Center for the History of Print Culture Colloquium

This talk examines the reading cultures of Cape Town’s slaves, free blacks, and labourers (after emancipation in 1838) as common readers. It reveals how they used literacy practices to represent themselves and their world views. The Dutch East India Company (DEIC or VOC), a Slave Lodge school, Muslim religious schools, missionary societies, and book and tract societies proved fruitful for finding evidence of reading.