Creating Postcolonial Literature

African Writers and British Publishers

C. Davis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349350513, 9780230369368
• eBook ISBN: 9781137328380
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Literature

Using case studies, this book explores the publishing of African literature, addressing the construction of literary value, relationships between African writers and British publishers, and importance of the African market. It analyses the historical, political and economic conditions framing the emergence of postcolonial literature.

Part I

Oxford University Press in Africa, 1927–80

1

The Vision for OUP in Africa

I have a vision … of Oxford African Primers in the hands of these squatting boys, in mission schools, in town and village, in bush schools far out in the blue where native teachers, only a little less heathen than their pupils, are struggling to make a greater Africa. This is not only ‘uplift’, it is also a sound business proposition, because each book will be paid for!

– Letter from Eric Parnwell to Kenneth Sisam, 1928¹

Eric Parnwell, ‘Expert in Overseas Education’ at OUP, first visited Africa in 1927 with the mission to seek out new markets for OUP and to identify the new direction for the company on that continent. Parnwell’s account of his ‘African tour’ is an illuminating document, which articulated his plan for a racially stratified publishing policy. His vision was for OUP to undertake mass publishing of schoolbooks for African children across the continent: a combination of a vision of a ‘greater Africa’ and a ‘sound business proposition’. This chapter examines how Parnwell’s cultural and economic strategy unfolded in South Africa and in the African colonies in the twentieth century, and examines how OUP’s strategy was modified in the postcolonial period.

The British Empire was a captive market of vital significance to the British book trade in the late nineteenth century.² The imperial book trade served two distinct markets with separate sales channels: firstly, trade to the settler colonies, which consisted largely of trade books for the white settler populations of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, and, secondly, trade to the occupied colonies, which was predominantly in the form of schoolbooks for the colonial education system. As the settler colonies became self-governing dominions in the early twentieth century, British publishers moved in to protect these markets and several larger publishers established publishing branches in these countries: indeed, in the first half of the twentieth century, the prosperity of British publishers came to hinge on these special commercial relationships with Britain’s so-called ‘free empire’. Most significantly, British publishers moved in after self-government in Australia in 1901, to ensure a continued commercial advantage: Macmillan led the way, opening a branch in Melbourne in 1905, and OUP swiftly followed in 1908. This business was dominated by colonial editions, which were series of mainly new British novels published in conjunction with UK editions and sold by British publishers to exporters throughout the empire and dominions.³ OUP opened a branch in Toronto in 1904, and was followed, after self-government in Canada, by Macmillan in 1906. Publishers then, with varying degrees of success, attempted to follow a similar model in the other British dominions of New Zealand and South Africa.

The book trade to the occupied colonies was also significant for British publishers in the early twentieth century. British publishers enjoyed the protection of copyright legislation: the 1842 and 1911 Copyright Acts applied throughout the colonies, with the result that any book published in Britain was automatically entitled to be published in the empire. India, at the heart of the British imperial strategy, was the major book export market for British books. Priya Joshi describes the Indian book market as ‘massively profitable’ in the nineteenth century, and writes that 80 per cent of Macmillan’s foreign book sales were to India in 1901.⁴ The most commercially significant trade in schoolbooks was dominated by Macmillan, Longmans, Green and OUP. Macmillan opened branches in Bombay (1901), Calcutta (1907) and Madras (1913), and OUP followed suit, establishing a branch in Bombay in 1912 to produce Indian schoolbooks in the vernacular, and subsequently opening branches in Madras and Calcutta in 1915.⁵

In the early twentieth century, OUP also established itself as a major publishing authority on the British Empire. Rimi Chatterjee’s detailed study of OUP’s publications for and about India identifies the ‘saleability of the other’ at this time: ‘the Press made its money interpreting other civilisations for the West’. She notes how OUP continued this tradition until the end of British rule in India: ‘The old pattern of “India experts” in England writing books from the English point of view continued to be followed in London as the norm.’⁶ Similarly, OUP played a significant role in what Said terms the ‘codification of difference’ about Africa in this period.⁷ It was involved in the task of categorising and systematising the continent through amassing empirical knowledge: ethnographic, economic, scientific, geographic, linguistic and historical. OUP published such seminal works as Eric Walker’s Historical Atlas of South Africa (1922), The African Research Survey of Science in Africa (1935), Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) and The Nuer (1940), C. G. Seligman’s Races of Africa (1939), T. R. Batten’s Africa Past and Present (1943), Elizabeth Colson and Max Gluckman’s Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (1951) and the Handbook of African Languages (1956).

Alongside this role in supporting the creation and circulation of Eurocentric discourses on Africa, OUP began to establish a commercial empire in Africa from the early twentieth century. A sales office was opened first in Cape Town in 1915 and trade to the British colonies in Africa began in the late 1920s. This was followed by the establishment of sales offices in Nairobi, Ibadan, Accra, Dar es Salaam and Addis Ababa during the 1940s and early 1950s. The Press was not a commercial institution: it was, and remains, an arm of the University administered by the Delegates – appointed academics within the University – and managed by the Secretary, a full-time manager relieved of academic duties. However, it was supported by the commercial London-based business of Oxford University Press, which had been established in 1896 under the management of the Publisher to the University, with the primary purpose of serving the Clarendon Press by promoting, distributing and selling the publications of the OUP throughout the world.

