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Metonymies of Lead: Bullets, Type and Print Culture in South African Missionary Colonialism
LEON DE KOCK
LANGUE: THE CONTEXT OF PRINT CULTURE
It would be a commonplace to say that the history of print culture can be seen as a midpoint, a swivel, in the larger history of colonisation and modernisation in South Africa, and yet this remains a point of profound significance in any encompassing review of the country’s violent emergence as a state, a polity in the modern sense, with a constructed—although persistently contested—sense of its own public sphere. The very construction of such a sphere, a logos-centred site of deliberative public reason in the Kantian sense, in which a Westphalian state would eventually emerge, depended critically on the development of a print culture. In the same way that the spine of a book glues together the divergence of the volume’s contents within a single, usable and handy form, so 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. 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 to a few centres of literary patronage” (cf. Peires 1979; Switzer 1983), and although it must be countered that the oral tradition was never so simply “reduced”, the terms of contestation were nevertheless inscribed in print. The more general cultural realignment brought about by the printing press set in motion a process that would leave deep indentations on the people of an emerging, unequal “nation”, one eventually promulgated into being (in the form of the Union of South Africa) in print proclamations that were heavily biased in favour of the bringers of “light”—and type—to the “dark” continent through the great agency of literacy.
In Towards an African Literature, A. C. Jordan describes the connection among literacy, print culture and Christianisation as central to the history of African education in South Africa:
In all speech communities of the Southern Africans, what literacy exists is inseparably bound up with the Christian missionary enterprise. To be able to “preach the Word” the missionaries had not only to learn the languages of the people, but also to reduce these languages to writing. Translators, interpreters, preachers, and teachers had sooner or later to come from among the aborigines themselves. And so some of the apt converts had also to be introduced to the rudiments of modern learning through the language of the missionary body concerned. But since, outside of the missionary bodies, no one undertook to educate the Africans, acceptance of “the Word” remained the only means of access to any form of modern learning (Jordan 1973a, 37).
And one should add that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly after the social devastation of the Cattle Killing disaster of 1856–57, the die was cast: “modern learning”—that is, access to the book, the ability to write and read in English as well as in the “reduced” languages—allowed entry into an irreversibly changing economic and social order.
Literacy, then, and behind it the widespread introduction of print culture, was at the centre of colonisation in South Africa, implicit in the frontier struggle between sharply contrasting modes of information and comprehension. In this struggle, two major lines of conceptual agency were in evidence. On the one hand, the Nguni people of the Eastern Cape ultimately (although not exclusively) resorted to thaumaturgy in an attempt to expel whites by cathartic apocalypse (cf. Hodgson 1985, Peires 1989; De Kock 1996). On the other hand, missionaries assiduously and laboriously exercised cultural surveillance via teaching and religious supervision based on the pseudo-rationalism of a professedly revealed “Truth”. As the historical record suggests, the thaumaturgical and military modes of resistance largely ended with the Cattle Killing catastrophe, which in turn opened the way for significant growth of mission education and the teaching of predominantly Protestant educators who propagated a discourse of metaphors, in the sense adumbrated by Hayden White (1978) and Richard Rorty (1989), masquerading as literal truth. In doing this, print was the handmaiden of this “truth”.
Literacy was the basis of what became an informing, knowledge-creating representational order. The larger object of literacy was a linguistic colonialism that placed “English” and the values embedded in it at the apex of the exalted and frequently evoked notion of “civilisation”. The linguistic and semantic modality switch implicated in literacy teaching—built squarely upon the edifice of a print culture—was therefore at the centre of an encompassing mission whose aim was nothing less than the reinvention of the territory and its peoples as a polity of the civilised (read British) realm. This is precisely what was locked up in the influential Victorian idea of “manifest destiny” (Bosch 1991, 298). For missionaries, those great facilitators of this supposedly “manifest” destiny, print culture and “literacy” were their direct ideological (they would have said “spiritual”) aids. If, as Gray (1989, 19–20) has suggested, translation can be seen as central to the literary processes of Southern Africa, then one of its sources is surely in print-based missionary interaction, where a form of experiential or modality translation1 saw persistent attempts to transcode oral modes and diverse, often non-Christian spiritual experience into literate representations of the more orthodox understandings of human experience located in a Protestant code of belief. Although these were incomplete, complex and multiform processes, neither necessarily dichotomous nor evolutionary (see Gunner 1986; Hofmeyr 1993; 2004), they nevertheless had deep and far-reaching implications. Anthropologist Jack Goody (1977, 37) argues that in many recorded cases, literacy (implying as it does an eventual, if partial, shift in emphasis from speech to writing) facilitates a transformation in cognitive procedures by which knowledge is more manageably reified. Drawing on Goody, Jean Comaroff (1985, 143) suggests that literacy generated a greater awareness of the “process of abstraction and a concern with knowledge and value as explicit systems beyond the immediate contexts that generate them”. Writing about cultural transformation among the southern Tswana, Comaroff (1985, 143) argues that literacy “transforms the consciousness of those who acquire it”. As I argue at greater length in Civilising Barbarians (1996, 64–104), Lovedale in the Eastern Cape, along with other institutions and individual missionaries, not only established a widespread literate order that incorporated institutional surveillance, but in doing this it sought to “translate” indigenous forms of subjectivity into excessively narrow limits determined by Western literary forms of expression. This process relied to a very great extent on the existence and continued refinement of a growing culture of print and on the reification of the Book as a pre-eminent source of both knowledge and human understanding in a normative sense.
