‘The Root and Flower of a People's Strength’: On the Bi-centenary of The South African Commercial Advertiser and The South African Journal, 1824–2024

Abstract

The South African Commercial Advertiser, a weekly, and The South African Journal, a bi-monthly, were published in Cape Town in 1824, until the publisher George Greig and the editors Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn closed down in the face of the threat of government censorship. In effect, the two overlapped in their coverage and the newspaper and the magazine (or review) are best read together as articulations of the general aims of the triumvirate of editors and publishers. This paper seeks to describe and evaluate the South African scope and achievement of these two publications.

Keywords:

• South Africa 1824
• The South African Commercial Advertiser
• The South African Journal
• Pringle
• Fairbairn
• Greig
• colonial governance
• free press

Introduction

No. 1 of George Greig's weekly South African Commercial Advertiser appeared on 7th January 1824. Intended ‘chiefly for the use and accommodation of persons connected with Trade and Merchandise,’ the Advertiser found room for ‘Literary Productions … Agriculture’ (‘Prospectus’) and other fields of interest. Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn, who took over as joint editors with the third issue, announced in No. 8 their imminent publication of The South African Literary Journal: although it appeared without the word ‘literary’ in its title, the designation is important. The Journal in its Prospectus looked forward to coverage of Education, Religion, Literature, Science, Commerce, Statistics, General History, Philosophy and the Principles of the Sciences. As descriptive, speculative and commemorative, this article seeks to give an account of the achievements of the Advertiser and its inter-connection with the Journal, and to elaborate on the politics of their aims, suggesting that together the two publications give expression to an embryonic South African imagination and sensibility.

Pringle’s Edinburgh Journalism

Pringle brought real experience to his journalistic work in Cape Town. From April to September 1817, he had been co-editor with James Cleghorn of the first six issues of Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. Pringle himself had, like the publisher, had the idea to found this new rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. The co-operation with Blackwood ended after those first six issues, partly because Pringle sided with his co-editor Cleghorn in a difference with Blackwood. Pringle also contributed to the magazine.¹ Although Blackwood's sympathies were Tory, Pringle himself wrote of Blackwood's project that ‘the scheme as far as it was realised in the first six numbers (which were Whiggish) was mine’ (Qtd in Vigne: 30). Under Pringle and Cleghorn's editorship the magazine was both a business success and well received by readers. After their quarrel with Blackwood was taken to arbitration, the two editors received financial compensation from the publisher.

In 1817, Pringle had also taken on the editorship of the Edinburgh Star, a liberal newspaper. The Star appeared on Tuesdays and Fridays, so Pringle was responsible for two leading articles per week. Significantly perhaps, for Pringle's South African journalism: ‘The Star carried substantial reports and readers’ correspondence and was frequently drawn upon for news, but its instincts were not combative […]. Under Pringle the Star took pride in its law reports, which it sometimes published in separate form’ (Cowan 1946: 20, 37).

Pringle and Cleghorn soon found work with Blackwood's rival Constable, whose The Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany, a New Version of the Scots Magazine they edited from October 1817 until March 1819. Once again Pringle contributed to the journal.² The ruthless hostility of the Edinburgh Tory faction led to the fact that, despite some illustrious contributors – including Hazlitt and Scott – Constable's Edinburgh Magazine (as it became) failed under Pringle and Cleghorn, although, under its new editor, it published a favourable review of Pringle's poem The Autumnal Excursion.

Thomas Pringle's journalism in Cape Town in 1824 had been strangely foreshadowed by his work in Edinburgh with the publishers Blackwood and Constable (1817–1819). In Edinburgh Pringle worked with two publishers and a co-editor: in Cape Town he worked with two publishers (one also a printer) and a co-editor. In both cities he was responsible for a magazine and a newspaper: in both the enterprise was cut short, in Edinburgh for personal reasons, in Cape Town for political. Whereas in Edinburgh Pringle and Cleghorn had fallen out with both Blackwood and Constable, in Cape Town Pringle and Fairbairn maintained their bond with Greig their publisher.

In a letter to Fairbairn of 24 November 1822, Pringle invites his friend to come out to South Africa to join him in his school:

I have also another affair that requires your attention here. I am projecting a magazine to enlighten South Africa. There is nothing of this kind in the Colony, not even a decent newspaper and there is a great wish for it. The ablest of the Clergy will heartily assist in it – and as there are no Booksellers we would have all the profits in our own hands. The Government, I believe, will support and patronise it – at least I have the zealous support of my chief friend the Colonial Secretary [Colonel Bird]. (Pringle, 2011: 82)

On 31 October, in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, Pringle had been less confident, Lord Charles Somerset having been led to believe ‘that I am a violent Whig and formerly a supporter of the democrat press (as it is called) in Scotland’ (2011: 77).

