In the canon of South African literature in English, Thomas Pringle has occupied a privileged place, both as the producer of the first substantial body of literary, journalistic and reportorial work about this country, and as an exemplary figure for the liberal values of press freedom and racial tolerance. In this combination of the ethical and the aesthetic, Pringle is commonly considered a crucial writer around whom “the core foundational myths of South African liberalism have been constructed” (Dubow 2006, 27). Yet scant critical attention has been paid to the diffractions of circumstance that attended the production of Pringle's work or the motivations for his public actions. Pringle's life and writings, particularly his poetry, are the product of a complex conjoining of different contexts. As the title of this study indicates, Pringle must be located within, and among, three national or geographical spaces, all of which exerted an intermingled influence on his imagination. Although Pringle may be regarded as central to the lineages of South African liberalism, it should also be recognized that he was a person in transit between different national spaces and also between different sets of formative influences. This mutability registers in the poetry, in particular, which moves from an absorption in the Scottish antiquarian revival and Scottish and English Romanticisms to a poetry of public address that draws retrospectively on eighteenth-century models. Pringle's Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, published for the first time in African Sketches (1834), a volume that brought together the poetry and a significant section of Pringle's prose, exhibits a similarly diverse range of concerns and motivations, particularly in its final chapters that are heavily invested in the surge of political events that lead to the abolition of colonial slavery in 1833– 34. A considerable proportion of Pringle's South African writing was produced when he lived in London (1826– 34), where his public profile was, paradoxically, more substantial than it ever had been in Scotland or South Africa. Even so, Pringle wrote from within a kind of double expatriation, and these mixed junctures give his work an intriguing angularity that sets him apart from his metropolitan counterparts.

It was Pringle's great misfortune— as it was of others— to cross the path of Lord Charles Somerset, the plenipotentiary figure of British authority at the Cape. Somerset, who had been governor since 1814, was a British aristocrat with a military and court background. In a letter to Colonial Secretary Bathurst in 1815, he declared his intention to run the colony as an “outwork to India” and to “sacrifice local considerations to the needs of that great Empire” (quoted in Edwards 1934, 19). Such imperial anachronism dominated Somerset's career at the Cape and became increasingly untenable as both global and local developments necessitated changes he was incapable of responding to. C. A. Bayly has described British colonial governorships of this period as “proconsular regimes” dominated by an adherence to “loyalism, royalism and aristocratic virtue” (1989, 194). Somerset's style of government reflected this ethos: it was autocratic, with effective power invested either in himself or those appointed by him; even judicially, Somerset's role as Judge of the Court of Appeal meant that he had the final say in any matters that involved infringements of the law. His aristocratic intransigence in the face of demands for judicial and other reforms, precipitated largely by the arrival of the British emigrants, eventually proved his downfall, and in 1827, under pressure both from the Whig lobby in parliament and disaffected settlers in the Cape, he resigned. Ironically, Pringle had at first benefited from Somerset's patronage: he approved generous grants of land to the Pringle party on the frontier, and when Pringle made his way to the Cape toward the end of 1822, it was to take up a government post set up for him by Somerset. Pringle's subsequent fallout with the governor was swift and brutal and came at a time when Somerset's affronted megalomania was at its worst.

Pringle had never envisaged his stay on the frontier as permanent; even before the Scottish party arrived at their settlement, he had used his letters of introduction to petition colonial officials for employment in Cape Town. Once he was in a position to relinquish his frontier obligations he did so; nor did he ever return there on any permanent basis.

In an 1814 “postscript” to Waverley, Walter Scott described contemporary Scotland as the product of a rapid, forced march to modernity. “There is no European nation,” he wrote, “which, within the course of half a century, or in little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland.” He makes it clear that such change entailed the “destruction” and “eradication” of an entire class of people:

There is a tension here between historical change as a “gradual” evolutionary “drift” down the unperturbed surfaces of a “deep and smooth river,” while at the same time asserting the “steadily and rapidly progressive” nature of these changes.