That is to say, a widespread culture of the book and of print made it possible both to inscribe in the subjectivities of captive audiences—principally, but not exclusively, in mission school rooms—behavioural prescriptions (whether these were always followed being a different matter) and to encode such attempts at behavioural and spiritual modification within deterministic modes of literary representation. To wit: missionary print culture in its educational guise quickly devolved into a leaden discourse of heavily prefigured emplotments based on a Manichean metaphoric binary in which an entire universe of difference was squeezed into the starkly reductive dyad of “light” and “dark” (or civilisation and barbarism) and its many subsidiary metaphoric pairings. Then, on the basis of such dualism, emplotments derived from known literary forms were widely employed as normative forms in the durable medium of print, through which the subjects of the civilising mission were swayed. These forms included comedic resolutions of individual human waywardness and misunderstanding under a kindly Godhead, tragic examples of individual hubris and subsequent spiritual fall, and romantic emplotments of heroic endurance following privation in a spiritual wilderness.2 Despite well-developed and persuasive arguments about what Shula Marks has influentially described as the “ambiguities of dependence” in conditions of colonial hegemony (cf. Marks 1975), the point made by Jean and John Comaroff in this regard is worth recalling: that the “spatial, linguistic, ritual, and political forms [of] European culture” made up the context in which agreement and disagreement, subjection and rebellion, took place. “Colonised peoples”, write the Comaroffs, “frequently reject the message of the colonisers, and yet are powerfully and profoundly affected by its media. That is why new hegemonies may silently take root amidst the most acrimonious and agonistic of ideological battles” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 311). These new hegemonies were quite literally founded on the edifice of a print culture, and on the institutionalisation of the Book.
PAROLE: ENCOUNTERS IN PRINT
In this section I discuss a case history that draws on the more general points made above. My discussion draws into its ambit the printed renditions of the journal writing of Tiyo Soga, the first ordained black minister in the South African mission fields, in whose printed textual remains one finds the traces of what I regard as an agonistic relation to missionary forms of discursive agency. The term “agonism” is borrowed from Foucault, who, in his essay “The subject and power” (1982, 790), argues that “the relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot … be separated”. Rather than speak of an “essential freedom”, Foucault (1982, 790) writes, “it would be better to speak of an “agonism”—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation”. The power relationship, writes Foucault (1982, 790), is characterised at its “very heart” and “constantly provok[ed]” by the “recalcitrance of will and the intransigence of freedom”. This occurs within a context in which the structuring of the possible field of actions for subjects, in its widest sense, is at play. Such structuring, in the Foucauldian argument, occurs principally in the discursive domain, and in that domain print culture, totemically enshrined in the Book, became in the Victorian age one of the most powerful and commonly engaged discursive sites of agency.
The missionary incursion into Southern Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred not only within various day-to-day narratives of legitimation, but also in the context of a developing canon of book-length accounts of missionary travels and adventures. “Accounts of missionary ‘labours and scenes’ had by the late nineteenth century become an established literary genre”, write the Comaroffs (1991, 172). This was “a literature of the imperial frontier, a colonising discourse that titillated the Western imagination with glimpses of radical otherness – over which it simultaneously extended intellectual control” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 172), or tried to, with overwhelming persistence. It was within this general corpus that a critical sub-genre emerged: the “rise” of the putative, generalised African subject, discursively plotted as an ascent from degradation to salvation.
Robert Moffat’s Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (1842) and David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) are outstanding examples of books that, given the special prominence accorded to printed tomes emanating from the metropole under the imprimatur of established printing houses, helped to establish a strong legitimating context for missionary work in general, and more specifically for the discursive regulation of subjectivity, especially what was regarded as errant subjectivity, within particular literary forms.
While proposing to reveal divine truth, Moffat, for example, appears to have been indulging in a common literary form made possible by the convenience of the book, namely the romantic quest. As Northrop Frye, in his work on romance as a form of “secular scripture”, suggests, romance frequently reveals a mental landscape in which heroes and villains “exist primarily to symbolise a contrast between two worlds, one above the level of ordinary experience, the other below it” (Frye 1976, 53). The upper world is idyllic, while the lower world, associated with exciting adventures involving separation, loneliness, humiliation and pain, is a “demonic or night world”; the “narrative movement keeps rising into wish fulfilment or sinking into anxiety or nightmare” (Frye 1976, 53). In Missionary Labours, Moffat (1842, v) tends to use the structures of secular scripture for a patently melodramatic salvation narrative in which, while the heathen others he encounters in Southern Africa show a “radical identity in the operations of human depravity”, “convulsed by sin, and writhing with anguish”, he himself rises above such depravity in the guise of a romantic protagonist surrounded by “perishing, and helpless, and all but friendless millions” (Moffat 1842, v–vi).
