Imagining Imperial Modernity in Colonial West Africa

Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial
West Africa:
Gerald Spencer Pryse’s Work for the Empire
Marketing Board
Tim Buck
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
Detail from Gerald Spencer
Pryse, A Street in Kano, 1927 imperially and indigenously modern.
(plate 10).
Colonial West Africa’s Exotic Configuration

DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12145 In the early 1920s the newspaper West Africa issued a call for Western cultural
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 producers – both painters and writers – to visit Britain’s tropical colonies in West
38 | 5 | November 2015 | pages
940-963 Africa and draw upon their life and atmosphere as material for their work.8 A series
© Association of Art Historians 2015 941

Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa
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 defi nition), ‘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

Tim Buck
1 Gerald Spencer Pryse,

Native Chiefs in Palaver, 1928.
Lithograph, 101.6 × 63.5 cm.
Manchester: Manchester
City Galleries. Photo: ©
Manchester City Galleries.
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
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.
Indigenous Modernity in Colonial West Africa

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

Tim Buck
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
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
2 Mr and Mrs E. K. Adisi in

front of their home in Accra,
published in West Africa, 31
March 1923. Photo: © British
Library Board, LON148,
p. 305.

Defining/Imagining Colonial West African Identity

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

Tim Buck
3 Rose Chicotot Stinus with

Back from Fishing, 1924,
published in West Africa,
15 March 1924. Photo: ©
British Library Board,
LON112, p. 215.
‘the subject of place’. One of the latter, Back from Fishing (plate 3), was considered by the
reviewer ‘a sympathetic appreciation of dignity and mystery proceeding from race’,41
yet although a degree of individuality is evident in the two figures, the sparsely-clad
fishermen could in 1924 equally have been viewed more generically as exotic Africans
personifying the exotic tropical empire.
However, such were the conflicting visual constructions of West African identity
then in circulation that immediately following Stinus’ exhibition another show
of work in London offered an alternative account of life in the region. As part of
its display at the British Empire Exhibition, the colonial government of Gold Coast
exhibited paintings that it had commissioned from a British artist, Edith Cheesman,
which depicted aspects of the colony’s economic and social transformation.42 In
conveying Gold Coast amidst the throes of imperial modernization, Cheesman was

often required to paint visually dull subject-matter, such as Boys on Parade (plate 4),
a depiction of one of the trade schools established by the colonial government to
provide training in manual trades. This nondescript image would, nonetheless, have
served the requirements of the Governor of Gold Coast, Sir Gordon Guggisberg,
in relaying to a domestic British audience evidence of how Britain was helping to
‘civilize’ the colony. For in addition to teaching technical skills, the trade schools
had a supposedly ‘civilizing’ role. They inculcated ‘character training’ and students
were expected to display behavioural traits of cleanliness, obedience, and respect
for parents and institutions: qualities that may be ascribed to the boys seen in the
picture.43 The painting can, however, also be read as serving an additional, less
transparent, propaganda purpose. Surrounding the open expanse of the school-
ground – an example of the type of ‘desirable [colonial] space in which bodies
[are] changed into ... orderly, docile and disciplined subjects’ – Cheesman depicts
a number of neat and tidy whitewashed school buildings.44 They form a barrier
between the manmade and prosaic landscape – an outcome of imperial modernity
– and the native forest that looms large in the background of the painting and which
symbolizes an untransformed and, hence, still potentially exotic Africa. Here,
though, the concept of the exotic functions merely as background nature thereby
lacking in ‘significance [and] narrative potential’.45 In Cheesman’s painting, an
imperial vision of modernity has replaced exoticism as the dominant narrative of
British colonial West Africa in the 1920s.
Although marginalized (and, ideologically, Guggisberg would surely have
welcomed this), Cheesman’s limited expression of West Africa’s exoticness still held
value for him. He admitted he felt sorry for her ‘having to tackle a subject so lacking
in artistic possibilities as a tidy, well-swept, school-ground’, but considered that her
‘skilful introduction of the harmattan mists in the great forest in the background’
elevated what he feared was dull subject-matter into the status of art: ‘The Scouts
on parade and at work, the buildings they had built, were all I wanted – Miss
Cheesman has given us a picture.’ 46 Guggisberg’s seizing upon the exotic element
in Cheesman’s painting suggests that an evocation of an exoticized tropical empire
still retained significant cultural capital, however partial the expression of that
exoticism was.47 Even though it was beneficial for an imperialist, such as him, to
4 Postcard of Edith
Cheesman, Boys on Parade,
Kibbi Trade School, Gold
Coast, 1923/24. Cambridge:
Royal Commonwealth
Society Library. Photo:
© Royal Commonwealth
Society Library, Cambridge
University Library.

Tim Buck
have, for short-term political and economic purposes, art that conveyed a temporally
specific notion of a modernizing empire, it was as important, for long-term needs
of historical endorsement – what the artist and cultural historian Kenneth Coutts-
Smith has called ‘the freezing of concepts’ – that this art, too, was validated.48 Bohrer
has outlined the dynamic, evolving role that the viewer has played in the reception
of ‘representational transformations’ of the exotic.49 Boys on Parade would potentially
have challenged an established and still prevailing art-historical configuration of
the tropical empire as timelessly exotic – a configuration to which Stinus’ work
contributed – but the exotic veneer that embellishes Cheesman’s depiction of
imperial modernity in Gold Coast nonetheless granted the work, for Guggisberg
(and, presumably, he hoped, for other viewers), a degree of cultural authenticity.
Imperial Modernity/An Indigenous Exotic: Spencer Pryse’s EMB Images

The image of West Africa that Spencer Pryse held prior to his arrival there in
September 1927 differed from the exoticized conception produced by Stinus, and
from the modern ‘civilized’ region emerging under British imperial rule, conveyed
by Cheesman. In an account of his visit he describes that before stepping ashore
he thought of West Africa as a place of ‘tin sheds with strings of sooty individuals
at work, or carrying headloads; a dismal picture, not without a hint of forced
labour’.50 The pernicious effect of this impression is, however, somewhat negated
by Spencer Pryse limiting its overall veracity – he designates it a ‘local’ idea, one
more associated with an attempt by ‘the great trading companies’ to convey ‘the
extent of their activities’, rather than a universal image generally believed as
characteristic – and on arrival this negative mental image is quickly dispelled.51
West Africans, Spencer Pryse finds, do indeed carry loads on their heads, but ‘under
an intense sunlight they are richly coloured’, and although sheds are found ‘from
end to end of the country’, visually, they barely impinge upon the landscape.52 It
is, he details, to these ‘tin sheds’ that the indigenous population bring quantities
of ground-nuts each season, but now in his account the negative implications
that, for him, previously surrounded the manner of their doing so is subjugated
to the visual impression they create. He describes ‘as something epic ... this simple
gathering-in of the groundnut’, and considers that it provides rich ‘subject matter
for a frieze that might adorn a public building in London as the Venetians once
adorned their palaces’.53 Within the space of consecutive paragraphs, Spencer
Pryse’s initial expression of concern over the fate of some of Britain’s imperial
subjects is overshadowed by an exoticized projection of West Africa’s population
and landscape. This is expounded upon to an even greater degree in a further
recollection of the sights he witnessed:
I have watched long lines of camels from Sokoto and Zinder, their Tuareg
proprietors perched high on piled-up bags, shrouded in indigo draperies,
each with a great cross-handled sword slung at his side. I have seen them
again in the white African moonlight mysteriously set against the sky. I have
watched groups of women in twilight interiors, waiting for their loads of
groundnuts to be weighed out, sumptuous and sombre groups that might
inspire new essays in art. I have seen men with the proportions of Greek
athletes racing all day up and down the beach when a steamer has been
loading ... Such images as these have replaced what I took with me to Africa.
In those pre-conceived monotonous lines of carriers it is hard to recognize
the diversity and amplitude of the reality.54

