Graphic Fictions: Reader Research and the Making of a Comic Strip in 1950s “British West Africa”

In 1954 the United Africa Company (UAC), one of West Africa's largest British trading companies, with a decades-long presence in the region, commissioned market researchers to find out about reader preferences among hundreds of its employees. UAC managers wished to harness the medium of print to the genre best suited to the communication of a number of public relations messages promoting its pro-African ethos and practices in the face of what it termed “‘smear’ campaigns” by West African nationalists. The report on the preferences of approximately 600 readers in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia forms the core of this article, which examines the historicity of West African readerships, the transnational popular literary genres they consumed, and the UAC-sponsored comic strip Joseph: The Thrilling Adventures of a Young African, published in local newspapers from 1956 to 1958.