Written Culture in a Colonial Context African History
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Written Culture in a Colonial Context African History VOLUME 2 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/afh Written Culture in a Colonial Context Africa and the Americas 1500 - 1900 Edited by Adrien Delmas Nigel Penn LEIDEN • BOSTON LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012 Cover illustration: The Treaty of Waitangi – replica and photo, Daniel Reeve This book is printed on acid-free paper. This book was earlier published under ISBN 9781919895260 by UCT Press , Cape Town, South Africa (2011). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Written culture in a colonial context : Africa and the Americas, 1500-1900 / edited by Adrien Delmas, Nigel Penn. p. cm. -- (African history ; v. 2) Papers first presented at a conference at the University of Cape Town in Dec. 2008. Previously published: UCT Press, 2011. Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-22389-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Written communication--Africa--History-- Congresses. 2. Written communication--America--History--Congresses. 3. Communication and culture--Africa--History--Congresses. 4. Communication and culture--America-- History--Congresses. 5. Cultural relations--History--Congresses. 6. Africa--Colonization-- History--Congresses. 7. America--Colonization--History--Congresses. I. Delmas, Adrien. II. Penn, Nigel. III. Series: African history (Brill Academic Publishers) ; v. 2. P211.3.A35W75 2012 302.2’24409--dc23 2011047480 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.nl/brill-typeface. ISSN 2211-1441 ISBN 978 90 04 22389 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 90 04 22524 4 (e-book) Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ vii Foreword: Writing at Sea Isabel Hofmeyr ................................................................................................... ix Contributors ............................................................................................................ xiii Introduction: The written word and the world Adrien Delmas ................................................................................................... xvii Part I 1. Rock art, scripts and proto-scripts in Africa: The Libyco-Berber example Jean-Loïc Le Quellec ......................................................................................... 3 2. From pictures to letters: The early steps in the Mexican tlahcuilo’s alphabetisation process during the 16th century Patrick Johansson .............................................................................................. 31 3. Edmond R. Smith’s writing lesson: Archive and representation in 19th-century Araucanía André Menard .................................................................................................... 57 Part II 4. Missionary knowledge in context: Geographical knowledge of Ethiopia in dialogue during the 16th and 17th centuries Hervé Pennec ...................................................................................................... 75 5. From travelling to history: An outline of the VOC writing system during the 17th century Adrien Delmas ................................................................................................... 97 6. Towards an archaeology of globalisation: Readings and writings of Tommaso Campanella on a theological–political empire between the Old and the New worlds (16th–17th centuries) Fabián Javier Ludueña Romandini ............................................................... 127 vi contents Part III 7. Charlevoix and the American savage: The 18th-century traveller as moralist David J. Culpin ................................................................................................ 149 8. Written culture and the Cape Khoikhoi: From travel writingto Kolb’s ‘Full Description’ Nigel Penn ......................................................................................................... 171 9. Nothing new under the sun: Anatomy of a literary-historical polemic in colonial Cape Town circa 1880–1910 Peter Merrington ............................................................................................ 195 Part IV 10. Mapuche-Tehuelche Spanish writing and Argentinian- Chilean expansion during the 19th century Julio Esteban Vezub ....................................................................................... 215 11. To my Dear Minister: Official letters of African Wesleyan Evangelists in the late 19th-century Transvaal Lize Kriel .......................................................................................................... 243 12. Literacy and land at the Bay of Natal: Documents and practices across spaces and social economies Mastin Prinsloo ............................................................................................. 259 Part V 13. The ‘painting’ of black history: The Afro-Cuban codex of José Antonio Aponte (Havana, Cuba, 1812) Jorge Pavez Ojeda ........................................................................................... 283 14. On not spreading the Word: Ministers of religion and written culture at the Cape of Good Hope in the 18th century Gerald Groenewald ........................................................................................ 317 15. Occurrences and eclipses of the myth of Ulysses in Latin American culture José Emilio Burucúa ...................................................................................... 341 Index ......................................................................................................................... 373 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the French Institute of South Africa, especially its Directors, Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti and Sophie Didier, for financial and moral support. The Institution both helped to facilitate the conference at the University of Cape Town where these papers were first presented in December 2008 and contributed to the costs of the publication of this volume. Other members of the Institution who provided valuable and efficient support were Mathy Bombutsi and Werner Prinsloo. We would also like to acknowledge financial support from the University of Cape Town, which contributed towards the cost of hosting the conference. Members of the Department of Historical Studies at UCT played their part in hosting delegates and organising the event, especially the Departmental Administrators, Brenda Beneke and Ilana van Schalkwyk. Tanya Barben of the Rare Books section of UCT Libraries helped to source some of the illustrations. Finally, our thanks go to the participants involved in this project, including Catarina Madeira Santos, Jean-Paul Zuñiga, Nigel Worden, Shamil Jeppie, Carolyn Hamilton, Francis Galloway and Sergio Mejía. The editors FOREWORD: WRITING AT SEA Isabel Hofmeyr In late 16th and early 17th-century Holland, lovers of navigational books would all have been familiar with a house in Damrak in central Amsterdam. Belonging to the printer Cornelis Claesz, the building was distinguished by a sign ‘Writing Book on the Water, by the Old Bridge’ (In’ Schrijfboek op’t Water bij de oude Brugghe), which announced the presence of a bookshop operating from the premises. Inside, traders, investors and navigators came to select books from a rich stock of maritime travel accounts, atlases, seamen’s guides and cartographic manuals pertaining to all areas of the known world. The sign was indeed apt: knowledge about various parts of the world had travelled across the water and was captured in books concentrated in the house by the bridge in Damrak. Claesz’s bookshop features in this volume, in the piece by Adrien Delmas on the systems of writing and record-keeping used by the VOC. This sign of ‘writing on water’ is an appropriate symbol for the rich innovation of this book. This brave collection takes the idea of ‘writing’ and turns it into a fluid domain in which disciplines can speak to each other in new ways. The collection uses writing as a way to bring together different areas of the world — rather like Claesz’s shop, which housed books about many parts of the globe and attracted customers from far and wide. The collection makes us think about ‘writing’ in new ways; metaphorically, it puts the idea of writing all at sea. It is appropriate that the papers in this collection originated from a workshop held in Cape Town, historically an entrepôt where people and goods from Africa, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean encountered each other. The papers provide new intersections, namely, between scholars of Africa and those of Latin America, two regions of the world generally kept apart by the Cold War area studies map that still dominates