Here, then, in this retrospective account, we have a summation of the exotic material
that awaited Spencer Pryse’s paintbrush. But as an artist commissioned by the EMB
his objective was to produce posters that fulfilled a contemporary political need.
Annie Coombes has argued that the representation of Africa was never ‘fixed’ but
‘eminently ... variable, depending on the political exigencies of any specific historical
conjuncture’,55 and in this instance the imagining of West Africa centred upon a
contemporary political need to promote a modern economically self-sufficient
empire less vulnerable to foreign competition.56 Spencer Pryse, in recording the
effects of imperial modernity in West Africa, faced the challenge of how to make
art out of often more prosaic material; the cranes, machines, and newly constructed
harbours that were radically altering a landscape and culture, so often perceived
in Western imagination as timelessly exotic. Confronted with the same problem,
Cheesman had resolved it by marginalizing the exotic, confining it to an atmospheric,
background role. For Spencer Pryse, though, judging by the effusive aesthetic
descriptions that permeate his account, three years after Cheesman’s visit, the exotic
could not be so easily subjugated: for him, it continued to define West Africa.
His EMB commission resulted from protracted negotiations with the Poster
Section sub-committee that began in June 1927 when he discussed with sub-
committee member Frank McDougall the possibility of receiving a commission from
the Board ‘to visit Africa with the object of making a series of original sketches for
posters’.57 In August this request was granted and he was offered a fee of up to 1,000
guineas to design two sets of lithographs featuring colonial East and West Africa.58
Later that month, he accepted a revised fee of 1,100 guineas for two sets of five colour
lithographs depicting scenes in West Africa that were to be derived from ten stipulated
subjects.59 Ultimately, a Gold Coast set was scheduled for display in March or April
1928 comprising three large posters, titled Gathering Cocoa Pods, Takoradi Harbour, and Sorting
Manganese Ore measuring 101.6 cm by 152.4 cm, interspersed by two smaller posters,
titled The Talking Drums and Native Chiefs in Palaver, measuring 101.6 cm by 63.5 cm.
In common with other artists employed by the EMB, Spencer Pryse’s objective
was to design posters that met the Board’s aesthetic and ideological requirements.60
That meant, as far as the latter objective was concerned, an ideological representation
of the tropical colonies as ‘the empire’s gardens’,61 a rich source of food and raw
materials, but, due to their technological undevelopment, also as the repositories of
British manufactured goods.62 Indeed, a set of posters designed by Edward McKnight
Kauffer for an early EMB series entitled ‘One Third of the Empire is in the Tropics’
conformed to this ideological conception.63 Two of Kauffer’s posters depict the
harvesting, by hand, of bananas and cocoa whilst another incorporates within its
design a set of statistics that register the growing mutual trade between Britain and
her tropical African colonies, and draws attention to the notion of complementary
economies – an imperial vision dating back to the late nineteenth century and Joseph
Chamberlain.64
Although the themes of Takoradi Harbour and Sorting Manganese Ore conform to the
typical configuration of the colonial empire in EMB posters as a primary producer,
they are distinguished by their depiction of a tropical colony’s modern transportation
and industrial infrastructure. The transportation of colonial produce – the theme
of Takoradi Harbour – may have been selected by the EMB as suitable subject-matter
for Spencer Pryse due to the importance the colonial authorities attached to the
construction of the British-designed harbour at Takoradi which opened on 3 April
1928 just as the posters were on display in Britain. Guggisberg, when reviewing
his achievements as Governor, had prioritized the modernization of the colony’s

Tim Buck
transportation infrastructure, especially the construction of a deep water harbour at

Takoradi, believing that this would assure ‘the safety of ... trade’, and thus ‘assurance
of our revenue – the sinews of war for our campaign of education and progress’.65
Similarly, the representation of the colony’s manganese ore production may have
been due to a combination of its historic imperial importance – by 1916 the Nsuta
mine was exporting some 30,000 tons of ore a year to Britain where it was used in
the production of steel helmets – and its use of advanced modern technology – when
Spencer Pryse visited, the mine was being run by the African Manganese Company,
a subsidiary of the American company, Union Carbide, who, after acquiring the
mining concession in 1923, had introduced labour-saving machinery to stabilize
production costs and deal with the labour shortages that frequently occurred in Gold
Coast’s mining industry.66
Spencer Pryse’s reaction to this incursion of industrialized modernity was,
however, more ambiguous. On one occasion, echoing Guggisberg, he commented,
supportively, that the harbour’s construction had greatly reduced the transportation
costs of Gold Coast produce,67 yet on another, he expressed broader reservations
about industrialization’s seemingly inexorable domination. Europeans, Spencer Pryse
argued, were ‘inclined to worship’ industrialism as though in itself it marked ‘some
sort of culmination’. ‘It took’, he believed, ‘that sinister screen picture Metropolis’,
which ‘only the other day ... sent a shudder through Western Europe’, to affirm
that ‘though industry must lie at the foundation of all achievement, it may never be
the apex’.68 His reference to Metropolis is worthy of note. When it opened in Britain
on 21 March 1927 at the Marble Arch Pavilion, the film was acclaimed in the film
industry trade journal, The Bioscope, as ‘the greatest screen achievement ever seen’,69
and comments in the popular press were equally effusive: ‘Amazing – superb.
Unparalleled in film history’, considered the Daily Mail; ‘A film to be seen again and
again’, thought the Daily Express.70 Lang’s film proffered a bleak and nightmarish
image of industrialized modernity encapsulated in a contemporary review in The
Times which considered ‘the fear of machines and of what they represent is one
from which no modern community can easily escape. They appear as the enemies
of ... individuality [and] are recognized by many as the symbols of a process of
standardization which may extend, and is perhaps extending, from things to
men.’ 71 Another contemporary review thought Metropolis offered a ‘vision of a world
shortly before midnight, the dance on a volcano, a minute before it erupts’.72 Lang’s
dystopian vision clearly had critical resonance,73 as well as popular appeal (the film
played to packed houses on its opening in London),74 and his dark expression of
modern industrial life can be seen as contributing to a conception of the inter-war
years as ‘an age of anxiety, doubt or fear’.75
The circulatory proximity of Lang’s powerful and populist anti-industrial
imagery to the industrial scenes depicted in EMB posters in the late 1920s cannot
be easily dismissed and some, it could be argued, bear the imprint of his bleak
configuration. Take for instance Clive Gardiner’s Making Electrical Machinery (plate 5),
an image designed to positively convey modern British industry.76 In Gardiner’s
depiction, the factory hands, through pictorial modes of colour and design, are
subsumed into an enveloping industrialized environment; a realization that permits a
reading of the image as an evocation of modern industrial life in which individuality
is stripped away, rendering workers anonymous and less visible. Gardiner’s portrayal
of indistinguishable, robotic figures – a visualization that echoes a configuration in
Metropolis, notably in a scene that shows line upon line of head-bowed, uniformed
figures shuffling as one towards their place of work – could, therefore, be deemed an

