Reconsidering the History of South African Journalism provides a revolutionary evaluation of the press’s nuanced function during and after slavery in the Cape (1800–38). The book demonstrates how early newspapers were closely connected to slavery, both logically and commercially, challenging the romanticized portrayal of the ‘free press’ as a democratizing force. The book painstakingly examines how pioneering journalists and printers were frequently slaveholders themselves, using their publications to legitimate and profit from human bondage. It is aimed at journalism experts, media historians and postcolonial studies researchers.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first, ‘History’, the author exhumes the origins of the Cape’s ‘slave press’, notably The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, founded by British slave traders. It juxtaposes the rise of ‘liberal’ newspapers such as The South African Commercial Advertiser with their paradoxical reliance on slave advertisements. The second part is ‘Content’, where the author analyses press discourse on slavery, exposing how even anti-slavery platforms commodified enslaved people through advertisements. For example, Chapter 6’s narrative of slave sale notices is particularly harrowing. In ‘Aftermath’, the third part, Botma reassesses the legacy of these newspapers, arguing that their moral compromises – driven by profit and ethnic rivalries – cast a long shadow over South Africa’s myths of press freedom.
The book’s greatest contribution lies in its unflinching archival work, which dismantles the myth of journalism’s inherent progressivism. By foregrounding primary sources, including slave advertisements in ‘liberal’ papers, it reveals the press’s active role in dehumanization. In Chapter 4, the analysis of De Zuid-Afrikaan as a pro-slavery Dutch mouthpiece and the commercial ties between printers and slaveholders is especially illuminating. The concluding critique of the ‘Chinese wall’ between adverts and editorial content resonates powerfully in today’s era of corporate media dominance.
The book’s potential to transform media historiography is undermined by its lack of attention to three interrelated frameworks, in spite of its exceptional archival rigour. First, by ignoring important connections to larger colonial media ecosystems, the study of the Cape’s ‘slave press’ remains isolated. Standardized ‘fugitive slave’ templates were distributed from Cape Town to Calcutta by Dutch and British slaveholding elites.Footnote 1 Advertisements in The Cape Town Gazette were identical to those in the Royal Gazette of Jamaica, right down to the use of dehumanizing typeface: the Gazette’s wording ‘Sturdy Malay boy, lightly used’ attests to this. These parallels reveal how media technologies upheld racial capitalism throughout empires, a trend that the book’s nation-bound perspective hides.
Second, the complex information networks that enslaved communities maintained are not considered: the book’s sole focus is on print media, which is dominated by Europe. Records show that the Khoi people used rock art and satirical songs to counter propaganda from the mainstream press, while enslaved people at the Cape regularly used religious gatherings to spread subversive information.Footnote 2 The ‘print hegemony’ of slaveholding newspapers was seriously challenged by these alternative media networks, which included what academics refer to as ‘nocturnal storytelling circles’. The book perpetuates what postcolonial media theorists have called the epistemic violence of traditional press historiography by omitting these indigenous communicative practices from its definition of ‘journalism’, thereby reproducing the colonial archive’s systematic erasure of subaltern agency. Given the focus of recent research on reclaiming these underutilized news distribution channels as valid elements of early South Africa’s media ecology, this omission is especially startling.
Furthermore, the book loses a crucial chance to explain the technopolitical continuities between colonial print capitalism and digital extraction with its brief nod towards modern media compromises. An examination of three understudied links would be useful. First, today’s algorithmic profiling was foreshadowed by the racist taxonomy of slave advertisements, which reduced people to ‘healthy male, £25’ in newspaper columns. For bodies to be readable for exploitation, both gig economy platforms and auction blocks rely on standardized metadata. Second, Big Tech and slaveholding newspapers have similar profit structures. Facebook’s ‘Marketplace’ makes cash from migrant workers with hyper-targeted advertisements, just like The Cape Town Gazette made wealth from enslaved bodies through transaction announcements. The study here does not include this continuous chain of rentier media. Lastly, encrypted conversations and meme activism are digital equivalents of the enslaved people’s resistance strategies, such as coded songs and oral networks. The author, however, overlooks how oppressed populations today reappropriate media instruments, much as their forebears defied the ‘slave press’, by obsessing over print artefacts.
Reconsidering the History of South African Journalism is a crucial corrective to existing media histories. By revealing the press’s ties to slavery, it forces readers to face difficult realities about power and profit in journalism, but it also unintentionally modernizes colonial viewpoints by leaving out indigenous agency and global parallels. Nevertheless, this book is essential for rethinking press freedom, which is not a neutral ideal but rather a contested space where exploitation and liberation have always coexisted.