Our first passage expresses already familiar convictions. I quote it as a benchmark against which to measure the deviations that follow. Here is Pringle in full evangelical force in or around 1834:

The capitalization, the italics: there is even something typographically desperate in this bid to fashion empire into benign ethical subdual, which again suggests that Pringle might have been aware that these exorbitant expectations would not come to pass. His reference to Christianity as a “talisman” (“charm, amulet, thing supposed capable of working wonders” (Oxford English Dictionary)) casts religion itself as an apotropaic object or spell with which to “subdue” the “savage,” as though empire proceeds by a magical fetishism, thus mirroring the alleged primitivism of the colonized. When we add to this the envisaging of a divinely sanctioned expansion of “moral influence” and “territorial boundar[ies]” as the evangelical empire presses northward through the continent, we are fully immersed in an imperial imaginary that seemingly knows no bounds. This triumphalist narrative is, however, intersected— even cancelled— by other narratives, which tell different stories of empire and the imperial project. Just as the evangelical fabulations of Pringle's later poetry were on occasion interrupted by a poetry of bleak directness, so too in the Narrative there are sections that read very differently from these evangelical allocutions. A number of such passages could be cited, but the one to which I shall turn is particularly compelling since it must confront that most intractable of colonial problems, one whose legacy still haunts the present: the extermination of the San.

We have no detailed understanding of the circumstances in which Pringle and his family chose to abandon their native country and emigrate to the Cape Colony. The closest we get is this passage early in the Narrative:

This passage registers the geopolitical reverberations of a shifting world system in which a tenant farming family from the Scottish Lowlands is “scatter[ed] over the world” and where displacement from one national space becomes displacement into another. For just as the practices of agricultural improvement serve to evict the Pringle family from the tenancy of their farm, so to do modernizing imperatives drive the Xhosa and other indigenes from the territories that the Scottish settlers are to occupy. And while for the occupying colonists the intent of their chosen spatial displacement is to restore the state of “rural independence” of which they had been deprived (i.e., by their own reckoning, to move backward in time before moving forward), for the colonized the consequences are more calamitous: they experience an unprecedented acceleration in time, a shattering, with their present tense forced to become a “distant point,” to use Scott's phrase, as they are hurtled into an enforced futurity.

When Pringle arrived in London in 1826, he entered a social, political and cultural formation considerably removed from the sparse and abrasive ethos of the Cape Colony. He had now to negotiate a more complex, if less threatening, terrain, and his means of negotiation was a professional engagement with print culture— as journalist, pamphleteer, poet, editor and, most prominently, as Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. In the mid-1820s, print politics and print culture in Britain were characterized by significant divisions, the most salient of which was that between a “democratic” political establishment, which, however divided within its own ranks, regarded parliament and constitutional reform as constituting the only legitimate form of politics, and dispersed but still articulate proponents of radical reform who wished, in various ways, fundamentally to transform existing political structures. Pringle had come from an anachronistic colonial situation in which print dissemination was limited and print control despotically vested in the hands of a single individual; in this context, the right to print was granted to none but the most direct government functionaries and the battle fought by Pringle and Fairbairn had been to extend this right to an emergent colonial middle class. If such a move constituted, in condensed form— and with the obvious limitations of a racially divided colonial state— a replay of the classic eighteenth-century Enlightenment scenario of the opening of a public sphere in the waning absolutist state, then the situation that Pringle encountered in 1826 was very different. As Kevin Gilmartin explains, disparate radical groupings were united in their conviction that the state and its civil institutions were irreparably compromised and that “the press and opinion were no longer counterposed to the absolutist state, as in the classic bourgeois public sphere, but were instead divided between a corrupt state and the advocates of reform” (1996, 23). This split reproduced itself in the broad configuration of the reading public as well, resulting, as Jon Klancher notes, in “not a single but two national reading publics, implacably opposed in their language and politics” (1987, 98).

The period from the 1820s to the 1870s is a problematic one for South African literary history written in English. With the notable exception of the poetry of Thomas Pringle, not much happens in the official genres and no single literary work survives as anything other than a period piece. If, however, one broadens the boundaries of literary history to include a variety of genres conventionally overlooked or marginalised by it – diaries/journals, letters, articles in the periodical press, politically motivated writing, for example – then the ‘field’ enlarges significantly. Envisaged in this way, literary history also intersects with the expanding civic infrastructure of schools, libraries, art galleries, museums, learned societies, newspapers and periodicals. In effect, since early colonial literary activity is simply too sporadic to generate those forms of continuity which we associate with a national literature, it is necessary to expand the remit of literary history to include diverse forms of print production and cultural practice. For similar reasons, the work of outsiders commenting on South African affairs may be regarded as indigenous insofar as these writers enter into the currents of intellectual life and contribute to the formation of colonial identity. The best known and most influential of these works was Anthony Trollope's two-volume South Africa, an account of a five month visit to the country published in 1878. The book provoked widespread debate among colonial readers – in itself an indication that colonial South Africans were beginning to conceive of themselves as a distinctive national group rather than merely a province of empire.