The South African Commercial Advertiser³

The first issue of The South African Commercial Advertiser appeared on Wednesday 7 January 1824. Although Pringle and Fairbairn were taken on as editors ‘from the third issue’ (Pringle, 2011: 92), which appeared on 21 January, the contract, signed by the three collaborators and guaranteeing that the editors’ names be kept secret, and that all copy supplied by the editors would not be altered in any way without their consent, is dated 7 February 1824. The second issue introduced on the front page below the title and date some words of Dr. Johnson from Boswell's Life, which were to remain the newspaper's masthead motto at least until it closed in May: ‘The mass of every People must be barbarous where there is no Printing.’ (The first appearance of the motto included ‘and, consequently, Knowledge is not generally diffused.’) From the third issue, Pringle and Fairbairn ‘undertook the literary management of the paper.’ (Narrative 1835: 181)

Pringle and Fairbairn's individual predilections may be expressed in some details of the Advertiser's copy. Quotation of Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), and unascribed publication of his verse may reflect Pringle's own interest in his fellow Scot. Of Pringle, his friend Robert Story wrote that

in his admiration of Campbell's verse, may be traced the germinating love of freedom and abhorrence of oppression, which became the ruling passion and determining motive of his life. (Qtd by Conder, in Pringle's Narrative 1835: xxv)

And in ‘The Emigrant's Cabin’ Campbell is among the poets Pringle anticipates discussing with Fairbairn (Pringle 1989: 31). Fairbairn had replied to Pringle's invitation to join him at the Cape in a letter which imagined the two of them as ‘Franklins of the Kaap.’ The reference was to Sir John Franklin whose account of his arctic expedition had been published in 1823. (Vigne 2012: 119) The Advertiser kept up a running interest in current exploration from its first issue, with accounts of such figures as Captain Parry, who was to co-operate with Franklin himself in an attempt to find the North-West Passage, and the Italian Belzoni, African explorer and Egyptologist. Pringle's and Fairbairn's interests (they were still running their Academy or school in Cape Town) seem to converge in the discussion of Public Schools:

In the efficiency of such establishments, while under the immediate patronage of any Government, we have no faith: for Patronage, in such cases, is but another word for control; and no man, who knows any superior but the Laws, is a fit guide or companion for the young. (No. XVII: 135) ⁴

On the next page, however, is a letter from ‘A Parent’ expressing appreciation of ‘the kind intention of the British Government’ and the Government Academy of Uitenhage, ‘which is conducted with the greatest regularity and success,’ and where ‘due attention is paid to the morals of the pupils’ (136). Perhaps this is evidence that, like the Edinburgh Star, the Advertiser was intended to be ‘not combative’.

The Advertiser was conducted as if its readership were male. “Gentlemen” were invited to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. (71) At the “Commercial Anniversary Dinner” on 22d April a toast was drunk to “The Ladies of the Colony”. (137) However in No. III had appeared a letter questioning the Advertiser's indifference “to the displeasure of the female world”. (20) That the letter was signed “Laetitia Tattle”, who “as an earnest of our disposition to please” is offered two paragraphs under the heading “London Female Fashions for October”, suggests perhaps that the letter was the work of the editors themselves.

The Advertiser’s Liberal Principles

The two editors seem to have shared responsibility for the leading article which opened each issue: Pringle wrote that the leading article of the last issue to appear from their joint editorship ‘happened to be of me [sic] composition.’ (Narrative 1835: 184)⁵ Their distinctive voice is heard at least from No. IV which opens with an essay on infidelity, citing a Quarterly Review article by Southey, mentioning Scott, Campbell, Rogers and Wordsworth, and commending the progress of missionary activity in the colony. In No. VI the leading article opens with a reference to the newly independent states of South America and praises Scotch resistance and victory over the English, who are recognised for their overthrow of Napoleon. Byron is quoted:

Freedom's battle once begun

Descends from bleeding sire to son,

And vanquish’d oft, IS EVER WON. (41)⁶

The idea of freedom is developed in a notice of a recent slave insurrection in Demerara, and is developed further in No. VIII, which cites Fielding's argument that novelists ‘are the only historians to whom credit is due, or from whom much practical wisdom can be derived’ (57). This editorial begins to make clear the editors’ combination of Enlightenment confidence and Romantic enthusiasm:

