The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures by Archie L. Dick (review)

In southern African studies, research on books and reading has always proceeded in fits and starts with work scattered across a number of domains: ethnographies of reading, applied linguistics, literary studies, librarianship and information studies, studies of orality and literacy. Archie Dick’s marvelous book draws together this fragmented field, providing the first book-length study on this topic.

The monograph comprises a series of case studies that move from slavery to the end of apartheid. The broad theme running across the book is that of reading against the odds, of “common readers” excluded by racist and oppressive structures, actively or passively prevented from reading, but managing to read nonetheless. The book presents a rich cast of characters—“slaves and freed slaves, poor Muslim and Christian children and adults, soldiers, political prisoners, township activists, and political exiles” (3)—and their interactions with institutions that attempted to stop them from reading or funneled them into institutions that sought to train them to read in ways that suited white supremacy.

The case studies illuminate a rich range of literacy contexts: slavery and postemancipation; white women’s organizations that promoted reading in the service of political projects; black soldiers during World War II gaining access to reading through Books for Troops schemes; white-dominated library institutions under apartheid; antiapartheid reading practices within the country and in exile; and reading within prisons. Each case study is deeply researched and draws on extensive archival work and oral interviews. As a result the book is alive with absorbing details and riveting vignettes, all embedded in a rich sense of context. The discussion of slave literacies shows the range of languages in operation (Dutch, Cape Dutch, Malay, Arabic, Buginese, Tamil, and Sinhalese) and the uses to which slaves put such literacy as they were permitted to get (some at a school at the Slave Lodge). One woman, Rosina, “read the statue of emancipation ‘in a loud voice’ on every anniversary of the freedom of the slaves, outside the window of her embarrassed former owner, who had abandoned her and her two children she had by him” (39).

The section on white-controlled libraries and white librarians under apartheid is especially illuminating. It includes an account of H. J. de Vleeschauwer, a Flemish Nazi collaborator subsequently sentenced to death by a Belgian military court. De Vleeschauwer fled to Switzerland and then South Africa, where he ended up as head of the Merensky Library at the University of Pretoria, also holding chairs of philosophy and librarianship at the University of South Africa. Vleeschauwer brought with him a large library of looted books.

Dick presents an instructive account of the intersections between apartheid libraries and the Publication Control Board. The whites-only library association supported the censorship system and ardently participated in a program of book burning by which tens of thousands of banned books were removed from libraries and transported to depots for incineration. The book examines how antiapartheid librarians in township libraries sought to subvert the system from within, circulating banned books clandestinely. These texts were eagerly taken up in the network of reading and debating groups that characterized township life during the struggle. A fascinating chapter on the library at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (located on the ANC’s base in Tanzania) shows how rank-and-file readers generally escaped the serious political reading that their leaders wanted them to consume and instead read lifestyle magazines.

The final chapter, on reading in prison, highlights the role that books played in an oppressive state system. Books were inevitably seized in police raids and anything with a suspicious title (like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black) was taken as evidence or confiscated. Possessing banned books in some cases lead to detention, torture, and imprisonment. In prison, access to books was manipulated, with even the Bible confiscated on occasion. Some prisons had small libraries and...