5 Clive Gardiner, Making image critical of factory life.77 Yet this was clearly not a message that the EMB wished
Electrical Machinery, 1928.
Lithograph, 101.6 × 152.4 cm. to convey. The Board promoted British manufactured goods as a vital component of
Manchester: Manchester imperial trade, and the caption that surmounted Gardiner’s poster, ‘Empire Buying
Manchester City Galleries. Makes Busy Factories’, would have helped reinforce a positive conception of the
industrial workplace as active and dynamic; qualities that, it could conversely be
argued, are conveyed in his design. This linguistic message – one of the techniques
that, Roland Barthes has argued, societies developed to fix the disparate and possible
meanings that lurk within an image – serves in directing a viewer of the poster
towards the EMB’s desired reading, or in Barthes’ words, ‘it remote controls him [or
her] towards a meaning chosen in advance’.78 Thus, for the EMB, Gardiner’s image
would have asserted progress and expansion: modern concepts ideally suited to his
formally modernist representation. Situating a modern visualization of industrial
Britain within a broader imperial context would have served the EMB’s purposes in
the reconfiguration of empire, which it deemed essential if Britain was to believe ‘in
her ability to serve the world under the new order as she had served it under the old’.79
Like Gardiner’s image, Spencer Pryse’s Gold Coast posters were also displayed
below a banner headline, but unlike the unequivocal wording that accompanied the
former work, the statement that surmounted his designs, ‘What Gold Coast Prosperity
Means’, is a more ambiguous declaration, one that fails to close down possible
alternative readings of the imagery. For the EMB, prosperity for Gold Coast meant
prosperity for Britain, evidenced by the linguistic message incorporated into the
poster The Talking Drums, which details the rising value of British exports to the colony.
Prosperity, though, linked as it often is to the practices of modernity, can engender
costs, and Spencer Pryse’s images of Gold Coast in the throes of an industrializing
transformation may be read less as celebrating the former condition and more as

Tim Buck
highlighting its corollary. To this end, it is useful to initially compare the realization of
machinery in Spencer Pryse’s depiction of the African Manganese Company’s mining
camp at Nsuta, Gold Coast – the subject-matter of Sorting Manganese Ore (plate 6) – with
the depiction of an electricity turbine that Austin Cooper provided in an EMB poster
entitled Making Electrical Machinery in the United Kingdom (plate 7). Despite its title, there is little
evidence of manufacturing in Cooper’s image, merely an end-product that acquires
greater mystique through the lack of knowledge that surrounds its production.
Glistening in shafts of faceted light that play over pristine surfaces, a gigantic turbine
is shown dwarfing a diminutive figure who peers out from behind it, his hand
seemingly caressing its golden flank. This, perhaps, is the image of industrialism
that Spencer Pryse so feared: the machine as the culmination of progress; as the
focus of worship. By contrast, the machine depicted in Sorting Manganese Ore is, with its
gaping black maw, reminiscent of that which features in Metropolis, particularly as it is
imagined by Freder, the son of the master of the city, who, in a semi-conscious state,
has a nightmarish ‘vision of it as a sinister, man-eating Moloch’.80
Spencer Pryse’s realization of Gold Coast’s industrial life clearly contrasts with
Cooper’s and Gardiner’s representation of the British equivalent. The machine is not
visually celebrated (as it is, foregrounded in Cooper’s design); instead Spencer Pryse
renders it as a saturnine presence in the background of his image. Neither is there
the explicit visual integration of worker and machine so evident in Gardiner’s poster.
Although the uniformity of the mineworkers’ body shape emulates the repeated
6 Gerald Spencer Pryse, posture of Gardiner’s robotic figures, thereby similarly allowing the former to be
Sorting Manganese Ore, 1928.
Lithograph, 101.6 × 152.4 cm.
perceived as absorbed into the industrial process, they remain, nonetheless, through
Manchester: Manchester the pictorial mode of colour, metaphorically distanced and seemingly beyond
Manchester City Galleries. the tenacious grasp of modernity. A clear visual distinction between the extrinsic

mechanical and intrinsic human aspects of the industrial process is maintained, and
Spencer Pryse’s figures retain greater individuality through their subtly differentiated
dress whilst the pastel tones of their shirts helps to separate them jointly from a more
monochrome industrialized environment. As the eye follows the two lines of figures
that radiate out from the shadowy depths of the ore-crushing machinery, so it is
drawn to more intense localized colour – the blue and pink tones that colour the shirts
of the figures shown to the right of the conveyor belt, and, more notably, the lilac-
and-white tones that colour the shirt of the individual in the immediate foreground.
Compositionally, small outbursts of colour are granted a relative pictorial prominence
in a generally low-toned image, so as to signify what Spencer Pryse regarded as the
heightened aesthetic perception of West Africa’s indigenous population. For the
EMB, his image clearly served their ideological needs in expressing the notion of
a progressive tropical empire. However, in foregrounding Gold Coast’s intrinsic
aestheticness (in other words, its exoticism) in a poster that principally conveys
imperial modernity, Spencer Pryse may be deemed as offering a salutary reminder
of a loss that modernity’s homogenizing capacity had imposed upon Western life;
the cost of which manifested itself, in his eyes, in a more uniform visual drabness.
Sorting Manganese Ore conveys Gold Coast’s resistance to this omnipotent and aesthetically
enervating force, though, as the looming presence of the alien machine suggests, it is a
resistance that Spencer Pryse perhaps believed would be difficult to maintain.
7 Austin Cooper, Making If Sorting Manganese Ore can be deemed to suppress modernity’s impact upon the
Electrical Machinery in colonial empire, then Takoradi Harbour (plate 8) arguably goes further in negatively
the United Kingdom, 1930.
Lithograph, 101.6 × 152.4 cm. defining its arrival. The poster was closely developed from a watercolour, Takoradi,
Manchester: Manchester From the Gardens of the Resident-Engineer, a grainy black and white reproduction of which
Manchester City Galleries. appeared in West Africa in March 1928.81 A busy harbour scene of unremitting,

Tim Buck
8 Gerald Spencer Pryse, primarily mechanized, industry is viewed from behind a fragile barricade of
Takoradi Harbour, 1928.
Lithograph, 101.6 × 152.4 cm. richly coloured plants – a vestige of West African exoticness that, paradoxically,
London: Mary Evans Picture lies within the garden of the individual overseeing this devastating transformation
Library. Photo: © Mary Evans
Picture Library/Onslow of the coastline. It is, perhaps, not surprising – at least in terms of fulfilling his
Auctions Limited.
EMB remit – that Spencer Pryse painted such a scene, for it is invariably at the
coast that cultures initially interact, and where the potential for transformative
change is greatest.82 To the left of the image a line of indigenous labourers is shown
entering the docks. Replete with aesthetic and ideological potential (as Spencer
Pryse demonstrated in his depiction of the Nsuta mine workers), here they have a
marginalized and visually reduced presence, depicted as small silhouetted figures
far removed from those aesthetically charged ‘men with the proportions of Greek
athletes racing all day up and down the beach’ whose profound impression he
recalled in his account. Instead, it is imported technology, in the form of the cranes
surmounting Takoradi’s wharf, and the rail tracks that incise it, which holds sway.
At the end of the wharf, and sailing away on a distant horizon, Spencer Pryse
depicts one of the ocean-going ships that this cost-saving, quayside mechanization
serves. Yet, despite the poster’s ostensible celebration of a technological
advancement that, it was maintained, would in the long term accrue greater
economic prosperity for Gold Coast, Spencer Pryse’s image fails to wholeheartedly
endorse this ideological message.
The watercolour shows an horizon that is partially obscured at the right by a
scarlet hibiscus that reaches skywards; its lofty presence and rich colouration, an
all too visible signifier of West Africa’s fecund and exotic flora. But as the eye travels
along the horizon to the left hand edge of the picture, it is interrupted initially by a