Who invented, if we may so use the word, The Liberty of the Press – Representative Governments – Religious Toleration – Open debates in Parliament and Courts of Law – Reports of Proceedings in these – News Papers – Post Roads, and Mail Coaches to carry these and all other sorts of intelligence, faster than the winds, to all quarters of the civilised world. Yes! To whom do we owe these? To no man exclusively. They are emanations of the Spirit of ‘this Majestic World’ brooding on its own thoughts. They resulted from the collective wisdom of the Race, resting on its two main wings – the past and the future. (57)

The energy continues in No. IX which opens with a quotation from ‘The illustrious author’ Thomas Campbell's the Pleasures of Hope (1799):

Come, bright Improvement! On the car of Time,

And rule the spacious world from clime to clime … (Campbell 1851:15)

The editors rejoice in ‘the progress of free institutions over the world’ and the fact that ‘both Knowledge and the love of Liberty are rapidly pervading every part both of the old and new Continents … ’ (65)

Despite the confidence of their assertion of their Enlightenment principles, the editors seem to have become aware of opposition and public distrust. In No. XIII the leading article on the ‘unanimity of all [British] parties in the cause of Freedom’ (97) quotes from ‘The Time-Piece,’ Part Two of Cowper's The Task:

That's noble, and bespeaks a Nation proud

And jealous of the blessing.

These lines follow immediately on:

Slaves cannot breathe in England, if their lungs

Receive our air, that moment they are free;

They touch our country, and their shackles fall. (ll.40-45, Cowper 1934: 147)

The editors go on to ‘disclaim the prejudices, and disown the name of EITHER … TORIES or WHIGS.’ Equally strongly they ‘disclaim the name, and detest the principles of RADICALS, or LEVELLERS.’ Referring ‘with pride and confidence to the spirit of [their] Twelve preceding Numbers,’ Pringle and Fairbairn were responding strongly to ‘loose talk […] about “Reports” of the prevalence of a “Spirit of Radicalism” throughout the Colony’: the sense is that ‘such dark and disgraceful allegations’ (98) have been aimed at the editors themselves.

No. XIV opposes the principle of ‘unite and govern yourselves’ for ‘Provinces’ to the Machiavellian maxim of ‘Divide and Govern […] by which despotism has been fostered in Independent States.’ In ‘Provinces,’ like the Cape Colony ‘a Free Press’ is necessary for the harmonisation of ‘Public Opinion’ (105). This argument is taken further in No. XVII, which refers to the Swiss-born (naturalised British) political theorist Jean-Louis de Lolme (1740–1806):

So far from operating against regular Governments […] it would not be difficult to prove that no Government is safe where a Free Press does not exist … (135)

The last issue to be published under joint-editorship, No. XVIII, of May 5, opened with a ‘Postscript’:

His Majesty's Fiscal having assumed the CENSORSHIP of ‘The South African Commercial Advertiser,’ … we find it our duty, as British Subjects, under these circumstances, to discontinue the Publication of the said Paper for the present in this Colony, until we have applied for redress and direction to his Excellency the Governor, and the British Government. (145)

Although the leading articles may have contributed to the Fiscal’s decision, the Advertiser’s reporting of specific news was later cited against the publisher and editors.

News, ‘Trade and Merchandise’

The Advertiser relied for overseas news largely on British, and, occasionally, European and American periodical publications, with other contributions from recently arrived visitors or returnees from overseas, or letters from Britain passed on by local readers. Its sources of local news were ‘correspondents,’ that is readers and subscribers. These came from all over the Cape: Graaff-Reinet, Stellenbosch, Bathurst, Albany, Uitenhage, ‘Graham's Town,’ ‘French Hoek.’ Recurring reports dealt with such topics as ‘The Caffers,’ ‘The Mantatees,’ (war-like offshoots of tribes dispersed by Shaka) the progress of missions, and locusts and other farming topics. Something of the spread of the Advertiser's coverage can be traced from the first number, which carried a report on the visit to Cape Town of a Bechuana royal party accompanied by Moffatt, the missionary, whose account of the ‘Pietshow’ (pitso) held at ‘the Kuruman, or New Latakoo’ called by King Mateebe to prepare his people to defend themselves against the advancing Mantatees and the encounter which followed, is continued in the second number. In No. III appeared a poem which rendered the King's speech into short-line couplets, ‘Done into English from the short-hand notes of the Hottentot HATTA, Prince Peclu's sworn interpreter, now in the Cape’ (19), a poem which Botha (1984: 18) ascribes to Pringle. The Royal party were also entertained on board a transport ship in Cape Town harbour. Late in March, No. XIII reports that ‘Our friends Peclu and Teysho, with the Missionaries who accompanied them, have reached the Hex River, on their return home … ’ (99).

