Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of perspectives--historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; "iimbongi," orature and the canon; book-collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books "as "art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of "book history" for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa. "Book History" or "Histories of the Book" has been an important and influential field in European and North American scholarship for at least three decades. This volume showcases the "History of the Book" within a South African context and its significance in South Africa's emerging studies of print culture.

This study looks into the making of historical knowledge through written texts and publications. The focus is on the colonial subjugation of a South African community, the Hananwa of Kgalusi Mmaleboho, in a war against the Boers in 1894. During the course of the twentieth century, two diaries, one by an Anglican priest (Colin Rae) and one by a German missionary (Christoph Sonntag), came to play an extraordinary role in the way 'Malaboch' and his people would be represented in what Roland Barthes referred to as the "civilisation of the written word." Attention is paid to the diary as a source for historical research, and the extent to which, especially in published form, its aspirations also as a literary genre affect its possible meanings for successive generations of readers.