Setting Transvaal Scenes in German Type: Missionary Carl Hoffmann’s Book Designs, c.1900–1930

Carl Adolf Hoffmann is counted among the most prolific 19th- and 20th-century authors employed by the Berlin Missionary Society in the former Transvaal, South Africa, home to the Berlin Mission Church’s northern-Sotho/Sepedi-speaking synods. Hoffmann attempted to record African history and cultural practices with a view to preserving them for posterity by rendering orally performed knowledge into written and printed text. His efforts coincided with the German Romantic project to capture folklore and folktales. In this article, I look into ink and paper as media in the communication network of the Berlin Mission, and address the extent to which image and text were employed to replicate for a German audience the missionary–ethnographer’s experience of African oral performance ‘in the field’. Taking into consideration the scenography accomplished through book design, typography, page layout and illustrations, I ask to what extent it might be useful to approach the ink-on-paper recordings of African narratives as performative spaces in their own right. The scholarly articles and illustrated books that resulted from missionary Carl Hoffmann’s ‘long conversation’ with a number of interlocutors – especially from the Woodbush/Mamabolo region – are now dated media, printed in dated type, arrested in a lapsed socio-political paradigm. Although openly accessible in the digitised Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, significant ‘decoding’ is required to render them meaningful for 21st-century audiences. In this investigation, I attempt to configure what it was that missionary Hoffmann attempted to capture, how it was represented within a German print-cultural network, and what this may imply for South African self-understandings today.