The Advertiser's detailed and local news reports were set against the colonial overview taken in the leading articles, where Pringle and Fairbairn spoke ‘as South African Colonists and as Editors of a South African Newspaper’ (98). No. X argued that

The truth is, a country can be faithfully described by none but its own inhabitants. They alone have a degree of interest in it. They alone know its real character; and their accounts, by showing their own dispositions and ability, let you at once into the mind and heart of the people among whom they dwell. (73)

They were on occasion critical of travellers’ descriptions of the country, including Barrow's unsympathetic account of the Dutch settlers. (145) As part, perhaps, of their self-definition, the editors found it

both useful and interesting to compare occasionally our own character as a community, and the progress and prospects of the colony we inhabit, with those of other countries in a like state of immaturity and probation. (33)

The Advertiser carried reports of Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, of settlements in Illinois, of the West Indies, Mauritius, Ceylon, Sierra Leone and St. Helena.

Under the heading ‘Report of Law Proceedings,’ No. VI, of Wednesday 11 February, carried an unsigned letter arguing for ‘that particular application of the Liberty of the Press by which a summary of all judicial proceedings is given to the public’ (42). The writer proposes to report, through the Advertiser, ‘such Cases occurring in our Courts here, as, from the nicety of the questions at issue, or their general importance to the Colony, appear to merit the attention of the public’ (43). The anonymity of the letter may suggest something of careful procedure on the part of the editors, but No. XIV of 7 April quotes an ‘able and respected French lawyer to the effect that ‘Publicity … is the Soul of Justice’ (106). In any event, thus began the columns of ‘Law Intelligence’ which continued to appear in the Advertiser and were instrumental in its closure in May.

From No. VII of 18 February to No. XIII of 31 March, the Advertiser carried reports of the case of ‘His Majesty's Fiscal v. Launcelot Cooke … .’ In late 1823 or early 1824, Cooke, a Cape Town merchant, partner in Cooke and Thompson, sought to employ a ‘prize slave’ by the name of Jean Ellé.⁷ However, the head of customs, Charles Blair, arbitrarily assigned Ellé to Wilberforce Bird. Cooke and his lawyer Edwards together gathered testimony from others in the Colony, drew up a memorial stating the grievances many had with Blair's conduct and sent it to the governor for transmission to London. But Somerset passed the memorial over to the fiscal, who charged Cooke and Edwards with ‘libelling a public servant’ – a charge that could lead to banishment. The court eventually sentenced Edwards for contempt to one month in prison: on his release he produced in court a list of legal precedents to substantiate his claims against the governor. Thanks to Edwards, Cooke won the case brought against him by Somerset after an appeal to the full court. The trial had exposed the soft under-belly of the colonial administration.

The editors recognised that settlers were subject not only to the challenges of perhaps repressive government, possibly hostile indigenous peoples, weather and isolation, but also to the depredations of colonial entrepreneurs. The Advertiser twice mentions one such scheme:

that modern El Dorado, ‘The Poyais Settlement … ’ – a barren jungle, amidst hostile savages, and infested by every thing venomous and vile, to which that charlatan Knight, Sir George Macgregor, lately allured so many of his countrymen, and left them to perish miserably! (124)

Macgregor was a Scottish soldier and fraudster who drew investors and 250 settlers to Poyais, pristine jungle on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. More than half the settlers perished in the enterprise. (Wikipedia, Poyais) ‘The Poyais Emigrant,’ an ironically sad Scots song of parting appeared in No. XV on 14 April (118).

No. XVIII of 5 May reported that ‘HIS MAJESTY'S FISCAL having assumed the CENSORSHIP’ of the newspaper, ‘we find it our duty, as BRITISH SUBJECTS, to discontinue the Publication of the said Paper for the present in this colony’ (145). No. XIII of 31 March had advertised as in the press and soon to be published The Trial of L. Cooke and W. Edwards For an Alleged Libel on C.Blair, Esq., which was advertised as just published in No. XVII of 28 April. (The undertaking recalls Pringle's experience on the Edinburgh Star.) By that time Launcelot Cooke had in an advertisement asked for all demands against him to be sent ‘to the Counting House of Messrs. COOKE & THOMPSON’ (who advertised regularly in the Advertiser) as he was ‘intending to leave this colony’ (110).

