African Bodies, European Texts: Picturing The Pilgrims Progressin Africa Isabel Hofmeyr

In a brief memoir, Named for Victoria, Queen of England, the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, recalls some of his early childhood reading.The selection of books he encountered at home comprised a random assortment of readers, primers, an abridged version ofA Midsummer Nights Dream, a biology textbook, and a selection of Anglican pamphlets and tracts.Included in this collection was also the Igbo translation of The Pilgrims Progress. I remember also my mothersIje Onye Kraist which must have been an Igbo adaptation ofPilgrimsProgress.It could not have been the whole book; it was too thin.But it had some frightening pictures.I recall in particula r a most vivid impression of the valley of the shadow of death.1

In Achebes recollection, two aspects of the text stand out firstly it was abridged and secondly it was illustrated.These two features in turn succinctly summarize how the Protestant classic,The Pilgrims Progress altered as it traveled into Africa where it was to be translated into 80 languages. As Ive demonstrated elsewhere, the book generally changed its physical form, breaking up into smaller units as it was disseminated in bits and pieces via a variety of media by mission organizations.2In the case of the Igbo translation, the book loses weight as it travels and like many other African editions, ends up in an abridged form. The physical manifestation of the book, thus, tells us something of its history. A second material feature of the text which betrays the changes it undergoes is the illustration. In Achebes edition, these 1 ChinuaAchebe, Named for Victoria, Queen of England, inMorning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), 121.It is not entirely clear exactly which illustration he recalls.The Igbo editions I have seen carried the Austin photographs which did not include an illustration of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.There may well have been other Igbo editions or Achebe could have been recalling illustrations from an English edition. 2 See Isabel Hofmeyr, Bunyan in Africa: Text and Transition, inInterventions 3 (3) 2001, 322-335. 2 pictures were, in all likelihood, photographs showing African characters acting out scenes from the stor y.The presence of illustrations inThe Pilgrims Progress was, of course, not unusual.Editions of the book had, since the fifth printing ofThe Pilgrims Progress Part I in 1681, routinely been illustrated.3These images represented European characters in every imaginable pictorial medium like line-drawing, engraving, woodcut or painting.Photographs, however, were never used. The Igbo edition with its illustrations points back, then, to earlier European editions of Bunyan. Yet at the same time these illustrations with their African characters and their photographic medium demonstrate that the text had also changed.By examining a range of illustrations in African editions of Bunyan, this paper probes exactly what these changes are and askswhat this evidence might tell us about how the text was remade under pressure from the local intellectual formation it encounters.The final pictorial forms that emerged in African editions were likewise made across time and space and were the result ofdiverse intellectual interests in the international mission domain.We also inquire what the implications of these African illustrations were for the text back in Britain. * The use of Bunyan illustrations has to be understood as part of the field ofvisual evangelism.As practitioners sensitive to the capacity of different media, missionaries were quick to appreciate the proselytizing potential of visual material.Pictures could create a spectacle and draw a crowd.In the minds of some, pictures were a universal language4 which could promote the illusion of shared understanding.Or, as one missionary working in India commented in 1897, I felt there were two short and sure ways to Biblical knowledge.To doctrine, there was the Catechism; and to New Testament history there were pictures.How these young preachers have mastered the life and teaching of Jesus by those pictures! and how 3 Norvig, DarkFigures, 119.4 Phrase from advertisement at the back of USCL, One-hundred-and-thirty-seventh Annual Report (London: USCL, 1936). 3 readily and easily they preach by their aid.5 Images were at times favored as appropriate for literal-minded converts or, as one missionary put it, a native always talksinpictures.6Missionaries increasingly identified pictures as seminal to the success of any printed publication.7Herbert Griffiths, writing from Angola in 1956 observed: African as you know are keen on pictures and a few in a bookwill make all the difference.8One report from Nigeria stated that pictures were so popular that they were torn out of books and sold separately.9 Pictures and images also became a major form of spreading publicity and propaganda about the mission to its supporters at home. Mission stations were, in short, picture-laden environments. As a key instrument of proselytization,The Pilgrims Progress came to Africa orbited by its own galaxy of visual confetti.Forthe nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries, these illustrations were the European set of images to which their originating mission societies had access.These pictures were overwhelmingly evangelical in provenance.Most of these illustrations had originated with the RTS which had funded the majority of African editions.The RTS (founded in 1799) had first started to produce its own illustrations from the 1820s when the organization had adoptedThe Pilgrims Progress as one of its tract (not without some opposition as some did not agree with the use of non-scriptural material for evangelical purposes).10

