1900s–1930s: (Other Voices — African Arts as Resilience and Resistance, Newspapers as Forums for Anti-Colonial Opinion, the New Educated Elite Increasingly A…

1900s–1930s: (Other Voices — African Arts as Resilience and Resistance, Newspapers as Forums for Anti-Colonial Opinion, the New Educated Elite Increasingly Aware of Injustice but Seeking Reform Rather Than Revolution Before the 1940s, and the Spread of Literacy Through Communal Readings): African grievances found expression through many channels beyond formal politics in the early decades of the twentieth century. While one view holds that European rule brought cultural degeneration and destroyed the authenticity of local artistic endeavor, another recognizes that African artistic forms proved both resilient and adaptive — by the 1930s, African artists and craftsmen were gently mocking Europeans and the systems of governance that sustained them, notably in sculpture, and the Africanization of supposedly European artistic styles itself represented a form of resistance. Newspapers were crucial in some areas, notably South Africa where some of the earliest appeared in the 1900s, and an African voice was soon heard in West Africa, where by the interwar years newspapers were an increasingly important forum for debate and anti-colonial opinion. Lack of literacy restricted circulation to an educated elite, although by the Second World War it was not uncommon for village meetings to take place around the reading aloud of a newspaper by one of the community’s literate members. This new educated elite was increasingly aware of the injustice of colonial society and economy, and increasingly restless about its exclusion from the system — yet before the early 1940s, few thought in terms of outright independence and the wholesale destruction of the colonial order, but rather reform within it. The colonial system had educated its own critics but not yet its gravediggers — that transformation would only come with the Second World War itself.