The principle was thus established that the cultural and scholarly endeavours of the Clarendon Press should be funded by the profits from colonial markets. According to Bourdieu’s analysis, this is an economy of cultural production that contains inherent contradictions. In The Rules of Art he sets out a model of cultural production in which the fields of restricted and large-scale production are polarised, and while he acknowledges that it is possible for a publishing house to have ‘two different economies coexisting within it, one tuned to production and research … the other orientated toward the exploitation of assets’, in his opinion this is an irreconcilable position: ‘one can easily conceive of the contradictions that result from the incompatibilities between these two economies’.⁸

This chapter assesses OUP’s enterprise in order to understand the interplay of cultural and economic capital between London and the African branches: it examines how OUP’s system of cross-subsidisation of different areas of its publishing list was carried out, and asks whether this strategy led to ‘contradictions’ and ‘incompatibilities’. In addition, it charts the relationship that was established between OUP and the British colonial government, and considers the impact of this on the educational and literary texts that OUP published for Africa. This overview of OUP in Africa is followed in the three subsequent chapters by a closer examination of OUP’s strategy in West and East Africa after independence, and in South Africa after 1946.

OUP in South Africa, 1927–46

As the London Publisher from 1913, Humphrey Milford authorised OUP’s early expansion into Africa. Five years after the Union of South Africa was founded as a dominion of the British Empire, in March 1915, Charles Mellow was appointed as OUP’s representative in Cape Town, and he acted as an agent for OUP and other publishers.⁹ However, the South African market proved to be particularly challenging to British publishers in the first half of the century due to local competition and strong anti-British sentiment: Macmillan, OUP, Blackie and Longmans, Green all struggled for a share in the book market.

One of Parnwell’s first tasks when he visited East and South Africa in 1927–28 was to investigate the situation in the Cape Town branch in person. He rapidly came to the conclusion that the publications of the Clarendon Press would be suitable only for the white English-speaking minority, and that the ‘European’ educational market was saturated by local publishers. He felt that the main area for expansion in Southern Africa would be the provision of books for the South African and British colonial government’s Native Education programme, identifying 5.5 million Africans in the Union and one million in Southern Rhodesia. However, despite Parnwell’s enthusiasm to enter this market in South Africa, there is no archival evidence that the plan was successful. On a return trip in 1943, he wrote that the ‘Native and European’ trade in South Africa was being surpassed by the trade in West Africa.¹⁰ Both OUP managers and Parnwell agreed that the Cape Town branch development was hindered by its failure to move rapidly into Native Education.¹¹

The Press had difficulty entering this market in South Africa due to the lack of funding and central organisation of the African schools. Elsewhere in British colonial Africa, OUP worked closely with the Colonial Education Department to supply schoolbooks, but as a self-governing dominion South Africa’s education system was independent of the Colonial Office. Native Education in the Union was handled by the four provincial Education Departments, each of which worked independently. African education was seriously underfunded by the government from 1910 to 1948, with the result that only 30 per cent of African children received any schooling. Expenditure for white pupils was nearly ten times as much as for African pupils. Church groups and missions largely controlled African education, and, as Jeffrey Peires describes, they had their own printing presses for publishing textbooks, which restricted the opportunities for commercial publishers.¹² In 1926 in South Africa there were 2702 schools run by church groups and missions, and only 68 state schools for black students.¹³ This situation continued into the early 1950s, when, for example, only about 1 per cent of schools in the Cape were state provided (24 out of 2296).¹⁴ Jonathan Hyslop argues that the mission schools were incapable of meeting demand, and as a result ‘failed both the potential pupils they excluded and the minority of actual pupils they took in’.¹⁵ Parnwell thus anticipated the market for schoolbooks for Native Education as early as the 1920s, and the foundations were laid in the 1930s and 1940s. However, his strategy was slow to be realised, and it was not until the advent of Bantu Education that the Press was able to achieve mass publishing of schoolbooks for black South Africans.

‘A hand in the game’: OUP in British colonial Africa, 1927–45

In addition to developing a strategy for South Africa, Parnwell set out to develop the business of OUP in the African colonies. Indeed, the Overseas Educational department (OED) of OUP had been formed in 1926 expressly for the publication of books for schools in the empire.¹⁶ Parnwell’s first memorandum back to London in 1927 explains the process by which OUP negotiated this arrangement. Parnwell begins by describing how he got to work building up relationships with the colonial education officers to convince them to start adopting Oxford University Press textbooks in their schools:

I had an interview this morning with S. Rivers-Smith, Director of Education in Tanganyika. He told me that he did a good business with Macmillan in Swahili readers and other books produced in India. There was no objection whatever to the employment of Indian labour on this work, in fact it was essential in order that the books should be cheap. Evidently Macmillan thought it worth their while, as they were keen on it, and he would like us to have a hand in the game.¹⁷

He then described how textbooks for the colonies were beginning to be organised centrally by the Colonial Office, specifically by the African Books Committee:

The Committee also advises the local directors of Education and teachers in the choice of existing English and vernacular textbooks, and will arrange for the publication of manuscripts of which it approves. It may be predicted that any textbook approved by thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Oxford University Press in Africa, 1927–80
• Part II The Three Crowns Series, 1962–76
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index