Its earliest illustrations feature characters in extant dress often in interior settings (Figure 10).This style derived in part from eighteenth-century traditions of Bunyan illustration which favored naturalistic polite genre conventions dominated by domestic family settings.11 This convention in turn had arisen in response to the crude wood-cuts characteristic of many seventeenth-century editions (a style incidentally to which Blake returned in his illustration of Bunyan).These early RTS series were superseded by others.One commonly used RTS sequence, for example, drew on 5 Two Days in a Mugh Village, inMissionaryHeraldSeptember 1897, 482.6 Pugh, Foreword. 7 ICCLA Papers, 501/2, document dated 5 November 1931. 8 ICCLA Papers, 531/28 (D), Letter, 29 June 1956. ICCLA, 527/24, ADC Religious Instruction Material, Sunday School material includes illustrations from The PilgrimsProgressto color in.9 ICCLA Papers, 509/8, Memo IV, 28 February-25 March 1939.10 Hewitt,Let the People Read, 30; Green,The Story, 14; Anderson, ThePrintedImage,34. 11 Norvig, DarkFigures, 122. 4 Biblical conventions of illustration and showed vaguely Hellenic or Palestinian-looking characters in a Holy Land-type setting.Yet another strand within the RTS repertoire were the late nineteenth-century paintings by Harold Copping with seventeenth-century characters in Puritan dress.These images in turn reflected a turn-of-the -century tendency to interpret Bunyan as English and, in pictorial terms, registered itself in a move to re-insert Bunyan into the seventeenth-century and the Southern English shires (Figures 27-30).12 From early on in the twentieth century, these European Bunyan illustrations began to be supplanted by images reflecting African characters.These Africanized images generallyoriginatedaslocally-inspired initiatives in particular mission stations. The range, style and competence of these renditions obviously varied enormously and ran, on the one hand, from rather amateurish sketches and stick-figure characters to accomplished renditions by professional artists, on the other (Figures 29 to 31).13

These drawings were all by Europeans and it is generally only in postindependence mission and commercially-produced school editions that the work of African artists is reflected (although in the 1930s the RTS did commission the South African artist George Pemba to undertake a sequence of illustrations but thesewereneverused).14

Alongside these various traditions of drawn illustration were also photographs.Two sets of photographic illustration were undertaken the first in 1919/20 in Northern 12 A good sequence of illustrations is in Frank Mott Harrison, Some Illustrators ofThe Pilgrims Progress(Part One) John Bunyan,The Library (fourth series) 3 (7) 1936, 241-263.These demonstrate the move towards using Southern English landscapes as backdrops for the pictures (242, 243, opp. 244, opp. 256, opp. 260).On the Southern countiesas templates of Englishness see, Alan Howkins, The Discovery of Rural England, in Robert Colls andPhilipDodds,eds.,Englishness:Politicsand Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 62. 13 For stick fi gure illustrations seeRwendo Rwo Mufambi (no publication details or date given) although such stick figures became something of an evangelical vogue and were widely used by the East African Revival, a laity-led evangelical movement that swept through much of East Africa in the 1930s and 40s (and incidentally used Bunyan widely).For one account, see J. E. Church,Quest for the Highest: An Autobiographical Account of the East African Revival (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1981) which also includes examples of such stick figure art. Another amateur set of pictures is in the Bambara edition (no place of publication: CMA, n.d.) For more professional illustrations, see, for example Montagues illustrations for the Ndebele edition. 14 Sarah Huddleston, George Pemba: Against All Odds (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, n.d.), 27-8. 