A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 1 This electronic material is under copyright protection and is provided to a single recipient for review purposes only. COMMON SENSE ILLUSTRATIONS GUANYA PAU AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF SHAMELA broadview editions series editor:L.W.Conolly MEMOIRSOFMODERNPHILOSOPHERS 1 A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 2 Review Copy Zobah at a funeral feast.Photographer:William C.Siegmann. A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 3 Review Copy GUANYA PAU A Story of an African Princess Selected Tales Joseph Jeffrey Walters edited by Gareth Griffiths and John Victor Singler broadview editions A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 4 Review Copy ©2004 Gareth Griffiths and John Victor Singler All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of photo- copying,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5 — is an infringement of the copyright law. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Walters,Joseph J.(Joseph Jeffrey),d.1894. Guanya Pau :a story of an African princess / by Joseph Jeffrey Walters ;edited by Gareth Griffiths and John Victor Singler. (Broadview editions) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55111-365-1 1.Vai (African people)—Fiction. I.Griffiths,Gareth,1943- II.Singler,John Victor III.Title. IV.Series. PR9384.9.W35G83 2004 823 C2004-905018-4 Broadview Editions The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable lesser-known works. Broadview Press Ltd.is an independent,international publishing house,incorporated in 1985.Broadview believes in shared ownership,both with its employees and with the general public;since the year 2000 Broadview shares have traded publicly on the Toronto Venture Exchange under the symbol BDP. We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publications – please feel free to contact us at the addresses below or at [email protected]. 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PRINTED IN CANADA A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 5 Review Copy Contents Acknowledgments • 7 Introduction • 9 Joseph Jeffrey Walters:A Brief Chronology • 61 A Note on the Text • 63 Introductory Notes to Guanya Pau • 65 Guanya Pau:AStory of an African Princess • 69 Appendix A:From Sir Arthur Helps,Friends in Council (1853) • 155 Appendix B:Charles C.Penick,“The Devil Bush of West Africa” (1893) • 160 Appendix C:Excerpts from three books by Thomas Besolow (1890, 1891,1892) • 168 Appendix D:The Vai Writing System • 177 Appendix E:Letters and Articles by Joseph Jeffrey Walters 1. To Mrs.Louise Wood Brackett,5 October 1888 • 179 2. To the Editor,Oberlin News (7 April 1892) • 180 3. To the Rev.William S.Langford,15 May 1893 • 181 4. To the Rev.Joshua A.Kimber,2 June 1893 • 182 5. To the Rev.Joshua A.Kimber,12 October 1893 • 183 6. “An Appeal for Help,”Oberlin News (30 November 1893) • 184 7. From “A Letter from Africa,”Baltimore American (21 January 1894) • 185 8. To the Rev.Joshua A.Kimber,5 June 1894 • 188 9. Annual Report and Scholarship List,Cape Mount Mission, 13 August 1894 • 190 10. To the Rev.Joshua A.Kimber,17 September 1894 • 196 Appendix F:Obituaries of Joseph Jeffrey Walters 1. From The Storer Record (February 1895) • 197 2. From The Oberlin Review (6 February 1895) • 197 Bibliography • 201 LETTERSWRITTENINFRANCE 5 A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 6 Review Copy 6 CONTENTS A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 7 Review Copy Acknowledgments The late Bill French,legendary owner of the University Place Book- shop,Manhattan,New York,brought Guanya Pauto Singler’s attention. The quotations from Episcopal missionaries appear courtesy of The Archives of the Episcopal Church USA in Austin,Texas.We are grateful to Jennifer Peters,archivist,and the staff for their assistance. We are also grateful to the archivists at Oberlin College and the West Virginia Collection at West Virginia University and to Margaret White at the Penick Archives in Winston-Salem,North Carolina. We also wish to thank the following for their kind assistance:The Rev.Canon E.Bolling Robertson,head of the Cape Mount Mission from 1945 to 1971; Alan Schaplowsky at Columbia University Library;librarians at New York University,the University of Michi- gan,and the New York Public Library;Guinevere Roper and Todd Bolton at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park;Dr.Levi Zangai and Atim Eneida George for research at the Maryland State Archives; Dr.Jeanette Carter for research at the Library of Congress;Francis O’Neill and Donna Williams at the Maryland Historical Society;the Rev. Paul Coke, Dr. D. Elwood Dunn, the Rev. Emmanuel D. Hodges,the Rev.Dr.Gary W.Kriss,James B.Lumei,Dr.Jane Mar- tin,Moses Nagbe,Dr.Mohamed Nyei,Marilyn Robertson,W.Feweh Sherman,William Siegmann,Dr.Linda Susman,Warren Susman,Dr. Luciano Varaschini, and E. Boakai Zoludua.We also wish to thank Carolyn,Michael,and Aneurin Griffiths for their help in preparing the manuscript. We