Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self

Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Edited by Karin Barber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. v, 451; $75.00. Tin-trunk texts, as Karin Barber dubs them, are the grist for this social history of literacy in Anglophone Africa. The fifteen collected essays issue from a series of seminars and an international conference attended by historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. The aim of these gatherings was to explore what across Africa often keep in boxes hidden under their beds (p. ix)-tin-trunk treasures, so to speak. In this volume the documents are used as a means of assessing the role of literacy among common people: teachers, healers, clerks, students, preachers, traders, and others. The collection also comments on the documents produced by the more highly educated African intelligentsia. Three overarching themes provide the structure for this exploration. Part 1 takes up history from below and includes discussion of the constitution of the self through diaries, letters, sermons, and notebooks. Part 2 focuses on literacy from above, by studying the reading and writing practices among the African elite who converged around literary and debating societies as well as newspapers and publishing houses. Part 3 (the shortest) advances the notion that in their search for cultural innovation, these tin-trunk literati succeeded in creating new genres. It is true that colonial Africa saw an explosion of writing and print (p. 1) and some of the primary sources under scrutiny in this volume are stunning examples of the creativity, savvy, and vitality with which Africans confronted an often violent encounter with European modernity. Christianity and western education became for subjects not only markers of civilization and elite status but, also tools for political expression. Against all odds, many inserted themselves firmly in a historical process that sought to exclude them. The book raises an interesting discussion regarding the question of how women in the early twentieth century used their literacy and took part in textual production. Two examples stand out: the case of healer Louisa Mvemve in the Union of South Africa, discussed by Catherine Burns, and that of the first indigenous woman to become head of a school in the Gold Coast, Mercy Ffoulkes-Crabbe, in the chapter by Audrey Gadzekpo. It is important to observe that in Southern Africa (the focus of six of the fifteen chapters) literacy could said to emerge out of self-defense strategies deployed against a repressive administration bent on thwarting African attempts to attain modernity. The lengths to which Louisa Mvemve went to document her struggle against the authorities is nothing short of monumental. Working as a healer on the Reef and the Eastern Cape from about 1914 to the 1930s, Mvemve wrote hundreds of letters to officials of the Native Affairs Department- and she left behind a rich paper trail: legal appeals, pamphlets, testimonials attesting to her medicinal knowledge, and personal notes. Heir to a long tradition of healing practices passed on by her Xhosa ancestry, Mvemve viewed herself as midwife, diagnostician, and innovator of cures- denouncing what she considered witchcraft while aligning herself with contemporary certified physicians and chemists. She wanted no less than to be granted the might of a medical man to examine the people who wants to cured by my Root Mixtures (p. 79). That her battle for legitimacy ultimately failed is an indictment of the segregation and gender inequity of her time. …