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2.2

“Spread Far and Wide over the Surface of the Earth”: Evangelical Reading Formations and the Rise of a Transnational Public Sphere: The Case of the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association

ISABEL HOFMEYR

The field of book history as a distinct enterprise has only recently started to take root in South Africa. As such, it is necessarily a late entrant into a field that elsewhere has been taking shape for several decades. While this belated entry poses problems, it equally presents opportunities. Like most endeavours in the humanities, book history, since its inception, has been largely national in orientation (the book in France, the book in Australia and so on). However, this national emphasis has increasingly given way to more transnational approaches, and like most disciplines, book history faces a post-nationalist intellectual climate. South African interest in book history consequently emerges at a time when “mainstream” research must of necessity reinvent itself. One useful direction, then, for South African book history to take is to conceptualise itself as transnational. In this way, local book history will be able to enter a productive dialogue with “mainstream” scholarship and will be able to formulate paradigms that illuminate both the uniqueness of South African developments and the ways in which these can be factored into a broader international story.

This essay attempts to explore these propositions in relation to what may at first appear to be a modest case study—that of the Cape Town Ladies’ Bible Association (CTLBA). However, this organisation has been chosen as it forms part of a much larger transnational landscape, namely that of nineteenth-century Protestant evangelical reading and publishing. As others have pointed out, within the expanding world of European nineteenth-century book production, Christian religious material comprised the overwhelming proportion of what was produced (Bayly 2004, 357; Howsam 1991). However, the meaning of this fact has seldom been grasped, since studies of nineteenth-century book production tend to follow two separate analytical channels, the one concerned with religious publishing, the other with secular enterprises. The two arms—secular and religious—are often treated discretely, the former the domain of historians of the book and publishing (Feather 1988), the latter the domain of scholarship on nineteenth-century Christianity, missions and philanthropy (Raven 2000; Maughan 1996).

As Howsam (1991) has demonstrated, the demands generated by Protestant evangelical publishing, most notably the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), had far-reaching consequences for the organisation of the nineteenth-century book industry. The book-binding sector, for example, was modernised from a small-scale craft operation to a modern industry by the unprecedented demand for bound Bibles generated by the BFBS. Put in slightly different terms, a transnational public of Protestant readers affected the shape of the book industry in Britain. This transnational public, of course, comprised many millions of people involved in local reading, distribution and sometimes publishing operations, and it was the joint labour of these people that brought this public into being. However, the styles of reading and writing practices formulated by such local groupings are currently poorly understood. In part, this has to do with the tendency to see broad social processes like imperialism, Christian missionary activity and so on as transnational, while people, and particularly colonial subjects, are seen as national. Instead, as this essay attempts to demonstrate, many people actively involved themselves in transnational organisations and formulated ways of reading to support and give substance to their view of a worldwide network of readers.

The precise case we use is that of the CTLBA from the 1890s to 1920s. The organisation had begun in the 1840s as part of the South African Auxiliary of the BFBS (SAABFBS). Detailed minutes, however, only commence in 1892 and run until 1962 (CTLBA 1892–1962). The cut-off date of the 1920s has been chosen as it was a period of rising colonial nationalism and the weakening of ties between South Africa and Britain. In examining the “reading formations” of the CTLBA, we seek to demonstrate how a consideration of one aspect of book history in South Africa might simultaneously illuminate the field of “mainstream” book studies.

I

On 28 November 1912 the members of the CTLBA gathered for their monthly meeting at the YWCA in Cape Town. The meeting opened with a Bible reading and a prayer. The committee (headed by its president, Mrs Wilmot) was made up of 13 women, several of whom were the wives of Protestant clergy of different denominations. Present at the meeting, although not a member of the committee, was Mrs Schelpien, an itinerant seller of Bibles and tracts and employee of the CTLBA (CTLBA 28 June 1909); her name was not noted in the minutes and she was instead entered as “Bible woman”. Present also, although not a member of the committee, was Rev. Van der Merwe, secretary of the South African BFBS (CTLBA 28 Nov. 1912).

In the proceedings of the meeting, Rev. Van der Merwe read a letter regarding the supply of testaments “to certain natives in Johannesburg”. A second letter was read regarding the distribution of testaments “sent by [the Cape Town] Ladies Branch to a Buddhist monastery in Ceylon” and mention was made of “testaments sent for Afghans”. A report was then read of work among “the Moslems” in Cape Town and suburbs. The next item on the agenda was the returns from the depot of the BFBS in Cape Town, which included the sale of 8,354 Bibles, 1,559 testaments and 365 portions, which represented just over £800. The Bible woman then gave her report for the last three months, during which she had visited 902 homes. The minutes noted that she “gave a verbal account of work in homes w[h]ere mothers are drunkards etc.”. The meeting closed with prayer, after which the honorary treasurer received from the committee members present the annual subscriptions that they had garnered from a network of “lady collectors” (CTLBA 28 Nov. 1912).

