Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies

been so engaged with the preservation of Timbuktu’s rich manuscript heritage (including in a project funded in part by the South African government; see Jeppie and Diagne [2008]), has written about some South African Muslims’ cultures of print (Jeppie 2007, 45–62). Muhammed Haron (2001) has brought to wider attention the rich history of Islamic libraries, especially in the Western Cape. In similar vein, Saarah Jappie has explored a twentieth-century Cape Town imam’s library (2009). But much else remains to be done, as it does in the field of publishing in Yiddish and Hebrew. South Africa’s first Yiddish newspaper, Der Afrikaner Israelit (The African Israelite), a weekly published in Johannesburg, appeared for a period of only six months in 1890 (Poliva 1961, 17; 1968, 56).¹² Der Kriegstaphet (The war dispatch), the first Yiddish daily, appeared in Cape Town for less than three months in late 1899 (Poliva 1961, 7). Most other papers serving a Jewish readership (in English or Yiddish) were equally short-lived, and when Joseph Poliva compiled his list of such periodicals in the early 1960s, only one still appeared to be running, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, which had appeared since 1948 (twice weekly, then five times a week after 1953). South African Jewry was among the wealthiest diasporic Jewish communities globally at least until the 1960s (Segal 1963, 17); a nuanced study of the community’s engagement with print culture in the region would no doubt be illuminating. So too would work on the lives of books brought to the country by other of its many immigrant communities (to name only a few: Greek and Greek-Cypriot, Lebanese, Lusophone, Taiwanese, and former Yugoslav).

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      The interest evident in Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s essays in the complex transnational energies at play in the circulation of print and text leads us naturally to the interest shared, in the essays included in the section of this volume that follows, in the effect on texts of variously construed local and global imaginaries, and in the fates of texts that are subject to transnational reading practices and that confront—and evoke—new and different affective relations, sometimes in and through different textual guises.

      John Gouws (Chapter 3.1) considers the publication and reception contexts of an influential memoir by a leading post-Anglo Boer War Afrikaner icon, Deneys Reitz. Herinneringen van den Engelschen Oorlog 1899–1902 was completed in 1903, during Reitz’s exile in Madagascar. The published text of Reitz’s Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War (1929) differed in several crucial respects and, as Gouws argues, the memoir’s textual history offers “an interesting instance not so much of how authors’ books change empires, but of how empires and the demands they make on those who negotiate their self-understood lives within them change authors and their books” (119). Between these two publication dates, Reitz had become involved in the project of endorsing and promoting the vision of Louis Botha, the Union of South Africa’s first prime minister and another Anglo-Boer War veteran, for a unified (white) dominion. Gouws shows how the textual revisions Reitz made after 1924, when J. B. M. Hertzog came to power and began the promotion of Afrikaner nationalism, actively work to promote reconciliation between white English speakers and Afrikaners. The changes, he argues, balance local and imperial perspectives and imperatives, and, in tracing them, Gouws seeks to demonstrate how such close attention to text remains constitutive of one important strand of book-historical method.

      Lucy Graham’s essay (Chapter 3.2) considers some of the “consequential changes” made to different editions of an important and too-often overlooked mid-twentieth-century South African novel, Mittee by Daphne Rooke (1951)—“the most popular South African writer in America” in the 1950s, Graham notes (121). The first British edition of the novel included a scene in which a black man rapes a black servant, while the first American edition, by contrast, included a typical “black peril” narrative featuring the rape of a white woman by black men. Graham’s research shows that Rooke initially wrote the latter version, but that the left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz, fearful that the novel would run foul of the South African censors, compelled the change. However, the change was not made in the Houghton Mifflin edition published in the United States. Graham considers how such changes reflect the expectations of different markets and examines the consequences of having multiple versions of the same work in circulation. She takes as her point of departure the judgment by J. M. Coetzee (2001, 211) that, “[t]o her credit”, Rooke did “not indulge in the ne plus ultra of colonial horror fantasies, the rape of a white woman, though she does come close to it”. Coetzee’s comments seem uncontroversial when read in an afterword included in a reprint of the 1951 Gollancz text, but when his text was reproduced in a 2008 reprint of the American text, a contradiction appeared. For here, as Graham observes, “Coetzee mentions Rooke’s avoidance of a ‘black peril’ scene”, and yet the text contains the representation of the rape of Letty, a white character, by a black man (122).

      If these chapters chart the likely reasons for—and the effects of—textual variation in which the author is complicit (even if the effects on reading and the implications for future paratexts are not predictable), the third essay in this section (Chapter 3.3), Rita Barnard’s engaged and suggestive consideration of the fate of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country in the ambit of Oprah Winfrey’s television and online Book Club, examines the potential of certain texts for near-endless reinterpretation and appropriation in contexts in which authorial intent is not at issue. First published in New York in February 1948 (and in London the following September), Paton’s most famous novel provides a compelling example of the implication of a South African novel in these global economies. By the mid-1950s it had been dramatised, filmed, abridged, condensed and incorporated into school curriculums; it had become a multimedia phenomenon for a global audience, despite what many South Africans may have thought of its Christian humanism (see Van der Vlies 2007, 71–105). During the final quarter of 2003 it was chosen as the second novel to be featured on Winfrey’s revamped Book Club, and the literary academic drafted in to serve as the expert to answer online questions posed by Oprah’s readers was Rita Barnard, one of the most astute contemporary critics of South African cultures and the global sphere. In response to my invitation to contribute to a 2004 journal special issue, Barnard offered an insightful account of her experience with what she calls the Oprah “megatext”, exploring the implications of Oprah’s selection of Paton’s novel both for the history of the novel’s reception and for “the international consumption of South African literature and of ‘South Africa’ as mediascape at the present moment” (144). Barnard argues that Cry, the Beloved Country’s co-option by Oprah presents a new departure in its reception history in which it becomes one narrative among many, including of Winfrey herself (and her charitable activities in South Africa), “under the auspices of a well-meaning (if commercially driven) ethic of emotional similitude” (155). Barnard concludes polemically, speaking to the imperative for book history to consider transnational audiences and sites of commodification, and that nations may well “come to signify in a new way—as mediascapes, occasions for certain kinds of stories and … certain kinds of touristic experiences” (155).¹³

      The potential methodological suggestiveness of the essays in this section of the present volume is clear: not only do they remind us that we should pay attention to which version of a work we are reading (students and even some scholars of modern literature in particular still need to be reminded of this fact rather too frequently), but they point to the presence of ideological exigencies in the ways in which texts come to have unpredictable afterlives. It matters that one is reading the version of Mittee first published in the United States rather than the one that appeared in Britain, particularly if a paratext (like Coetzee’s), which refers to one version, is reproduced in an edition that uses another. In a more recent example, a discussion of the ethics of representing and appropriating narratives of trauma, and especially of the place of fiction in a work ostensibly of non-fiction, would play out very differently in a classroom whose students had read the American rather than the South African and British version of Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, as Laura Moss has illustrated so convincingly (2006; see also Sanders 2007, 160).

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      How attentive we ought to be to the location, material conditions and textual variations among versions of a text is worth considering in relation to the writer who is arguably South Africa’s most famous literary novelist (even if he is no longer resident in the country), but whose work’s contested designation