5 Angola at the Baptist mission at San Salvador and the second in 1927 at Muhono CollegeinUganda.15 The spread and reach of these various sets of illustrations varied considerably.In some cases, illustrations were limited to one edition which circulated within a single language zone and at times, only amongst the stations of the same mission society in that zone.Other sets of illustrations traveled more widely and appeared in several different language editions across the continent.This reach was enabled by a series of international Protestant literature organizations which actively sought to promote co-operation and rationalization amongst those mission societies working in the field of Christianliterature.16The major player in this regard was the International Committee for Christian Literature in Africa (ICCLA).The impetus for this committee and others like it, lay in a perception that rates of literacy had risen without a commensurate increase in suitable reading material.Newly-literates required suitable publications to counter the threat of secular and increasingly, communist-inspired material.Towards this end, ICCLA energetically pursued different strategies: they audited what was available, made recommendations to missions, co-ordinated and strengthened regional cross-mission literaturecommittees where these existed, shared resources and ideas, and produced a journalBooks for Africa.Older organizations in the field, like the RTS (renamed the United Society for Christian Literature (USCL) in 1936), the American Tract Society, and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) (an Anglican organization) continued to 15 For accounts of the Northern Angolan pictures see, Austin, The Pilgrims Progress in a Congo Setting,150-3.The making of the Muhono photographs is briefly described inSeed Time and Harvest, March 1927, 14. 16 For information on these see Cornelius H. Patton, A World Program of Christian Literature, International Review of Missions 11(44) 1922, 572 -85; Charles E. Wilson, A Survey of Christian Literature in African Languages,International Review of Missions 10 (39) 1926, 376-84; Claude de Mestral, Christian Literature for Africa, International Review of Missions 43 (172) 1954, 436-42;C. E. Wilson, The Provision of a Christian Literature for Africa, International Review of Mission 15 (59) 1926, 506-14; John H. Ritson, Christian Literature in the Mission Field, International Review of Mission 4 (14) 1915, 200-220; Claude de Mestral, What is Christian Literature?Books for Africa 23 (3)1953,45-6. 6 undertake similar work but not without some sense of irritation at the new and more aggressive methods of ICCLA.17 As with all other Protestant organizations, ICCLA continued to earmarkThe Pilgrims Progress as an important text. The pages of their publications recommended it for evangelical and educational purposes.18They urged school libraries to acquire copies. They reviewed new editions.19They recommended it as a prize book.20 Books which resembled Bunyan or carried a similar message were favorably reviewed.Thomas Mofolos Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveller to the East) was discussed as an African Pilgrims Progress.21Elsewhere ICCLA shared information onPilgrims Progress coloring-in packs for Sunday schools.22 ICCLA publication further provided advice on how to obtain or generate illustrations forThe Pilgrims Progress.23 In choosing which illustrations to adopt, there was of course considerable debate. One missionary Ralph Wilson from Angola wrote to ICCLA in 1956 seeking help with illustrations for a new Umbundu version of Bunyan.The illustrations of the existing edition were not popular as the faces of characters were blank and without any features. Wilson wrote: Almost all object to the black smudgy faces.They [his congregants] are quite sensitive and say We dont look like that.Wilson had two other sets of illustrations on hand.The first was by W P F Burton and had been done for the Lingala ve rsion and offered more physiognomical details.24The second was a Portuguese edition, printed in Brazil which contained British line cuts representing characters in a seventeenth-century setting.The respondents to Wilsons survey rated the Burtons pictures first, the Portuguese/British pictures second and the existing 17 Patton, A World, 575. 18 ICCLA Papers, 532/29 (B), Sub-committee of the Uganda Diocesan Literature Committee, 15 February 1954, notes on Bunyan for high schools and training colleges. 19 BooksforAfrica 2 (1) 1932, 9; 20 (2) 1950, 34; 20 (4) 1950, 68.20 ICCLA Papers, 500/1, MinutesofCLASub -committee, 4 November 1927 and 27 October 1926. 21 The Church Assembly News June 1935, which notes that The Traveller to the East is an African Pilgrims Progress, included in ICCLA Papers, 511/9; BooksforAfrica 4 (2) 1934, 32. 22 ICCLA Papers, 527/24, ADC Religious Instruction Material.23 ICCLA Papers, 527/24, C. de Mestral to Ross Manning, 1 June 1956; 529/26, Miss Hunter to ICCLA, 25 August 1956, 531/28, ICCLA to Herbert Griffiths, 10 July 1956. 24 ICCLA, 533/30 (E), Letter dated 11 November 1955. 7 black smudgy/Kamba pictures third.25As matters turned out, and unbeknown to Wilson, this black smudgy set had already been ordered and so this is what they ended up with.26 Underlying Wilsons comments, and indeed much of the venture of Africanizing Bunyans illustrations, was a mission pre-occupation with making things African.This movement, as Dana Robert has demonstrated, stemmed from mission involvementinpost-First World War internationalism.A concomitant of this one-world vision was a concern with local particularity that could help define internationalism.As Robert indicates, in the mission domain these ideas expressed themselves in projects like the indigenization of Christian literature and attempts to de -westernizeChrist.27 Such debates were inevitably shot through with contradictions. Any