in 1820, only to be impounded by the colony’s acting governor, Sir Rufane Donkin. A press was considered potentially subversive, the nerves of the colonial authorities having been exercised by Greig’s, Thomas Pringle’s and John Fairbairn’s agitation for a free press. The confiscated press was sent to Graaff-Reinet, where it was occasionally used to run off government notices, before being sold at auction once the principle of the free press had been established for the colonies (in 1827). In 1839 Meurant sold the press and the newspaper he had established (and which he printed on it) to the very same Godlonton with whom it had arrived in the country nearly two decades earlier (Gordon-Brown 1979, 7–11; see also Rossouw 1987, 102, 47).
For missionaries, active in South Africa since the 1730s, printing was essential for evangelising. LMS missionaries Dr J. T. van der Kemp and J. Read, at Graaff-Reinet from May 1801, are generally regarded as having been responsible for the first printing in South Africa outside of Cape Town (Smith 1971, 53). Their earliest publications, a spelling book and spelling table, have not survived. Scholars also merely accept the account of a catechism printed in a Khoisan language (Wilhelm Bleek lists it as Tzitzika Thuickwedi mika khwekhwenama, or “Principles of the word of God for the Hottentot nation”) at Bethelsdorp (near present-day Port Elizabeth) in 1803 or 1804 (Smith 1971, 54). The LMS’s Robert Moffat (1795–1883) is remembered for printing texts in Setswana at Kuruman in the Northern Cape on a cumbersome iron printing press that had arrived in Cape Town in October 1825 and been allocated to Moffat in 1831 by the LMS’s superintendent in South Africa, John Philip. It would be in use at the Kuruman station until the early 1880s (Bradlow 1987, 9, 11; Fraser 2008, 7–9). Moffat had printed a Bechuana Spelling and Reading Book in London in 1826. His Setswana translation of the Bible appeared in 1857; the press also produced numerous tracts, periodicals, spelling books, catechisms and hymnals (Bradlow 1987, 19; Smith 1971, 54–57).
Among the Scottish missionaries, Rev. John Ross and Rev. John Bennie operated a Ruthven press at Tyume (“Chumie”), later Lovedale, near Alice in the Eastern Cape from December 1823 (Smith 1971, 57). The press at Lovedale printed Bennie’s A Systematic Vocabulary of the Kaffrarian Language in 1820 (Bradlow 1987, 10). The Methodists started printing after the Presbyterians, but soon made up for it with their productivity—in Grahamstown from 1833 and thereafter at Fort Peddie (Bradlow 1987, 59–60; Rossouw 1987, 174). There were a number of other Wesleyan presses in the eastern Cape Colony from the early 1830s, run by such missionary printers as William Binnington Boyce (noted grammarian active in the eastern Cape 1830–43, and responsible for a[n isiXhosa] Grammar of the Kaffir Language, published in Grahamstown in early 1834, with an expanded 1844 edition printed in London), James Archbell, John Ayliff (who later founded what became Healdtown Institute and compiled an isiXhosa vocabulary that was published in London in 1846), and John Whittle Appleyard (arrived 1839, remembered for his influential isiXhosa grammar, The Kafir Language) (Gordon-Brown 1979, 56–57; Gilmour 2006, 73–77, 95–96). Gilmour (2006, 111) has written engagingly about the complicated manoeuvring in print by Methodist grammarians whose approach “relied to a large extent upon the seemingly problematic task of removing the language from its cultural context”, demonstrating that the complexities of the Xhosa language suggested that the Xhosa people could be Christianised, but not that they were inherently noble (as they had earlier been seen) (Gilmour 2006, 73). Print made the circulation—and political usefulness—of such readings immensely influential.
Smith and Rossouw have noted the spread of printing through the rest of the colony and into Natal—the first recorded occurrence is in 1844 in Pietermaritzburg (Smith 1971, 93)—and what became the Orange Free State (1846, Wesleyan Mission press at Platberg) (Rossouw 1987, 174) and Transvaal republics (1862 at Potchefstroom) (Rossouw 1987, 16; see further Smith 1971, 82–90 on the Cape, 91–99 on Natal, 101–4 on the Orange Free State, and 105–31 on the Transvaal).
