The Black Press and Black Literature in South Africa 1900–1950

Couzens, Tim

doi:10.1080/00138397608690731

Cited by 16 publications

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“…In approaching the ephemeral form of the newspaper column as an important instance of African urban inscription, I reiterate arguments made elsewhere about the significance of African print cultures for a proper understanding of the rich history, continuities and contexts of popular African authorship and literary production; in short, of the newspaper as an important early arena (in the absence of other platforms) of African literary-cultural expression (Couzens 1974(Couzens , 1985Newell 2002Newell , 2013Barber, 2012Barber, , 2016Peterson, Newell & Hunter 2016;Askew 2016;Sandwith 2019). As suggested above, this includes a claim for the newspaper as an important index of urbanity and the corresponding argument that local African print cultures constitute a significant, although frequently overlooked, arena for the inscription of both city life and the life of the city.…”

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confidence: 85%

“…4 Other sellers in the market place of truth included the Communist newspapers, Umsebenzi and Umvikele Thebe, the mining industry-linked paper Umteteli wa Bantu, established in 1921 as a counter to black radicalism and a brace of commercial black newspapers controlled by the Argus Printing and Publishing Company, of which The Bantu World was one. As scholars have noted, the period saw the demise of many independent, African-owned papers as these came under the increasing sway of more powerful commercial interests (Couzens 1976;Switzer 1988). In the absence of independent alternatives, the black commercial press became an important focus for urban African elites, taken up for the purposes of public debate, political engagement, moral education and social gossip.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…See Sandwith (2019) for more on the satirical tradition and Dhlomo's awareness of the politics of style. Other studies of The Bantu World include Couzens (1976), Switzer and Switzer (1979), Switzer (1997), Peterson (2006), Thomas (2006) and Healy-Clancy (2014).…”

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Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Sandwith¹

2019

Eng in Afr

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Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s 'Drum generation'. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, A n A frican Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, "R. Roamer Esq." which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu W orld over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant's room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer's verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience,

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Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Sandwith¹

2019

Eng in Afr

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“…Selope Thema, The Bantu World was one of the most successful newspapers of its time. Supported and sanctioned by a mix of white liberal commercial and later mining interests, it enjoyed wide-spread legitimacy and impressive circulation figures amongst a largely urban, African elite (Couzens 1976;Switzer 1988). It was also routinely derided in dissenting intellectual circles, labelled a "pseudo Native weekly" (cited in Couzens 1976, 11) by liberal sympathiser William Ballinger and denounced as the "voice of Caliban" by the Orlando township newspaper, The Voice of Africa (June 1950, 6).…”

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“…In line with this Special Issue, I approach the newspaper -and the newspaper column -as texts in their own right, as sites of discursive performance and invention rather than merely repositories of historical or literary gems. As such, the paper builds on the idea of the newspaper as an important incubator of literary expression in African contexts and adds emphasis to emergent readings of African newspapers as sites of stylistic and genre-based experimentation and innovation in which the boundaries between the literary and the non-literary are frequently breached (Jordan 1973;Couzens 1974;Newell 2002Newell , 2013Barber 2012;Peterson 2012;Peterson, Hunter, and Newell 2016). In this regard, the column writing genre -inherently unstable, malleable and idiosyncratic -emerges as a very important and distinctive discursive, even literary, form in a tradition of African newspaper formats which are often not very "newsy;" in which information takes second place to social gossip, moral exhortation, philosophical reflection, literary criticism, aesthetic experimentation and political commentary.…”

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Well-seasoned talks: the newspaper column and the satirical mode in South African letters

Sandwith

2019

Social Dynamics

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In this article, I examine the popular satirical column "R. Roamer Esq." written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa's protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo's satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading of South African literary history that goes beyond the published literary text, one which can accommodate the idiosyncratic form of the newspaper column. In this sense, the newspaper itself is reimagined as an important site of linguistic and genre-based experimentation, invention and play.

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Print Culture and Imagining the Union of South Africa

Johnson¹

2015

The Book in Africa

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Please do not cite or quote from this paper. It is a the first draft of a chapter that will appear under a similar title but in much-changed form in Caroline Davis and David Johnson (eds.), Debates in African Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). Novels The South African War had an unanticipated impact upon British book sales, as the The Bookman's monthly survey for January 1900 explains: At first glance it might seem that there was little connection between [the War and the book trade], but unfortunately this is not the case. There is a serious falling off in business, a very noticeable curtailment of orders. This is partly owing to the interest evinced in the war news contained in the daily and evening papers, leaving little time for more profitable reading, and partly to the fact that so many high families and others have been plunged into mourning by the sad losses, more especially among the officers, in South Africa. Even where this is not the case the anxiety felt for the safety of those serving in the front has completely set aside the question of book-buying, for the present, at any rate. .. . There is a small redeeming feature amid all this depression of business. It is that the war has created a literature of its own, which is much sought after. 2 Writers and publishers were swift to react to this new growth area in book sales: by the end of 1900, 33 books on the War had been published, 23 works of fiction and reportage, and ten aimed at juvenile readers. By 1910, 84 books on the War had been published, 60 for adults and 24 for juvenile readers. 3 Many of the novels on the South African War looked forward to reconciliation between Briton and Boer. Bertram Mitford's Aletta. A Tale of the Boer Invasion (1900) was the first novel to resolve the political conflicts of the South African War through the marriage of characters representing the two contending factions. Such a narrative structure repeats that of the late eighteenth-/ early nineteenth-century subgenre of the novel Katie Trumpener designates as the 'national tale'. Trumpener explains how '[d]uring the first decades of the nineteenth century, novelists in Ireland, then in Scotland and England, continue to rewrite this national marriage plot [as these novels] engaged, from the outset, in a complicated political reconciliation process'. 4 The marriage-as-allegory-for-national-reconciliation novel was not the only version of the national tale, 5 but it was the one which travelled especially successfully to colonial and neo-colonial societies. 6 Latin American historical romances, for example, demonstrate 'the inextricability of politics from fiction in the history of nation-building [as they provide] stories of star-crossed lovers who represent particular regions, races, parties, or economic interests, which should naturally come together'. 7 The South African version has an Englishman and an Afrikaner woman struggling through the hostilities of the war and marrying each other in the closing chapter. 8 Aside from Aletta, other examples include C...

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The Black Press and Black Literature in South Africa 1900–1950

Cited by 16 publications

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Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Well-seasoned talks: the newspaper column and the satirical mode in South African letters

Print Culture and Imagining the Union of South Africa

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