‘Our common humanity’: print, power, and the colonial press in interwar Tanganyika and French Cameroun

If the concept of global civil society offers a way of thinking about the interwar period that does justice to the new linkages that were developing at the time, it also offers an opportunity to reflect on ‘the varied, contingent meanings of the global – and the limits to such globalist visions’, as this special issue makes clear. This article explores these themes in an African context in relation to two government periodicals, Mambo Leo and the Gazette du Cameroun, both of which first appeared in the early 1920s, and a settler-edited newspaper aimed at an African audience, L’Éveil des Camerouniens, published 1934–35. It argues that such official and semi-official publications serve to illustrate both the unexpected ways in which this period witnessed the birth of new forms of global connection and the limits of such connection.