9 Gerald Spencer Pryse, plume of smoke seen rising from a vessel berthed alongside the harbour and then
Takoradi: The Government
Slipway under Construction, by a further, more prominent, smoke column shown belching from a steam engine
1927, published in West depicted in the lower left foreground. The two vertical pictorial elements situated
Africa, 10 March 1928. Photo:
© British Library Board, at each edge of the picture balance the composition and internally frame a scene
LON501, p. 267.
of primarily mechanized industry. They also function as symbolic opposites that
represent, to the right, an example of exotic West African nature, and, to the left,
evidence of the fall-out produced by Western-introduced industrial modernity.
The poster could be read in terms of West Africa’s capacity to accommodate
the industrial technology that accompanied imperialism’s modernizing processes,
that, indeed, an indigenous, exotic natural beauty readily coexisted alongside a
previously alien presence. But an alternative reading may suggest that, for Spencer
Pryse, this was not such a happy marriage. His visual investment in the, at times,
detailed depiction of West African flora, utilizing a palette of rich cobalt blue, vivid
scarlet, and cool lime green, contrasts starkly with the muted grey and ochre tones
he deploys to more prosaically describe the infrastructure of the harbour. It was a
visual contrast that was commented upon at the time. A review in West Africa of the
closely related watercolour declared that ‘the contrast between the wild beauty of
Africa and the vast enterprise below, almost menacing in its hints of latent power, is
most cleverly brought out’.83 The reviewer correctly identified the harbour’s latent
potential to change the visual character of Gold Coast, yet, in a poster that ostensibly
celebrates Britain’s capacity to economically transform a subject territory, Spencer
Pryse, primarily through a selective deployment of high-pitched and muted colour,
prioritizes an exotic conception of Gold Coast over one that projects the country as a
site of imperial modernity.
A further watercolour of the harbour, Takoradi: The Government Slipway under
Construction (plate 9), also reproduced in West Africa in March 1928, may be read
more pessimistically, for here imperial modernity appears to fully erase West
Africa’s intrinsic exoticism. Although the original watercolour was exhibited in
Britain (at Liverpool, for example, in 1930),84 West Africa’s poor-quality black and

Tim Buck
white reproduction of the painting – alongside black and white reproductions of

other of the watercolours published in various journals at this time – may have
contributed to the manner in which they were read by the British public.85 Denied
colour’s aestheticizing capacity – used to powerful effect by Spencer Pryse to
visually ameliorate the impact of Western industrial technology upon West Africa –
compositional elements hold sway in West Africa’s reproduction.86 In the midground
of the painting, Spencer Pryse depicts the manmade promontory of land that is the
slipway of the painting’s title. Standing upon it is shown a train, comprising a steam
engine and two wagons, and at the end of the slipway, a crane, too large to be entirely
accommodated within the picture frame.87 Scattered across the slipway, and dwarfed
by the crane, can be seen a number of indigenous labourers carrying headloads.
Compositionally, technological modernity carries a powerful visual impact within
the image, but it is, though, the stretch of coastline seen in the background of the
watercolour that provides the painting’s most damning commentary upon the
invasiveness of modernity in West Africa. In black and white reproduction, the
coastline appears to be represented by a barely differentiated stain upon the paper
that evokes a barren environment, seemingly denuded of life or vegetation; a portent,
perhaps, of the devastating impact modernity will have upon the region.88 As if to
force home the bleakness of this message, Spencer Pryse shows, hanging over the
condemned coastline, the lifting gear of the giant crane, starkly outlined against the
sky, the isolated cable, ominously resembling a hangman’s rope suspended from a
gibbet. This metaphor of death, of irreversible destruction, amplifies the image’s
powerful negative charge.
The EMB’s Imagery: Contemporary Critical Reaction

The contemporary critical attention paid to the EMB’s posters centred on the
naturalistic style that was a feature of many; a style deemed to lack the essential visual
qualities of good poster design. Reviewing an exhibition of early work commissioned
by the Board, staged at Burlington House in November 1926, the critic for The Times
considered it ‘disappointing’, and that the images lacked the ‘concentration in
design ... necessary to make an illustration telling in poster form’. Reflecting on the
exhibition as ‘an opportunity missed’, the review concluded, ‘they know what they
want to convey but they do not understand the machinery of its conveyance in poster
form’.89 The ‘they’ referred to in this final phrase is telling, for it was not so much
the artists to whom the critic was referring – ‘all well known and successful on the
hoardings’ – but those who had commissioned them. ‘They’, the reviewer believed,
had warned their artists ‘against designing over the head of the public’.90
This critical commentary, however, requires careful evaluation. For a start,
only twenty-five designs, produced by thirteen artists, were exhibited at Burlington
House, so in this instance there was limited evidence upon which to draw firm
conclusions as to the aesthetic characteristics of the EMB’s output. Additionally, a
number of the designs were by artists such as Norman Wilkinson, Charles Pears,
Fred Taylor, and, indeed, Spencer Pryse, who worked in a readily comprehensible,
naturalistic idiom. The two designs exhibited by Spencer Pryse, An Indian Rice
Field and Tea-Picking in Ceylon – based on earlier images produced for the Empire
Exhibition in 1924 – would have constituted part of the work that the reviewer
considered to ‘err a little on the pictorial side’. The designs singled out in The Times
as ‘easily the best in the room’ were Kauffer’s Bananas – The British West Indies and Cocoa
– West Africa, which were lauded for a greater concentration of ‘illustrative material’.
Tellingly, though, for the reviewer, Kauffer’s work for the EMB did not match that

which he had previously produced for other clients: ‘It is a sad thought that – for
whatever reason – a poster advertising the British Empire should be less effective,
practically and artistically, than a poster by the same artist advertising the cleaning
of gloves.’91
Kauffer’s more formally modernist work had previously been used by Frank
Pick, who, as head of London Underground’s Traffic, Development and Advertising
Department, had commissioned posters from him as early as 1915. He admired
Kauffer’s designs as they fitted readily within his broader objective to ‘restore a
social function to [modern] art’ by linking it directly to modern life.92 Praising,
in 1923, the abstract imagery of his posters, Pick defined Kauffer’s practice in the
following terms: ‘He asks himself what is the idea to be conveyed rather than what
is the object to be illustrated ... [and] with how little, boldly and bravely executed,
will the public be satisfied and convinced.’93 As chairman of the EMB’s Poster
Committee, Pick was not averse to commissioning modernist designs for the Board
(as, for example, Clive Gardiner’s), but, nonetheless, despite the Poster Committee’s
openness to differing formal aesthetics, contemporary critical consensus situated
their output within the realm of the academic. For Major A. A. Longden, writing
in Commercial Art in February 1928, the EMB could be ‘looked upon as the Royal
Academy of the poster world’.94 Whilst the Observer’s critic Jan Gordon, reviewing a
large exhibition of EMB posters at the Imperial Institute in March 1934, considered
10 Gerald Spencer Pryse,
A Street in Kano, 1927. that many lacked the pictorial aggressiveness characteristic of the best poster design
Watercolour, 54 × 77 cm. and that they would not ‘rouse a protest’ if exhibited as framed works in the Royal
Private Collection. Photo:
© Author. Academy.95