The last item in Facts Concerning the Stopping is an announcement that ‘On Wednesday next, a Paper, containing Advertisements only, will be published … and forwarded, for the accommodation of our Commercial Friends’ (4). The Advertiser had been sustained for its brief first life by its promotion of ‘Trade and Merchandise’: by advertisements, reports of sales and rates of exchange, notices of arrivals and departures of ships. Most of the advertisements are for sale of fixed and movable property, commercial goods and services, but the detail occasionally gives a vivid image of the everyday life of bourgeois Cape Town in 1824: from circulating libraries to a sea-bathing institution. There are repeated requests from merchants for the settlement of outstanding debts and calls for help such as: ‘WANTED a Wet Nurse, without a Child’ (32), and offers such as: ‘To let. – A clever Coachman’ (72).

There would have been slave-owners among the Advertiser's subscribers: and the advertisements for the sale of slaves highlight the compromised liberalism of the editors and publisher. From No. I to No. XVIII the Advertiser ran nine such advertisements in English and Dutch: a freehold-farm in Rondebosch comes with ‘Some Male and female Slaves used to House Work and Field Labour; – a Carriage, Curricle, and pair of steady good Horses, with Harness’ (6). ‘For Private Sale, a Slave Boy, being a good Waggon-driver’ (132): alternatively, ‘UIT DE HAND TE KOOP, een Jongen, zynde een goede Wagen-dryver’ (134). Gawie Botma argues that Greig, Pringle and Fairbairn had to temper their liberalism, and possibly their anti-slavery sentiments to avoid censorship and censure:

Maar op een beginselsaak het SACA se stigters vasgestaan: Geen vooraf sensuur deur die koloniale regering sou aanvaar word nie, terwyl die koerant seker was dat hy groot steun onder koloniste sou verwerf deur op meer burgerlike vryhede aan te dring. Slawerny was egter ‘n verdelende onderwerp. (Botma 1995: n.p.)

[But on one principle the SACA's founders stood firm. No pre-publication censorship would be accepted, while the newspaper was certain that it would enjoy great support from the colonists by insisting on more civil liberties. Slavery was however a divisive topic.]

The contradictions do not disappear. The South African Liberal Party ‘closed its doors completely rather than abide by the Prohibition of Political Interference Act of 1968, which banned the participation of any one ‘population group’ in the politics of another’ (Southall 2022: 34).

Newspaper and Magazine

Het Nederduitsch Zuid-Afrikaansch Tijdschrift and the Journal would each remain unilingual, sharing cultural responsibility to the two languages. The Advertiser, however, carried advertisements in Dutch from its first issue, which announced ‘that we shall most thankfully insert any Communications in Dutch that are properly authenticated’ (1824: 2), understandably, since many of the paper's ‘Commercial Friends’ would have been Dutch-speaking. No. XIII reported further that from the next issue the paper would be ‘much extended, and more closely printed, as it is then intended to appear in ENGLISH and DUTCH’ (97).

Nonetheless, Pringle and Fairbairn seem to have made sure that their two publications co-operated. The Advertiser carried advance notices of the appearance of the Journal, with some foretaste printing of items from the magazine (67, 129, 151), and they used the newspaper's columns in other ways. Reciprocally, the first number of the Journal carried an advertisement for the Advertiser ‘THE FIRST PRODUCTION OF THE FREE PRESS OF SOUTH AFRICA.’ The first issue of the Journal also carried a report ‘On the Capabilities of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope’ from ‘A Settler’ in Albany. The writer, while acknowledging the complexities of colonial life – drought, the rust, and transport difficulties among them – concludes that

there is no cause purely natural, that contributes so much to the prosperity of colonies as the ease with which their inhabitants are enabled to produce the necessities of life [and] that there is no spot on the face of the globe, where this advantage is enjoyed in a more eminent degree than at the Cape (Journal: 59)

He (presumably) speaks as ‘the head of a party of emigrants’ and his account of his departure from Britain suggests both his own sense of social class and a picture of post-enclosure, post-war, post-Peterloo, industrialising Britain:

We fled from humiliation, dependance (sic), want, contempt, degradation, and vice, with a host of other evils, which, like a besieging army, we saw surrounding an overcrowded and unprovided city, causing indeed prodigious, though unavailing exertions on the part of its defenders, but a great deal of misery to the inhabitants; and thought we did them, as well as ourselves, a service, when we broke through the lines of the enemy and sought another home. (56-57)

He is implicitly critical of any complaint raised by other settlers.

When the editors of the Journal received a response to ‘Capabilities’ (signed by another ‘A Settler’) which stressed the hardship and difficulties of the new colonists, their determination, courage and perseverance, and raised doubts about whether the first ‘A Settler’ was a settler at all, they did not wait to print it in the second issue: it appeared in No. XV of the Advertiser on 14 April (117-118). Perhaps they considered the exchange a matter of some urgency, which would reach a wider readership in this way, but the newspaper closed after three more issues and there seems to have been no further correspondence.