In 1857, the year in which David Livingstone’s similarly grandiose narrative elaboration of missionary adventures, Missionary Travels, was published, Tiyo Soga returned to the Cape from Scotland, where he had trained at the University of Glasgow and been ordained as a Presbyterian minister (Saayman 1991, 58–64). It was within the constraints of developing textual currents (as described above) that were imprinting literary modes for defining the destiny of Africa and individual African subjects in forums of public representation that a model “converted” subject such as Tiyo Soga was compelled to delineate, and literally to write up, his own role. After Soga’s death in 1871, he was textually incorporated into a sub-genre of the more general tradition of published missionary heroism as the singularly most emblematic “rise” of what his conversion champions, in self-congratulatory mode, styled a “model Kafir” (Chalmers 1877, 488). A “model Kafir”! What a neat textual trope, what an accomplished figure to present within the technological accomplishment, the four-sided symmetry, of print! Soga was Lovedale’s own proudly proclaimed emblem of heroic spiritual elevation and his story was given book form in John A. Chalmers’ biography, Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (1877). This work appears to have been largely plagiarised—such was the breathless eagerness to imprint the solidity of this seeming success—in Rev. H. T. Cousins’ From Kafir Kraal to Pulpit: The Story of Tiyo Soga (1899). These biographies are self-styled declarations of triumph—after many decades of conspicuous failure—of missionary-colonial signifying imperatives, codified powerfully in the form of the Book, in which the African’s “rise” is cast in the dye of a prescriptive, although predictable, narrative shape: errant native subjects are stabilised and their “stabilisation” rendered immortal, held fast, in print. However, the same narrative was rendered agonistically, full of latent incitement and provocative challenge, by Tiyo Soga himself, as I will shortly demonstrate.3
Chalmers’ biography rings with the leaden moral certainties of Victorian missionary imperialism, which systematically sought to efface difference in the name of Christian virtue. His narrative did this by trans-coding details about Soga’s life into recognisable formal patterns of descent and ascent drawn from the romance archetype. Chalmers depicted Soga’s origins as typically depraved in an introductory chapter entitled “The polygamist’s village”. According to his account, the village is a site of degradation and barbarism. The polygamist is Tiyo’s father, “Old Soga”, who was a senior counsellor of the Xhosa chief Ngqika. In Chalmers’ interpretation, all useful activity in the village is sullied by the want of industriousness and civilised vigour. Craftsmen “leisurely and indolently” ply their trades, while “the patriarch of the village and his associates lounge and bask in the sun, alternately smoking and sleeping” (Chalmers 1877, 2). Women draw water, hew wood and prepare the food, and young boys tend calves and goats. Chalmers (1877, 3) prefers not to view this sketch as pastoral or idyllic, a lost Eden, as many today might be tempted to trope such an imagined scene. It is rather a scene of “dull monotony ... varied by the visit of some chief on a begging expedition, a marriage festival ... the intonjane dance—obscene in all its aspects”. The village is a place of superstition and of “nocturnal revelries”, where men dance to the “most barbarous and obscene songs of an enraptured audience” (Chalmers 1877, 3). But the link with civilisation and its benefits is found when “Old Soga” uses a plough to cultivate ground after being advised to do so by a European. Eureka! The use of Western agricultural techniques becomes a “silent emblem” of a “still greater power which was secretly at work, and is destined yet to revolutionise the moral wastes of Southern Africa” (Chalmers 1877, 7).
It is Tiyo Soga who, in Chalmers’ story, was destined to personify the transition from “moral waste” to redemption, but in so doing he also had to shed all outward trappings of Xhosa culture. This was the unstated sine qua non of the “model Kafir”, and as such Soga was to carry the Nguni people into modernity as a book-codified, textual signifier of missionary success. He is therefore a narrative persona of considerable significance. Chalmers was able to present his biography in a largely unproblematic manner as a story of ascent (the “rise” of the “model Kafir”) in the convenient form of a linear account that saw the external details of his life as consistent with the needs of such a narrative. And the external details were indeed consistent: Soga did in fact go to Lovedale as a boy. He was taken to Scotland on two different occasions to be educated. He did come home as the first ordained African minister and he did serve his life out as a missionary. But this narrative concealed and repressed everything prior to its own inauguration. Soga’s own writing, in contrast, provides evidence of contradiction and agonistic response, of implicit incitation against the prescribed narrative line, even while Soga apparently reproduces an orthodox text of missionary sentiment.
