Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
scholarship has been comparatively slow to develop and if post-colonial studies have only relatively recently taken account of the co-implication of the material and the discursive in textual and cultural analysis, the early twenty-first century saw the consolidation of vibrant communities of scholars of Antipodean, South Asian and Canadian book histories in particular, and well-developed national book and publishing history projects in Australia and Canada (with similarities and differences from those in the United Kingdom and United States).7 Several related conferences outside metropolitan Europe and North America have taken place on related themes. Robert Fraser’s Book History through Postcolonial Eyes (2008) presented itself as a primer for the field, and his and Mary Hammond’s double-volume Books without Borders project (2008) collected a number of essays by emerging and established scholars working on post-colonial and transnational book history topics.8 The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) made an admirable attempt at global inclusiveness, with important survey essays on a number of post-colonial contexts.9
There is a consensus that literary studies in South Africa suffered for much of the middle of the twentieth century from a stranglehold of new critical impulses interested in the text alone rather than its material forms or multiple uses. Literary scholarship was, in Sarah Nuttall’s (2002, 283) words, long “badly served” by a “mixture of belles-lettristic and New Critical formative pedagogical influences” that “paid little attention to the materiality and context of texts”. Work on South African topics from a broadly book-historical methodological perspective has, however, also gathered pace over the last decade. For many, an understandable focus has been with economic and political challenges to local educational and indigenous-language publishing, or with charting what is actually being published and purchased in the country (see Seeber & Evans, 2000; Land, 2003; Galloway 2002a; 2002b; 2004; Galloway & Venter, 2004; 2006). There are also studies of reading formations in Southern Africa that explore how racial and ethnic identities have been interpolated (and interpellated) by and variously implicated in the multiple uses of literacy and reading in projects of local and national identification and by growing consumer cultures. Here work by Hofmeyr (1993; 2001), Archie Dick (2004a; 2004b; 2006; 2008) and Sarah Nuttall (1994; 2004), among others, has been especially important (see also Kruger & Shariff, 2001; Laden 2001). Patrick Harries (2001; 2007), Leon de Kock (1996), Rachael Gilmour (2006) and others have extended a sense of the uses of printing and the book in the mission field (about which more to follow).10
Several special issues of local South African academic journals have spoken to book-historical concerns: an issue of African Research and Documentation on “Reading Africa” (2000); Hofmeyr and Nuttall’s issue of Current Writing (2001) broadly concerned with “The Book in Africa”; Hofmeyr and Kriel’s issue of the South African Historical Journal (2006) making a case for the development of lively interdisciplinary areas of research in South Africa; my special issue of English Studies in Africa, “Histories of the Book in Southern Africa” (2004), which focused on the textual conditions and transnational institutions of literariness influencing the lives of books from the country; Isabel Hofmeyr and Archie Dick’s issue of Innovation (2007); and John Gouws’s issue of English in Africa (2008), which included papers from a conference on Orality, Manuscript and Print in Colonial and Post-colonial Cultures held in Cape Town in 2007 (see Gouws 2008). My own monograph on the construction of the idea of a “South African” literature in English, which was offered as a series of case studies of the publication and reception histories of works regarded as canonical in the Anglophone South African academy (from Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm onwards), appeared in 2007. Peter McDonald’s detailed and illuminating investigation of the effects of censorship on South African literary cultures during the apartheid era, The Literature Police, appeared in 2009. There is, however, still relatively little work, considering the extraordinary richness of the field.
The present volume draws together representative work by some of the labourers hitherto in this field, from South Africa and abroad, and from a variety of disciplines. Some of these essays appeared (many substantially revised, some rewritten) in one of the special issues, collections or monographs cited above, or in other scholarly journals in a number of fields. Others are original essays suggesting new directions for a field whose theoretical breadth is energising. The coverage is not exhaustive, because this is not a history of the book in South Africa. It is, rather, a collection of material as fascinating and diverse as it is suggestive of methodologies—historical, historiographic, bibliographic, literary critical, cultural studies, sociological—that might be applied to new research in all of the areas not covered in this reader. The chapters have been grouped in terms of coverage and theoretical application according to several shared characteristics or objects of focus: print cultures and colonial public spheres; South African literatures in the global imaginary; three encounters with books by J. M. Coetzee; questions of the archive and the uses of books; orature, image, print; ideological exigencies and strategies of coercion; and new directions. These I will discuss in turn in the remainder of this introduction, putting their contributions to the field in the context of the histories of print culture in the region. This contextualisation necessitates a brief consideration of the beginnings of print in South Africa.
II
While we do not know when the first printed text arrived in South Africa (was it borne ashore by an early Portuguese visitor, perhaps, or even by an earlier Chinese navigator, or washed ashore after a shipwreck?), we do know that the printing press itself arrived relatively late: the first, by common agreement, was operated by Johann Christian Ritter (1755–1810), who had arrived at the Dutch-run settlement in Cape Town in 1784 to work for the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) as a bookbinder. The governing body of the DEIC, the Lords Seventeen, approved Ritter’s list of required materials for a complete printing office on 28 June 1794 (Smith 1971, 12). Ritter subsequently printed several miscellanea on a small hand press; a fragment of part of an almanac for 1796 is the earliest surviving item (Smith 1971, 14). Despite petitioning for the post of printer to the (now British colonial) government, that post went first to H. H. Smith in 1799, before Sir George Yonge briefly awarded a monopoly on printing to the firm of Walker and Robertson in July 1800. But after its self-styled Government Printing Office was taken over by the authorities in October 1801 (the firm had dared to issue a newspaper, The Cape Town Gazette, and African Advertiser/Kaapsche Stads Courant, en Afrikaansche Berichter, in August 1801), H. H. Smith became printer (see Smith 1971, 11–22),11 while Ritter remained a bookbinder (Rossouw 1987, 131, 66). For almost the next quarter of a century, the only printing presses in the Cape were that of the Government Printing Office controlled by the colonial administration; in Graaff-Reinet (more on which later), and those run by the mission stations.
Among the early commercial printing pioneers at the Cape was George Greig (1799–1863), who ran a printing business in Cape Town from 1823 to 1835. Greig borrowed an old press from the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) superintendent, John Philip (the LMS had two presses, which had arrived in 1814 and 1819), before acquiring his own and publishing the first issue of The South African Commercial Advertiser on 7 January 1824, beginning a struggle over freedom of the press in the Cape Colony that saw him forced to sell his press to the government and leave to pursue his case in London. He finally returned in August 1825 with permission to resume printing the Advertiser (Rossouw 1987, 70, 69; Smith 1971, 32–45). William Storey Bridekirk (c1796–1843), who had arrived at the Cape in 1817 and worked in the Government Printing Office before opening his own stationery and bookbindery on Longmarket Street, appears to have bought the presses that Greig was forced to sell in 1824 (Smith 1971, 40). With the encouragement of the authorities, Bridekirk briefly published his own newspaper, The South African Chronicle and Mercantile Advertiser, until late December 1826 (Smith 1971; Rossouw 1987, 18).
Another early pioneer influenced more directly by Greig was Louis Henri Meurant, a farmer’s son from Berne, Switzerland, who had trained as a printer with Greig in Cape Town in 1823 (Smith 1971, 33–35). In 1830 Meurant bought at an auction in Graaff-Reinet a press that had a long history in the colony: it had been given by one Rutt, printer at the King’s Printing House in Shacklewell, London, to two of his former employees, Thomas Strongfellow and Robert Godlonton, who had joined one of the settler parties