An Assembly of Leaders

The case of Magema Magwaza Fuze (c. 1840–1922) is about the problem of the introduction of writing in nineteenth-century colonial Natal by missionaries. The relative ‘success’ of this missionary endeavour appeared in the small and growing number of converts to Christianity who were literate and therefore no longer confined to an oral culture only. By the end of the nineteenth century, observers could identify an incipient ‘class’ of educated and literate Africans, amakholwa (‘believers’). Fuze was one of these literati: an aspirant kholwa intellectual, he was a printer by profession and an assistant to the controversial John William Colenso, the Bishop of Natal. In the early twentieth century he was a columnist for the Zulu-English newspaper Ilanga lase Natal and authored the book Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (The Black People and Whence They Came). This article considers how Fuze and his kholwa contemporaries debated the meaning of reading and writing in the pages of Ilanga lase Natal, contested the symbolic and cultural values associated with the written word as a technology and as an artefact, and in the process created, or perhaps failed to create, a public sphere in which they imagined, and wrote about, themselves as an assembly of readers.