In Chalmers’ biography, then, Soga is born into the secular underworld of his father’s “polygamist’s village”, and undergoes a “baptism into heathenism” at birth—a rite of animal slaughter described in lurid detail (Chalmers 1877, 11–12) that is meant to suggest the state of degradation the young hero has still to overcome. “Amid such superstition and sensuality, barbarism and ignorance, there can be no intellectual growth, or purity of life”, Chalmers writes (1877, 12). Immediately following this evocation of an underworld, the second chapter proffers, as a stark alternative, a site of worldly salvation in the Tyumie mission station, described as a centre of “light and knowledge” (Chalmers 1877, 13). But for the existence of such places, Chalmers narrates, “the heathen world would never know that there is a higher life than that of eating, drinking and making merry” (Chalmers 1877, 13). Tyumie is also a “city of refuge” from the injustice, violence and cruelties of witch doctors (Chalmers 1877, 15). The hero of the mission station is Rev. John Brownlee. Implicit in the structure of Chalmers’ story are the tell-tale levels typical of Frye’s “secular scripture”, even though the narrative becomes prosaic once the victory over heathenism is confirmed. In Chalmers’ story there is a fusion of two modes of emplotment: romance and biography. The narrative creates the idea of an incredible elevation from the dark netherworld of heathenism to the “centre of light”, but this quest is muted because Soga is not allowed his own romantic-heroic agency. He is led out of darkness by one of Brownlee’s successors, Rev. William Chalmers, who takes Soga to Lovedale and initiates his wonderful transformation into a “model Kafir”. From this point on his course is set by the greater narrative of conversion, in which Soga himself has a limited role. The story then assumes the apparent—but deceptive—form of empirical biography, although the underlying romantic idea of heroic ascent continues to provide a conceptual framework for the narration. Tiyo must “either advance or sink never to rise again” (Chalmers 1877, 31). His narrative life, his book-codified existence, is a terribly linear, earnest and upward path of Protestant virtue and selfless service to Christianity.
After Soga’s return to South Africa as a missionary in 1857, his transformation was such that the Port Elizabeth Telegraph could comment: “In this person may be seen the transcendent operation and effects of Christianity, civilisation, and science trampling under foot every opposing prejudice and difficulty” (quoted in Chalmers 1877, 133). Soga was by now a textually objectified figure: he featured widely in stories about the miraculous possibilities of conversion and was celebrated in print culture as a product of that culture. However, his own writing suggests that the space between this public, textually constituted persona and his more ambivalent, private sense of self was severely agonistic. Soga returned to South Africa in the year of the Cattle Killing, the greatest disaster the Xhosa had ever known. This was an event of great complexity and the culmination of extreme social distress among the Xhosa following violent frontier wars, great loss of land and the stripping away of autonomous authority in the first half of the century (cf. Mostert 1992; Peires 1989). To a writer like Chalmers, however, a crudely reductive conclusion was available: “Tiyo Soga landed at Algoa Bay on the 2nd of July, 1857, and found that those to whom he had come to preach the Gospel were a dispersed nation, utterly destroyed by their own folly” (Chalmers 1877, 129). Soga, along with another missionary, sets up a station at Emgwali and comes to fulfil a formal, although limited, narrative role as a standard bearer of Christianity in the midst of heathenism. The chapter titles liken the course of Soga’s life to horticultural and organic metaphors of growth, suggesting orderly (if uneven) progress towards a single outcome: “Getting into harness”, “Bearing precious seed”, “Dark shadows”, “Glimpses of sunshine” and “Sunset”.
But it is rewarding to read the one odd chapter in this sequence, “Dark shadows”, in which Chalmers purports to present deeply private confessions of doubt, supposedly written by Soga in his private journal. In Chalmers’ account, these doubts are resolved, much in the way of a conventional crisis of faith, and a glorious unity with God is eventually achieved when Soga later dies of tuberculosis. A perusal of the journal, however, shows that this is not the case. Donovan Williams (1983, 11) speculates in his biography of Soga that Chalmers may have had access to material that has since been lost. David Attwell (1997), advancing persuasive reasons for his deduction, prefers the conclusion that Chalmers assembled most of the confessional “journal entries” himself, drawing on the private journal and letters.4 When we read about Soga’s supposed trials of faith, then, we encounter a dense sediment of textual traces. On the one hand, it does seem the case that Soga was given to morbidity, as Williams (1978, 86–87) notes in his biography, which is far more reliable than Chalmers’. Further, Williams (1978, 86) quotes a letter that stands free of accusations of editorial meddling in which Soga makes confessions of doubt that sound very similar to Chalmers’ apparently embellished accounts. There are in addition two journal entries in isiXhosa in which Soga expresses severe doubt about his vocation (Williams 1978, 22, 35). On the other hand, speculation about the motive for Chalmers’ embellishments, if such they are, are best framed within his own narrative exigencies in writing Soga’s biography. A standard account of Ignatian doubt, followed by a resurgence of faith, would arguably have strengthened the notion of a “Model Kafir”, since such crises of confidence were a textually recognisable motif in narratives of Christian belief. Attwell (1994, 16) resorts to a similar argument: “Chalmers wanted to show that the Protestant spirit could be found alive and well in an African. Soga’s crises of faith could be read into a narrative of heroic, self-chastening individualism which provided ample justification for the missionary enterprise.” At the same time, however, the potential of the confessional passages to disrupt Chalmers’ story of a fully “converted” African Christian means that they would have read as a threatening supplement to Chalmers’ text unless swiftly recuperated into the more recognisable motif of sporadic, but ultimately healed Christian doubt. In view of this, it seems unlikely that Chalmers would have invented the passages entirely. It seems more probable that he would have assembled and rewritten various shreds of Soga’s writing drawn from elsewhere and set about using them in a recuperative manner, while also satisfying his own documentary sense of record as a biographer. Chalmers thus conspicuously renarrativises and sentimentalises5 Soga’s doubts into resurgent faith, but it is significant that this move is effected in Chalmers’ narrative voice and not that ascribed to Soga.
