The Book in Africa

Critical Debates

C. Davis,D. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137401625
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume presents new research and critical debates in African book history, and brings together a range of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in the subject. It includes case studies from across Africa, ranging from third-century manuscript traditions to twenty-first century internet communications.

Part I

From Script to Print

1

Copying and Circulation in South Africa’s Reading Cultures, 1780–1840

Archie L. Dick

Introduction

In June 1800, Lady Anne Barnard observed that J. C. Ritter’s Almanac only sold one copy in each of the Cape’s four districts, and that the printer made ‘a fortune of two shillings by it’.¹ Explaining that all the inhabitants read or copied out of that one, she pinpointed well-established practices of copying and circulating reading matter at the Cape of Good Hope at the turn of the eighteenth century. Although almanacs had been printed and sold since 1796, handwritten copies of almanacs were not uncommon at the time, and an example for 1801 can be found today in the Mendelssohn collection of the South African Parliament Library.² By 1836, printers still produced a few copies for the same reason, and Robertson’s booksellers carried just a few almanacs and directories. When Lady Jane Franklin enquired about this in November of that year, she was told that as soon as there were a few ‘works on the colony … they were always bought up immediately’.³ They were probably also copied and circulated.

Cape almanacs and directories were not the only type of reading matter that was copied and circulated. Lady Barnard and Lady Franklin visited the Cape when the control over printing by the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) was weakening, and the English-language press just beginning to establish itself. Just over a decade after a printing press was introduced, Dutch rule ended with the second British occupation in 1806. Soon afterwards, Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn, the self-described ‘Franklins of the Cape’, campaigned successfully for greater press freedom, promoting in the process a more robust print culture.⁴ There quickly followed a significant rise in the number of English-language newspapers, as well as a few Dutch and bilingual Dutch–English newspapers.

A chart of nineteenth-century newspapers with a list of titles that lasted less than one year attests however to a misunderstood market.⁵ Newspaper editors wrote about ‘an increasing appetite for reading’ and a ‘taste for reading which is evidently spreading’, but by about mid-century one lamented: ‘in the colony, that large portion of the population forming the actual “lower class” supplies no readers for periodicals’.⁶

The reasons why newspapers folded so suddenly may include language, subscription fees, printing costs, high levels of illiteracy, and transport to isolated areas. More significantly, several ‘lower-class’ as well as wealthier readers were unlikely to buy their own copies of newspapers because, as Kirsten McKenzie argues, reading at the Cape had a ‘strongly communal character’.⁷ This practice may be explained to some extent by the lingering tradition of voorlesers (readers). They were appointed officials who, among other community clerical tasks, read the scriptures or led the hymn-singing in Dutch Reformed churches and, often also as teachers, read passages of text to children in schools.⁸ This kind of literacy behaviour characterised early Cape reading cultures, manifesting practices of copying, circulating and communal reading before the impact of the printing press and print capitalism was felt more widely.

William Johnson explains that reading cultures are socio-cultural systems that embrace several elements such as how to decode texts, where reading occurs, choosing to read aloud, selecting what should be read and not read, when reading occurs, who the members of reading communities are and what motives drive reading.⁹ He does not specify how reading matter is produced and distributed to communities of readers. Yet, as this chapter argues, copying and circulating were reading and especially reader-related practices from about 1780 until the 1840s, and they were integrated into political, religious and cultural developments at the Cape of Good Hope. This was a period of transition in South Africa’s book history in which its reading cultures began to adapt to and impact a new mode of producing reading material.

Applying copying and circulating practices throughout this period, readers produced and distributed reading matter, often leaving marks of ownership and identity on them. In this way, readers inserted themselves into the production, distribution and even the consumption circuits of reading matter. These practices were driven less by economics than by other social forces, and although print commodities started to circulate at the Cape by the turn of the eighteenth century, the copying and circulation of reading matter continued for several decades. This argument adds to growing concerns about the presumed universality of Benedict Anderson’s ‘print-capitalism’ thesis, according to which capitalism best drives the assembly of disparate communities through print commodities circulated via the market.¹⁰ Recent studies in Africa-diaspora and African print cultures raise contrary insights.