Print culture pre-empted—one might even say largely predetermined the outcome of—pitched battles over identity and subjectivity in Southern Africa: the reduction of extreme heterogeneity into varieties of difference able to be compassed by technologies of understanding, control and ultimately conversation (and the performance of civility) was in one way or another dependent on print—and what print is seen to make possible. “Literacy … and behind it the widespread introduction of print culture”, Leon de Kock suggests in his contribution to this volume (54), “was at the centre of colonisation in South Africa”. In nineteenth-century colonial South Africa, the introduction and spread of print was not without physical and metaphorical battles, and the battles not without casualties: De Kock deploys an anecdote about the melting of lead type from the press at the Lovedale mission in the Eastern Cape to make bullets for colonial forces during one of the brutal frontier wars against the Xhosa—in this case, the War of the Axe, 1846–47—as a symbolic event that speaks redolently of the imbrication of violence and text (52; see also De Kock 1996, 31).
De Kock’s essay guides us through some of the key moments of mission-directed printing in Southern Africa, among them Van der Kemp and the Glasgow Missionary Society’s John Ross, who brought a Ruthven press with him to the Cape Colony in 1823. De Kock argues that missionary uses of the printing press paved the way for the forging, out of a “diverse heterocosm of cultural identities”, of a recognisably modern—although fractured and contested—public sphere. Invoking Benedict Anderson’s much-quoted idea that nations are imagined communities—although De Kock notes it might be more appropriate in the case of South Africa to refer to the imagination of a “colonial proto-nation”—in whose self-conceptualisation print culture acts as a key technology, strategy and mode of expression, De Kock suggests that in colonial South Africa, “the introduction of print enabled a medial convergence, a technological axis in whose versatile embrace all parties in an otherwise Babelesque swirl of incommensurability could—theoretically—both speak and be heard across time and space” (50). Thus, while it might now be routine to argue that the history of print culture represents a turning point in the history of South African modernity, “a midpoint … in the larger history of colonisation and modernisation” in the region (50), it cannot be gainsaid that the spread of print was vitally important in the difficult emergence of South Africa as a modern state.
While some responses to the coming of print involved oppositionality, others were more complicated and nuanced. De Kock’s essay builds on his generalisations to develop a case study focusing on the experience of Tiyo Soga, the first ordained black missionary minister in South Africa, charting the implications of the contested relationship Soga’s writings and life (as represented by subsequent mission activity as “exemplary”) present for the forms of subjectivity and agency into which the mission experience compelled him. Here De Kock reprises an interest in some of his earlier work in the hybrid potentialities of such complex and multiply aligned figures, and in their suggestiveness for understanding the development of black African nationalism in South Africa. In “Sitting for the civilization test”, De Kock (2001, 392) attempted to present, as a polemical “alternative” to what he characterised as “the by now ritualized invocation of oppositionality” in discussions of the post-colonial, “evidence of desired identification with the colonizing culture as an act of affirmation, a kind of publicly declared ‘struggle’ that does not oppose the terms of a colonial culture, but insists instead on a more pure version of its originating legitimation”. Many black South Africans, De Kock (2001, 403) continued,
did not fight not to become colonial subjects, they fought to become colonial subjects in the public realm, the res publica, in the fullest possible sense, and they did so in the image of unalloyed imperial promise. In the process they sought to hold to eternal shame the shoddy colonial compromises inflicted in the name of the civil imaginary.
Soga provides De Kock with an opportunity to test his claim that, in many cases in the history of colonial and proto-post-colonial South African history in which print cultures can be said to have been a vehicle for the development of a multivalent public sphere, “it is precisely the conflictual, oppositional quality of colonial subjectivity, allegorized as a universal factor by Bhabha, that is downplayed by ‘native’ subjects in their embracing of the undarkened ideals of civil community in the colonial mirror” (De Kock 2001, 404–5).
De Kock continues to promote groundbreaking work on