Tim Buck
Although Spencer Pryse’s EMB posters did not arouse specific comment, his West
Africa watercolours garnered extensive contemporary critical reaction. Longden,
again, discussed the watercolours in Commercial Art in March 1928, and believed they
offered an insight into the potential material rewards that awaited colonial West
Africa’s economic development. He considered that the pictures of Nigeria brought
light to a country that ‘seems too little known’, and ‘should do much to interest our
people in the endless possibilities of this enormous tract of land’.96 Whilst for Sir
Lawrence Weaver, author of a ‘Foreword’ in the catalogue that accompanied the
exhibition of the watercolours in Liverpool in January 1930, the paintings served
‘the purposes of the EMB’ in conveying the imperial reality of contemporary life
in colonial West Africa.97 And in a similar vein, when the exhibition transferred
to Manchester in May that year, the Manchester Guardian urged ‘anyone interested in
West Africa, whether as an armchair traveller or as a merchant’, to visit a show that
provided a ‘noteworthy feat of pictorial journalism’.98
Reference to the aesthetic quality of Spencer Pryse’s watercolours is
noticeably absent in Longden’s account in Commercial Art; of principal interest
to the publication – part of the wider forum in which art was evaluated in the
1920s – was the imagery’s effectiveness as EMB propaganda.99 However, analysis
of the watercolours’ critical reception reveals diverse voices competing for the
authority to declare the true imagining of the tropical empire at this time.100 Thus
for Frank Rutter, reviewing them in the Studio in May 1928, it was their aesthetic
quality to which he was drawn. Rutter considered that Spencer Pryse had produced
‘invariably picturesque’ renderings of West African life which paid ‘homage to art’
through their ‘expressive drawing, harmony of colour and dignity of design’.101
He further sought to advance their reception by inserting them into a ‘series’ of
relevant, culturally established works, notably to watercolours produced by the late
nineteenth-century artist-traveller, Arthur Melville.102 Rutter considered that ‘the
wateriness’ of Spencer Pryse’s Nigerian scene, A Street in Kano (plate 10), displayed ‘a
certain kinship’ with Melville, who had utilized wet, running washes and blurred
effects in watercolours depicting dancers at the Moulin Rouge in 1889, and in views
of Tangier in 1893.103 More broadly, Rutter praised Spencer Pryse’s judiciously
employed ‘gorgeous colour’: ‘Here the artist plays colour symphonies with the loud
pedal down; elsewhere he mutes his orchestration to the point of reticence.’104 For
him, colour was the essential means through which Spencer Pryse conveyed West
Africa’s intrinsic exoticism, ‘the spirit’ of which, according to the Manchester Evening
News, the watercolours captured ‘before it finally dies away’.105 More significantly,
for the Manchester Evening News reviewer, Spencer Pryse’s depiction of imported
modernity, scenes of ‘railroad building and dredging ... subjects that in themselves
are commonplace and ordinary’, were seemingly impregnated with West Africa’s
‘spirit of beauty’ to the extent that ‘subjects quite conventional’ became ‘entirely
aesthetic’.106 For this commentator, Spencer Pryse successfully beautified the
mundanity that could define industrialization and ameliorated its visual impact,
thereby permitting colonial West Africa of the late 1920s, despite the presence of
imperial and domestic modernities, to still be characterized as a site of an authentic,
exotic experience.
On his arrival in West Africa in 1927 Gerald Spencer Pryse was confronted
by a changing physical and cultural environment that was partially attributable
to over three decades of British imperial rule. However, alongside modernities
introduced under that rule, as well as those that had been domestically produced,
he encountered a West Africa that in Western imagination also remained timelessly

exotic; a configuration to which he was powerfully drawn and which manifests itself
in the images he made. This is particularly true of many of his watercolours – works
such as A Street in Kano – that went beyond the immediate needs of the Board; pictures
that ignore contaminating modernities with the potential to jeopardize West Africa’s
exoticism.
Commissioned by the EMB to produce posters that conveyed industrialized
processes recently introduced into colonial West Africa in a positive light, Spencer
Pryse deploys the exotic in these works to suppress or negatively position these
incursions of imperial modernity. In doing so he potentially undermined one of
the EMB’s significant objectives – the celebration of a modern imperial economy.
The pictorial tensions produced by the juxtaposition of imperial modernity and an
indigenous exotic that permeate his designs arguably challenge the notion that the
Board’s posters presented a ‘modern and unified interpretation of the Empire’.107
Rather, they reveal the conflicting configurations of the tropical empire in circulation
in the 1920s.
In 1922, Bertrand Russell had warned in The Problem of China that ‘the obvious
charm which the tourist finds in China cannot be preserved; it must perish at the
touch of industrialism’.108 Spencer Pryse sought though to preserve something of
exotic West Africa in his pictures of industrializing Gold Coast; images that defuse
modernity’s pervasive and enervating presence.
Notes and 4, Fall/Winter 2004, 143, 132.