This account provides a useful summary of the structure and activities of the CTLBA. In terms of structure, the organisation was a sub-committee of the Cape Town Auxiliary of the South African BFBS, in turn a chapter of the British BFBS. In terms of its activities, the CTLBA comprised a committee of middle-class white women who undertook, firstly, the work of raising money to support the sale and distribution of scriptures and, secondly, of arranging for the distribution of these scriptures in Cape Town. The fundraising activities were undertaken by committee members themselves or by “lady collectors”—friends, relatives and acquaintances upon whom the committee members could prevail to undertake fundraising on the CTLBA’s behalf. At the November meeting, the contributions of these “subcontracted” “lady collectors” were handed over by committee members. The CTLBA in turn used part of this money to hire a Bible woman whose primary job was to sell Bibles in poor and working-class areas. In cases where the committee had money to spare, this was given to the South African BFBS.

One way to make sense of this group of Cape Town women is through the extensive literature on nineteenth-century philanthropy. As this scholarship has demonstrated, nineteenth-century Britain was replete with instances of women who grouped together in philanthropic committees and used the opportunities presented by such public work to further their interests. These committees took women outside the household and shifted key assumptions about the correct distribution of power between men and women. In some cases, women were paid for committee-related work. Such employment for women threw the Victorian idea of separate spheres for men and women into some doubt, as male and female now operated in a shared and salaried professional realm (Thorne 1999, 92–104).

At some levels, the Cape Town committee reflects similar trends. The CTLBA, for example, used the opportunity of philanthropic work (in this committee and others like the Cape Town Ladies’ Benevolent Society) to develop public positions for themselves. Women assumed positions of public authority, they handled money, they hired and fired people, they ran meetings, and kept minutes and accounts. Indeed, the president, Mrs Wilmot, gained public recognition for her labours by being made an honorary life governor of the BFBS “in recognition of the work done by the Ladies of our Committee for the B.F.B.S.” (CTLBA 24 Feb. 1915).

As Susan Thorne (1999) has pointed out in her analysis of Christian mission-related women’s committees in nineteenth-century England, women’s philanthropic endeavours often assumed a transnational character. Like their counterparts in London, the women of the CTLBA were not only involved in “uplifting” the poor in their immediate vicinity; rather, they saw their brief as the whole world, or in the phraseology of the BFBS, “spread far and wide over the surface of the earth” (SAABFBS 1859, 13). Much of the activity of the committee was consequently aimed at developing forms of reading and communication to position themselves as transnational religious subjects and actors.

As the minutes of the November meeting of 1912 make clear, the women of the CTLBA used this forum to place themselves at the centre of a set of local, national and transnational textual relations, and at every monthly meeting, these relationships of distribution and circulation were dramatised. Locally, they could use the committee meeting as a way of imaginatively entering the poorer areas of Cape Town; the Bible woman provided reports of her work, and through these narratives, the committee members could construct themselves as the benefactors of the poor and could feel themselves connected to these areas. Nationally (or regionally), the members of the CTLBA could think of themselves as linked to the recipients of Bibles in much of the subcontinent, be these “natives” in Johannesburg, colportage in Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo (CTLBA 9 Sept. 1926), Hereros in South West Africa (CTLBA 8 Sept. 1925) or Sotho cattle herders in Lesotho (SAABFBS 1861, 8–9). As the oldest women’s Bible Auxiliary in Southern Africa, the CTLBA maintained correspondence with and gave advice to equivalent organisations in places as far afield as Durban and Bulawayo.

Transnationally, the CTLBA used its committee status to forge links with numerous different groups, including, as we saw in the case of the November 1912 meeting, Buddhists in Ceylon and Afghans on the North-west Frontier. Indeed, one of the committee members, Mrs Fagg, had actively been pursuing the question of Buddhists in Ceylon for some time and had written to the BFBS head office in London with a donation of £1 6s 6d to purchase Sinhalese testaments for the Buddhists in Kandy (CTLBA, 28 Nov. 1912). The BFBS had passed on her donations and instructions to the Ceylon Auxiliary of the BFBS, and its secretary, Mr T. Gracie, had in turn reported to Rev. Van der Merwe, his counterpart in the SAABFBS. It was this letter that was in turn read out to the CTLBA at the November meeting:

