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

While much has been written in the last twenty years about the social and political history of South Africa, very little research has explored the evolution of that country’s reading cultures, particularly as these relate to the country’s long struggle for democracy. Archie Dick’s study of South Africa’s book and reading cultures fills this gap in the historical record and provides a compelling analysis of both the strategies employed by elites to control reading and the methods used by common readers to respond to those regulatory efforts. Building his argument on a wide variety of primary sources that were largely inaccessible before the 1990s (e.g., official records of women’s organizations, army education units, prisons, and libraries), Dick reveals the different ways that social and political meaning was imposed, contested, and subverted in the spaces created by South Africa’s reading cultures.

The book is organized chronologically, beginning with a discussion of the literacy practices of Cape Colony inhabitants in the middle of the seventeenth century and ending with a study of the strategies employed by political activists to combat censorship in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter 1 provides a detailed analysis of the reading and writing activities of slaves and free blacks in the early days of Dutch colonialism, while chapter 2 explores the effects of nineteenth-century European liberalism on South Africans’ literacy skills. In both of these chapters, the impact of religious schools (both Christian and Muslim) on emerging South African reading cultures is well documented. Chapter 3 shifts its attention to the women’s organizations in the late nineteenth century that contributed to the construction of a particular model of nationhood by actively promoting designated history texts in schools, libraries, and reading groups. The analysis here focuses specifically on the ways in which women’s groups collaborated with educators to construct a white reading nation. Chapter 4 argues that the successful Books for Troops Scheme during the Second World War not only introduced tens of thousands of (black and white) South African soldiers to the pleasures of reading but also empowered a small number of committees to determine the kinds of books to which those troops had access.

The most compelling section of this book is, however, the two-part portrait of the battle between the apartheid government and political dissidents over access to thousands of books banned by the state between the 1950s and late 1980s. Chapter 5 describes the “holocaust of literature” perpetrated by the many librarians and educators who collaborated with state authorities to control people’s access to information, while chapter 6 presents an overview of the extraordinary efforts made by dissidents to acquire censored materials and share them with other readers. Dick’s depiction of the dedicated citizens who risked their lives for the love of books and ideas is truly inspiring.

Chapters 7 and 8 bring the study to a close by telling the stories of activists who refused to let state authorities choose their reading materials for them. Some went into exile in Tanzania, where they established a library and college where South Africans could read without fear of persecution. Others stayed in South Africa, were arrested, and were ultimately found guilty of, among other things, possessing banned books. The convicted readers did their best to continue educating themselves using the sparse resources provided by prison libraries.

One of Dick’s greatest strengths as a writer is his attention to detail. He uses meticulous, nuanced studies of individual documents, people, and organizations to bring statistics and bureaucratic records alive. A weakness of this study, however, is the inconsistent application of the theoretical framework elaborated in the introduction. After promising to apply Michel de Certeau’s notion of “tactics” and “strategies” to the history of South African reading communities, Dick refers back to de Certeau only once (in chapter 5) in the following eight...