I wish to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British 5 Sir Lawrence Weaver, ‘Foreword’, in West African Exhibition: Exhibition of
Art for providing funding for the Postdoctoral Fellowship that Paintings by G. Spencer-Pryse: Native Products and Ethnographical Material, British
enabled me to research this essay. I also wish to acknowledge West Africa, Liverpool, 1930.
comments made by contributors to the ‘Visual Culture in Crisis’ 6 Having previously produced propaganda posters for the First World
conference held at the University of York in May 2013 at which War, campaign posters for the Labour Party, as well as advertising
I presented a version of this paper. I would like to express my posters for London Underground, and the British Empire Exhibition,
gratitude to the editors of Art History and to the anonymous Spencer Pryse’s reputation as a poster designer was firmly established
referees whose insights have strengthened the argument of by the late 1920s. See Alan Windsor, ed., Handbook of Modern British
this paper, and I am also grateful to David Peters Corbett for Painting and Printmaking 1900–1990, Aldershot, 1998, 288.
his comments and helpful advice. Finally, I wish to express my 7 V. Y. Mudimbe argues that the colonization of Africa produced ‘a
sincere thanks to Tessa Spencer Pryse who permitted me access dichotomizing system’ (an argument especially relevant to Britain’s
to the collection of watercolours produced by her father, Gerald West African colonies) that opposed ‘agrarian and customary
Spencer Pryse. communities’ against ‘urban and industrialized civilization’ and
‘subsistence economies’ against ‘highly productive economies’.
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
1 J. M. Lee, ‘The dissolution of the Empire Marketing Board, 1933:
Knowledge, Bloomington, IN, 1988, 4.
Reflections on a diary’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1: 1,
8 West Africa, founded in 1917, and published from offices in Fleet
October 1972, 50. On the establishment of the EMB, see Sir William
Street, was described by its editor, Albert Cartwright, in October
S. Crawford, ‘The poster campaign of the Empire Marketing Board’,
1921, as the ‘only British weekly newspaper devoted exclusively
Commercial Art, 4: 33, March 1929, 131–2, and Crawford’s earlier
to the Allies’ countries in West Africa’. The newspaper, Cartwright
comment that the EMB had ‘been set up to help in developing the
continued, offered ‘unique advantages to business enterprises
Empire as a “big business”’. Commercial Art, 1: 6, December 1926.
addressing themselves to one of the great new markets of the world,
2 Manchester City Galleries, Empire Marketing Board Posters, London, 2010.
comprising about thirty millions of people, mainly industrious
3 The artist Keith Henderson, for example, wrote to the members of
and prosperous, and advancing rapidly in the practices of modern
the Poster Section in 1929 asking to be excused submitting ‘roughs’
civilization’. In welcoming articles, he went on to outline the
for their inspection. His request was denied because the committee
newspaper’s subject matter – a list that included news of commercial
members ‘felt that one principal reason why roughs were required
enterprises; sketches of tribal life and customs; descriptions of
was in order to safeguard artists from proceeding with work that
hunting, mining, and scenery; fiction inspired by West African life;
was unlikely to be approved’. First Sub-Committee – Poster Section
comments upon public affairs, and photographs and pen-and-ink
Minutes, 11 July 1929, CO 760/2, The National Archives, Kew.
sketches of the region. See West Africa, 15 October 1921. According
4 In his analysis of the work produced for the EMB by the Irish painters
to Hakim Adi, West Africa was owned by the British-owned shipping
Seán Keating and Margaret Clarke, Mike Cronin has also exposed a
line Elder Dempster, though more recent research by Jinny Kathleen
gap between a message that the Board wished to convey – namely
Prais fails to verify this claim. See Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain,
that of an industrious imperial labour force united in service to the
1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism, London, 1998, 26;
empire – and the artists’ imagery. In ‘depicting independent Irish
and Jinny Kathleen Prais, ‘Imperial travellers: The formation of West
indolence rather than subservient imperial industry’, Cronin argues
African urban culture, identity, and citizenship in London and Accra,
that Keating’s and Clarke’s work ‘subtly subverts’ one of the Board’s
1925–1935’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan,
key imperial messages. See Mike Cronin, ‘Selling Irish bacon: The
2008, 62. Adi’s claim is, however, plausible. Founded at the end of
Empire Marketing Board and artists of the Free State’, Éire/Ireland, 39: 3
the nineteenth century, Elder Dempster quickly became the major

Tim Buck
shipping company in West Africa, opened the first bank in the region, Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the
and owned Nigeria’s largest circulation daily, the Nigerian Daily Times, Imperial World, Cambridge, 2006, 252.
so it had a compelling commercial incentive to fi nance a newspaper 26 Manchester City Galleries, Empire Marketing Board Posters. Spencer Pryse’s
that favourably publicized the region. West Africa’s ideal readership depiction of an exotically dressed British official would not have been
was those interested in the political, commercial, and social life of without significance for any African viewers of the poster, for, as
the region, but this did not signify one that was solely British. Indeed, Terence Ranger argues, ‘African observers of the new colonial society
the newspaper carried news of Pan-African politics, and a number of could hardly miss the significance that Europeans attached to ...
its contributors were West African. One such, the Ghanaian barrister public rituals’. Terence Ranger, ‘The invention of tradition in Colonial
and journalist, J. E. Casely Hayford, considered West Africa a ‘notable Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition,
exception’ within the English press in its efforts to correct the ‘wrong Cambridge, 1983, 237.
impression’ about Africa. J. E. Casely Hayford, ‘Nationalism as a West 27 The West Africa Students’ Union was formed in London in August
African ideal’, Wasu, 2, December 1926, 25 cited in Prais, ‘Imperial 1925, and a former president of the Union, J. B. Danquah, later
travellers’, 62. established the West Africa Times in Accra, where ‘numerous literary,
9 ‘The Most Picturesque Colony in the Empire’, West Africa, 24 September debating, and social clubs blossomed during the second half of the
1921. 1920s’. See Prais, ‘Imperial travellers’, 68, 25, 138.
10 Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing 28 Allan McPhee, The Economic Revolution in British West Africa, 1926, London,
the Caribbean Picturesque, Durham, NC and London, 2006, 93, 98. 1971,104.
11 Gerald Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, Progress, October 1928, 29 West Africa regularly published photographs of West Africans enjoying
114. what could then have been construed a Western lifestyle. Photographs
12 ‘The Most Picturesque Colony in the Empire’, West Africa. On denying of West African students at Cambridge University, and of a West
different cultures a sense of contemporaneity, see Johannes Fabian, African cricket team in Accra, are just two of numerous examples. See
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Objects, New York, 1983, 31–5. West Africa, 15 January 1927 and 1 July 1922.
13 Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle, 30 ‘West Africa: Pictures and their lesson’, West Africa, 7 April 1923.
Stanford, CA, 1991, 4. 31 Hugh Wyndham, ‘The colour problem in Africa’, International Affairs,
14 Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic, Baltimore, MD, 4: 4, 1925, 176, cited in Hetherington, British Paternalism and Africa
1998, 2. 1920–1940, 70.
15 See Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, ‘Introduction’, in Howard Booth 32 Sir Gordon Guggisberg, Governor of Gold Coast (1919–27), referred
and Nigel Rigby, eds, Modernism and Empire, Manchester and New York, to the educated Ghanaian elite in a short pamphlet entitled The Keystone
2000, 7. Other contributions to this discourse included Bertrand (1924). In describing the scene at the laying of the foundation-stone
Russell, The Problem of China, 1922, Maryland, 2008; and Wyndham of the government secondary school at Achimota, outside of Accra,
Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, London, 1932. on 24 March 1924, he mentioned that ‘scattered thickly’ amongst
16 Frederick Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in the onlookers ‘were the European-clad Africans – barristers,
Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2003, 16. doctors, teachers, traders – the pioneers of the progress of their race’.
17 For Spencer Pryse, the purpose of many of his watercolours was to Guggisberg, however, undermined their immediate worth to the
bring out the ‘essence of the place’ and ‘the soul of a people’. Although colony when describing how ‘African professional men’, all of whom
not directly serving the needs of the EMB, they furthered broader had received their higher education in Europe, assisted in the laying
imperial objectives when exhibited on a West Africa stand at an of the foundation-stone, but that only two unnamed professions
imperial exhibition in Canada, and as British imperial propaganda at ‘could supply properly qualified members’, a situation that, for him,
an event in Copenhagen. See ‘The artist and his experiences in West constituted ‘scathing comment on the inadequacy of our existing
Africa by a special correspondent’, West Africa, 10 March 1928, 252. system of education’. Cited in Henry B. Goodhall, Beloved Imperialist: Sir
18 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 113. Gordon Guggisberg, Governor of the Gold Coast, Durham, 1998, 129–30.
19 ‘Paintings of West Africa. Exhibition at the Platt Hall Branch of the 33 On the politics of authenticity, see Petra Rau, ‘The trouble
City Art Gallery, Manchester’, Manchester Guardian, 21 May 1930. with cosmopolitans: Ford and Forster between nation and
20 See Stephen Constantine, Buy and Build: The Advertising Posters of the Empire internationalism’, in Grace Brockington, ed., Internationalism and the Arts
Marketing Board, London, 1986, 12. in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, Bern, 2009, 180.
21 In describing the empire as a ‘family’, the EMB echoed language used 34 Prais, ‘Imperial travellers’, 66. For an account of changing British
by the journalist and Conservative MP Percy Hurd in 1924, when he attitudes to West Africans, see Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘The betrayal of
considered the British Empire ‘a family affair’. Percy Hurd, The Empire, Creole elites, 1880–1920’, in Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds,
A Family Affair: Being a Popular Survey of the Self-Governing Dominions, Crown Black Experience and the Empire, Oxford, 2004, 194–227.
Colonies and Protectorates and Mandated Territories under the British Crown and Recital 35 C. F. Hayfron-Benjamin, ‘The Land of Sunshine greets her sister states:
of Empire Policy, London, 1924, 5–6. Exhibition lessons to both races’, West Africa, 24 May 1924, 64–5.
22 For a discussion of how Gauguin pictorially resolved the juxtaposition 36 Hayfron-Benjamin, ‘The Land of Sunshine’.
of modernity and the exotic that he encountered in Tahiti in 37 See, ‘Gold Coast at Empire Exhibition’, West Africa, 5 May 1923.
the 1890s, see Elizabeth C. Childs, ‘The colonial lens: Gauguin, 38 John Tagg, ‘Evidence, truth and order: Photographic records and the
primitivism, and photography in the fin de siècle’, in Lynda Jessup, growth of the state’, in Liz Wells, ed., The Photography Reader, London and
ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, New York, 2003, 257, 259.
Toronto, 2001, 50–70. 39 West Africa, 26 August 1922.
23 Spencer Pryse’s configuration of West Africa in Native Chiefs in Palaver 40 Bongie, Exotic Memories, 19.
constitutes part of a broader focus apparent in British art in the first 41 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Times, 5 March 1924, 12.
three decades of the twentieth century; one that highlighted the 42 See Buck, ‘Reconfiguring the exotic and the modern’, 80–135.
colonial empire’s exotic, authentic culture as a means through which 43 See Goodhall, Beloved Imperialist, 140.
to represent it. See Tim Buck, ‘Reconfiguring the exotic and the 44 Tagg, ‘Evidence, truth and order’, 260.
modern: A study of some British artists’ engagement with Empire in 45 Bongie, Exotic Memories, 98.
the 1920s’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 46 Gold Coast News, 31 January 1924, 1–2.
2011, 34–43. 47 For an argument that new texts evoke the ‘horizons of expectations’
24 Penelope Hetherington succinctly defines Indirect Rule as ‘a system made familiar by earlier texts that have constituted a genre, and that
which aimed at the growth of a responsible African elite, out of their relationship to these predecessors is determined by the way
the old tribal elite, which would gradually be taught the duties and in which they vary, alter, or merely reproduce those horizons, see
responsibilities of rulers of a modern state’. Penelope Hetherington, Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti,
British Paternalism and Africa 1920–1940, London, 1978, 137. Minneapolis, MN, 1982, 22–3.
25 James Epstein, ‘Taking class notes on empire’, in Catherine Hall and 48 Kenneth Coutts-Smith, ‘Cultural colonialism’, Third Text, 16: 1,

