introduced to production and with the that in Gold Spencer Pryse's to this of industrialized modernity was, however, more one he that the construction had reduced the of Gold Coast on he expressed Spencer Pryse argued, were to industrialism as in it of he picture which the other … a through Western to that at the of all it may be the His to is of it opened in Britain on March 1927 at the the film was in the film trade The as ‘the and in the were equally – in film considered the Daily film to be seen and the Daily film a and of industrialized modernity in a contemporary review in The Times which considered ‘the of and of what they is one from which no modern They as the of … [and] are by many as the of a of which may and is perhaps from to contemporary review offered a of a world before the on a a before it vision had as as film to on its in and his of modern life be seen as to a conception of the years as ‘an of

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