The Advertiser and the Journal overlapped in other ways. The former's prospectus had offered ‘a facility … which we hope will develop Genius, and raise the Literary reputation of the Colony’ (‘Prospectus’ in Advertiser 1978). Over the course of its 18 issues, a couple of dozen rhymed verses appeared, but there seems to have been something of a change of policy as Fairbairn and Pringle took over the editorship. No. II published ‘Woman’, four quatrains mysteriously ascribed to Byron. The poem is not in the Oxford Complete Poetical Works and its genteel sentiments are quite un-Byronic:

Woman, first and greatest treasure,

Man on earth can ever know,

From thy charms what bliss, what pleasure,

What bewitching pleasures flow! (Advertiser 1978, 12)

The conclusion of Byron’s similarly titled ‘To Woman’ points the difference:

The Record will for ever stand,

‘Woman thy vows, are trac’d in sand. (Byron: 1, 45)

In No. III appeared the sad Scots-toned ‘Original Lines to the Air of “There is nae luck about the house”,’ which could have been one of Pringle's, but otherwise the early issues feature Cape verse, of local colour and humour, and two accomplished pieces, ‘Lines Written at Cape Point’ and ‘To the Memory of Col. Fraser, Late Commandant of His Majesty's Forces on the Frontiers,’ the latter signed ‘W.S.’ who may have been William Smith, a member of the Cape Literary Society. (Papers 1825) This poem and others from the first run of the Advertiser were to appear in Stapleton (1828). The only other signed piece is ‘The Cape of Good Hope in 1814 and 1824, A Familiar Epistle. From Timothy Torrid, to his cousin Peter, in Westminster.’

The editors’ selection criteria seem to surface in No. III which carried the irregular couplets of ‘Speech by his Majesty King Mateebe’ and become more explicit in No. IV which carries both Fairbairn's ‘Song’ and some verses which may be a joint effort by the editors:

To Correspondents

Good ‘Timothy Torrid’ must cool for a week yet;

With ‘Simon the Sage’ we have no time to speak yet.

Poor ‘Edwin’ appears just transported from schooling,

And ere trying to rhyme, ought to write without ruling.

The botanist ‘Gleaner’ may take back his ‘Simples,’

And tender ‘Matilda’ may call for her ‘dimples;’

The ‘Grubber’ of Graham’s Town my cease from his tasking;

The ‘Courtship’s’ debarred at the ‘third time of asking,’

‘Old Crabtree's epistle’ is somewhat too crusty,

And the paper on ‘Rust’ is a little too rusty;

The ‘Complainer’ has pith, with a style rather ficklish,

But the ‘State of Cape Town’ is a subject too ticklish.

We hope ‘these here strictures’ will not seem uncivil,

And we’ll write to the rest by our own private ‘Devil.’ (30)

Perhaps these lines express both the editors’ taste and their political caution? The next 14 issues of the Advertiser published only 11 poems, including one each by Southey and Campbell, but most of local origin. ‘Verses to the Editor … ’ turned into assured and eloquent verse Pringle and Fairbairn's aims for the paper. The quatrains are signed ‘W.H. Albany, 3d Feb. 1824’ (53): the initials were borne by a number of settlers. An ‘Impromptu’ glances ironically at the recent building of the first Catholic church in South Africa, which was in Harrington Street, near Fairbairn and Pringle's academy:

On Passing a Certain New Catholic Chapel

‘Is this chapel of Roman or Gothic, or what style?’

Said Dick Smith to his friend, who replied with a Pat smile,

I should rather suppose, from the name of the Priest

Mr. Scully, ‘tis Roman-Golgothic at least. (53)

The controversial Father Scully would have served many Irish soldiers among his congregation. (See ‘Archdiocese’) ‘The Emigrant’ is an anonymous poem with Canadian reference (111) and the Advertiser's last verses before ‘Stopping’ are the hymn ‘From Greenland's icy mountains’ (148). But the most interesting are the four poems in Dutch from Nos. XIV, XV and XVI. The first is an elegant if wordy translation of Pope's ‘Ode on Solitude,’ identified as ‘Uit het Engelsche naar Pope door Tollens’ (111). Next are two short poems ‘De Geest des Tyds’ (The Spirit of the Times) and ‘Het Puntdicht’ (The Epigram) (124) and finally the Horatian or Tibullian ‘De Gelukkige Man’ (The Happy Man) (133), all ascribed to ‘Mr H.A. Spandaw’ (or ‘Spandauw’). Tollens was Hendrik Tollens (1780–1856), the Dutch poet best known for ‘Wien Neêrlands Bloed’ (Those of Dutch Blood), the national anthem of the Netherlands from 1815 to 1932. ‘Mr Spandauw’ may have been the pseudonym of a resident of Graaff-Reinet, thinking of Spandau Kop, a distinctive koppie near the town. If the hill had been named for the Berlin fortress by a Prussian soldier, the name may date from the time of the Dutch East India Company (Basson, personal correspondence). Perhaps these poems found their way into the Advertiser rather than the Tijdschrift because of their more secular ring?

