Guanya Pau: A Story of an African Princess

206 Pages·2004·1.31 MB·English

by  Joseph Jeffrey Walters, Gareth Griffiths, John Victor Singler

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COMMON SENSE
ILLUSTRATIONS
GUANYA PAU
AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF
SHAMELA
broadview editions
series editor:L.W.Conolly
MEMOIRSOFMODERNPHILOSOPHERS 1
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Zobah at a funeral feast.Photographer:William C.Siegmann.
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GUANYA PAU
A Story of an African Princess
Selected Tales
Joseph Jeffrey Walters
edited by Gareth Griffiths and John Victor Singler
broadview editions
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©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
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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
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6 CONTENTS
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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.
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8 INTRODUCTION
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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).
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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