also wish to thank Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce a chart of Vai script characters and an example of Vai writ- ing,both from John Victor Singler,“Scripts of West Africa,”in The World’s Writing Systems,ed.Peter T.Daniels and William Bright (New York,1996) 593-98. GUANYAPAU 7 A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 8 Review Copy 8 INTRODUCTION A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 9 Review Copy Introduction 1. The Text of Guanya Pau:The History of its Publication The Historical Significance of Guanya Pau What makes this small text so significant? After all,it is only 81 pages long (in this edition) and its author,Joseph Jeffrey Walters,with char- acteristic modesty, describes himself in the short introduction as merely “an undergraduate”who “cannot hope to be able to make a valuable contribution to Literature”(75).What is so important about this text is that it remains the earliest complete text we have of a fic- tional work in English by an African.Published in 1891,it predates J.E.Caseley Hayford’s autobiographical and polemic novel Ethiopia Unbound,which was published in London in 1911 and which is cited in many places as the first long African fictional text in English.Thus, Singler’s discovery of Guanya Pau in 1985 set back the date for the earliest complete,surviving African fictional text in English by twen- ty years. In 2002 Stephanie Newell edited and published an even earlier, though incomplete,fictional text,recovered from the pages of con- temporary Gold Coast newspapers, entitled Marita, or The Folly of Love.1 This was published in serial form in the early Cape Coast newspaper The Western Echo,starting on January 20,1886.Of course, in the nineteenth century Africans were writing extensively in Eng- lish,appropriating and transforming the language to their own ends and purposes. They edited newspapers, published articles, wrote books, preached and published sermons, wrote reports and travel accounts, published occasional verse and wrote histories. Many poems,short stories,and even fragments of longer fiction such as the Newell text also appear in the newspapers of the period.But Guanya Pau is still the earliest African long fiction in English to have been published in book form and to have survived as a whole,making it of great historical importance. 1 Stephanie Newell,ed.Marita,or the Folly of Love:A Novel by A.Native (Boston:Brill Academic Publishers,2002). GUANYAPAU 9 A-MFRONT.QXD 10/20/2004 11:56 AM Page 10 Review Copy The Modern Recovery of Guanya Pau Singler became aware of the existence of Guanya Pau when William P. (Bill) French, owner of the University Place Bookshop in New York,showed him a catalogue reference to the book.Singler found a copy of the text on microfilm at the New York Public Library. Since then,a copy of the original edition has been found in the Spe- cial Collections section of Oberlin College, Ohio, where Walters studied and took his bachelor’s degree in 1893,and a second copy in the University of Michigan library.These are the only copies we have found so far,though there may be others in the collections of the many US colleges and libraries whose catalogues we have not been able to search.The only subsequent republication we have been able to determine is in the periodical The Liberia Recorder,which issued the novel in serial form in Monrovia in late 1905 and early 1906. Only some of the issues have survived.1 Through corresponding with the librarians at Oberlin and at the Episcopal Church Archives in Austin,Texas,Singler discovered that Walters had attended the Episcopal Church’s Cape Mount Mission school in Liberia and had,after graduating from Oberlin,been the superintendent of the mission.Singler had taught at the same school from 1971 to 1975.Singler published the first article about the text in an academic journal in The Liberian Studies Journalin 1990.He had previously published an article in The Daily Observer, a Liberian newspaper.Singler and Griffiths had begun work on a fully annotat- ed edition and were negotiating a contract for that edition when Oyekan Owomoyela’s edition was issued by the University of Nebraska Press in 1994. Owomoyela had contacted Singler in August,1992,to request a copy of any work that he had published on Walters. However, he did not alert Singler to the fact that he planned to use that material to work on his own edition of Guanya Pau.The publication of Owomoyela’s edition effectively closed the Singler/Griffiths project down for several years as it seemed to them that a second edition would be difficult to justify to a publisher so quickly after the first. There are a number of serious limitations to the Owomoyela edi- tion.It consists of a simple facsimile of the text,based on a photo- copy of the original text obtained from Oberlin College.There are 1 We are grateful to Jane Martin for bringing the republication of Guanya Pauin the Liberia Recorderto our attention and making copies of the rele- vant issues available to us. 10 INTRODUCTION