Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
and in a late colonial period that is the subject of the next essay in the collection, by Isabel Hofmeyr, who over the past three decades has been perhaps the leading instigator and senior scholar of South African print culture studies. Among her chief interests has been the circulation of print through and across transnational spaces, which in the process have been reconceptualised for readers. It has long been a critical commonplace that nations are in some senses imagined into being, that they “depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions” (Brennan 1990, 49). All manner of print culture has played a vital part in the building of this apparatus. Yet there has hitherto been relatively little consideration of the role of traffic in texts across national or colonial borders in the formation of post-colonial “national” literary and cultural identities. These boundaries, understood as encoding the opposition of centre and periphery, metropole and margin, imperial capital and colony, as well as the hierarchies of political and cultural value they are taken to represent, were once crucial to the structure of discourse about post-colonial studies. But they have increasingly been revised and rendered problematic by scholarship that explores what Elleke Boehmer and Bart Moore-Gilbert (2002, 12) called the “‘thick’ empirical sense of post-coloniality as an interactive horizontal ‘web’”, a “global network of transverse interactions”. The “entire imperial framework becomes from this perspective at once decentred and multiply centred”, Boehmer (2002, 6) writes in a study of links and relationships between and among anti-imperial and proto-post-colonial writers and activists. It becomes, too, one in which imperial subjects did not always view themselves as an audience or readership narrowly limited by their residence, wherever that may have been.
Isabel Hofmeyr (2004b, 4) has argued that the study of cultures of the book in Africa, “[e]merging as it does in a postnationalist moment”, is well placed to capitalise on new conceptualisations of the relationships among centres and peripheries. She has suggested, too, that book history is “inherently transnational”: books are
intended to circulate widely. Their portability extends their reach. Printers and their technologies have proved equally mobile. While a fashion for national histories of the book might have obscured some of this mobility, book history is an ideal site from which to explore themes of transnationalism (Hofmeyr 2010, 107).
In tracking the curious afterlives of African-language translations of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in her 2004 monograph, The Portable Bunyan, Hofmeyr (2004a, 25) showed how
we have to keep our eye on the text as a material object. This procedure is necessary in order to bring to light the intricate circuits along which texts are funneled rather than the route we imagine or anticipate they might traverse. One such presupposition is that texts tread predictable paths, namely from “Europe” to “Africa”, “north” to “south”, “metropole” to “colony”. With regard to The Pilgrim’s Progress, the commonsense temptation is to imagine the text traveling this route, diffusing outwards from the imperial center to the furthest reaches of empire, with apparently little consequence for the context from which it emanated.
The essay by Hofmeyr in this volume joins her other scholarship in providing a model for this kind of work. It argues that the missionary publishing projects of nineteenth-century Southern African Protestant evangelical organisations, like the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association, provide vivid and suggestive instances of how transnational communities were imagined by influential actors in the spread of one important kind of print culture. She questions a “tendency” that regards “broad social processes like imperialism, Christian missionary activity and so on as transnational” (75) while simultaneously conceptualising of individual colonial subjects as strictly and only bound by identification with the local (and the proto-national). Instead, Hofmeyr argues, those involved in transnational organisations “formulated ways of reading to support and give substance to their view of a worldwide network of readers” (75), one with shared supranational characteristics and affiliations.
Hofmeyr’s recent work in this vein (2008; 2010) has examined print cultures that traverse lines of affiliation across and around the Indian Ocean rim, establishing a web of interrelationships and spheres of shared languages and identifications. She argues that these “public spheres” are to be seen constituted in “the cross-cutting diasporas” found between the 1880s and First World War in ports along the east coast of Africa, the coasts of the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, western Australia, and the islands of the Indian Ocean, and “the intellectual links” among these diasporas, “based particularly around ideas of social reform and religious revivalism” (Hofmeyr 2010, 108). Referring to the huge volume of circulated material, from India, Egypt and elsewhere throughout and around the ocean rim, Hofmeyr (2010, 108) suggests that this expansive tracing of circuits of trade and affiliation unsettles at least one “deeply seated assumption … in studies of book history”, namely “that a printed document is necessarily a commodity situated in a network of commercial and capitalized relations”. What studying traffic across and around the Indian Ocean allows, she suggests, is a view of a world of relations equally dependent on “philanthropy, commerce, craft and mechanization” (Hofmeyr 2010, 108). The portability of books routinely “extends their reach”; if “a fashion for national histories of the book might have obscured” some of the complex examples of extreme mobility Hofmeyr has made such fine work of tracking (this includes her work on the African afterlives of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), book history offers us “an ideal site from which to explore themes of transnationalism”, she contends (Hofmeyr 2010, 107).
Meg Samuelson’s work on Indian Ocean imaginaries shares this impulse to shift attention from centre–periphery studies to the axis of South–South relations. Her essay in this volume considers the case of an extraordinary epistolary and print exchange among three remarkable individuals from South Africa and India in the late 1920s and 1930s: V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, the first agent of colonial India in South Africa; Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, an archivist in the Cape Town Archives; and P. Kodanda Rao, Sastri’s personal secretary. Jeffreys attended a lecture given by Sastri in Cape Town in November 1928 and was thrown into turmoil by an encounter with an Indian who did not conform to her imperial(ist) stereotype. Rao accompanied Sastri on his 1928–29 visit to South Africa, and subsequently entered into a long-running correspondence and friendship with Jeffreys. Encouraged by their correspondence, Jeffreys embarked on a project of intensive research on India, her letters reporting on her reading of everything “from accounts by retired Raj administrators to ‘racy and entertaining’ tales” (95). While at first informed by a conceptualisation of India as peripheral and subservient within the British empire, what Samuelson calls “a North-South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library system”, the Jeffreys–Rao correspondence allowed this white South African to “bypass the North”, engaging in (and fostering) “an alternative South–South axis of textual circulation” (95). Samuelson’s sophisticated use of archival material explores how this exchange participated in the textual production of a public sphere in and between these countries in the late-imperial period. Prompted in large measure by her Indian correspondents, Jeffreys went on to produce a number of important essays on the creole nature of South African cultures, which Samuelson discusses elsewhere (2007). Samuelson’s work points towards a more nuanced understanding of the history of the imagining of South Africa as a plural place, marked by creolized cultures, and one that has long been enriched by the coming of those marked by a dominant discourse as strangers.
In a recent essay, Hofmeyr (2010, 112–14) makes mention of the spread of press ownership among members of Durban’s Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century: Tamil journalist P. S. Aiyar launched three newspapers, Indian World (1898), Colonial Indian Times (1899–1901) and African Chronicle (1908–21; 1929–30), in Tamil and English; Osman Ahmed Effendi ran Durban’s first Muslim newspaper in Durban, Al-Islam, between 1907 and 1910, and followed this with Indian Views (1914), both papers appearing in English and Gujarati; Gandhi himself launched a newspaper, Indian Opinion, in 1903, later to be run by his son, Manilal, from the time of Gandhi’s departure from South Africa in 1914 until the 1960s. Both Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s engagements with Indian Ocean imaginaries suggest the range of work that still remains to be done in this fascinating area—and in the area of print cultures in minority diasporan