2002, 2. Coutts-Smith’s article was first published in Black Phoenix, The Gold Coast Legislative Council Debates, 1925–26, 25, cited in Wraith,
the forerunner of Third Text, in 1978, and was reprinted by the latter Guggisberg, 119.
journal on the basis that its analysis ‘seems just as prescient as when it 66 See Gold Coast News, 31 January 1924, 2, and Jeff Crisp, The Story of an
first appeared’. Coutts-Smith, ‘Cultural colonialism’, 1. African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles 1870–1980, London, 1984,
49 Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture, 21–2. 42, 50.
50 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 112. Spencer Pryse may 67 Spencer Pryse, West African Exhibition, 19.
have recollected an image produced by Cheesman in conjuring up 68 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 113.
his mental image. Her painting, Kofiridua Station, Gold Coast (1923/24), 69 The Bioscope, 14 April 1927.
possibly exhibited at the Wembley exhibition, certainly reproduced 70 The Bioscope, 31 March 1927.
as a colour postcard on sale there, depicts lines of Ghanaians carrying 71 ‘Marble Arch Pavilion. “Metropolis.”’ The Times, 22 March, 1927, 12.
headloads, whilst in the background it shows two large, corrugated 72 E.S.P., ‘Metropolis’, Licht-Bild-Bühne, 11 January 1927, cited in Thomas
iron sheds. As a Labour Party sympathizer who designed election Elsaesser, Metropolis, London, 2008, 16.
posters for the party in 1923 (Jim Middleton, Labour Party General 73 Critical reaction to the film was not uniformly positive – H. G.
Secretary, referred to Spencer Pryse in 1942 as ‘an old and valued Wells thought it the ‘silliest film’, one that provides ‘in one eddying
friend of the Party’, see Middleton to Professor A. W. Ashby, 13 March concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and
1942, People’s History Museum, LP/GS/ 40-44), he may also have muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general’. ‘Mr
been familiar with publications produced by the Labour Research Wells Reviews a Current Film’, New York Times, 17 April 1927, 4, 22.
Department. In 1927 it published Imperialism in West Africa which 74 The Bioscope, 31 March 1927, 41.
detailed that ‘West African railways and public works have been and 75 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars, London, 2009, 2.
still are constructed mainly by forced labour’. Elinor Burns, British 76 Gardiner’s design was one of three images of British industry that was
Imperialism in West Africa, London, 1927, 46. approved on 16 March 1928, when it was agreed that the wording
51 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 112. under them should be A Blast Furnace, Motor Manufacturing and Making
52 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 112. Electrical Machinery. Poster Section Minutes, 16 March 1928.
53 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 112. 77 Stuart Hall’s definition of modernity, as a condition in which
54 Spencer Pryse, ‘An artist in West Africa’, 113. ‘everything is destined to be speeded up, dissolved, displaced,
55 Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular transformed, reshaped’, serves in positioning Making Electrical Machinery
Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, New Haven, 1994, 2. within a framework of modernity. Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction’, in
56 Stephen Contantine, ‘Bringing the Empire alive: The Empire Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, eds, Formations of Modernity, Cambridge,
Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda 1926–33’, in John 1992, 15.
Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture, Manchester, 1986, 195. 78 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in Wells, The Photography Reader,
57 Poster Section Minutes, 23 June 1927. The sub-committee operated 117, 118.
under the chairmanship of Frank Pick who had been responsible for 79 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and
the London Underground’s use of innovative poster designs in the Propaganda 1919–1939, Cambridge, 1981, 104, quotes Stephen Tallents in
1910s and 1920s. The Projection of England, London, 1932, 37.
58 Poster Section Minutes, 4 August 1927. 80 Elsaesser, Metropolis, 71.
59 Poster Section Minutes, 18 and 31 August 1927. Taking into account 81 West Africa, 10 March 1928, 267.
the greater distance of Spencer Pryse’s venture, his fee of 1,100 82 See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New
guineas bears testimony to the reputation he had earned as a poster York and Abingdon, 2008, 7.
artist by this time. By comparison, Keith Henderson, for example, was 83 West Africa, 3 March 1928.
offered only 300 guineas, inclusive of travelling expenses, to produce 84 West African Exhibition: Exhibition of Paintings by G. Spencer-Pryse: Native Products
a set of five designs of the Irish Free State. Poster Section Minutes, 18 and Ethnographical Material, British West Africa, Liverpool, 1930, 16.
August 1927. 85 The watercolours were widely reproduced, especially at the time
60 Poster Section minutes record that Spencer Pryse’s designs for of their exhibition at the Imperial Institute in March 1928. The
Manganese Ore and Takoradi Harbour were deemed satisfactory by the Illustrated London News, Commercial Art, The Studio, and West Africa all carried
sub-committee subject to a minor amendment of the latter work. See reproductions at this time, as did The Times on 30 October 1928, yet
Poster Section Minutes, 3 February 1928. save for two colour images in the Studio and one in Commercial Art, the
61 Manchester City Galleries, Empire Marketing Board Posters. reproductions were in black and white.
62 Jill Casid has argued that ‘tropical landscape was an aesthetic 86 When the watercolours were exhibited at Manchester City Art Gallery
and material invention of eighteenth century colonization in the in May 1930, the Manchester Evening News considered that ‘colour and the
Caribbean’. Here, she maintains, developed ‘the idea of colony as vivid use of it is the first impression given from a glimpse of this novel
plantation and the plantation as farm’ – a conception that could make collection’. Manchester Evening News, 21 May 1930.
the tropical empire appear as ‘rooted and natural as rural England 87 For a discussion of how ‘technological monumentalism ... contributed
was supposed to be’. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization, to representational dilemmas’, see Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the
Minneapolis, MN and London, 2005, 8. Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany 1890–1945, Cambridge and New
63 Having been approved by the Poster Section Sub-Committee, York, 2005, 26.
Kauffer’s set of posters was to be one of the first seen on the EMB’s 88 When reviewed in The Times, the watercolours, though considered
hoardings when it was scheduled for display between 19 September ‘excellent as illustrations’, were deemed to require some ‘bracing as
and 2 October 1927. See Poster Section Minutes, 2 June and 29 pictures’, and that their appeal would be improved if they were more
September 1927. ‘definitely designed’. ‘Art Exhibitions. Mr Spencer Pryse’s Pictures.
64 See David Meredith, ‘Imperial images: The Empire Marketing Board, British West Africa’, The Times, 3 March 1928. Spencer Pryse, perhaps
1926–32’, History Today, 37: 1, January 1987, 32. Kauffer’s scenes of piqued by the review, included a ‘Special Notice’ in the exhibition
banana and cocoa harvesting were exhibited at the Royal Academy catalogue that accompanied a later showing of the West Africa
as part of an exhibition of EMB posters that opened on 2 November pictures at the Alpine Gallery, London in March 1929, in which he
1926, to coincide with the seventh Imperial Conference then being stressed that they were sketches which had not ‘been added to, in any
held in London. See An Exhibition of Original Posters designed for the Empire way [as] to do so, would have diminished their sense of actuality’; a
Marketing Board, London, 1926. EMB Publicity Committee minutes characteristic viewed at this time as an important element in artist-
detail that one purpose of the Exhibition was to give those ‘attending travellers’ work. Gerald Spencer Pryse, Exhibition of Pictures painted in the
the Conference an advance opportunity to inspect privately the artists’ Colonies of Nigeria and the Gold Coast (British West Africa), London, 1929.
work’. Publicity Committee Minutes, 16 September 1926, CO/760/1. 89 ‘Art and Empire Products. A Poster Exhibition’, The Times, 3 November
65 See G. Guggisberg, The Gold Coast; A Review of Events of 1920–1926, Accra, 1926, 11.
1927, 95, cited in Ronald E. Wraith, Guggisberg, Oxford 1967, 102; and 90 ‘Art and Empire Products. A Poster Exhibition’, The Times, 3 November