I would have written to you before this regarding the contribution of £1.6.6 which you so very kindly forwarded to the London Bible House from Mrs Fagg, for the distribution of Testaments in the Buddhist monastery in Kandy; but it had taken time to effect the distribution. I thought it would be much better to get at the Buddhist priests in a personal way, rather than to visit the temple and distribute the books more or less publicly. So I arranged with two of my missionary friends to get into personal touch with the priests. Their efforts have met with much success and already most of the 27 Sinhalese Testaments which I sent have been handed to them. A few copies remain to be given out as opportunity occurs. The books so far have been gratefully received and the recipients have all promised to read them as opportunity occurs in their quiet seclusion. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit will use His Holy Word to lead them out of the darkness into light (31 August 1912, T. Gracie to G. P. van der Merwe, attached to CTLBA 28 Nov. 1912).

The letter demonstrates how one woman utilised the CTLBA to make her presence felt in London and Ceylon. Through the South African BFBS she could cause books to be moved through time and space and, on her behalf, have them delivered thousands of miles away. Mrs Fagg appears to have developed a life-long interest in Buddhists and continued to try to have testaments thrust upon them.

Part of the authority and energy of the committee derived from this knowledge that it could cause texts to circulate through time and space. This sense arose in part out of their direct control over the Bible women they employed. In hiring these intermediaries, the committee was following metropolitan fashions where, through the energy and organisational ability of Ellen Ranyard (Howsam 1991), the idea of using Bible women as intermediaries between middle-class committees and poor communities was formulated. Known as the “missing link”, such Bible women were widely used across the British empire as a way of reaching into the “dens and rookeries” of the poor (Anon. 1957, 240). Bible women would be supplied with Bibles and testaments and would then sell these in poor communities on a lay-by system in which a small amount of money would be given each week until the full price of the Bible had been paid off. These women consequently established ongoing relationships with their customers and in some cases also gave other forms of assistance like health care for the sick and clothes for the needy. In Howsam’s words (1991, 2), these relationships formed a complex “bible transaction”, part “commercial, personal, philanthropic and cultural”.

In their dealings with these Bible women, the CTLBA assumed a position of paternalism. At times they would withhold a portion of someone’s salary if they were ill (CTLBA 25 Jan. 1898). In other instances they fired women for what they considered inappropriate behaviour (“rudeness and unladylike behaviour”) (CTLBA 29 June 1909). With regard to Bible women themselves, we have little evidence of their biographies and opinions outside those left in the official records of organisations like the CTLBA. However, in at least some cases, it is clear that these women saw the job as an opportunity to buy respectability. Take, for example, the case of Rachel Williams, an ex-slave:

Rachel Williams was one of the emancipated slaves of 1838, and well knew how to sympathize with the poor coloured population; she was a refined woman for her class; and being an intelligent Christian and very happy and consistent in her daily walk, her visits were much valued and blessed. She was cut off in the midst of abundant labours, during the fever epidemic of 1867 (SAABFBS 1873, 2).

Another Bible woman, Mrs Miller, was described as follows:

As a Christian visitor to the poor, a vendor of Bibles from house to house, a collector of Free Contributions to the Bible Society, and the manager of a Clothing Club for the benefit of the families which have been brought to her notice during her eight years of service, she has proved a persevering and devoted friend of the poor, and a consistent agent of the Bible Society. The proof of her work, as far as figures can show it, appears in our Balance Sheet; but we believe a more important record is on High, and will be her rejoicing on the great Day of Account (CTLBA 1870, 2).

It is clear as well that the women learned from the Bible women and vice versa. One of the first women hired by the CTLBA in the 1840s was a woman from England. However, she could not speak Dutch and tended to mimic the forms of evangelisation used in England, like “cottage meetings” (sermons in the houses of the poor). She proved to be less than effective and so the next appointment was a “colonial” woman who spoke Dutch and English; she soon discontinued the cottage meetings. With increasing frequency, the committee appointed Bible women who had some nursing background and who could offer a combination of print and medicine that had proved so effective in other mission settings (A. M. Piers to Mrs March, letter dated 27 Nov. 1894 attached to CTLBA 13 Oct. 1894).

Another way to understand how members of the CTLBA viewed themselves and their work is through a closer consideration of the genres through which they represented themselves and negotiated their transnational networks. Like all other committees, the CTLBA generated and circulated a series of texts; it received texts, reprocessed them and passed them on. The major texts received were the reports from the Bible women. These were verbally delivered and then summarised in the minutes, often according to rules of understatement. Take, for example, the summary of the Bible woman’s report given in the November meeting. The minutes note that she “gave a verbal account of work in homes w[h]ere mothers are drunkards etc.”; the radical curtailment apparent in the “etc.” usefully captured a genre favoured by the CTLBA, which wished to portray itself as in touch with the poor, but at the same time not contaminated by their “depravity”. Via the Bible woman, they could both be “directly” in touch with poverty, but at the same time demonstrate their gentility by euphemising its more awful effects. Their task became one of both vouching for their “close encounter” with poverty and of sparing their audience its excesses.