attempts to define what was African immediately threw up a range of contesting claims and definitions.Take, for example, the black smudgy featureless images that Wilsons interlocutors rejected.For the RTS/USCL these were imminently African and so, in their estimation, could be used in any part of the continent. By contrast, pictures with too much specific detail could betray the characters ethnic background and so have limited circulation potential.Such images portraying one particular tribe [were] therefore lacking in universal appeal among the many tribes. The RTS solution was to recommend the blank, featureless faces whose tribal markings are undecipherable.28How RTS/USCL officials in London detected tribal markings is not clear, particularly since the pictures they were discussing comprised rather rough line drawings of a photograph of a character dressed up pageant-style.Their perception of tribalness was hence largely chimerical.Nevertheless it played a key ideological role in providing the negative definition underlying their understanding of 25 ICCLA, 533/30 (E), Letter dated 11 November 1955.26 ICCLA, 533/30 (E), Letter dated29 December 1953.27 Dana R. Robert, The First Globalization: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement between the World Wars, abst ract of paper included in Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities: Conference Programme, 3 -7 July 2001, Hammanskraal Campus, University of Pretoria. 28 USCL, One-hundred-and-forty-eighth Annual Report (London: USCL, 1947),16-17. 8 African, namely a universal continent-wideAfrican Christianity, standing in opposition to any local and troublesome social categories like ethnicity. The decision, then, about which illustrations to print was by no means straightforward and was wrought in different locales and institutions. The web of debate shaping the choice of any illustration extended across a wide zone reaching on the one hand from local preferences amongst converts to the recommendations of international agencies, on the other.In between lay the preferences of individual missionaries, the traditions of particular mission stations, the capacities of printing presses, the perceived preference of particular markets (like for example school readers), and so on.Very often, this transnational debate registered itself not only in the choice of illustration but, in some instances, in the pictorial conventions of certain images themselves.A brief consideration of two sets of illustrations will throw further light on this assertion. * The first set of photographic illustration for The Pilgrims Progress was made under the direction of a Baptist missionary, P. H. Austin at San Salvador in Northern Angola (Figures 36 to 39).Austin took the initiative as he felt that the existing illustrations with white men in early Victorian costume were not appropriate and were scarcely likely to convey a helpful impression to the natives.In order to remedy the situation, he decided to take pictures in a native setting, with natives representing the characters.(These explanations were provided in an article that he did on the pictures for the Baptist Missionary Heraldof1923.)29The photographs were used both in the Kongo edition and for magic lantern slides. The people chosen to play the parts of the various characters were prominent mission personalities: Miguel Nekaka (Figure 8), a leading convert and translator, played Evangelist; Ambrose Luyanzi, secretary of the church took the role of Interpreter; and Kitomene, a prominent Christian and the leader of the mission porters was chosento play Christian.The photographs were taken on the mission precinct and feature some of its landmarks like the church, the ruins of the Roman Catholic cathedral on the boundary of the station, and Ambrose Luyanzis house. 29 Austin, The Pilgrims Progress, 150-3. 9 The photographs evidently proved to be popular and attracted crowds at magic lantern showings.30This popularity is hardly surprising.The book had been intensively propagated since the mission stations inception in 1878 and had been broadcast via every available medium sermon, pageant, choir service, magic lantern slide, mission periodical, and school book and in every available forum pulpit, classroom, sewing circle, choir vestry, and Sunday school.31 From the 1920s, the Kongo version could no longer be used in the classroom as the Portuguese colonial state, seeking to enforce a policy of assimilation, forbad the use of vernacular in schools in favor of Portuguese.This prohibition notwithstanding, Bunyan continued to be broadcast to the Protestant community from a range of church-related sites and continued to play an important part in the life of Kongo Protestants. Part of the books success, however, must be attributed to the photographs which helped to stitch the text even more firmly into the history and traditions of the Kongo Protestants.The photographs, after all, showed characters who were known to local readers.Such a conjuncture opened up the possibility that Bunyans story could be conflated with the biographies of the characters in the illustration.It is evidently an interpretive strategy that readers exploited.Or, as Joao Matwawana who lived in San Salvador in the 