"To make the people of South Africa proud of their membership of the great British Empire": Home Reading Unions in South Africa, 1900-1914.

This article examines the regulation of reading by two home reading unions operating in South Africa from 1900 to 1914. It challenges the view that reading is primarily regulated to sustain and support a particular economic order. The emphasis falls on cultural, gender, and political factors that mediated imperial and colonial views of guided reading during a fluid period in South African history.

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Reading always has historical and contextual dimensions. Reading practices, moreover, have to be situated concretely with respect to producers and providers of reading material, communities of readers, reading traditions, reading opportunities, and ways of reading. A growing number of case studies demonstrate the inventive use and "socially embedded" nature of reading and writing when adopted in specific spatial and historical settings. These situated practices destabilize received views of the value of literacy acquisition and reading. (1)

In addition to questions of who reads and what is read, there are questions also of when, why, where, how, and by whom reading materials are provided and distributed and especially of the regulation or guidance of reading itself. Answers to these questions will be valuable to a fuller understanding of what reading can and cannot do and what it is sometimes expected to do. A promising source for these answers is located somewhere between those approaches that emphasize the literary production of reading materials and those that stress readers' reception of texts, namely in the area of the regulation of reading and readers, and the ideological motivations driving this activity. This site of inquiry cannot be neatly confined to disciplinary study and encompasses library and information science (LIS), welfare, political, historical, educational, and cultural studies.

A recent article links the regulation of readers and the origins of the reader's advisor role in the United States with "social forces operating in the context of early twentieth century capitalism." (2) This less crude analysis of capitalism still connects reading regulation in a fixed way to the economic substructure in order to sustain and support a "regime of accumulation." Such a narrow focus on the needs of capital tends toward abstract and ahistorical explanations, with limited applicability. Guiding or regulating reading can be explained more convincingly by the interplay between economic factors and other prevailing circumstances relating to gender, race, and culture. In this wider explanation, reading regulation practices may or may not coincide with capitalist aims and may or may not intentionally serve or denounce them.

Therefore, there are also cultural and historical explanations for the regulation of reading and readers that complement narrow economic explanations. The rise of the working classes and the zeal for cultural and national identity often accompanied the growth of capitalism in several English-speaking countries. This article demonstrates that an imperialist outlook and a colonial nationalist response adopted by two separate "guided reading" initiatives were neither simple nor sophisticated reflections of early-twentieth-century South African capitalism.

The emphasis here falls on divergent applications of the "systematic guided reading" ideal of home reading unions by two South African women's organizations. The article traces the social and historical roots of the National Home Reading Union in Victorian England and its imperialist application by the Guild of Loyal Women to colonial South Africa from the closing stages of the South African War (1899-1902) until the commencement of the First World War in 1914. A local equivalent also operating during that period was the South African Home Reading Union, which was run by women with a moderate South Africanist outlook. Contested views of "guided reading" for empire building and for nation building will be identified in the rivalry between these imperial and colonial reading initiatives during a fluid and uncertain period in South African history.

The South African (or Anglo-Boer) War resulted in the incorporation of the South African (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State Republics into British South Africa and engendered a bitter hatred between British colonists and Dutch-Afrikaners. The relations between these two white groups fluctuated during the period of reconstruction following the war but improved sufficiently to allow the constitution of the Union of South Africa in 1910 based on their reconciliation and cooperation with Great Britain. These developments occurred largely at the expense of the black South African majority. The changes were dramatic: whereas the new Transvaal and Orange Free State Colonies were ruled as Crown colonies and a pro-imperialist party had been in power in the Cape in March 1905, by February 1908 all these colonies had self-government, and all three governments owed their existence to the support of Dutch-Afrikaners. (3) Relations between British colonists and Dutch-Afrikaners, however, remained strained and unstable, and women's organizations typically reflected the tensions between and within pro-British and pro-Boer camps. (4)

Women exploited opportunities and spaces in both Great Britain and South Africa to assert stronger roles for themselves in postwar public affairs. The growing opportunity for public activity provided to white women in general was "one of the lesser-known effects of the Anglo-Boer War on South African society." (5) The work of women's organizations was framed by patriarchal, colonial, moral, racial, and ideological contexts and revealed interesting contradictions involving notions of gender, race, social class, empire, and nation building. From just after the end of the war in May 1902 until about 1914, members of the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, in cooperation with the Victoria League (based in England) and the South African Home Reading Union, began to provide reading materials to "public libraries," school libraries, reading unions and reading circles, and their own members. (6) They involved themselves especially with the supply and quality of reading fare and with the regulation of reading itself.

These women's organizations were especially concerned with the kind of history books being read by children and with readers' cultural identity with either the British Empire or a "new" South African nation. In brief, they assigned imperial or nation-building roles to reading in line with their own views of what the relations between colonial South Africa and the British Empire should be. (7) Similar work was going on in Great Britain and several British colonies around the world in an attempt to shape and build the empire through educational and cultural initiatives. (8) As players in this wider movement, the South African women's organizations were driven by motives that brought them into both conflict and cooperation with each other, and that sometimes led to internal squabbles. While the Guild of Loyal Women strongly supported a pro-British imperial stance, the women of the South African Home Reading Union straddled pro-British and pro-Boer camps in a genuine effort to foster a white South Africanist political perspective.

Yet together they provided a platform for the emergence of a South African mass reading public, albeit racially skewed. Without them there may not have been the necessary planks from which to build more comprehensive book provision and reading schemes. Their initiatives, moreover, lent impetus to the more systematic provision of reading materials and the free public libraries that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s and that eventually reached a wider but still racially segregated South African readership. Reading practices and reading materials were certainly not absent in South Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. There was much of both already, and a strong concern with the quality of what was read by whom and for what purpose prompted the interventions by these organizations. Reading for political purposes, moral instruction, sexual dissipation, cultural development, rational recreation, technical instruction, and self-advancement was factored into debates by the education, book, and literature committees of these women's organizations. (9)

From a "Public University of Books" to an Empire Builder

The National Home Reading Union originated in London in 1889 and had for several years already had members and reading circles in South Africa. (10) But its early work in South Africa did not have the jingoist tone that it later assumed in the hands of the Guild of Loyal Women. The National Home Reading Union was itself patterned closely after the example of the Chautauqua movement in the United States. Founded in New York State in 1871 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Reading Circle grew eventually to a membership of 100,000 workmen, farmers, teachers, and housewives who read a course of prescribed books over a four-year period. (11)

This movement had also already surfaced at the Huguenot College in Wellington in the Cape Colony of South Africa in about 1885 or 1886. De Afrikaanse Chautauqua or Chautauqua Lees en Studie Sirkel, an Afrikaans reading and study circle, was founded on 16 December 1904 in Bethlehem in the Free State Colony. It aimed at providing educational opportunities for rural Afrikaners and similarly advocated a four-year reading and study course. Before the South African War it counted among its patrons several prominent Afrikaner leaders in the Orange Free State Republic, among them President M. T. Steyn. (12) It did not, however, have any links with a women's organization, and it had a limited reading impact. The National Home Reading Union, however, was the movement's British replication. It had a mass appeal, and its reach into the British colonies was extended by local English women's…