Tim Buck
1926, 11.
91 ‘Art and Empire Products. A Poster Exhibition’, The Times, 3 November
1926, 11.
92 Kauffer continued to design posters for London Underground
throughout the 1920s. See Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar
England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, Oxford, 1999, 9, 43.
93 Frank Pick on Kauffer’s ‘DIA Lecture’, 29 November 1923. London
Transport Group Archive 100 853/1 cited in Saler, The Avant-Garde in
Interwar England, 99.
94 Major A. A. Longden, ‘Recent EMB Advertisements’, Commercial Art, 4:
20, February 1928, 42.
95 Jan Gordon, ‘Art and artists: The Empire Marketing Board posters’, The
Observer, 25 March 1934, 14.
96 Major A. A. Longden, ‘G. Spencer Pryse, M.C. The Modern Merchant
Adventurer’, Commercial Art, 4: 21, March 1928, 108.
97 Weaver, ‘Foreword’.
98 ‘Paintings of West Africa’, Manchester Guardian, 21 May 1930.
99 Commercial Art, as its name suggests, was concerned with the
application of art to commercial needs. See Ysanne Holt, ‘The call of
commerce: The Studio magazine in the 1920s’, in Pamela Fletcher and
Anne Helmreich, The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939,
Manchester and New York, 2011, 163.
100 ‘What one has to look for is what counts as true at a given historical
moment; who is, to use [Michel] Foucault’s phrase, “in the true” and
thus has the authority to declare truth’. Michael Hatt and Charlotte
Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods, Manchester and New
York, 2006, 158.
101 Frank Rutter, ‘Recent water-colours by G. Spencer Pryse’, The Studio, 95:
422, May 1928, 326, 328.
102 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 36
103 Rutter, ‘Recent water-colours’, 326.
104 Rutter, ‘Recent water-colours’, 327.
105 Manchester Evening News, 21 May 1930.
106 Manchester Evening News, 21 May 1930.
107 Manchester City Galleries, Empire Marketing Board Posters.
108 Russell, The Problem of China, 141.

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Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial

The posters commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), ‘a departmental

Colonial West Africa’s Exotic Configuration

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© Association of Art Historians 2015 942

1 Gerald Spencer Pryse,

1930s in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Copenhagen, and Toronto, the paintings

© Association of Art Historians 2015 943

Indigenous Modernity in Colonial West Africa

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included student organizations formed in London, newspapers published in West

2 Mr and Mrs E. K. Adisi in

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Defining/Imagining Colonial West African Identity

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3 Rose Chicotot Stinus with

© Association of Art Historians 2015 947

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Imperial Modernity/An Indigenous Exotic: Spencer Pryse’s EMB Images

© Association of Art Historians 2015 949

© Association of Art Historians 2015 950

transportation infrastructure, especially the construction of a deep water harbour at

© Association of Art Historians 2015 951

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© Association of Art Historians 2015 953

© Association of Art Historians 2015 954

© Association of Art Historians 2015 955

© Association of Art Historians 2015 956

white reproduction of the painting – alongside black and white reproductions of

The EMB’s Imagery: Contemporary Critical Reaction

© Association of Art Historians 2015 957

© Association of Art Historians 2015 958

© Association of Art Historians 2015 959

Notes and 4, Fall/Winter 2004, 143, 132.

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