CIRCULATION, PROCESS AND STRUCTURE
Starting a newspaper with national aspirations in multiple languages dedicated to fighting the white supremacist status quo and serving a largely impoverished community was a monumental task even for one as ambitious as Seme. Couzens, citing S. M. Molema’s wonderful description of the multitude of composing, editing and printing tasks confronting Plaatje on Tsala ea Batho, published at the same time, reminds us that running a black newspaper was tough work at that time:210
There were no journalists or clerks; and Plaatje was the sole worker doing the job of three or four people besides being editor. He collected the post, opened and read letters … and kept records …. He read papers of other publishers and editors; Government gazettes and papers and translated all from English into Tswana and Xhosa. Using a typewriter he arranged all ideas and news, proof-read various communications and letters and after correcting, editing them sent everything to the printing presses. ... When all … were finally printed on thousands of reams of paper and folded properly, the papers were bound, addressed, stamped and sent to hundreds of subscribers.211
Abantu-Batho did have several editors and a small staff, but running it cannot have been easy, as an analysis of its circulation, structure and capital reveals.
In 1914 the price was 3d, and remarkably remained the same until the final issue in 1931, even in periods of declining advertising income. From 1915 the annual subscription of 12s 3d was constant until at least 1928. The number of pages was usually eight, sometimes six or four, comparing favourably with other black papers. Language composition varied; in January 1928, for example, less than one-sixth was in English.212
The circulation or reach of the paper was complex. In 1914 it was ‘on sale at all news agencies in the Transvaal’; by 1931, it claimed213 that it ‘circulates through agents Subscriber and news boys in every one part of the Union of South Africa including protectorates Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], Belgian Congo [Democratic Republic of the Congo] and South West Africa [Namibia]. No voice reaches further.’214 There is evidence it did reach Rhodesia.
In 1913 it claimed a weekly circulation of 5,000 ‘in Natal and the Transvaal alone’, a number not disputed by The Christian Express.215 In a letter to De Beers in 1914 soliciting advertising for the African language columns, C. S. Mabaso, Abantu-Batho secretary, claimed the same number, adding that it ‘enjoys the full confidence of the native population throughout the Union’, with its parent company ‘well financed’.216 In 1920 and 1928 Abantu-Batho, probably exaggeratedly, claimed the ‘largest circulation of any Native Paper in South Africa’.217 Mabaso, still Abantu-Batho secretary in 1922, repeated this claim (adding ‘sub-continent’) when he wrote to the Government Printer tendering for a contract for state notices, claiming a weekly ‘average circulation’ of 10,000. Published in three African languages, it carried ‘matters of particular interest to and affecting the native population throughout the Union’, but was ‘not intended to introduce anything with a political significance at all at these meetings; the object is merely to introduce our paper to [the] native public and enlist their sympathy and support’.218
There is some proof of decline. Barney Ngakane, active in the TNC from 1921, recalled, ‘I got most of my inspiration’ from Abantu-Batho. He estimated that by the late 1920s circulation was only 1,000.219 This modest figure is roughly comparable with other contemporary black papers,220 but definite decline is evident from the late 1920s, when paid subscriptions dwindled to a mere seven in Natal,221 although that province was never its base.
These figures appear modest, but the paper’s reach must have been considerably wider than paid subscriptions from a poor community with low literacy levels. Moreover, the general circulation of the early black press was small. Inkanyiso yase Natal could boast 2,500 sales in 1891,222 Koranta ea Becoana only 1,000–2,000 across the following decade,223 with Tsala ea Batho rising from 1,700 in 1910 to 4,000 in 1913, and Ilanga 3,000 by 1931. All this was framed by a rising, but still slight, black literacy rate of 9.7% in 1921 and 12.5% in 1932.224 Even the stately Cape Times had limited circulation in the 1910s, which, however, would double to 22,000 a day by the 1920s.225 Thus, by 1934 the black press directly reached only an estimated 25,000 of 850,000 literate Africans. Yet it influenced the more politicised and with a mushrooming effect as people passed issues from hand to hand or recounted aloud stories from its pages.226 The ‘persistence of oral reading’ was ‘often a collective experience, integrated into an oral culture’.227
How wide was this reach? We know it was read out at some rural and women’s meetings, and circumstantial evidence that papers were passed around and read out suggests a wide geographic and class reach. If we presume that readers were chiefly educated, urban strata, then there are also reports in the paper on rural events and of correspondence, for example, from the Lichtenburg mines, suggesting that copies penetrated there. The close involvement of editors in protests on pass laws and wages suggests attempts to reach workers. As Switzer observes, Abantu-Batho ‘gained a considerable audience as a result of the sympathetic coverage it gave to African workers mobilising’ at this time.228
More broadly, that there were not different ‘African minds’, but rather links and intersections between literate and oral evident in vernacular papers of the day is argued by John Lonsdale for the Gikuyu in Kenya of the 1920s. He also notes that young nationalists used newspapers to assert their authority against elders and chiefs, but often in a way that still included an element of oral performance: ‘literacy made oral authority portable, transferable … and readers could convert … personal skill into public authority any time they read out [newspapers] or other texts in public.’229
Plaatje recounted how, as a boy, he was often asked to ‘read the news to groups of men sewing karosses under the shady trees outside the cattle fold’.230 Something similar happened with Abantu-Batho. In 1919 the anti-pass law campaign prompted Sibasa Sub-Native Commissioner C. L. R. Harris to comment that Abantu-Batho was circulating among domestics in Johannesburg; ‘the unsophisticated African’
subscribes to the native newspapers (I find that the circulation of the Bantu-Batho amongst domestic servants in Johannesburg is remarkably large) the columns of which are followed word for word and even read aloud to the illiterate. The political teachings of these columns give him food for further reflection, and gradually he is drawn towards some native organisation or other ....
A knock-on effect took place as political news from the Rand, now the centre of black politics, was heard by elders who began to ‘wonder why’ and ‘become suspicious’. Harris, as a good colonialist, was appalled by this questioning, but conceded that it marked the onset of modernity. He was writing just after the huge anti-pass laws protests for which Abantu-Batho acted as a fund-raising node. To appreciate the centrality of the Rand, ‘one should peruse some of the correspondence appearing in the columns of the Bantu-Batho’ and he stated that black ‘bodies have considerably extended their tentacles’.231 This wider reach then was surely part of Abantu-Batho’s audience, and the questioning by readers was its legacy.
Proof of a far wider reach comes from the reprinting of an Abantu-Batho story in The Colonial and Provincial Reporter of Freetown, perhaps from British-based networks of Sierra Leoneans through the London African Telegraph. This example even pre-dates the arrival in Britain of the SANNC delegation that liaised with that paper. It may also reflect exchanges of newspapers, since we do know that copies were received in Tuskegee and Fort Hare.232 There also was occasional reprinting of its stories in other newspapers, in its first years notably Ilanga and Tsala ea Batho, but also The International and Indian Opinion, although in later