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2.2
“Spread Far and Wide over the Surface of the Earth”: Evangelical Reading Formations and the Rise of a Transnational Public Sphere: The Case of the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association
ISABEL HOFMEYR
The field of book history as a distinct enterprise has only recently started to take root in South Africa. As such, it is necessarily a late entrant into a field that elsewhere has been taking shape for several decades. While this belated entry poses problems, it equally presents opportunities. Like most endeavours in the humanities, book history, since its inception, has been largely national in orientation (the book in France, the book in Australia and so on). However, this national emphasis has increasingly given way to more transnational approaches, and like most disciplines, book history faces a post-nationalist intellectual climate. South African interest in book history consequently emerges at a time when “mainstream” research must of necessity reinvent itself. One useful direction, then, for South African book history to take is to conceptualise itself as transnational. In this way, local book history will be able to enter a productive dialogue with “mainstream” scholarship and will be able to formulate paradigms that illuminate both the uniqueness of South African developments and the ways in which these can be factored into a broader international story.
This essay attempts to explore these propositions in relation to what may at first appear to be a modest case study—that of the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association (CTLBA). However, this organisation has been chosen as it forms part of a much larger transnational landscape, namely that of nineteenth-century Protestant evangelical reading and publishing. As others have pointed out, within the expanding world of European nineteenth-century book production, Christian religious material comprised the overwhelming proportion of what was produced (Bayly 2004, 357; Howsam 1991). However, the meaning of this fact has seldom been grasped, since studies of nineteenth-century book production tend to follow two separate analytical channels, the one concerned with religious publishing, the other with secular enterprises. The two arms—secular and religious—are often treated discretely, the former the domain of historians of the book and publishing (Feather 1988), the latter the domain of scholarship on nineteenth-century Christianity, missions and philanthropy (Raven 2000; Maughan 1996).
As Howsam (1991) has demonstrated, the demands generated by Protestant evangelical publishing, most notably the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), had far-reaching consequences for the organisation of the nineteenth-century book industry. The book-binding sector, for example, was modernised from a small-scale craft operation to a modern industry by the unprecedented demand for bound Bibles generated by the BFBS. Put in slightly different terms, a transnational public of Protestant readers affected the shape of the book industry in Britain. This transnational public, of course, comprised many millions of people involved in local reading, distribution and sometimes publishing operations, and it was the joint labour of these people that brought this public into being. However, the styles of reading and writing practices formulated by such local groupings are currently poorly understood. In part, this has to do with the tendency to see broad social processes like imperialism, Christian missionary activity and so on as transnational, while people, and particularly colonial subjects, are seen as national. Instead, as this essay attempts to demonstrate, many people actively involved themselves in transnational organisations and formulated ways of reading to support and give substance to their view of a worldwide network of readers.
The precise case we use is that of the CTLBA from the 1890s to 1920s. The organisation had begun in the 1840s as part of the South African Auxiliary of the BFBS (SAABFBS). Detailed minutes, however, only commence in 1892 and run until 1962 (CTLBA 1892–1962). The cut-off date of the 1920s has been chosen as it was a period of rising colonial nationalism and the weakening of ties between South Africa and Britain. In examining the “reading formations” of the CTLBA, we seek to demonstrate how a consideration of one aspect of book history in South Africa might simultaneously illuminate the field of “mainstream” book studies.
I
On 28 November 1912 the members of the CTLBA gathered for their monthly meeting at the YWCA in Cape Town. The meeting opened with a Bible reading and a prayer. The committee (headed by its president, Mrs Wilmot) was made up of 13 women, several of whom were the wives of Protestant clergy of different denominations. Present at the meeting, although not a member of the committee, was Mrs Schelpien, an itinerant seller of Bibles and tracts and employee of the CTLBA (CTLBA 28 June 1909); her name was not noted in the minutes and she was instead entered as “Bible woman”. Present also, although not a member of the committee, was Rev. Van der Merwe, secretary of the South African BFBS (CTLBA 28 Nov. 1912).
In the proceedings of the meeting, Rev. Van der Merwe read a letter regarding the supply of testaments “to certain natives in Johannesburg”. A second letter was read regarding the distribution of testaments “sent by [the Cape Town] Ladies Branch to a Buddhist monastery in Ceylon” and mention was made of “testaments sent for Afghans”. A report was then read of work among “the Moslems” in Cape Town and suburbs. The next item on the agenda was the returns from the depot of the BFBS in Cape Town, which included the sale of 8,354 Bibles, 1,559 testaments and 365 portions, which represented just over £800. The Bible woman then gave her report for the last three months, during which she had visited 902 homes. The minutes noted that she “gave a verbal account of work in homes w[h]ere mothers are drunkards etc.”. The meeting closed with prayer, after which the honorary treasurer received from the committee members present the annual subscriptions that they had garnered from a network of “lady collectors” (CTLBA 28 Nov. 1912).
This account provides a useful summary of the structure and activities of the CTLBA. In terms of structure, the organisation was a sub-committee of the Cape Town Auxiliary of the South African BFBS, in turn a chapter of the British BFBS. In terms of its activities, the CTLBA comprised a committee of middle-class white women who undertook, firstly, the work of raising money to support the sale and distribution of scriptures and, secondly, of arranging for the distribution of these scriptures in Cape Town. The fundraising activities were undertaken by committee members themselves or by “lady collectors”—friends, relatives and acquaintances upon whom the committee members could prevail to undertake fundraising on the CTLBA’s behalf. At the November meeting, the contributions of these “subcontracted” “lady collectors” were handed over by committee members. The CTLBA in turn used part of this money to hire a Bible woman whose primary job was to sell Bibles in poor and working-class areas. In cases where the committee had money to spare, this was given to the South African BFBS.
One