Print Culture in Southern Africa

Caroline Davis is Associate Professor in Publishing at University College London. She is the author of African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing (2020), Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (2013) and the co-editor of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (2015). Archie L. Dick is Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria. He previously taught at the University of the Western Cape and the University of South Africa. He is the author of several books, including Reading Spaces in South Africa, 1850–1920s (2020) and The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (2013). Elizabeth le Roux is Associate Professor and the coordinator of Publishing Studies in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria. She is co-editor of the journal Book History and is the author of Publishing Against Apartheid South Africa: A Case Study of Ravan Press (2020) and A Social History of the University Presses in Apartheid South Africa (2016). Dennis Walder is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, and the author of numerous publications on modern and postcolonial literatures, including Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (2013).

Introduction

Caroline Davis, Archie Dick and Elizabeth le Roux

Reading Communities and Circuits

1. Reading Authors of the Enlightenment at the Cape of Good Hope from the Late 1780s to the Early 1830s

Archie L. Dick

2. The Black House’, or How the Zulus Became Jews

Hlonipha Mokoena

Transnational Publishing Histories

3. Setting Trans-Vaal Scenes in German Type: Missionary Carl Hoffmann’s Book Designs, ca. 1900–1930

Lize Kriel

4. History by Paratext: Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka

Corinne Sandwith

5. A Question of Power: Bessie Head and her Publishers

Caroline Davis

6. Minding Their Own Business: Penguin in Southern Africa

Alistair McCleery

Print, Publishing and Politics

7. ‘To See Us as We See Ourselves’: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical

Khwezi Mkhize

8. What ‘Other Devils’? The Texts of Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi Revisited

Brian Willan

9. Miriam Tlali and Ravan Press: Politics and Power in Literary Publishing during the Apartheid Period

Elizabeth Le Roux

10. Anatomy of the Challenges Facing Zambian Writers and Publishers of Literary Works

Cheela Himutwe K. Chilala