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

World Wide Web and 24-hour globalised television have transformed the arena of identity and self-fashioning in the contemporary world, creating transnational subjects who no longer observe the “national” domain as their principal enclosure for identity and self-understanding, print in the colonial era stood virtually alone as a technology of mass communication, breaching tribal, class, gender, political and geographical insularities, and creating a new, potentially trans-ethnic basis for self-identification. The impact of print in this regard, especially the increasing commercialisation of print products in the nineteenth century, should not be underestimated.

      In the South African mission fields in the nineteenth century, then, the printing press made it possible to realign a diverse heterocosm of cultural identities into the makings of a more singular cultural order (cf. Crais 1992), despite the fact that singularity was always contested and orders were regularly undermined, both subtly and otherwise. Nonetheless, the forms in which these contestations took place were cast, or recast, in the co-axial metonymies of lead, an often violent interfusion of cultural hegemony and military enforcement. In the argument of Mike Kantey (1990, vii), “one of the most important effects of these early mission presses was to reduce a rich and diverse oral tradition to a few centres of literary patronage” (cf. Peires 1979; Switzer 1983), and although it must be countered that the oral tradition was never so simply “reduced”, the terms of contestation were nevertheless inscribed in print. The more general cultural realignment brought about by the printing press set in motion a process that would leave deep indentations on the people of an emerging, unequal “nation”, one eventually promulgated into being (in the form of the Union of South Africa) in print proclamations that were heavily biased in favour of the bringers of “light”—and type—to the “dark” continent through the great agency of literacy.

      In Towards an African Literature, A. C. Jordan describes the connection among literacy, print culture and Christianisation as central to the history of African education in South Africa:

      In all speech communities of the Southern Africans, what literacy exists is inseparably bound up with the Christian missionary enterprise. To be able to “preach the Word” the missionaries had not only to learn the languages of the people, but also to reduce these languages to writing. Translators, interpreters, preachers, and teachers had sooner or later to come from among the aborigines themselves. And so some of the apt converts had also to be introduced to the rudiments of modern learning through the language of the missionary body concerned. But since, outside of the missionary bodies, no one undertook to educate the Africans, acceptance of “the Word” remained the only means of access to any form of modern learning (Jordan 1973a, 37).

      And one should add that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly after the social devastation of the Cattle Killing disaster of 1856–57, the die was cast: “modern learning”—that is, access to the book, the ability to write and read in English as well as in the “reduced” languages—allowed entry into an irreversibly changing economic and social order.

      Literacy, then, and behind it the widespread introduction of print culture, was at the centre of colonisation in South Africa, implicit in the frontier struggle between sharply contrasting modes of information and comprehension. In this struggle, two major lines of conceptual agency were in evidence. On the one hand, the Nguni people of the Eastern Cape ultimately (although not exclusively) resorted to thaumaturgy in an attempt to expel whites by cathartic apocalypse (cf. Hodgson 1985, Peires 1989; De Kock 1996). On the other hand, missionaries assiduously and laboriously exercised cultural surveillance via teaching and religious supervision based on the pseudo-rationalism of a professedly revealed “Truth”. As the historical record suggests, the thaumaturgical and military modes of resistance largely ended with the Cattle Killing catastrophe, which in turn opened the way for significant growth of mission education and the teaching of predominantly Protestant educators who propagated a discourse of metaphors, in the sense adumbrated by Hayden White (1978) and Richard Rorty (1989), masquerading as literal truth. In doing this, print was the handmaiden of this “truth”.

      Literacy was the basis of what became an informing, knowledge-creating representational order. The larger object of literacy was a linguistic colonialism that placed “English” and the values embedded in it at the apex of the exalted and frequently evoked notion of “civilisation”. The linguistic and semantic modality switch implicated in literacy teaching—built squarely upon the edifice of a print culture—was therefore at the centre of an encompassing mission whose aim was nothing less than the reinvention of the territory and its peoples as a polity of the civilised (read British) realm. This is precisely what was locked up in the influential Victorian idea of “manifest destiny” (Bosch 1991, 298). For missionaries, those great facilitators of this supposedly “manifest” destiny, print culture and “literacy” were their direct ideological (they would have said “spiritual”) aids. If, as Gray (1989, 19–20) has suggested, translation can be seen as central to the literary processes of Southern Africa, then one of its sources is surely in print-based missionary interaction, where a form of experiential or modality translation¹ saw persistent attempts to transcode oral modes and diverse, often non-Christian spiritual experience into literate representations of the more orthodox understandings of human experience located in a Protestant code of belief. Although these were incomplete, complex and multiform processes, neither necessarily dichotomous nor evolutionary (see Gunner 1986; Hofmeyr 1993; 2004), they nevertheless had deep and far-reaching implications. Anthropologist Jack Goody (1977, 37) argues that in many recorded cases, literacy (implying as it does an eventual, if partial, shift in emphasis from speech to writing) facilitates a transformation in cognitive procedures by which knowledge is more manageably reified. Drawing on Goody, Jean Comaroff (1985, 143) suggests that literacy generated a greater awareness of the “process of abstraction and a concern with knowledge and value as explicit systems beyond the immediate contexts that generate them”. Writing about cultural transformation among the southern Tswana, Comaroff (1985, 143) argues that literacy “transforms the consciousness of those who acquire it”. As I argue at greater length in Civilising Barbarians (1996, 64–104), Lovedale in the Eastern Cape, along with other institutions and individual missionaries, not only established a widespread literate order that incorporated institutional surveillance, but in doing this it sought to “translate” indigenous forms of subjectivity into excessively narrow limits determined by Western literary forms of expression. This process relied to a very great extent on the existence and continued refinement of a growing culture of print and on the reification of the Book as a pre-eminent source of both knowledge and human understanding in a normative sense.

      That is to say, a widespread culture of the book and of print made it possible both to inscribe in the subjectivities of captive audiences—principally, but not exclusively, in mission school rooms—behavioural prescriptions (whether these were always followed being a different matter) and to encode such attempts at behavioural and spiritual modification within deterministic modes of literary representation. To wit: missionary print culture in its educational guise quickly devolved into a leaden discourse of heavily prefigured emplotments based on a Manichean metaphoric binary in which an entire universe of difference was squeezed into the starkly reductive dyad of “light” and “dark” (or civilisation and barbarism) and its many subsidiary metaphoric pairings. Then, on the basis of such dualism, emplotments derived from known literary forms were widely employed as normative forms in the durable medium of print, through which the subjects of the civilising mission were swayed. These forms included comedic resolutions of individual human waywardness and misunderstanding under a kindly Godhead, tragic examples of individual hubris and subsequent spiritual fall, and romantic emplotments of heroic endurance following privation in a spiritual wilderness.² Despite well-developed and persuasive arguments about what Shula Marks has influentially described as the “ambiguities of dependence” in conditions of colonial hegemony (cf. Marks 1975), the point made by Jean and John Comaroff in this regard is worth recalling: that the “spatial, linguistic, ritual, and political forms [of] European culture” made up the context in which agreement and disagreement, subjection and rebellion, took place. “Colonised peoples”, write the Comaroffs, “frequently reject the message of the colonisers, and yet are powerfully and profoundly affected by its media. That is why new hegemonies may silently take root amidst the most acrimonious and agonistic