Missionaries, Literature, and Censorship in South Africa. Early Twentieth-Century Cultural Dynamics

Since the late 1990s, after the demise of apartheid, literary criticism concerning South African textual production has mainly focused on contemporary issues, with the question of apartheid censorship at the forefront. Black and white writers under the National Party underwent pre- and post-publication censorship from 1954 (with the first Commission of Inquiry against “Undesirable Publications”) to the Publications and Entertainments Acts of 1963 and 1974. Less attention has been paid to the pre-apartheid period, even if the first decades of the twentieth century are essential to grasp the meaning and relevance of what happened in the near future. The aim of this article is to shed some light on the missionary societies’ publishing activities in the South African early twentieth-century context. I investigate the ambivalent relationship between black writers and the various European missions present on the territory. Like the Scottish Lovedale Mission Station, some educational institutions held the means of literary production (the printing presses) and acted as pre-publication censors, approving or refusing the manuscripts submitted for their acceptance. Yet, and somehow paradoxically, even missionaries could feel they were being controlled by a censorious governmental system when, for instance, their publications were stigmatised for taking too openly the side of the ‘natives’ – to the point of being confiscated for alleged subversive activities. Just because early twentieth-century South African cultural dynamics are many-sided and challenging, a brief investigation into some exemplary cases is meant to raise issues and promote further research.