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

PAROLE: ENCOUNTERS IN PRINT

      In this section I discuss a case history that draws on the more general points made above. My discussion draws into its ambit the printed renditions of the journal writing of Tiyo Soga, the first ordained black minister in the South African mission fields, in whose printed textual remains one finds the traces of what I regard as an agonistic relation to missionary forms of discursive agency. The term “agonism” is borrowed from Foucault, who, in his essay “The subject and power” (1982, 790), argues that “the relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot … be separated”. Rather than speak of an “essential freedom”, Foucault (1982, 790) writes, “it would be better to speak of an “agonism”—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation”. The power relationship, writes Foucault (1982, 790), is characterised at its “very heart” and “constantly provok[ed]” by the “recalcitrance of will and the intransigence of freedom”. This occurs within a context in which the structuring of the possible field of actions for subjects, in its widest sense, is at play. Such structuring, in the Foucauldian argument, occurs principally in the discursive domain, and in that domain print culture, totemically enshrined in the Book, became in the Victorian age one of the most powerful and commonly engaged discursive sites of agency.

      The missionary incursion into Southern Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred not only within various day-to-day narratives of legitimation, but also in the context of a developing canon of book-length accounts of missionary travels and adventures. “Accounts of missionary ‘labours and scenes’ had by the late nineteenth century become an established literary genre”, write the Comaroffs (1991, 172). This was “a literature of the imperial frontier, a colonising discourse that titillated the Western imagination with glimpses of radical otherness – over which it simultaneously extended intellectual control” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 172), or tried to, with overwhelming persistence. It was within this general corpus that a critical sub-genre emerged: the “rise” of the putative, generalised African subject, discursively plotted as an ascent from degradation to salvation.

      Robert Moffat’s Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842) and David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) are outstanding examples of books that, given the special prominence accorded to printed tomes emanating from the metropole under the imprimatur of established printing houses, helped to establish a strong legitimating context for missionary work in general, and more specifically for the discursive regulation of subjectivity, especially what was regarded as errant subjectivity, within particular literary forms.

      While proposing to reveal divine truth, Moffat, for example, appears to have been indulging in a common literary form made possible by the convenience of the book, namely the romantic quest. As Northrop Frye, in his work on romance as a form of “secular scripture”, suggests, romance frequently reveals a mental landscape in which heroes and villains “exist primarily to symbolise a contrast between two worlds, one above the level of ordinary experience, the other below it” (Frye 1976, 53). The upper world is idyllic, while the lower world, associated with exciting adventures involving separation, loneliness, humiliation and pain, is a “demonic or night world”; the “narrative movement keeps rising into wish fulfilment or sinking into anxiety or nightmare” (Frye 1976, 53). In Missionary Labours, Moffat (1842, v) tends to use the structures of secular scripture for a patently melodramatic salvation narrative in which, while the heathen others he encounters in Southern Africa show a “radical identity in the operations of human depravity”, “convulsed by sin, and writhing with anguish”, he himself rises above such depravity in the guise of a romantic protagonist surrounded by “perishing, and helpless, and all but friendless millions” (Moffat 1842, v–vi).

      In 1857, the year in which David Livingstone’s similarly grandiose narrative elaboration of missionary adventures, Missionary Travels, was published, Tiyo Soga returned to the Cape from Scotland, where he had trained at the University of Glasgow and been ordained as a Presbyterian minister (Saayman 1991, 58–64). It was within the constraints of developing textual currents (as described above) that were imprinting literary modes for defining the destiny of Africa and individual African subjects in forums of public representation that a model “converted” subject such as Tiyo Soga was compelled to delineate, and literally to write up, his own role. After Soga’s death in 1871, he was textually incorporated into a sub-genre of the more general tradition of published missionary heroism as the singularly most emblematic “rise” of what his conversion champions, in self-congratulatory mode, styled a “model Kafir” (Chalmers 1877, 488). A “model Kafir”! What a neat textual trope, what an accomplished figure to present within the technological accomplishment, the four-sided symmetry, of print! Soga was Lovedale’s own proudly proclaimed emblem of heroic spiritual elevation and his story was given book form in John A. Chalmers’ biography, Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (1877). This work appears to have been largely plagiarised—such was the breathless eagerness to imprint the solidity of this seeming success—in Rev. H. T. Cousins’ From Kafir Kraal to Pulpit: The Story of Tiyo Soga (1899). These biographies are self-styled declarations of triumph—after many decades of conspicuous failure—of missionary-colonial signifying imperatives, codified powerfully in the form of the Book, in which the African’s “rise” is cast in the dye of a prescriptive, although predictable, narrative shape: errant native subjects are stabilised and their “stabilisation” rendered immortal, held fast, in print. However, the same narrative was rendered agonistically, full of latent incitement and provocative challenge, by Tiyo Soga himself, as I will shortly demonstrate.³

      Chalmers’ biography rings with the leaden moral certainties of Victorian missionary imperialism, which systematically sought to efface difference in the name of Christian virtue. His narrative did this by trans-coding details about Soga’s life into recognisable formal patterns of descent and ascent drawn from the romance archetype. Chalmers depicted Soga’s origins as typically depraved in an introductory chapter entitled “The polygamist’s village”. According to his account, the village is a site of degradation and barbarism. The polygamist is Tiyo’s father, “Old Soga”, who was a senior counsellor of the Xhosa chief Ngqika. In Chalmers’ interpretation, all useful activity in the village is sullied by the want of industriousness and civilised vigour. Craftsmen “leisurely and indolently” ply their trades, while “the patriarch of the village and his associates lounge and bask in the sun, alternately smoking and sleeping” (Chalmers 1877, 2). Women draw water, hew wood and prepare the food, and young boys tend calves and goats. Chalmers (1877, 3) prefers not to view this sketch as pastoral or idyllic, a lost Eden, as many today might be tempted to trope such an imagined scene. It is rather a scene of “dull monotony ... varied by the visit of some chief on a begging expedition, a marriage festival ... the intonjane dance—obscene in all its aspects”. The village is a place of superstition and of “nocturnal revelries”, where men dance to the “most barbarous and obscene songs of an enraptured audience” (Chalmers 1877, 3). But the link with civilisation and its benefits is found when “Old Soga” uses a plough to cultivate ground after being advised to do so by a European. Eureka! The use of Western agricultural techniques becomes a “silent emblem” of a “still greater power which was secretly at work, and is destined yet to revolutionise the moral wastes of Southern Africa” (Chalmers 1877, 7).

      It is Tiyo Soga who, in Chalmers’ story, was destined to personify the transition from “moral waste” to redemption, but in so doing he also had to shed all outward trappings of Xhosa culture. This was the unstated sine qua non of the “model Kafir”, and as such Soga was to carry the Nguni people into modernity as a book-codified, textual signifier of missionary success. He is therefore a narrative persona of considerable significance. Chalmers was able to present his biography in a largely unproblematic manner as a story of ascent (the “rise” of the “model Kafir”) in the convenient form of a linear account that saw the external details of his life as consistent with the needs of such a narrative. And the external details were indeed consistent: Soga did in fact go to Lovedale as a boy. He was taken to Scotland on two different occasions to be educated. He