The textual “Soga” of these passages, then, or of the book version in all its totemic power, shows signs that “he” is struggling to maintain his faith. Chalmers interprets this as a general Christian crisis. Soga was “harassed by some of the bitterest trials, and by some of the darkest dispensations of providence” (Chalmers 1877, 271). At one point, (probably) embellished text purporting to be Soga’s journal reads:
5th January.— I have to complain of one grand defect in my character-irresolution. I cannot tell how many times I have resolved and re-resolved to be under God a better man than I know myself to be. All my resolutions in this respect have miserably come to naught. I have in reference to my state before God, to complain of the following things:- Although I know myself to be a great deceiver, although I know the consequence of this awful sin, although I know that I have a most responsible burden, in having taken unadvisedly upon myself the work of the ministry, although I know that all that I have hitherto been doing in the ministry has been in hypocrisy, and insincerity, I have to lament my deadness and hardness of heart in reference to these sins. When I attempt to peruse the word of God, it has no effect upon my mind. I remain unmoved. I have no sufficient sensibility to and perception of my sins. This I feel as if it were a barrier to my obtaining any true penitence regarding them. O God, by Thy spirit move me, and Thou shalt have the entire Glory (quoted in Chalmers 1877, 272).
This passage, whether taken as Soga’s “authentic” voice or as a contaminated residue of his textual remains, suggests the most extraordinary provocation of one who professes a certain kind of discourse and is in some senses its vehicle, but who is not able to meet it with an individual, personal conviction of truth. In the letter quoted by Williams, which is verifiably written by Soga, the “Model Kafir” writes as follows: “I have sometimes great regrets that I ever went to Scotland and entered the ministry ... I wish sometimes I could go to some dark spot of earth—live and reside there alone” (Williams 1978, 86). In this regard, it is instructive to contrast Victorian notions of self and subject with the more current notion that in regarding subjectivity through discourse one does not encounter full “consciousness”, but what Gayatri Spivak (1988, 12) once memorably called a “subject-effect”: “That which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network (‘text’ in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on”, Spivak writes, noting that each strand, if isolated, might also be revealed as woven of many strands. “Different knottings and configurations of these strands”, Spivak (1988, 12–13) adds, “determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent on myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject”. The seeming solidity of the book as artefact, however, especially in the Victorian era, would have created quite the opposite impression of its narrated subjects.
In retrospect, when Tiyo Soga is represented as expressing in one and the same passage of writing his “deadness and hardness of heart” to the Gospel and his desire to be moved by the “spirit” of God, or when he expresses a desire to hide on “some dark spot of earth”, the “subject-effect” created suggests conflict between different “strands” of the discursive text that constitute Soga’s seeming subjectivity. It appears that Soga’s subjectivity was strongly influenced by the pervasive textual strand of missionary Christianity, but the purported passage from his journal, even in interpolated form, and the evidence of his letter and the isiXhosa sections of his journal suggest that his religion was just such a strand and no more, and that even in one so comprehensively “converted” as he, no sovereign or fully “present” Christian consciousness was possible. In these terms, Christian converts could never be what the missionaries wished to believe they were and what the very form of the Book suggested they were—remade people, thoroughly in possession of a consciousness imbued with eternal grace. Indeed, in the Spivakian argument, all human subjectivity is many-stranded and not reducible to any one of its discernible “effects”. It is therefore the very conspicuousness of Chalmers’ attempt to recuperate the significance of Soga’s doubts, which ironically emphasises the supplementarity of Soga’s subjectivity, undermining Chalmers’ avowals of Christian consciousness as an all-powerful presence.
The textual persona of Soga in Chalmers’ account continued to express severe doubt for a period covering almost a year and a half. Soga supposedly wrote of “the most unaccountable hardness and unbelief in my heart” (Chalmers 1877, 273); he feared he had been “living the life of a mere formalist” (274) and that he was in “a wretched state of darkness” in which “prayer is an unprofitable burden”; he was “inclined to objectionable light heartedness” (215); he is alleged to have felt “religious duties a burden … preaching and exhorting a burden ... reading God’s word a burden ... prayer a burden” and he did all these things “mechanically” (276); he was sure “the prominent blemishes of my character have been indifference, indolence, unbelief, and faithlessness” (277). The concluding words attributed to Soga in this part of Chalmers’ narrative asserted that it was “impossible to conceive of anything more awful than the state of the human heart—my heart—when it can so much resist and oppose what God has done and said” (Chalmers 1877, 278).
