Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
suggests how constrained he was to use the predictable language of “degraded, despised dark races” when his audience seemed to demand it. Soga’s expression of this kind of sentiment also leads one to speculate that the “sifting” on the “national table” would tend towards the universalising ideal of (Western) “natural progress”. Such progress would tend to assert African rights and “nationhood” in terms of British values of “civilisation”, as John Tengo Jabavu was later to do. Like Jabavu, however, Soga would advocate such values in terms of their founding claims and in terms of their irreducibly revolutionary and liberating sense as instances of the spiritual millenarianism through which these values were originally propagated and not in their deferred, poorly translated colonial sense (for an example of such advocacy, see Soga’s letter referred to earlier, “What is the destiny of the Kaffir race” in the King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, 11 May 1865, in Williams 1983, 178–82).
Soga is therefore a figure who exhibits agonistic responses to textual incorporation by the narratives of a civilising colonialism. In Foucault’s sense of this term, Soga exhibits the “permanent provocation” of one who is drawn into power relationships as a voluntary subject, but who shows “recalcitrance of will” in his own “free” adoption of the values governing such relationships. His own writings, in which loyalty to African distinctiveness and missionary conformity is ambivalently inscribed, reflect a paradoxical shuttling in his own recourse to available forms of textual apprehension, whereas his more private textual residue suggests a tortured space of difference between textual entrapment and private otherness. In this emblematic case, the modalities of print—its concentration of audience or diverse publics, its implicit discursive regularities, its residues of rebellious or power-provoking subjectivity, its agency of representation across space and time, and its ability to accommodate awkward conjunctions—were decisive in the emergence and continuing determination of complex, multiply configured colonial subjects. Historically, there was no going back after print. The die was cast, and it was by recourse to the fracturing metonymies of lead that further deliberations, negotiations, and contestations over the destiny of individuals and groups would be conducted in South Africa.
NOTES
1See my more extended argument on this point in De Kock (2009).
2See De Kock (1996, 76–104) for an extensive discussion.
3Tiyo Soga is also responsible for rendering one of the great founding salvation narratives, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, into isiXhosa—Soga’s Uhambo lo Mhambi is an isiXhosa translation of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was published by the Lovedale Mission Press.
4See De Kock (1996, 206, endnote 10).
5In this regard, see David Attwell’s argument (1997, 571–72).
6On the importance of Indaba, see Switzer (1984).
7Soga was not alone in doing this. Famous examples include Bleek’s Zulu Legends (1952 [1857]), Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (1868) and Theal’s Kaffir Folk-Lore (1882). The important difference was that Soga was one of the first people to do this from within Xhosa culture, later to be followed by A. C. Jordan (1973b) and others.
8Although leaning more towards the affirmation of Soga’s transformative emphasis of African distinctiveness and towards his transculturated rewriting of enlightenment ideals, despite Soga’s capture within the teleology of a missionary salvation narrative, Attwell does, however, acknowledge the counter-argument, namely that Soga’s role appears to have been intrinsically, irremediably interstitial.
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