Kwame Osei-Poku

This dissertation focuses on significant issues about identity and ideology in three categories of selected archived travelogues published in the West African Review magazine during the pre-independence period. What is most essential to this dissertation is a concern about how African authored travel writing within the colonial period might conceive notions about local identity, and contribute to ideological construction while using a multifaceted or interdisciplinary approach in the analyses of these discursive categories.These African authored travelogues were produced in a period when there was no academic focus on non-European travel. Accordingly, the focal points of these travelogues are the representations of urban spaces in Africa, the extensive influence of European and American cultural lifestyles on Africans, perceptions about racial discrimination, inequality among Africans and similar experiences in Western spaces, as well as insights on the colonised’s impressions of the West.

This project engages in a critical multidisciplinary analysis of a selection of archived travelogues published in the defunct West African Review magazine of the colonial period (the 1930s – early 1950s). The analysis of these travelogues suggests a way to re-imagine and refocus the experiences and observations of the African authors who produced and replicated a genre which hitherto, and until quite recently, has been a major tool on by the West or European authors in shaping perceptions about many African and Oriental journey locations. What is most essential to this study is a concern about how African authored travel writing within the colonial period might conceive notions about identity, and contribute to ideological construction.