of Coetzee’s text—which we know most conventionally as Slow Man—demonstrates is that the author, even the critically lauded and globally garlanded author, ultimately is not, and cannot be, entirely in control of his own text(s) (220).
A focus on work by J. M. Coetzee is not intended to suggest that his work is necessarily exemplary (except insofar as the attention paid in the three essays included here to the circumstances of publication of three texts from different stages of this author’s career), but provides three models for the kinds of work on writers’ careers that might be attempted on a number of South African authors—of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama. Reassessment of writers’ works should, in other words, take a form other than the hagiographic, biographical or New Critical, these essays suggest.
* * *
The next section includes three quite different studies, each attending to the uses of books in a productive and distinctive manner. All, however, share a concern to show how books—and collections of books—evade the designs of monologic interpretation. They are portable, they invite unsettling readings—and they are not always what they purport to be. One such imposter is the subject of Lize Kriel’s lively chapter (Chapter 5.1): Malaboch or Notes from My Diary on the Boer Campaign of 1894 against the Chief Malaboch of Blaauwberg, District Zoutpansberg, South African Republic to which Is Appended a Synopsis of the Johannesburg Crisis of 1896, by Colin Rae, an English priest, published in Cape Town and London. Rae worked for six years in Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and based his book on his experiences as chaplain to the English members of a commando raised against the unfortunate Kgoši Kgaluši, or Mmalebôhô (Rae’s Malaboch). Despite being increasingly recognised as flawed, unreliable and even plagiarised, Rae’s text continued to be treated as a reliable source in historiography on the Boers’ campaign against Kgoši Kgaluši’s people. Kriel asks “why historians, normally priding themselves on the authority of their narratives on the grounds of their close scrutiny of ‘the facts’, failed to detect the flaws in the Rae text for so long” (228), and in so doing offers a consideration of the textual imperatives of representations of racial conflict in Southern Africa. Her essay poses challenging questions about the use of sources by historians and historiographers of colonial-era Southern Africa—with resonances for historiographic projects in other colonial contexts.
Archie Dick is interested in quite different books and their uses. His essay (Chapter 5.2) offers an engrossing account of the operation of the Books for Troops scheme in South Africa during the Second World War, which saw the South African Library Association (SALA) exploit an opportunity “to promote the democratic values of books, ideas and libraries” (in Dick’s paraphrase). It was perforce neither as extensive nor successful as the American Armed Services Editions (see Rabinowitz 2010), but nonetheless promoted reading to many black soldiers, while also promoting to white soldiers the possibility of “an inclusive South African national identity” (249). Dick’s essay points the way to more engaged and less descriptive work in library and information studies, sheds light on the reading and collecting tastes of South Africans at mid-century, and is an important contribution to a growing field of enquiry.
Hedley Twidle’s sophisticated and provocative essay (Chapter 5.3), written specifically for this collection, explores the challenge posed for studies of orature, print and textuality in South Africa, by another project to collate (like Rae) and collect and disseminate (like SALA)—in this case the Grey Collection, which had its beginnings with the 5,200 items donated by Sir George Grey, outgoing governor of the Cape Colony, to the South African Library (now the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town) in 1861. Grey had by that date served as governor of South Australia (1840–45), New Zealand (1845–53) and the Cape (1854–61); he would go on to serve once more as governor of New Zealand (1861–68), and later as MP and premier there. Twidle muses on the fact that this extraordinary collection—including a Shakespeare First Folio and valuable incunabula, as well as seminal texts on early ethnography, natural history and philology from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand—is chronically under-used, and this leads him to ponder how its organisation invites or frustrates use, and what this might imply for the colonial archive more broadly. The collection offers opportunities for studies of South–South links across various imperial spaces, including of comparative approaches to the study of autochthonous languages and the challenge their alterity was early regarded as posing to European modes of intellectual organisation and engagement. And yet, as Twidle observes, a dilemma in studying such collections in a post-colony is the constant return to organisational models inherited from the colonial period. “A point of departure from this familiar paradigm”, Twidle suggests,
might be to balance an attention to that rather abstract imaginary of accumulated texts and tropes—‘the colonial library’—with a more materialist account of ‘the library in the colony’. How are specific institutions and collections established within an expanding ‘world system’ in the nineteenth century? How are they marked by their local context and in what ways does this determine the problems and possibilities associated with their use today? (258).
Twidle attempts to answer some of these questions, specifically with attention to |Xam and !Kung material famously transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, and to Bleek’s role as the first librarian of the Grey Collection.
While Twidle’s essay comments on the wealth of knowledge about autochthonous languages held in the Grey Collection and on the hegemony of English in post-apartheid discourses of governance (and the so-called African Renaissance), the three essays that follow chart different courses through fascinating material that bears on some of the same concern with the “otherness” of other cultures of communication, and with their fates after (and imbrication with) technologies of print: Xhosa oral and performance culture, contemporary performance poetry and orature, and mid-century photonovels.
In the first of these essays (Chapter 6.1), Jeff Opland, long a leading scholar of oral cultures in South Africa, offers a thoroughgoing and suggestive survey of the appearances of representative ideas of the book in oral performances in isiXhosa. “If the technology of print introduced by whites was eager to absorb Xhosa oral traditions and if in the course of time it nurtured black contributors to the print media”, Opland writes, what, he wonders, “was the complementary attitude of Xhosa oral poetry to white culture?” (289). Considering how the Xhosa oral tradition interacted with white technologies of writing and of print, Opland examines first the depiction of books in praise poetry of the nineteenth century, before turning to the cases of two literate poets writing and performing in isiXhosa in the twentieth: Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Christian convert working in Johannesburg in the 1920s and a significant early woman writer in isiXhosa; and David Yali-Manisi, among the most important of the iimbongi in recent South African history, whose work has a fascinating history of print and performance—and a contested legacy. Opland almost single-handedly rediscovered and—with the help of Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende and Peter Mtuze—translated Mgqwetho’s important body of work (see Opland 2007). His relationship with Yali-Manisi—a not uncomplicated one of observation, facilitation, collaboration and promotion—has been written about by Opland himself (2005) and, more recently, subtly and judiciously by Ashlee Neser (2011). In this representative engagement with a long history of performed poetry in isiXhosa, a thorough revision of a chapter from his 1998 monograph, Xhosa Poets and Poetry, Opland shows how writing and print cultures were early associated with white colonial oppression in the region, and explores the implications of what appears still to be the case of oral technology’s apparently unwavering rejection of writing.
Deborah Seddon’s essay (Chapter 6.2) engages with the difficulty of representing orature in the South African literary canon while, in the author’s words, “promoting recognition of [...] its existence as an oral form” (306). Seddon engages with scholarship on orality and orature in the region, discusses the work of important but under-studied poets like Ingoapele Madingoane, and looks to the future negotiation of technologies of orality with print. In so doing, her work both revisits some of the issues canvassed in Opland’s and, in its polemical openness to the difficulties of producing a document
