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

inauguration. Soga’s own writing, in contrast, provides evidence of contradiction and agonistic response, of implicit incitation against the prescribed narrative line, even while Soga apparently reproduces an orthodox text of missionary sentiment.

      In Chalmers’ biography, then, Soga is born into the secular underworld of his father’s “polygamist’s village”, and undergoes a “baptism into heathenism” at birth—a rite of animal slaughter described in lurid detail (Chalmers 1877, 11–12) that is meant to suggest the state of degradation the young hero has still to overcome. “Amid such superstition and sensuality, barbarism and ignorance, there can be no intellectual growth, or purity of life”, Chalmers writes (1877, 12). Immediately following this evocation of an underworld, the second chapter proffers, as a stark alternative, a site of worldly salvation in the Tyumie mission station, described as a centre of “light and knowledge” (Chalmers 1877, 13). But for the existence of such places, Chalmers narrates, “the heathen world would never know that there is a higher life than that of eating, drinking and making merry” (Chalmers 1877, 13). Tyumie is also a “city of refuge” from the injustice, violence and cruelties of witch doctors (Chalmers 1877, 15). The hero of the mission station is Rev. John Brownlee. Implicit in the structure of Chalmers’ story are the tell-tale levels typical of Frye’s “secular scripture”, even though the narrative becomes prosaic once the victory over heathenism is confirmed. In Chalmers’ story there is a fusion of two modes of emplotment: romance and biography. The narrative creates the idea of an incredible elevation from the dark netherworld of heathenism to the “centre of light”, but this quest is muted because Soga is not allowed his own romantic-heroic agency. He is led out of darkness by one of Brownlee’s successors, Rev. William Chalmers, who takes Soga to Lovedale and initiates his wonderful transformation into a “model Kafir”. From this point on his course is set by the greater narrative of conversion, in which Soga himself has a limited role. The story then assumes the apparent—but deceptive—form of empirical biography, although the underlying romantic idea of heroic ascent continues to provide a conceptual framework for the narration. Tiyo must “either advance or sink never to rise again” (Chalmers 1877, 31). His narrative life, his book-codified existence, is a terribly linear, earnest and upward path of Protestant virtue and selfless service to Christianity.

      After Soga’s return to South Africa as a missionary in 1857, his transformation was such that the Port Elizabeth Telegraph could comment: “In this person may be seen the transcendent operation and effects of Christianity, civilisation, and science trampling under foot every opposing prejudice and difficulty” (quoted in Chalmers 1877, 133). Soga was by now a textually objectified figure: he featured widely in stories about the miraculous possibilities of conversion and was celebrated in print culture as a product of that culture. However, his own writing suggests that the space between this public, textually constituted persona and his more ambivalent, private sense of self was severely agonistic. Soga returned to South Africa in the year of the Cattle Killing, the greatest disaster the Xhosa had ever known. This was an event of great complexity and the culmination of extreme social distress among the Xhosa following violent frontier wars, great loss of land and the stripping away of autonomous authority in the first half of the century (cf. Mostert 1992; Peires 1989). To a writer like Chalmers, however, a crudely reductive conclusion was available: “Tiyo Soga landed at Algoa Bay on the 2nd of July, 1857, and found that those to whom he had come to preach the Gospel were a dispersed nation, utterly destroyed by their own folly” (Chalmers 1877, 129). Soga, along with another missionary, sets up a station at Emgwali and comes to fulfil a formal, although limited, narrative role as a standard bearer of Christianity in the midst of heathenism. The chapter titles liken the course of Soga’s life to horticultural and organic metaphors of growth, suggesting orderly (if uneven) progress towards a single outcome: “Getting into harness”, “Bearing precious seed”, “Dark shadows”, “Glimpses of sunshine” and “Sunset”.