At this point, Chalmers chooses to neutralise the potential force of these confessional declarations of ambivalence, resuming the narrative in his “own” voice—itself supplemented and conditioned by a tradition of Christian mysticism—by concluding that Soga’s “trials sent his thoughts inwards, and drew him closer to the Divine fountain for strength” (Chalmers 1877, 278). No such idea is uttered in the words ascribed to Soga. For the rest of the narrative, Chalmers concentrates on the outer features of Soga’s life: his deteriorating health; his move to a new mission station deeper in “Kaffraria”, at Tutura; and, finally, his death (“Sunset”). His life is summed up in a final triumphal statement whose triangular reduction to a point of only three words visually illustrates the narrative closure of Chalmers’ account (1877, 488):
He was a Friend of God; a Lover of His Son; inspired by His
Spirit; a Disciple of His Holy Word; an Ardent Patriot;
a Large-hearted Philanthropist; a Dutiful Son; an
Affectionate Brother; a Tender Husband; a
Loving Father; a Faithful Friend; a Learned
Scholar; an Eloquent Orator; and in
Manners a Gentleman; a Devoted
Missionary who spent himself
in his Master’s service;
A Model Kafir.
Despite this passionate asseveration of typecast conformity (literally and figuratively), there is strong evidence that the “Model Kafir” Tiyo Soga was both less and more than the sovereign Christian subject represented by Chalmers.
The sheer variability of Soga’s own discourse is shown by a comparison of two pieces written in different languages for entirely different audiences: one, a contribution in isiXhosa to the first issue in 1862 of Indaba, an isiXhosa-English newspaper issued by Lovedale6 and the other a lecture in English that he delivered to the YMCA in Cape Town in 1866. In the Indaba article, translated into English by J. J. R. Jolobe, Soga ostensibly speaks as a Xhosa subject and not as a missionary agent alone. “We Xhosas are a race which enjoys conversation”, he writes (in Williams 1983, 151), and provocatively proceeds to extol indigenous cultural practices—the very practices that he also, in print, associates with “degraded, despised dark races” (in Williams 1983, 192). Because Soga was writing in isiXhosa for a largely African audience, one can reasonably speculate that his sense of rhetorical address was less constrained by the perceived need to produce orthodox missionary language than in his public utterances in English and that he felt able to drop the habitual posture of judgmental censure about traditional culture. In contrast to Chalmers’ scene of indolence and “dull monotony”, Soga portrayed the Xhosa as vibrant conversationalists:
When a man who has things to relate comes to a home a meal is cooked in a tall pot because the people want him to eat to his satisfaction so that the happiness which is the result of a good meal will open his heart and the sore parts will heal. As soon as that happens there will be a stream of news flowing out of the mouth. The listener will continually assent. So will the narrator be encouraged. Silence will at times reign all ears listening. The damsel will constantly replenish the fire in the fireplace. When the news retailer finishes there will be a general hum, expressing agreement, rejoicing and acceptability of the visitor.
That is the essential nature of the Xhosa people. You too, Mr. Editor, will confirm this opinion the day you visit our homes in the rural areas. Once our people realise you are a man of words and a conversationalist the tribesmen will surround you. Stiff pumpkin and pit-corn porridge (umqa wesangcozi), a pumpkin and maize dish (umxhaxha), a mixture of sour milk and broken bread (umvubo) will be placed before you to eat to your fill. So I anticipate great happiness from the publication of the newspaper (quoted in Williams 1983, 151).
This passage is extraordinary because it not only suggests that Soga harboured sentiments of loyalty to traditional culture quite contrary to what was expected of a missionary in “Xhosaland”, but also in view of its textual celebration of oral culture. The picture of the “damsel” replenishing the fire while the speaker enthralls his audience suggests nostalgic longing for the joys of oral culture and is quite contrary to the imputation of Soga’s own biographer that “there is nothing in life at such a village either to stimulate or ennoble” (Chalmers 1877, 12). At the same time, one should note the paradox that Soga was writing this for the pages of a newspaper published by Lovedale, the very institution that had already begun to play such an important role in challenging the primacy of oral culture in favour of print culture.
It is also paradoxical that Soga introduced the idea of nation, in writing that “[o]ne advantage we shall reap with the coming of this journal is that we will be confident that the people will now get the truth about the affairs of the nation” (in Williams 1983, 151). Soga’s writing therefore presents the contradiction of seeming to celebrate a pristine oral culture in an orthodox missionary publication via the medium of print, whose very existence denies such a state of innocence. Further, the idea that “truth” about the “nation” should be privileged in such a publication suggests that the kind of truth found in Indaba had a greater reach than precisely the oral form of dissemination recalled so nostalgically by Soga himself. He continues:
As people who are always hungry for news often we find ourselves dupes of deceivers under the guise of relating genuine facts. We are fed with half-truths by travellers who pass near our areas. We are unreliable people Mr. Editor, to speak confidentially, because we like to exaggerate. We have a sense of humour and we can talk until light shines as if it was daytime. When you examine the report you are surprised to discover that there was not even a grain of truth in what was being said. We should be careful of what is reported from our areas at first. We must at times accept it with reservations. Today with your newspaper you are initiating an enterprise for banning falsehood. So we are pleased and grateful (quoted in Williams 1983, 151–52; emphasis added).
