and space. In what would only much later become known as “South Africa”, such a medial convergence gained purchase on most parties in an otherwise radically heterogeneous spread of communicative modalities, because the politics of colonial power relied on print culture as a means of dissemination and decree, diktat and didactics. In other words, not only was print one of the principal media of governance (legislation, proclamation, court records, executive decree), it was also the means of educational transmission and cultural persuasion (primers, dictionaries, textbooks, monographs, accounts of heroic missionary travels, the Bible and its many translations, religious tracts, literature, orthographies). The book in the narrower sense—and print culture in the larger sense—thus acted as a critically important technology through which were channelled the momentous battles over identity and the contests over “proper” forms of human subjectivity that were such a defining characteristic of the colonial period in South Africa, particularly in the nineteenth century.
It remains important, then, to recall that South Africa’s history of missionary colonialism, accompanying and buttressing an ultimately imperial overlordship, can be seen almost as a model of Benedict Anderson’s sense of nations (or, in this case, colonial proto-nations) emerging as imagined communities in which the institution of print acts as a medial axis, enabling the singularly defined polity or nascent nation—a constellation of diverse groupings previously at odds with or indifferent to one another—to constitute itself in temporally and spatially dispersed, but print-conjoined moments of imaginative unity and reflection. Not only are the contents of print and the medium itself trans-temporal and trans-spatial, but print also binds together a great diversity of immaterial, philosophical, conceptual, ideological, mythical, cosmological and symbolic substance, allowing for the nation-state paradox of potentially warring perspectives peacefully coexisting. Such an embrace of contraries—or disjunct modalities—can be likened to the way pages of a book lie materially against each other, despite the possibly rebarbative implications of animosities and contestations between the various standpoints inlaid in the seeming tranquility of the printed word, in black and white, composed and blocked off in aesthetically pleasing typeface and held in an often tangibly satisfying book design.
Print culture and its transfiguration of the messy business of speech and writing are indeed a kind of pacification, although we should never forget the deep irony of Chinua Achebe’s use of this term in the final line of Things Fall Apart, a novel that—to some extent—provides a broad-stroke allegorical matrix and a kind of shorthand for the historical process behind the emergence of print cultures under conditions of colonisation in general. That is, behind the clean lines and geometric symmetry of the material book, and anterior to its apparently tranquil presentation of civilly expressed perspectives, there often lies a tumultuous making and breaking. This is certainly the case in Southern Africa. As I suggested in Civilising Barbarians (1996), the orthodoxy of “English” as both a means of cultural transfusion and a discourse of power/ influence in the nineteenth-century “civilizing mission” in the region that was later to become known as “South Africa” was literally won by blood. And this eventual orthodoxy, this commanding and, in the final instance, bloody discourse of Enlightenment modernity was nothing if not bound up with the seminal emergence of print culture in the representational contests spearheaded by missionaries.
Print culture, the technological base item of which was “hot metal” or “type”—individual letters and words fashioned in metal and arranged into the template of rectangular folios by human hand—was historically implicated in a singularly brutal metonymy of lead. An historical item of signal import makes the point more tellingly than any number of words can: during the War of the Axe (1846–47), one of the so-called “frontier” conflicts on the eastern border of the Cape Colony, soldiers were pushed to the point of melting down lead type from the Lovedale mission—that hallowed site of civilising persuasion—to make bullets, instruments with which to kill opponents in a situation of war (De Kock 1996, 31; Shepherd 1940, 400). This deadly—and paradoxical—economy of lead, incorporating a literal transforming of the instruments of literacy and communication into instruments of killing, is an instance in the micro-sphere of a far more general condition during the many years of colonisation: the co-implication of printing and piercing, literacy and lubricity, disinterested information and deadly inculcation. If they will not have the book, then let them have the sword! Such was the order, or the index, of persuasion, the double-edged import of that lofty signifier “civilisation”. And the historical record shows that from the earliest missionary expeditions to South Africa, the printing press featured as a pre-eminent agent of pacification in the service of enlightenment, under the political aegis of what would later come to be understood as missionary imperialism. Johannes van der Kemp, the first missionary in the region from the London Missionary Society, carried a small printing press with him when he arrived at the Cape in 1799 (George 1982, 59). John Ross of the Glasgow Missionary Society transported a Ruthven press to the Cape in 1823, along with a supply of type, paper and ink (Shepherd 1940, 62). John Bennie, who was to lead the efforts at “reducing” isiXhosa to the systematic rules of orthography and the capture of print, wrote: “On the 17th [December 1823] we got our Press in order; on the 18th the alphabet was set up; and yesterday we threw off 50 copies … a new era has commenced in the history of the kaffer nation” (Shepherd 1940, 62–63). Indeed, a new era had begun, one in whose aftermath South Africans continue to tread, if not thrash, to this day. Bennie was describing the founding of one of the earliest mission presses, later to become famous and inordinately influential as the Lovedale missionary institution.
It was on the sure, working foundation of the printing press and the introduction of a more widespread culture of print that the twin pillars of basic missionary work were built: the enormous project of what became known as “literacy”: Literacy writ large, a social mission with incalculable consequences (cf. Switzer 1984), on the one hand; and, on the other, the laborious and intrusive process of “reducing” Southern African indigenous languages to the matrices of written orthographies, giving the agents of “reduction”—missionaries or their assistants, often “native agents”—a form of control over the written expressions of languages previously beyond their ken. This latter project was a subset of the grand ambitions of literacy, which in itself may have seemed innocent and useful enough, but which was never just “itself”. It was the enabler, along with print culture, the medial route through which every known article of “native” subjectivity—morality, ethics, cosmology, aesthetics (domestic, bodily, literary, architectural), personal deportment, attitude, demeanour, character, belief—would be renegotiated in an extended drama of identity politics. Cultural codes for the establishment of altered forms of identity, to be transmitted by “church, school, [and] printing press” (Mphahlele 1980, 31), would touch on almost every aspect of daily life. Indeed, every article in the practice of everyday life, as much as the articles of cosmological/supernatural belief, were to refashioned and endlessly renegotiated partly and importantly through the critical agency of “literacy” via a culture of print (and an inexhaustible pedagogy of persuasion). In much the sense that wireless technology, the World Wide Web and 24-hour globalised television have transformed the arena of identity and self-fashioning in the contemporary world, creating transnational subjects who no longer observe the “national” domain as their principal enclosure for identity and self-understanding, print in the colonial era stood virtually alone as a technology of mass communication, breaching tribal, class, gender, political and geographical insularities, and creating a new, potentially trans-ethnic basis for self-identification. The impact of print in this regard, especially the increasing commercialisation of print products in the nineteenth century, should not be underestimated.
In the South African mission fields in the nineteenth century, then, the printing press made it possible to realign a diverse heterocosm of cultural identities into the makings of a more singular cultural order (cf. Crais 1992), despite the fact that singularity was always contested and orders were regularly undermined, both subtly and otherwise. Nonetheless, the forms in which these contestations took place were cast, or recast, in the co-axial metonymies of lead, an often violent interfusion of cultural hegemony and military enforcement. In the argument of Mike Kantey (1990, vii), “one of the most important effects of these early mission presses was to reduce a rich and diverse oral tradition