The South African Journal

The editors’ liberal principles are perhaps less obviously proclaimed in the Journal than in the Advertiser. Nonetheless they are clear enough. Fairbairn's ‘General Introduction’ to No. I eulogises ‘Representative Governments, Free Trade, a Free Press, and the Religion of Purity’ (6). His two-part essay on ‘Literary and Scientific Societies’ opens with a reference that might have caught Somerset's eye, to ‘the invention of Printing, and that noble improvement on it, the Liberty of the Press’ (51). Pringle and Fairbairn's attempts to found such a society at the Cape were to be quashed by Somerset. (See Pringle's Narrative 1835: 191-195) Fairbairn seems more jingoistic than his colleague in his account of ‘the houseless savage and roving barbarian’ and ‘their imperfect languages’ (5). Of the French he writes that ‘Their poetry is not first-rate’ (7).

Pringle's ‘Verses on Perusing Some English Newspapers’ praises England ‘whose beacon-light … forever burns To tell where Freedom lingers yet’ (9) and Britain ‘under whose guardian shield, Law, Freedom, Truth begin their reign.’ Fairbairn offered a ‘Review of the Political State of Europe’ in No. II (163-166), and his substantial two-part account of Bigge's ‘Reports on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land’ (35-50, 93-105) recalls the Advertiser's recurring reports on other British colonies. The Journal also covered local Cape colonial news in ‘The Cape Chronicle,’ a digest of reports selected from the columns of the Advertiser.

Otherwise, the Journal covered colonial experience in various ways. In the first number appeared Fairbairn's approving review of the The State of the Cape in 1822, by ‘Civil Servant’ (Wilberforce Bird). Reminding his readers that these words ‘were written two years ago,’ Fairbairn closes thus:

There are two measures which appear to present a chance of giving some small aid to the settlers in Albany. The one is, the repaying to them the amount of the second and third instalments of the deposit; and the other, the granting an immediate title to the land of their location, with power to alienate. (150)

Pringle's ‘On the Present State and Prospects of the English Emigrants in South Africa’ in No. II names four ‘causes of the failure of this scheme of emigration’: ‘the population having preceded, instead of having followed the influx of capital … An arbitrary system of Government, and its natural consequences: abuse of power by local functionaries, monopolies, restrictions, &c,’ and ‘The vacillating and inefficient system pursued in regard to the Caffers … and the rust’ (159). Somerset and his functionaries must have had their eyes on the Journal from the start.

The Journal covered a range of less controversial South African topics. Pringle offered a two-part essay on ‘The Lion,’ ‘Description of the Zureveld,’ and ‘Notes on Rust, Bengal Wheat, &c.’ Stockenström contributed ‘Irruptions of Locusts and Trek-Bokken,’ and an unidentified writer an account of ‘Navigation of the Kowie.’ The doctor who wrote the first two parts of ‘On the Rearing of Children’ was in the words of A. M. Lewin Robinson ‘a physician of remarkably advanced ideas’ who may have Dr Richard Heurtley (1770–1830), whose name appears on the ‘List of Members’ of the South African Literary Society (Lewin Robinson 1962: 63, Papers 1825: 15).

