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

(Williams 1978, 86). In this regard, it is instructive to contrast Victorian notions of self and subject with the more current notion that in regarding subjectivity through discourse one does not encounter full “consciousness”, but what Gayatri Spivak (1988, 12) once memorably called a “subject-effect”: “That which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network (‘text’ in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on”, Spivak writes, noting that each strand, if isolated, might also be revealed as woven of many strands. “Different knottings and configurations of these strands”, Spivak (1988, 12–13) adds, “determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent on myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject”. The seeming solidity of the book as artefact, however, especially in the Victorian era, would have created quite the opposite impression of its narrated subjects.

      In retrospect, when Tiyo Soga is represented as expressing in one and the same passage of writing his “deadness and hardness of heart” to the Gospel and his desire to be moved by the “spirit” of God, or when he expresses a desire to hide on “some dark spot of earth”, the “subject-effect” created suggests conflict between different “strands” of the discursive text that constitute Soga’s seeming subjectivity. It appears that Soga’s subjectivity was strongly influenced by the pervasive textual strand of missionary Christianity, but the purported passage from his journal, even in interpolated form, and the evidence of his letter and the isiXhosa sections of his journal suggest that his religion was just such a strand and no more, and that even in one so comprehensively “converted” as he, no sovereign or fully “present” Christian consciousness was possible. In these terms, Christian converts could never be what the missionaries wished to believe they were and what the very form of the Book suggested they were—remade people, thoroughly in possession of a consciousness imbued with eternal grace. Indeed, in the Spivakian argument, all human subjectivity is many-stranded and not reducible to any one of its discernible “effects”. It is therefore the very conspicuousness of Chalmers’ attempt to recuperate the significance of Soga’s doubts, which ironically emphasises the supplementarity of Soga’s subjectivity, undermining Chalmers’ avowals of Christian consciousness as an all-powerful presence.

      The textual persona of Soga in Chalmers’ account continued to express severe doubt for a period covering almost a year and a half. Soga supposedly wrote of “the most unaccountable hardness and unbelief in my heart” (Chalmers 1877, 273); he feared he had been “living the life of a mere formalist” (274) and that he was in “a wretched state of darkness” in which “prayer is an unprofitable burden”; he was “inclined to objectionable light heartedness” (215); he is alleged to have felt “religious duties a burden … preaching and exhorting a burden ... reading God’s word a burden ... prayer a burden” and he did all these things “mechanically” (276); he was sure “the prominent blemishes of my character have been indifference, indolence, unbelief, and faithlessness” (277). The concluding words attributed to Soga in this part of Chalmers’ narrative asserted that it was “impossible to conceive of anything more awful than the state of the human heart—my heart—when it can so much resist and oppose what God has done and said” (Chalmers 1877, 278).

      At this point, Chalmers chooses to neutralise the potential force of these confessional declarations of ambivalence, resuming the narrative in his “own” voice—itself supplemented and conditioned by a tradition of Christian mysticism—by concluding that Soga’s “trials sent his thoughts inwards, and drew him closer to the Divine fountain for strength” (Chalmers 1877, 278). No such idea is uttered in the words ascribed to Soga. For the rest of the narrative, Chalmers concentrates on the outer features of Soga’s life: his deteriorating health; his move to a new mission station deeper in “Kaffraria”, at Tutura; and, finally, his death (“Sunset”). His life is summed up in a final triumphal statement whose triangular reduction to a point of only three words visually illustrates the narrative closure of Chalmers’ account (1877, 488):

      He was a Friend of God; a Lover of His Son; inspired by His

      Spirit; a Disciple of His Holy Word; an Ardent Patriot;

      a Large-hearted Philanthropist; a Dutiful Son; an

      Affectionate Brother; a Tender Husband; a

      Loving Father; a Faithful Friend; a Learned

      Scholar; an Eloquent Orator; and in

      Manners a Gentleman; a Devoted

      Missionary who spent himself

      in his Master’s service;

      A Model Kafir.

      Despite this passionate asseveration of typecast conformity (literally and figuratively), there is strong evidence that the “Model Kafir” Tiyo Soga was both less and more than the sovereign Christian subject represented by Chalmers.

      The sheer variability of Soga’s own discourse is shown by a comparison of two pieces written in different languages for entirely different audiences: one, a contribution in isiXhosa to the first issue in 1862 of Indaba, an isiXhosa-English newspaper issued by Lovedale⁶ and the other a lecture in English that he delivered to the YMCA in Cape Town in 1866. In the Indaba article, translated into English by J. J. R. Jolobe, Soga ostensibly speaks as a Xhosa subject and not as a missionary agent alone. “We Xhosas are a race which enjoys conversation”, he writes (in Williams 1983, 151), and provocatively proceeds to extol indigenous cultural practices—the very practices that he also, in print, associates with “degraded, despised dark races” (in Williams 1983, 192). Because Soga was writing in isiXhosa for a largely African audience, one can reasonably speculate that his sense of rhetorical address was less constrained by the perceived need to produce orthodox missionary language than in his public utterances in English and that he felt able to drop the habitual posture of judgmental censure about traditional culture. In contrast to Chalmers’ scene of indolence and “dull monotony”, Soga portrayed the Xhosa as vibrant conversationalists:

      When a man who has things to relate comes to a home a meal is cooked in a tall pot because the people want him to eat to his satisfaction so that the happiness which is the result of a good meal will open his heart and the sore parts will heal. As soon as that happens there will be a stream of news flowing out of the mouth. The listener will continually assent. So will the narrator be encouraged. Silence will at times reign all ears listening. The damsel will constantly replenish the fire in the fireplace. When the news retailer finishes there will be a general hum, expressing agreement, rejoicing and acceptability of the visitor.

      That is the essential nature of the Xhosa people. You too, Mr. Editor, will confirm this opinion the day you visit our homes in the rural areas. Once our people realise you are a man of words and a conversationalist the tribesmen will surround you. Stiff pumpkin and pit-corn porridge (umqa wesangcozi), a pumpkin and maize dish (umxhaxha), a mixture of sour milk and broken bread (umvubo) will be placed before you to eat to your fill. So I anticipate great happiness from the publication of the newspaper (quoted in Williams 1983, 151).

      This passage is extraordinary because it not only suggests that Soga harboured sentiments of loyalty to traditional culture quite contrary to what was expected of a missionary in “Xhosaland”, but also in view of its textual celebration of oral culture. The picture of the “damsel” replenishing the fire while the speaker enthralls his audience suggests nostalgic longing for the joys of oral culture and is quite contrary to the imputation of Soga’s own biographer that “there is nothing in life at such a village either to stimulate or ennoble” (Chalmers 1877, 12). At the same time, one should note the paradox that Soga was writing this for the pages of a newspaper published by Lovedale, the very institution that had already begun to play such an important role in challenging the primacy of oral culture in favour of print culture.

      It is also paradoxical that Soga introduced the idea of nation, in writing that “[o]ne advantage we shall reap with the coming of this journal is that we will be confident that the people will now get the truth about the affairs of the nation” (in Williams 1983, 151). Soga’s writing therefore presents the contradiction of seeming to celebrate a pristine oral culture