The Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund, Late Colonial Development, and the Prizing of African Literatures, 1950–62.

As scholars such as Caroline Ritter have recently demonstrated, late colonial development policy exercised significant influence on the print culture infrastructures of decolonizing African nations. The history of the Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund (MWMF) and its literary prize (1950–62) renders visible the influence of the ideology of late colonial development on this emergent field: while the positioning of language in the field was bound up in the metropolitan conferral of literary legitimacy on European languages (and, conversely, in African struggles to confer the same legitimacy on African vernaculars), the positioning of language in the surrounding field of power formed the site of a different kind of struggle regarding late colonial development in British Africa. Those members of the MWMF administrative committee who advocated after 1949 and through the 1950s for the inclusion of African vernaculars were appealing to the early twentieth-century ideology of Phelps-Stokeism, a theory of differentiated education for Africans that was based on a Social Darwinist assumption of racial inferiority. Associated with Wrong's interwar and wartime work for the International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa and particularly with the late colonial development impulses of this work, the Phelps-Stokeist rationale for legitimizing African languages does not always line up neatly with African nationalist and anticolonial motivations for supporting vernaculars. The influence of late colonial development on the emergence of the postcolonial field of cultural production matters: the history of this field must be tracked via the metropolitan (British) welfare state and the emergent postwar development paradigm, both of which shaped debates about language, for instance, that have long been attributed to the influence of metropolitan publishers and the African nationalisms of figures such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, among other forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]