The literary pages of the Journal were dominated by Fairbairn's ponderous essay ‘On the Writings of Wordsworth’ (12-16, 107-117). The choice of poetry reflects the direction the Advertiser took after Pringle and Fairbairn's assumption of the editorship. Of the 20 poems that appeared in the two issues, seven are by Pringle, five by Fairbairn, and three by Campbell. In No. I, under the heading ‘Fugitive Poetry’ appeared two poems of Campbell: ‘To a Beautiful Jewish Girl’ and ‘The Drinking Song of Munich’: the introductory note claims that the poems ‘have been given to us, as early and unpublished effusions from the pen of a great and virtuous living poet’ (35). In the words of Lewin Robinson: ‘In 1824 at the Cape of Good Hope, the law of copyright had little meaning for magazine editors’ (1962: 55). In No. II appeared Campbell's ‘The Name Unknown. An Imitation of Klopstock’ (91). Of the other five poems published in the Journal, all are anonymous. One is subscribed ‘N.S.’: on the basis of the terminal letter code, this may be the Cape Town Merchant, Stephen Twycross, another member of the Literary Society (Lewin Robinson 1962: 56, Papers 1825: 15). The other is marked ‘Albany, April, 1823,’ which makes this poem, ‘On the Death of a Little Girl,’ an early example of Settler poetry. It is an accomplished piece, which seems to have made an impression on Pringle, whose ‘Afar in the Desart’ is the keystone of the Journal's contribution to South African poetry in English. Among the creatures of the desert in Pringle's poem is ‘the Bat flitting forth from his cleft in the stone’ (Journal 1824: 106). In later versions this became ‘the twilight bat from the yawning stone’ (Pringle, 1989: 10). ‘On the Death of a Little Girl’ has the line ‘The twilight bat and the mournful owl’ (Journal 1824: 136).

Conclusion

In 1828 R. J. Stapleton included 16 poems from the Advertiser and the Journal in his Poetry of the Cape of Good Hope: Selected from the Periodical Journals of the Colony, which may be read as a first effort to anthologise a South African imagination. (Limited as it is: of the 100 pages, Stapleton gives over 40 to his own verse.) The central awareness even here remains Pringle's: his welcome of Dutch and Xhosa to his poems and attempts to give voice to indigenous people seem to be reaching for expression of a distinctively South African sensibility. Historically, the political and journalistic achievement of the Advertiser has been more important and readily acknowledged. Kirsten Mckenzie describes the movement of which the Advertiser was part:

From the 1820s onwards, a new political culture was gaining ground in both the metropole and the colonies. Associated with the economic transformations of an industrialising metropole and the rise of the middle class to political power in both Britain and its colonial dependencies, it can be designated by the term ‘bourgeois public sphere.’ The press was intimately connected in both practical and symbolic ways with this new vision of political power which expressed itself in opposition to the aristocratic privileges of the ancient regime. While expressed in the language of universality, the bourgeois public sphere was also inherently exclusionary. (McKenzie 1988–1989: 88)

Mckenzie's caution is also well expressed by Paul S. Landau, who writes of ‘the divorce between the world of texts and the lives of most South Africans, and so of how partial our perspective remains’ (2010: 445) Nonetheless, can we not be grateful for what the Advertiser and the Journal have left us, as we look forward. Do they not let us ‘into the mind and heart of the people among whom they dwell’?⁸

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Tony Voss

Tony Voss is a Research Associate of Nelson Mandela University. He was born in Namibia, and educated in South Africa and the United States. He taught at universities in South Africa and Zimbabwe until he retired in 1995. He lives in Sydney.

Notes

1 ‘Notices concerning the Scottish Gypsies’, April, May, September; ‘The Wreath,’ June; ‘Song–Maid of my heart, a long fare well,’ June; two sonnets– ‘To a young Lady caressing her Infant Brother’ and ‘To a revered Female Relative,’– August. (Robinson 1923 f.n., 25)

2 ‘Border Sketches’, August, 1817, and October, 1817; ‘The Minstrel's Vision, or, The Isle of Eyra’, August; ‘Streams, whose torrent waters glide’, September, 1817; two songs (later published in the second volume of Albyn's Anthology), October, 1817; ‘To a Lady, inclosing some MS. Poems’, March, 1818; ‘The Legend of the Rose’, June, 1818; ‘Of love, and love's delight no more I sing’, June, 1818. (Robinson 1923 f.n., 25)

3 Botha gives a detailed account of the life of the Advertiser and the South African Journal. (Botha, 15–34)

4 The pages of the Advertiser were numbered sequentially from issue to issue.

5 As there is little to add to A. M. Lewin Robinson's full and rich account of the first life of The South African Journal (9–78), I will focus in what follows on the interconnections between the editors’ two sets of responsibilities.

6 The Giaour, ll.123-5. Perhaps quoted from memory. The Oxford text reads: ‘For freedom's battle once begun, /Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son,/Though baffled oft, is ever won’ (Byron 1980: III, 43).

7 See Matthew Blackman for a detailed account of the case.

8 Thanks for their help to Michael Chapman, Eleanor Gordon of the National Library of Scotland, the Fisher Library, University of Sydney, Andrew Martin and Petro Nhlapo of the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, Brian Pearce, and the State Library of New South Wales, Hélize van Vuuren.