for the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) as a bookbinder. The governing body of the DEIC, the Lords Seventeen, approved Ritter’s list of required materials for a complete printing office on 28 June 1794 (Smith 1971, 12). Ritter subsequently printed several miscellanea on a small hand press; a fragment of part of an almanac for 1796 is the earliest surviving item (Smith 1971, 14). Despite petitioning for the post of printer to the (now British colonial) government, that post went first to H. H. Smith in 1799, before Sir George Yonge briefly awarded a monopoly on printing to the firm of Walker and Robertson in July 1800. But after its self-styled Government Printing Office was taken over by the authorities in October 1801 (the firm had dared to issue a newspaper, The Cape Town Gazette, and African Advertiser/Kaapsche Stads Courant, en Afrikaansche Berichter, in August 1801), H. H. Smith became printer (see Smith 1971, 11–22),11 while Ritter remained a bookbinder (Rossouw 1987, 131, 66). For almost the next quarter of a century, the only printing presses in the Cape were that of the Government Printing Office controlled by the colonial administration; in Graaff-Reinet (more on which later), and those run by the mission stations.
Among the early commercial printing pioneers at the Cape was George Greig (1799–1863), who ran a printing business in Cape Town from 1823 to 1835. Greig borrowed an old press from the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) superintendent, John Philip (the LMS had two presses, which had arrived in 1814 and 1819), before acquiring his own and publishing the first issue of The South African Commercial Advertiser on 7 January 1824, beginning a struggle over freedom of the press in the Cape Colony that saw him forced to sell his press to the government and leave to pursue his case in London. He finally returned in August 1825 with permission to resume printing the Advertiser (Rossouw 1987, 70, 69; Smith 1971, 32–45). William Storey Bridekirk (c1796–1843), who had arrived at the Cape in 1817 and worked in the Government Printing Office before opening his own stationery and bookbindery on Longmarket Street, appears to have bought the presses that Greig was forced to sell in 1824 (Smith 1971, 40). With the encouragement of the authorities, Bridekirk briefly published his own newspaper, The South African Chronicle and Mercantile Advertiser, until late December 1826 (Smith 1971; Rossouw 1987, 18).
Another early pioneer influenced more directly by Greig was Louis Henri Meurant, a farmer’s son from Berne, Switzerland, who had trained as a printer with Greig in Cape Town in 1823 (Smith 1971, 33–35). In 1830 Meurant bought at an auction in Graaff-Reinet a press that had a long history in the colony: it had been given by one Rutt, printer at the King’s Printing House in Shacklewell, London, to two of his former employees, Thomas Strongfellow and Robert Godlonton, who had joined one of the settler parties to the Eastern Cape in 1819. The press arrived with Strongfellow and Godlonton in Algoa Bay (now Port Elizabeth/Nelson Mandela Metro) aboard the Chapman 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
