Seminar Questions

• What was the motivation for publishing a newspaper in Cape Town in the 1820s?
• Who were the audiences for the South African Commercial Advertiser?
• Why did the colonial government censor the South African Commercial Advertiser?
• Compare and contrast press censorship in colonial South Africa and India.

Seminar Readings

** A Condensed Edition of the First Eighteenth Numbers of the South African Commercial Advertiser (Cape Town, 1826), iii-x and 1-20

** ‘Papers relating to the South African Commercial Advertiser and its Editor’, Parliamentary Papers, Cape of Good Hope, Return to an Address of the House of Commons, of the 30th May 1827, 1-7

* McKenzie, Kirsten, ‘Franklins of the Cape: The South African Commercial Advertiser and the Creation of a Colonial Public Sphere, 1824-1854’, Kronos, 25 (1998)

Additional Readings

Primary

‘Papers relating to the South African Commercial Advertiser and its Editor’, Parliamentary Papers, Cape of Good Hope, Return to an Address of the House of Commons, of the 30th May 1827

Further issues of the South African Commercial Advertiser are available online via Oxford University Library.

Transcriptions of extracts from various nineteenth-century South African newspapers are available online via the Genealogical Society of South Africa.

Secondary

Dick, Archie, ‘Book History, Library History and South Africa’s Reading Culture’, South African Historical Journal 55 (2006)

Dick, Archie, ‘Copying and Circulation in South Africa’s Reading Cultures, 1780–1840’, in Davis and Johnson (eds), The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Basingstoke, 2015)

Dubow, Saul, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820-2000 (Oxford, 2006), particularly chapter one

Hofmeyr, Isabel, and Lize Kriel, ‘Book History in Southern Africa: What Is It and Why Should It Interest Historians?’, South African Historical Journal, 55 (2006)

Holden, Carol, ‘Early Printing from Africa in the British Library’, British Library Journal, 23 (1997)

Holdridge, Christopher, ‘Laughing with Sam Sly: The Cultural Politics of Satire and Colonial British Identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850’, Kronos, 36 (2010)

Roux, Elizabeth le, ‘Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline’, Book History, 15 (2012)

Vlies, Andrew van der, ‘The History of the Book in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Michael F. Suarez, and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford, 2013)

Seminar Powerpoint

Powerpoint - Week 11

Seminar Handout

Handout - Week 11

South African Newspapers

Examples of other South African newspapers (download)