includes her work on the African afterlives of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), book history offers us “an ideal site from which to explore themes of transnationalism”, she contends (Hofmeyr 2010, 107).
Meg Samuelson’s work on Indian Ocean imaginaries shares this impulse to shift attention from centre–periphery studies to the axis of South–South relations. Her essay in this volume considers the case of an extraordinary epistolary and print exchange among three remarkable individuals from South Africa and India in the late 1920s and 1930s: V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, the first agent of colonial India in South Africa; Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, an archivist in the Cape Town Archives; and P. Kodanda Rao, Sastri’s personal secretary. Jeffreys attended a lecture given by Sastri in Cape Town in November 1928 and was thrown into turmoil by an encounter with an Indian who did not conform to her imperial(ist) stereotype. Rao accompanied Sastri on his 1928–29 visit to South Africa, and subsequently entered into a long-running correspondence and friendship with Jeffreys. Encouraged by their correspondence, Jeffreys embarked on a project of intensive research on India, her letters reporting on her reading of everything “from accounts by retired Raj administrators to ‘racy and entertaining’ tales” (95). While at first informed by a conceptualisation of India as peripheral and subservient within the British empire, what Samuelson calls “a North-South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library system”, the Jeffreys–Rao correspondence allowed this white South African to “bypass the North”, engaging in (and fostering) “an alternative South–South axis of textual circulation” (95). Samuelson’s sophisticated use of archival material explores how this exchange participated in the textual production of a public sphere in and between these countries in the late-imperial period. Prompted in large measure by her Indian correspondents, Jeffreys went on to produce a number of important essays on the creole nature of South African cultures, which Samuelson discusses elsewhere (2007). Samuelson’s work points towards a more nuanced understanding of the history of the imagining of South Africa as a plural place, marked by creolized cultures, and one that has long been enriched by the coming of those marked by a dominant discourse as strangers.
In a recent essay, Hofmeyr (2010, 112–14) makes mention of the spread of press ownership among members of Durban’s Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century: Tamil journalist P. S. Aiyar launched three newspapers, Indian World (1898), Colonial Indian Times (1899–1901) and African Chronicle (1908–21; 1929–30), in Tamil and English; Osman Ahmed Effendi ran Durban’s first Muslim newspaper in Durban, Al-Islam, between 1907 and 1910, and followed this with Indian Views (1914), both papers appearing in English and Gujarati; Gandhi himself launched a newspaper, Indian Opinion, in 1903, later to be run by his son, Manilal, from the time of Gandhi’s departure from South Africa in 1914 until the 1960s. Both Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s engagements with Indian Ocean imaginaries suggest the range of work that still remains to be done in this fascinating area—and in the area of print cultures in minority diasporan languages and cultures in South Africa itself. In relation to South Africa’s Islamic communities, for example, Shamil Jeppie, who has been so engaged with the preservation of Timbuktu’s rich manuscript heritage (including in a project funded in part by the South African government; see Jeppie and Diagne [2008]), has written about some South African Muslims’ cultures of print (Jeppie 2007, 45–62). Muhammed Haron (2001) has brought to wider attention the rich history of Islamic libraries, especially in the Western Cape. In similar vein, Saarah Jappie has explored a twentieth-century Cape Town imam’s library (2009). But much else remains to be done, as it does in the field of publishing in Yiddish and Hebrew. South Africa’s first Yiddish newspaper, Der Afrikaner Israelit (The African Israelite), a weekly published in Johannesburg, appeared for a period of only six months in 1890 (Poliva 1961, 17; 1968, 56).12 Der Kriegstaphet (The war dispatch), the first Yiddish daily, appeared in Cape Town for less than three months in late 1899 (Poliva 1961, 7). Most other papers serving a Jewish readership (in English or Yiddish) were equally short-lived, and when Joseph Poliva compiled his list of such periodicals in the early 1960s, only one still appeared to be running, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, which had appeared since 1948 (twice weekly, then five times a week after 1953). South African Jewry was among the wealthiest diasporic Jewish communities globally at least until the 1960s (Segal 1963, 17); a nuanced study of the community’s engagement with print culture in the region would no doubt be illuminating. So too would work on the lives of books brought to the country by other of its many immigrant communities (to name only a few: Greek and Greek-Cypriot, Lebanese, Lusophone, Taiwanese, and former Yugoslav).
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The interest evident in Hofmeyr’s and Samuelson’s essays in the complex transnational energies at play in the circulation of print and text leads us naturally to the interest shared, in the essays included in the section of this volume that follows, in the effect on texts of variously construed local and global imaginaries, and in the fates of texts that are subject to transnational reading practices and that confront—and evoke—new and different affective relations, sometimes in and through different textual guises.
John Gouws (Chapter 3.1) considers the publication and reception contexts of an influential memoir by a leading post-Anglo Boer War Afrikaner icon, Deneys Reitz. Herinneringen van den Engelschen Oorlog 1899–1902 was completed in 1903, during Reitz’s exile in Madagascar. The published text of Reitz’s Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War (1929) differed in several crucial respects and, as Gouws argues, the memoir’s textual history offers “an interesting instance not so much of how authors’ books change empires, but of how empires and the demands they make on those who negotiate their self-understood lives within them change authors and their books” (119). Between these two publication dates, Reitz had become involved in the project of endorsing and promoting the vision of Louis Botha, the Union of South Africa’s first prime minister and another Anglo-Boer War veteran, for a unified (white) dominion. Gouws shows how the textual revisions Reitz made after 1924, when J. B. M. Hertzog came to power and began the promotion of Afrikaner nationalism, actively work to promote reconciliation between white English speakers and Afrikaners. The changes, he argues, balance local and imperial perspectives and imperatives, and, in tracing them, Gouws seeks to demonstrate how such close attention to text remains constitutive of one important strand of book-historical method.
Lucy Graham’s essay (Chapter 3.2) considers some of the “consequential changes” made to different editions of an important and too-often overlooked mid-twentieth-century South African novel, Mittee by Daphne Rooke (1951)—“the most popular South African writer in America” in the 1950s, Graham notes (121). The first British edition of the novel included a scene in which a black man rapes a black servant, while the first American edition, by contrast, included a typical “black peril” narrative featuring the rape of a white woman by black men. Graham’s research shows that Rooke initially wrote the latter version, but that the left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz, fearful that the novel would run foul of the South African censors, compelled the change. However, the change was not made in the Houghton Mifflin edition published in the United States. Graham considers how such changes reflect the expectations of different markets and examines the consequences of having multiple versions of the same work in circulation. She takes as her point of departure the judgment by J. M. Coetzee (2001, 211) that, “[t]o her credit”, Rooke did “not indulge in the ne plus ultra of colonial horror fantasies, the rape of a white woman, though she does come close to it”. Coetzee’s comments seem uncontroversial when read in an afterword included in a reprint of the 1951 Gollancz text, but when his text was reproduced in a 2008 reprint of the American text, a contradiction appeared. For here, as Graham observes, “Coetzee mentions Rooke’s avoidance of a ‘black peril’ scene”, and yet the text contains the representation of the rape of Letty, a white character, by a black man (122).
If these chapters chart the likely reasons for—and the effects of—textual variation in which the author is complicit (even if the effects on reading and the implications for future paratexts are not predictable), the third essay in this section (Chapter 3.3), Rita Barnard’s engaged and suggestive consideration of the fate of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country