Editors Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein argue as an acute insight from case studies in Early African American Print Culture that circulation followed in the paths of political movements, racial ideologies and regional practices not always and necessarily buttressed by economics. Economic circulation, in other words, is an aspect of social circulation in print culture rather than the other way round. In some of the case studies, according to the editors, copying – such as a culture of reprinting, adaptation and reproduction in early African American print culture – ‘embarrasses a marketplace that rewards novelty with economic success’.¹¹

Stephanie Newell’s investigation into readerships of locally owned newspapers in colonial West Africa also observes the limitations of associating print capitalism with nationalism. She endorses Partha Chatterjee’s criticism that Anderson ignores ‘the various forms of community imagined locally, and ignores the diversity of local nationalisms to be found in the colonies’.¹² A bias in book history, Newell claims, is ‘the tendency to use generalised categories such as “the reader” or “reader” to refer to the plurality of consumers of books and other printed materials at different times and in different global locations’.¹³

In this way, local readers are frequently left ‘out of the frame’. She calls for situated histories of reading that will ‘accommodate diverse modes of textual production and reception that exist beyond “the book”, and that include newspapers, pamphlets, internet writings, and other so-called ephemeral texts’.¹⁴ What these scholars appear to overlook is the agency and actual practices of readers in the production and distribution of reading matter, and how they shaped the transition to print capitalism.

This chapter examines the production, through copying and circulating, of pamphlets, catechisms, handmade booklets, koplesboeke or student notebooks, and other ajami manuscripts (the use of Arabic script to write in another language). Readers, as copyists, circulated this reading matter at the Cape of Good Hope from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Largely indifferent to the rise of print capitalism, these readers produced and distributed reading matter in locally ‘imagined’ communities. Personal and social identities were often inscribed into this reading matter to signify ownership, social status, as well as crude forms of authorship. These practices persisted in different ways after printing was introduced, and they shaped the kind of print capitalism that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

Copying and circulation for political and religious reasons

During the eighteenth century books at the Cape were usually privately owned, and limited by and large to DEIC government officials and Dutch Reformed and Lutheran priests, who either brought their collections with them from Europe, or purchased them at local auctions.¹⁵ There were some Free Blacks, comprised mostly of manumitted slaves and exiles banished by the DEIC to the Cape, who owned books as well.¹⁶ A focus on copying and circulating renders visible the reading matter found outside elite networks. An earlier example is the notebook of Johannes Smiesing (1697–1734), a slave who was also a teacher in the DEIC Slave Lodge. Smiesing copied some of its contents from other books circulating at the Cape. Tamil-language remedies, judging from the handwriting, were copied into his book by someone else, possibly Nicholas Ondaatje, the Free Black teacher from Ceylon.¹⁷

Official copying was extensive at the Cape throughout Dutch rule, and the numbers of DEIC ‘pennisten’, or scribes, grew from about ten in the 1720s, to about 60 in 1793.¹⁸ They were expected, among other tasks, to produce at least three copies of the Council of Policy documents that would be shipped to company authorities in Batavia and Amsterdam.¹⁹ Many of these scribes became ‘free burghers’ or citizens, who began to copy and circulate other kinds of reading matter from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century.²⁰ These practices were put to effective use by free burgher ‘Cape Patriots’ who were unhappy that local officials and a well-connected clique excluded them from the economic boom resulting from a growing number of visiting ships.

In May 1778, anonymous pamphlets sealed in envelopes were strewn in the streets, and in front of some houses in Cape Town. These handwritten pamphlets dealt with grievances against the local administration. One was titled ‘The power and the liberties of a Civil Society defended by the feelings of the most eminent lawyers, dedicated to the judgement of the Cape citizen’. Another bore the title ‘To our brothers, Fellow Citizens of this Colony of the Cape Of Good Hope this is dedicated and recommended for their consideration’.²¹ A third pamphlet was called ‘A New Year gift to the citizens of the Cape’.²²

In March 1779, the ‘Cape Patriots’ sent a petition to the DEIC directors in Amsterdam asking for a fairer economic dispensation, and complained that local officials kept for themselves ‘the largest and most profitable part of the trade’ with Europe and the East Indies.²³ They also requested a local printing press, but to no avail.²⁴ The petition may have been flawed as unrepresentative because it was signed only by 404 ‘Cape Patriots’ of about 3000 free burghers then living at the Cape. Also, it was unsuccessful in the end. Nonetheless, the copying and circulation practices of the ‘Cape Patriots’ warrant closer scrutiny. The American War of Independence (1775–83) had influenced the ‘Cape Patriots’ actions.²⁵ More interesting though was the use of pamphlets in both cases.

Writing about ‘An Uncommon Cape’ (Cape Cod) in the United States, Eleanor Brackbill explains that pamphlets were standard for eighteenth-century political discussions. They consisted of pages stitched together, and could be produced quickly. Brackbill also adds, quoting Coit Tyler, that the pamphlet was ‘the chief weapon in the intellectual warfare of the American Revolution’.²⁶ Pamphlets were also used in political struggles in the Netherlands in the mid-eighteenth century, and typically had long titles. These became models for the ‘Cape Patriots’ and the copying of a pamphlet, in one case, would today be considered as flagrant plagiarism. The pamphlet ‘The power and the liberties of a Civi...