Soga was relying on distinctions between “deceivers” and “genuine facts” and between “truth” and “falsehood” that depended significantly on a central, print-borne institution of truth bearing such as the newspaper, but his argument entirely begged the question of the interest—which presumably underlies all “falsehood”—of the newspaper and its missionary supporters. The mere existence of facts in printed form in a newspaper after a process of sifting, Soga implies, gave them the higher truth status. One is irresistibly led to speculate on the invisible assumption behind this argument—that truth was better served by Christians and missionaries and, critically, in the printed medium.
Nevertheless, since the advent of literacy and the spread of print culture had become an inevitable condition at the time of Soga’s article, it should not be so surprising that he should have called for a new, printed repository of oral culture. His affiliation in the passage below remains with the idea of indigenous culture and history as worthwhile in its own right:
What are the corn-pits, the cattle kraals, the boxes and the bags. What are the skin shirts’ pockets, and the banks for the stories, and fables, the legends, customs and history of the Xhosa people and Fingo people? This is a challenge, for I envisage in this newspaper a beautiful vessel for preserving the stories, fables, legends, customs, anecdotes and history of the tribes (quoted in Williams 1983, 152).
Soga’s unstated implication was that the newspaper should “preserve” the various oral forms of culture within the context of an ascendant order of the written and printed form.7 His position therefore seems to have combined a reverence for Xhosa culture and history that would have been alien to the typical missionary attitude with an implicit endorsement of the agency of the ascendant order of print, the regime of literacy of which he had become an agent. This paradoxical position allowed Soga to call for a wholesale recasting of Xhosa history and culture in literate modes:
All is well today. Our veterans of the Xhosa and Embo people must disgorge all they know. Everything must be imparted to the nation as a whole. Fables must be retold; what was history or legend should be recounted .... Whatever was seen, heard or done under the requirements of custom should be brought to light and placed on the national table to be sifted for preservation. Were there not several tribes before? What is the record of their history and customs good or bad? Had we no chiefs in days gone by? Where are the anecdotes of their periods? Were these things buried with them in their graves? Is there no one to unearth these things from the graves? Were there no national poets in the days of yore? Whose praises did they sing? Is there no one to emulate this eloquence? In the olden days did not some people bewitch others? What were the names of the men of magic? Is it not rumoured that some were tortured severely and cruelly? Are there no people who have an idea of matters of this nature which happened under the cloak of custom? Are there no battles which were fought and who were the heroes? What feathers were worn by the royal regiments .... We should revive and bring to the light all this great wealth of information. Let us bring to life our ancestors; Ngconde, Togu, Tshiwo, Phalo, Rharhabe, Mlawu, Ngqika and Ndlambe. Let us resurrect our ancestral fore-bears who bequeathed to us a rich heritage. All anecdotes connected with the life of the nation should be brought to this big corn-pit our national newspaper Indaba (in Williams 1983, 152–53; emphasis added).
Both Williams (1983, 1) and, following him, Saayman (1991, 63) make the claim that Soga was the first black South African who, in Williams’s words, formulated “a philosophy of Black consciousness”. Williams (1983, 5–6) grounds his argument mainly on a journal entry and a letter to the King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, in which Soga contradicted the charge of Chalmers (later to become his biographer) that the Xhosa were doomed to extinction unless they could overcome their “indolence”. In his spirited reply to Chalmers, Soga argued that though “sunk” in the “barbarism of ages” (Williams 1983, 181), the Xhosa were progressing in civilisation at a steady rate. To conclude from this, however, that Soga was propounding “Black consciousness” in the modern sense seems to be stretching the point, especially in view of Soga’s explicit missionary bias and his belief in the origin of Africans as “sons of Ham” (see Soga’s journal entry, 25 April 1865, in Williams 1983, 38–40). From the long passage quoted above, it seems far more plausible to suggest that Soga was an important figure in the interpenetrations of orality and literacy and in the shift from independence to colonial interdependence, but that his “consciousness” was ambivalently—or agonistically—stranded.