      But it is rewarding to read the one odd chapter in this sequence, “Dark shadows”, in which Chalmers purports to present deeply private confessions of doubt, supposedly written by Soga in his private journal. In Chalmers’ account, these doubts are resolved, much in the way of a conventional crisis of faith, and a glorious unity with God is eventually achieved when Soga later dies of tuberculosis. A perusal of the journal, however, shows that this is not the case. Donovan Williams (1983, 11) speculates in his biography of Soga that Chalmers may have had access to material that has since been lost. David Attwell (1997), advancing persuasive reasons for his deduction, prefers the conclusion that Chalmers assembled most of the confessional “journal entries” himself, drawing on the private journal and letters.⁴ When we read about Soga’s supposed trials of faith, then, we encounter a dense sediment of textual traces. On the one hand, it does seem the case that Soga was given to morbidity, as Williams (1978, 86–87) notes in his biography, which is far more reliable than Chalmers’. Further, Williams (1978, 86) quotes a letter that stands free of accusations of editorial meddling in which Soga makes confessions of doubt that sound very similar to Chalmers’ apparently embellished accounts. There are in addition two journal entries in isiXhosa in which Soga expresses severe doubt about his vocation (Williams 1978, 22, 35). On the other hand, speculation about the motive for Chalmers’ embellishments, if such they are, are best framed within his own narrative exigencies in writing Soga’s biography. A standard account of Ignatian doubt, followed by a resurgence of faith, would arguably have strengthened the notion of a “Model Kafir”, since such crises of confidence were a textually recognisable motif in narratives of Christian belief. Attwell (1994, 16) resorts to a similar argument: “Chalmers wanted to show that the Protestant spirit could be found alive and well in an African. Soga’s crises of faith could be read into a narrative of heroic, self-chastening individualism which provided ample justification for the missionary enterprise.” At the same time, however, the potential of the confessional passages to disrupt Chalmers’ story of a fully “converted” African Christian means that they would have read as a threatening supplement to Chalmers’ text unless swiftly recuperated into the more recognisable motif of sporadic, but ultimately healed Christian doubt. In view of this, it seems unlikely that Chalmers would have invented the passages entirely. It seems more probable that he would have assembled and rewritten various shreds of Soga’s writing drawn from elsewhere and set about using them in a recuperative manner, while also satisfying his own documentary sense of record as a biographer. Chalmers thus conspicuously renarrativises and sentimentalises⁵ Soga’s doubts into resurgent faith, but it is significant that this move is effected in Chalmers’ narrative voice and not that ascribed to Soga.

      The textual “Soga” of these passages, then, or of the book version in all its totemic power, shows signs that “he” is struggling to maintain his faith. Chalmers interprets this as a general Christian crisis. Soga was “harassed by some of the bitterest trials, and by some of the darkest dispensations of providence” (Chalmers 1877, 271). At one point, (probably) embellished text purporting to be Soga’s journal reads:

      5th January.— I have to complain of one grand defect in my character-irresolution. I cannot tell how many times I have resolved and re-resolved to be under God a better man than I know myself to be. All my resolutions in this respect have miserably come to naught. I have in reference to my state before God, to complain of the following things:- Although I know myself to be a great deceiver, although I know the consequence of this awful sin, although I know that I have a most responsible burden, in having taken unadvisedly upon myself the work of the ministry, although I know that all that I have hitherto been doing in the ministry has been in hypocrisy, and insincerity, I have to lament my deadness and hardness of heart in reference to these sins. When I attempt to peruse the word of God, it has no effect upon my mind. I remain unmoved. I have no sufficient sensibility to and perception of my sins. This I feel as if it were a barrier to my obtaining any true penitence regarding them. O God, by Thy spirit move me, and Thou shalt have the entire Glory (quoted in Chalmers 1877, 272).

      This passage, whether taken as Soga’s “authentic” voice or as a contaminated residue of his textual remains, suggests the most extraordinary provocation of one who professes a certain kind of discourse and is in some senses its vehicle, but who is not able to meet it with an individual, personal conviction of truth. In the letter quoted by Williams, which is verifiably written by Soga, the “Model Kafir” writes