These mediated accounts of the Bible women were forwarded from the CTLBA to the SAABFBS and appeared in its annual reports. One example appeared in 1864:

It is no easy matter to give in condensed form an adequate report of such a work. Even in our meetings of Committee we feel that we cannot tell each other one half of the interesting matter which is brought before us by the agents under our superintendence. But of this we are satisfied, that prudent, persevering and prayerful effort is being put for the spread of Gospel Truth among the careless, the misguided, and the suffering poor around us (SAABFBS 1965, 9).

A decade later, similar reports were still appearing:

We are thankful for the one agent in the work—an earnest Christian woman, who has been disciplined by a wise Providence for going among the poor as a kind and sympathizing friend. We refrain from giving a detailed account, but this much we may say: Bibles are carried about from house to house, and through the markets and open streets, and offered for sale. 385 copies of the Holy Scriptures, in whole or in part, have been sold in this way, during the past year, and the sum of £17.18.10 received in payment. The sick and dying have been visited, and on every available opportunity sinners have been directed to the sinners’ Friend—the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who subscribe to this mission understand its quiet, penetrating methods, and will not require us to say more. The lady superintendent of the Bible woman submits a report of her work at our monthly meeting; and we are fully satisfied that our agent is a faithful Christian worker, doing service as unto the Lord and not unto men. We shall be happy to give more minute information to any friends who may require it (CTLBA 1877, 1).

Another genre favoured by the CTLBA was that of people weeping and crying when confronted with the Bible. The genre itself forms part of a broader Protestant mythology in which the Bible functions as a powerful and quasi-magical text that can precipitate radical changes in people. One physical manifestation of these internal changes is weeping and crying, which also symbolise the remorse that sinners feel for their wickedness. One typical report from the CTLBA appeared in the annual report of the SAABFBS in 1863:

The hard and sterile ground is before us, and our hearts are often overwhelmed by the revelations continually made of the depths of vice and iniquity too appalling to be even named, which constantly impede our progress. Still, we know that the work is the Lord’s. Our impotence matters little. It cannot be too hard for him our Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. He is showing us His Purpose of mercy, by raising up agents for the work—women adapted to both the English and Dutch speaking poor, and of such age and character as can with propriety go into these strongholds of sin and Satan, and hold forth the Word of Life. Sickness, and a sense of utter misery, will sometimes make those visits welcome. Tears have been shed as the love of Christ to sinners has been made known to one laid on a bed of suffering … Negro, Kafir, Malay, and European have been alike glad to meet the Bible Woman, and to pay their weekly pence for this blessed Book (CTLBA 1863, 6).

Like many other organisations, the CTLBA generated a history of itself, and this genre become another way of positioning the committee transnationally. This history was sketched out in an annual report in the 1860s:

We copy from the “Jubilee Memorial” of the Parent Society: “It is an interesting fact, that the first Bible Association ever formed was established in 1804, by a young lady fifteen years of age, at Sheffield, without her having the slightest knowledge of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which was formed in the same year. The name of this young lady was Catherine Elliott. Observing in her visits to the poor, a deplorable want of the Holy Scriptures, she determined to do what she could towards supplying this want. She mentioned to her younger brother her intention of contributing something every week towards purchasing a Testament, for at that time they had no idea of being able to give away a Bible. She began with a penny, and he with a half-penny. They procured a tin box in which they kept their savings till they amounted to sixteen pence, with which they bought a Testament. This young lady next drew up an appeal, which she sent to her school fellows. The proposal was received and entered upon with ardour, and the Testaments were given away as fast as they could be procured. The number of subscribers gradually increased, and a degree of system was adopted. The committee consisted of four subscribers, who met every fortnight. The total number of Bibles and Testaments distributed by this little Society in sixteen years exceeded two thousand five hundred (CTLBA 1868, 10).

William Elliott, the brother of Catherine, emigrated to South Africa, and it is his wife who founded the CTLBA. Thus, by tracing its history back through a female lineage, the CTLBA could script a history for itself that precedes that of the BFBS. This history also celebrates the role of women as philanthropic pioneers and hence establishes a precedent for the workings and identity of the committee.

