and collect and disseminate (like SALA)—in this case the Grey Collection, which had its beginnings with the 5,200 items donated by Sir George Grey, outgoing governor of the Cape Colony, to the South African Library (now the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town) in 1861. Grey had by that date served as governor of South Australia (1840–45), New Zealand (1845–53) and the Cape (1854–61); he would go on to serve once more as governor of New Zealand (1861–68), and later as MP and premier there. Twidle muses on the fact that this extraordinary collection—including a Shakespeare First Folio and valuable incunabula, as well as seminal texts on early ethnography, natural history and philology from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand—is chronically under-used, and this leads him to ponder how its organisation invites or frustrates use, and what this might imply for the colonial archive more broadly. The collection offers opportunities for studies of South–South links across various imperial spaces, including of comparative approaches to the study of autochthonous languages and the challenge their alterity was early regarded as posing to European modes of intellectual organisation and engagement. And yet, as Twidle observes, a dilemma in studying such collections in a post-colony is the constant return to organisational models inherited from the colonial period. “A point of departure from this familiar paradigm”, Twidle suggests,
might be to balance an attention to that rather abstract imaginary of accumulated texts and tropes—‘the colonial library’—with a more materialist account of ‘the library in the colony’. How are specific institutions and collections established within an expanding ‘world system’ in the nineteenth century? How are they marked by their local context and in what ways does this determine the problems and possibilities associated with their use today? (258).
Twidle attempts to answer some of these questions, specifically with attention to |Xam and !Kung material famously transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, and to Bleek’s role as the first librarian of the Grey Collection.
While Twidle’s essay comments on the wealth of knowledge about autochthonous languages held in the Grey Collection and on the hegemony of English in post-apartheid discourses of governance (and the so-called African Renaissance), the three essays that follow chart different courses through fascinating material that bears on some of the same concern with the “otherness” of other cultures of communication, and with their fates after (and imbrication with) technologies of print: Xhosa oral and performance culture, contemporary performance poetry and orature, and mid-century photonovels.
In the first of these essays (Chapter 6.1), Jeff Opland, long a leading scholar of oral cultures in South Africa, offers a thoroughgoing and suggestive survey of the appearances of representative ideas of the book in oral performances in isiXhosa. “If the technology of print introduced by whites was eager to absorb Xhosa oral traditions and if in the course of time it nurtured black contributors to the print media”, Opland writes, what, he wonders, “was the complementary attitude of Xhosa oral poetry to white culture?” (289). Considering how the Xhosa oral tradition interacted with white technologies of writing and of print, Opland examines first the depiction of books in praise poetry of the nineteenth century, before turning to the cases of two literate poets writing and performing in isiXhosa in the twentieth: Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Christian convert working in Johannesburg in the 1920s and a significant early woman writer in isiXhosa; and David Yali-Manisi, among the most important of the iimbongi in recent South African history, whose work has a fascinating history of print and performance—and a contested legacy. Opland almost single-handedly rediscovered and—with the help of Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende and Peter Mtuze—translated Mgqwetho’s important body of work (see Opland 2007). His relationship with Yali-Manisi—a not uncomplicated one of observation, facilitation, collaboration and promotion—has been written about by Opland himself (2005) and, more recently, subtly and judiciously by Ashlee Neser (2011). In this representative engagement with a long history of performed poetry in isiXhosa, a thorough revision of a chapter from his 1998 monograph, Xhosa Poets and Poetry, Opland shows how writing and print cultures were early associated with white colonial oppression in the region, and explores the implications of what appears still to be the case of oral technology’s apparently unwavering rejection of writing.
Deborah Seddon’s essay (Chapter 6.2) engages with the difficulty of representing orature in the South African literary canon while, in the author’s words, “promoting recognition of [...] its existence as an oral form” (306). Seddon engages with scholarship on orality and orature in the region, discusses the work of important but under-studied poets like Ingoapele Madingoane, and looks to the future negotiation of technologies of orality with print. In so doing, her work both revisits some of the issues canvassed in Opland’s and, in its polemical openness to the difficulties of producing a document or platform receptive to the form of contemporary orature in South Africa, points intriguingly towards possible future uses of print—and other technology, perhaps visual and recorded sound—in South Africa, in particular in institutions of higher learning. Seddon’s concern with the politics of representation and collection and with technologies of reproduction puts her work in dialogue, too, with Twidle’s essay. She takes her cue from Hofmeyr’s suggestion that the initial confrontation between orality and literacy in parts of South Africa had often “unpredictable” consequences for the relationship between writing and print; Hofmeyr showed how orality “transforms—or oralises—literacy, rather than the other way around”, Seddon notes. She wishes to turn to consider this “capacity for transformation” by examining how selected contemporary black South African poets “consistently viewed the print medium, alongside the continued deployment of oral forms, as an important means to ensure the preservation, education and dissemination of South African orature” (307–8).
Lily Saint’s 2010 essay on photonovels (or photocomics) in South Africa between the 1960s and 1980s has been condensed and revised for this collection from the Journal of Southern African Studies. In this revised version (Chapter 6.3), Saint considers the contexts of a number of publications that used staged photographs and text, most often employing narrative conventions associated with romance, thrillers and Westerns. Publications like Great, Kid Colt, Tessa, Dr. Conrad Brand, Grensvegter, and See: Romantic Adventures in Photos enjoyed enormous success. What energises Saint’s analysis is the speculation that these publications had readerships that cut across boundaries of class and—most importantly—race. Her evidence points in particular to black readers being more likely to read publications intended for white readers. Saint’s fascinating exploration of the semiotics of race in some of these publications points to hitherto unremarked fractures in the facade of white popular culture that, according to popular wisdom, celebrated racial purity. What Saint finds is that many of these publications employed what she calls “polyvocal, extra-literary discourses even when they attempt, particularly in their reliance on hyper-stylised genres, to reify narrative monolingualism” (Saint 2010, 944). As a consequence, she suggests, they attest the difficulty of apartheid’s attempts “to erase the mixture that was not only a part of everyday life in South Africa but even a part of Afrikaner heritage—and whiteness—itself” (Saint 2010, 944). Popular culture can be unconsciously subversive. This Saint illustrates in fascinating detail, demonstrating how the apparently ideologically empty appropriation of the Western photocomic form (and especially photocomics with quasi-“Wild West” narratives) “provided more heterogeneous modes through which to read race, poking holes in the apartheid screen of vision by fostering practices of interracial readership that crossed legal, imaginative and narrative boundaries” (342).
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An interest in legal and institutional restrictions on reading (and restrictions on ideologically motivated attempts to structure encounters with texts in particular ways) preoccupies the essays in the penultimate section of this collection. Peter McDonald’s essay (Chapter 7.1) obliquely approaches the operation of apartheid-era South Africa’s censors (the subject of his 2009 monograph, The Literature Police): the subject of the readings that he discusses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is obviously not a work by a South African author, but McDonald’s examination of the censorship system’s engagement with this novel and the problem of obscenity teases out its implications for a broader understanding of the form and nature of institutional reading and the policing of “literature” in white South Africa.