The explicit adoption of the idea of “nation”—a word Soga also uses in English in the journal entry referred to above—seems to have been a significant linking concept in the marriage implicitly proposed by him between a literate cultural order of print and a more traditional, oral culture. Soga writes of “the nation as a whole” as opposed to the “several tribes” of the past. As Bosch (1991, 298–99) argues, the concept of “nation” is clearly a product of Renaissance humanism (in whose traditions Soga was steeped through his Scottish university education) and its use is a marker of Soga’s contradictory impulse to protect pre-literate, pre-“national” culture by enshrining it in a printed form. This written form would never be neutral: it was affiliated to the orthodoxy of a colonising British nationalism, embodied by the Lovedale institution. However, within its structures and its texts, it would never be free of incitation and struggle either, and it would become the vehicle for what Attwell (1997, 570) calls a “transformative … enlightened mode of counterenlightenment”. The “transculturated” Soga, Attwell writes, repudiates the racism of Darwinian determinism. “To summarise,” Attwell (1997, 570) continues, “incorporation into a global and teleological history, the retention of racial distinctiveness, and adaptability are Soga’s currency, and his legacy”.8 In view of the direct links between African nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, print culture, and missionary institutions (particularly Lovedale), Tiyo Soga’s role as a interstitial figure who helped to inaugurate African “nationalism” as a hybrid of African pride—“Africa-consciousness”, as Saayman (1991, 63) calls it—and missionary-led notions of black “advancement” is of considerable importance. He was indeed a “progenitor of Black nationalism”, as Williams (1983, 7) claims, but perhaps in a far more ambiguous manner than Williams allows for.
That Soga’s discourse was agonistic—marked by variable, cross-stitched moments of enunciatory response to the power in which its agency was located—is suggested by the juxtaposition of the article in isiXhosa discussed above and a lecture written and delivered in English to the YMCA in 1866. The lecture was written in the scholarly idiom of the day and dealt with academic questions of theology. On the whole, it is not of direct relevance, but there is one startling digression in which Soga says:
But about the theory of development: I was going to say that I trust that when the next great wave comes which is to lift the world to a higher eminence of goodness than it has now reached, I trust that within its mighty sweep it will embrace my poor countrymen of Kaffraria. For I cannot comprehend how, according to the law of natural progress, they with other degraded, despised dark traces of this vast continent should have been left so far behind in civilisation and Christian enlightenment. I am not sure about the impartiality of progress; and I hope that when its next tidal wave comes, it will correct its manifest irregularities (quoted in Williams 1983, 192).
Soga’s reference to his “poor countrymen of Kaffraria” as “degraded and despised”, viewed in relation to his letter to Indaba in which he addressed his “countrymen” with far greater circumspection, suggests how constrained he was to use the predictable language of “degraded, despised dark races” when his audience seemed to demand it. Soga’s expression of this kind of sentiment also leads one to speculate that the “sifting” on the “national table” would tend towards the universalising ideal of (Western) “natural progress”. Such progress would tend to assert African rights and “nationhood” in terms of British values of “civilisation”, as John Tengo Jabavu was later to do. Like Jabavu, however, Soga would advocate such values in terms of their founding claims and in terms of their irreducibly revolutionary and liberating sense as instances of the spiritual millenarianism through which these values were originally propagated and not in their deferred, poorly translated colonial sense (for an example of such advocacy, see Soga’s letter referred to earlier, “What is the destiny of the Kaffir race” in the King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, 11 May 1865, in Williams 1983, 178–82).
Soga is therefore a figure who exhibits agonistic responses to textual incorporation by the narratives of a civilising colonialism. In Foucault’s sense of this term, Soga exhibits the “permanent provocation” of one who is drawn into power relationships as a voluntary subject, but who shows “recalcitrance of will” in his own “free” adoption of the values governing such relationships. His own writings, in which loyalty to African distinctiveness and missionary conformity is ambivalently inscribed, reflect a paradoxical shuttling in his own recourse to available forms of textual apprehension, whereas his more private textual residue suggests a tortured space of difference between textual entrapment and private otherness. In this emblematic case, the modalities of print—its concentration of audience or diverse publics, its implicit discursive regularities, its residues of rebellious or power-provoking subjectivity, its agency of representation across space and time, and its ability to accommodate awkward conjunctions—were decisive in the emergence and continuing determination of complex, multiply configured colonial subjects. Historically, there was no going back after print. The die was cast, and it was by recourse to the fracturing metonymies of lead that further deliberations, negotiations, and contestations over the destiny of individuals and groups would be conducted in South Africa.
NOTES
1See my more extended argument on this point in De Kock (2009).
2See De Kock (1996, 76–104) for an extensive discussion.
3Tiyo Soga is also responsible for rendering one of the great founding salvation narratives, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, into isiXhosa—Soga’s Uhambo lo Mhambi is an isiXhosa translation of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was published by the Lovedale Mission Press.
4See De Kock (1996, 206, endnote 10).
5In this regard, see David Attwell’s argument (1997, 571–72).
6On the importance of Indaba, see Switzer (1984).
7Soga was not alone in doing this. Famous examples include Bleek’s Zulu Legends (1952 [1857]), Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (1868) and Theal’s Kaffir Folk-Lore (1882). The important difference was that Soga was one of the first people to do this from within Xhosa culture, later to be followed by A. C. Jordan (1973b) and others.
8Although leaning more towards the affirmation of Soga’s transformative emphasis of African distinctiveness and towards his transculturated rewriting of enlightenment ideals, despite Soga’s capture within the teleology of a missionary salvation narrative, Attwell does, however, acknowledge the counter-argument, namely that Soga’s role appears to have been intrinsically, irremediably interstitial.
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