Unsurprisingly for a committee embedded in a transnational network, the CTLBA, like its parent body, relied heavily on narratives of circulation. Endless lists of figures and tables recorded how many Bibles, testaments and portions of scripture had been sold. As we have seen in relation to the meeting in November 1912, stories of Bibles travelling to far parts of the continent were often rehearsed. As Michael Warner (2002) has argued, questions of circulation, both real and imagined, lie at the very heart of how publics come into being. For Warner, it is the limits and pathways of circulation that are critical. How these are imagined become the sinews around which publics take shape. A key methodological move in such an equation is to pay close attention to how texts dramatise the limits of their circulation. In Warner’s words (2002, 63):

From the concrete experience of a world in which available forms circulate, one projects a public …. This performative ability depends, however, on that object’s being not entirely fictitious—not postulated merely, but recognized as a real path for the circulation of discourse. That path is then treated as a social entity.

By endlessly rehearsing how their Bibles circulated—in Cape Town, Central Africa and Ceylon—or how their funds passed to the SAABFBS and then on to the BFBS itself, the members of the CTLBA dramatised their role as part of a transnational reading and textual network. In this monthly iteration of how texts could be directed across the world and have powerful influences on all they encountered, the CTLBA played its part in laying the ground work for the emergence of the idea of a transnational Protestant reading public.

II

What deductions might we draw from the workings of the CTLBA? What light might this case study throw on international and national developments in the field? To answer this question, a brief overview of trends in the transnational history of the book becomes necessary. As I indicated above, most book history is national in its orientation. At the same time, there is a sizeable body of scholarship on the movement of books across boundaries. This scholarship generally takes the form of analysing patterns of book exports—mainly from England to colonial North America (Barber 1976; 1982; Bell, Bennett & Bevan 2000; Bell 2000; McDougall 2004)—and/or examining the creation of national markets in a colonial economy, which is the approach taken, for example, by the Australian History of the Book project (Lyons & Arnold 2001). This work is, of course, extremely important, but tends generally to rely on a model of “centre” and “periphery”: books are produced in the “centre” and consumed in the periphery, or book-making technology is produced in the “centre” and exported to the “periphery”.

The model of “centre” and “periphery” or “metropole” and “colony” in which influences from the former flow outwards to the latter has been under fire for some time. The critiques of this older model have emanated from revisionist understandings in which the imperial and post-imperial world is understood as an intellectually integrated zone (Prakash 1995; Cooper & Stoler 1997; Van der Veer 2001). Forms of influence consequently flow in more than one direction and developments are shaped in multiple sites, not only “centre” and “periphery”.

One recent study that avoids the pitfalls of “centre” and “periphery” in favour of a more integrated framework is Priya Joshi’s In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2002). Through placing an analysis of reading patterns in India alongside a history of the Macmillan publishing company, she demonstrates how popular reading tastes in India help to determine the shape and content of metropolitan publishing profiles. Readers in colonial markets are understood as intellectual players in a broader transnational arena rather than being imagined as mere consumers. The case study of the CTLBA offered here seeks to illustrate a similar process. The CTLBA is not just a minor grouping on the periphery whose work has little impact beyond Cape Town. Instead, the group needs to be understood as agents whose reading and textual practices play a role in bringing a transnational Protestant arena into being.

Yet is such an approach useful in the emerging field of book history in South Africa? A transnational approach is necessarily ambitious, since it entails a grasp of intellectual developments in several parts of the world. Book history in South Africa is currently in its infancy and such work as does exist is largely national in orientation. A further problem is that much material pertaining to book studies in South Africa is dominated by a presentistic book development paradigm. There is consequently a lot of material on development-related areas like literacy, libraries and educational publishing. Yet there is little curiosity about the histories of textual practices, about how print culture has operated in the past and how, for example, distinctive forms of textual practice have emerged as book-making technology has been “baptised” in African intellectual and spiritual traditions.¹

Book history in South Africa consequently faces two challenges: it needs to live up to its name and become book history. It also needs to develop a stronger transnational awareness so that the work done in South Africa can demonstrate its importance to scholarship elsewhere. Without such a development, book history in this country runs the risk of becoming an antiquarian endeavour.

NOTES

1In situations of early encounter between mission and convert, where literacy is generally acquired outside formal institutions, the phenomenon of “miraculous literacy”—where Africans acquire the ability to read (and sometimes to write) through divine intervention—is not uncommon (Hofmeyr 2001; Hodgson 1980). In such conceptualisations, the idea of the printed text is radically reinterpreted: it becomes an object that circulates between heaven and earth, and an object that “speaks” through immersion in oral traditions.

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