Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
should be privileged in such a publication suggests that the kind of truth found in Indaba had a greater reach than precisely the oral form of dissemination recalled so nostalgically by Soga himself. He continues:
As people who are always hungry for news often we find ourselves dupes of deceivers under the guise of relating genuine facts. We are fed with half-truths by travellers who pass near our areas. We are unreliable people Mr. Editor, to speak confidentially, because we like to exaggerate. We have a sense of humour and we can talk until light shines as if it was daytime. When you examine the report you are surprised to discover that there was not even a grain of truth in what was being said. We should be careful of what is reported from our areas at first. We must at times accept it with reservations. Today with your newspaper you are initiating an enterprise for banning falsehood. So we are pleased and grateful (quoted in Williams 1983, 151–52; emphasis added).
Soga was relying on distinctions between “deceivers” and “genuine facts” and between “truth” and “falsehood” that depended significantly on a central, print-borne institution of truth bearing such as the newspaper, but his argument entirely begged the question of the interest—which presumably underlies all “falsehood”—of the newspaper and its missionary supporters. The mere existence of facts in printed form in a newspaper after a process of sifting, Soga implies, gave them the higher truth status. One is irresistibly led to speculate on the invisible assumption behind this argument—that truth was better served by Christians and missionaries and, critically, in the printed medium.
Nevertheless, since the advent of literacy and the spread of print culture had become an inevitable condition at the time of Soga’s article, it should not be so surprising that he should have called for a new, printed repository of oral culture. His affiliation in the passage below remains with the idea of indigenous culture and history as worthwhile in its own right:
What are the corn-pits, the cattle kraals, the boxes and the bags. What are the skin shirts’ pockets, and the banks for the stories, and fables, the legends, customs and history of the Xhosa people and Fingo people? This is a challenge, for I envisage in this newspaper a beautiful vessel for preserving the stories, fables, legends, customs, anecdotes and history of the tribes (quoted in Williams 1983, 152).
Soga’s unstated implication was that the newspaper should “preserve” the various oral forms of culture within the context of an ascendant order of the written and printed form.7 His position therefore seems to have combined a reverence for Xhosa culture and history that would have been alien to the typical missionary attitude with an implicit endorsement of the agency of the ascendant order of print, the regime of literacy of which he had become an agent. This paradoxical position allowed Soga to call for a wholesale recasting of Xhosa history and culture in literate modes:
All is well today. Our veterans of the Xhosa and Embo people must disgorge all they know. Everything must be imparted to the nation as a whole. Fables must be retold; what was history or legend should be recounted .... Whatever was seen, heard or done under the requirements of custom should be brought to light and placed on the national table to be sifted for preservation. Were there not several tribes before? What is the record of their history and customs good or bad? Had we no chiefs in days gone by? Where are the anecdotes of their periods? Were these things buried with them in their graves? Is there no one to unearth these things from the graves? Were there no national poets in the days of yore? Whose praises did they sing? Is there no one to emulate this eloquence? In the olden days did not some people bewitch others? What were the names of the men of magic? Is it not rumoured that some were tortured severely and cruelly? Are there no people who have an idea of matters of this nature which happened under the cloak of custom? Are there no battles which were fought and who were the heroes? What feathers were worn by the royal regiments .... We should revive and bring to the light all this great wealth of information. Let us bring to life our ancestors; Ngconde, Togu, Tshiwo, Phalo, Rharhabe, Mlawu, Ngqika and Ndlambe. Let us resurrect our ancestral fore-bears who bequeathed to us a rich heritage. All anecdotes connected with the life of the nation should be brought to this big corn-pit our national newspaper Indaba (in Williams 1983, 152–53; emphasis added).
Both Williams (1983, 1) and, following him, Saayman (1991, 63) make the claim that Soga was the first black South African who, in Williams’s words, formulated “a philosophy of Black consciousness”. Williams (1983, 5–6) grounds his argument mainly on a journal entry and a letter to the King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, in which Soga contradicted the charge of Chalmers (later to become his biographer) that the Xhosa were doomed to extinction unless they could overcome their “indolence”. In his spirited reply to Chalmers, Soga argued that though “sunk” in the “barbarism of ages” (Williams 1983, 181), the Xhosa were progressing in civilisation at a steady rate. To conclude from this, however, that Soga was propounding “Black consciousness” in the modern sense seems to be stretching the point, especially in view of Soga’s explicit missionary bias and his belief in the origin of Africans as “sons of Ham” (see Soga’s journal entry, 25 April 1865, in Williams 1983, 38–40). From the long passage quoted above, it seems far more plausible to suggest that Soga was an important figure in the interpenetrations of orality and literacy and in the shift from independence to colonial interdependence, but that his “consciousness” was ambivalently—or agonistically—stranded.
The explicit adoption of the idea of “nation”—a word Soga also uses in English in the journal entry referred to above—seems to have been a significant linking concept in the marriage implicitly proposed by him between a literate cultural order of print and a more traditional, oral culture. Soga writes of “the nation as a whole” as opposed to the “several tribes” of the past. As Bosch (1991, 298–99) argues, the concept of “nation” is clearly a product of Renaissance humanism (in whose traditions Soga was steeped through his Scottish university education) and its use is a marker of Soga’s contradictory impulse to protect pre-literate, pre-“national” culture by enshrining it in a printed form. This written form would never be neutral: it was affiliated to the orthodoxy of a colonising British nationalism, embodied by the Lovedale institution. However, within its structures and its texts, it would never be free of incitation and struggle either, and it would become the vehicle for what Attwell (1997, 570) calls a “transformative … enlightened mode of counterenlightenment”. The “transculturated” Soga, Attwell writes, repudiates the racism of Darwinian determinism. “To summarise,” Attwell (1997, 570) continues, “incorporation into a global and teleological history, the retention of racial distinctiveness, and adaptability are Soga’s currency, and his legacy”.8 In view of the direct links between African nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, print culture, and missionary institutions (particularly Lovedale), Tiyo Soga’s role as a interstitial figure who helped to inaugurate African “nationalism” as a hybrid of African pride—“Africa-consciousness”, as Saayman (1991, 63) calls it—and missionary-led notions of black “advancement” is of considerable importance. He was indeed a “progenitor of Black nationalism”, as Williams (1983, 7) claims, but perhaps in a far more ambiguous manner than Williams allows for.
That Soga’s discourse was agonistic—marked by variable, cross-stitched moments of enunciatory response to the power in which its agency was located—is suggested by the juxtaposition of the article in isiXhosa discussed above and a lecture written and delivered in English to the YMCA in 1866. The lecture was written in the scholarly idiom of the day and dealt with academic questions of theology. On the whole, it is not of direct relevance, but there is one startling digression in which Soga says:
But about the theory of development: I was going to say that I trust that when the next great wave comes which is to lift the world to a higher eminence of goodness than it has now reached, I trust that within its mighty sweep it will embrace my poor countrymen of Kaffraria. For I cannot comprehend how, according to the law of natural progress, they with other degraded, despised dark traces of this vast continent should have been left so far behind in civilisation and Christian enlightenment. I am not sure about the impartiality of progress; and I hope that when its next tidal wave comes, it will correct its manifest irregularities (quoted in Williams 1983, 192).
Soga’s reference to his “poor countrymen of Kaffraria”