This is a rich and diverse study of what South Africans read and why and how they read it. The cover provides two images: a 1971 book burning in Johannesburg and a Western Cape slave clandestinely reading a book. The book contains another twenty images, as well as five tables, detailed endnotes and a sufficient index. Archie L. Dick focuses on ‘common readers’, as ‘slaves and freed slaves, poor Muslim and Christian children and adults, soldiers, political prisoners, township activists, and political exiles’ (p. 3). He argues convincingly that reading – from the establishment of the Cape Colony in 1652 to the waning days of apartheid – was an act of subversion against oppression and authority. ‘Reading “struggles”,’ Dick argues, ‘occur in “zones of influence,” which are sites and spaces like the streets, canteen and taverns, reading circles, reading societies, schools, churches, prisons, and libraries’ (p. 5).
Following the introduction, Chapter 1 addresses reading culture at the Cape in the ‘long eighteenth century’. Chapter 2 analyses the control of reading material at the Cape in the first half of the nineteenth century and is not unreasonable in suggesting that, as the paternalistic bonds of the eighteenth century loosened, reading became subject to both liberal and racialized attitudes. The third chapter jumps to the early twentieth century, when women's groups attempted to use books to foster senses of British imperial, Afrikaner and united South African identity, both before and after Union in 1910. Books ranging from Green's A Short History of the English People to Henty's With Kitchener in the Soudan: a story of Atbara and Omdurman were employed, with the latter used as a high school matriculation history text. Chapter 6 examines rebellious readers in townships in the 1980s, while Chapter 7 focuses on reading at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in exile in Tanzania. Chapter 8 covers reading in prison. The book concludes with a reflection on the special place of Dickens in the South African imagination and further avenues for research.
This book's broad temporal and thematic range, as well as its episodic nature between and within chapters, is linked by the shared thread of Dick's ‘common reader’, and, to a slightly lesser extent, by his exploration of how reading subverts authority. The range of sources in English, Dutch and Afrikaans is impressive. To explore how free blacks and slaves at the eighteenth-century Cape learned how to write letters and pass notes, Dick employs the Cape Lodge slave house journal of Jan Smiesing, a slave turned teacher. The reader can tell that Dick enjoyed researching and writing this book through his enthusiastic descriptions and analyses of sources.
Smiesing's notebook is described as:
bound with bright red covers that have two leather ties to secure them. Just beneath his name and surname inscribed on the cover is the date 1717, followed by the barely visible number 32 to indicate that it covers the years 1717 to 1732. The notebook consists of fourteen unnumbered pages of writing. Several pages have been neatly cut out of the book. Some passages of writing end abruptly and parts appear to be missing. These features raise interesting questions about how ideas and books circulated at a time when there was no print culture at the Cape. The first printing press only arrived in 1784, unlike other VOC [Dutch East India Company] colonies like Ceylon where printing had already started in 1736. There was, however, an energetic culture of copying from books in longhand for private use, or circulation for limited use. (p. 20)
For those not familiar with the history of South Africa, Dick provides good historical context for his examinations of reading and libraries near the beginning of each chapter. The book adds reading and libraries – subversive and not – to the state of knowledge on the country's cultural, social and political history, but it is also valuable in its own right as a study of ‘evil and ethics in book and reading cultures’ (p. 99), race-oriented social engineering through books, and books and learning as a unifying force. In the outstanding Chapters 4 and 5, Dick sets out how books were used for troop morale to defeat fascism in Europe and North Africa, and controlled in support of fascism in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The Books for Troops programme of the Second World War, which provided over 1 million books and several million magazines to black and European South African soldiers in Europe and North Africa, changed views on race: eventually, 42 per cent of white soldiers said that blacks should get more political rights. And yet, under apartheid, Belgian Nazi-collaborator Herman de Vleeschauwer came to be head librarian and professor at the University of Pretoria and Unisa (University of South Africa). Chapter 5, which discusses de Vleeschauwer's career, also describes the complicity of British and Afrikaner librarians with apartheid book burnings. I could not find any weaknesses in the book, other than that The Story of an African Farm appears only towards the end, and in anecdotal form about codes used by anti-apartheid political activists. Schreiner's novel may be the least ‘hidden’ book in the history of South Africa and Dick surely came across it in his research.
The book explodes the myth that has lasted to this day: that South Africans, particularly black South Africans because of their oral tradition, do not read. As Dick shows, the Cape under the Dutch East India Company was not a vapid and unliterary culture detached from European civilization. Black South Africans attended public readings, wrote in the sand, and took inspiration from the inequalities in Dickens' novels in the struggle against apartheid.