1940s and 50s, recalled: The people identified with the characters in the stories and because of their own history and folk memories of the rebellion of 1913-1[5] (The Buta War), read political significance into the struggles of the Christians in the book.32 The Buta War was a rebellion which erupted around San Salvador in response to Portuguese forced labor policies.33Antipathy was directedboth to Portuguese colonial officials and the Kongo King who recruited workers for plantations on the island, San Tome and the coastal enclave, Cabinda. The uprising was lead by an erstwhile recruiter, Chief Tulante Alvaro Buta.Miguel Nekaka was to playa major 30 Austin, The Pilgrims Progess, 151.31 See footnotes 49 and 50 in Chapter Three.32 Letter from Jim Grenfell relaying experiences of Joo Matwawana, 13 October 1998.33 On Buta War see Stanley, The History,336-40; Marcum, TheAngolanRevolution ,51-4;Missionary Herald, April1914,104 -112. 10 role in the event, firstly through his attempts to negotiate a settlement and then as a target of Portuguese rule as he, along with three others from the mission, was imprisoned for several months. His imprisonment in turn formed part of a Portuguese attempt to implicate the Protestant mission as instigators of the uprising. The Bunyan photographs in which Nekaka featured were taken some four to five years after the end of the Buta War in 1915, at a time when the memory of the event still persisted.Nekaka and others in the photographs were prominent personalities and as Matwawanas comments suggest, their presence in the books illustrations, invited readers to see them as the texts protagonists. The story consequently became a kind of biography in which events in the story are made to fit the experiences of the people in the photographs. Nekaka had been a central character in the Buta War and so, the book could be interpreted as a story about that event.

In the case of the Kongo edition of Bunyan, then, the illustrations played a key part in how the story was read. Yet, what did these pictures mean to an audience far away? In probing this question, it is perhaps useful to pause and ask some questions around why photography as a medium was chosen.At first glance, the decision may seem unremarkable. Missionaries used photography widely and its inclusion in one of their favorite texts would hence seem inevitable.34However, if considered against European traditions of illustration, the presence of photographs in a fictional text becomes noteworthy no European edition of Bunyan ever used photographic 34 For material on mission photography see Rory McLachlan Bester, Insecure Shadows: CPSA Mission Photographs from Southern Africa c. 1895 -1945, MA Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1997; Patrick Harries, Photography and the Rise of Anthropology: Henri -Alexandre Junod and the Thonga of Mozambique and South Africa,; Michael Godby, Framing the Colonial Subject: The Photographs of W. F. P. Burton (1886 -1971) in the Former Belgian Congo,SocialDynamics 19 (1) 1993, 11-25; Rayda Becker, The Photographs of W. F. P. Burton, in Anitra Nettleton, ed.,Of Course you Would not Want a Canoe: The Collection of W. F. P. Burton(Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 1992), 27-37; Christraud M. Geary, Missionary Photography: Private and Public Readings,African Arts4 (24) 1991, 48-59.On colonial photography more generally see, Paul S. Landau, Photography and Colonial Vision,; Chris Morton, Interesting and Picturesque: Staging Encounters for the British Association in South Africa, 1905, ; Elizabeth Edwards, ed.,Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 11 illustrations.35Indeed, such a convention would be unthinkable for a European edition.Photography has after all always been associated with evidence and scientific verisimilitude.As a form of illustration, it accompanies works of non-fiction. Fiction, by contrast, has always been illustrated by means of drawing, painting or engraving.Photography and fictional writing are hence mutually exclusive if brought together, the presence of the one would automatically throw doubt on the status of the other.The Pilgrims Progress, a work of fiction, and the photograph, a source of evidence, inhabited incommensurate domains.In its three-century-long existence in Europe, the book was to be adorned by every type and convention of drawing, painting, wood cut and engraving, but never by a photograph. Yet, when the text traveled to Africa, photographic illustration become possible.The boundarybetween fiction and photograph is breached and the two cohabit quite happily.How does one explain this conundrum?What is it about the history of photography in Africa and the history of Bunyan translation that enables this shift?One way to answer this question is to examine the repertoire of visual conventions that missions evolved to communicate with a home audience, for it is in part from this enabling matrix that the fictional photograph emerged. In examining the photographs and Austins description of their making, it is clear that they encompass several mission genres. The first of these is the ethnographic photograph, as many others have indicated, a form widely practiced by missionaries.36 They identified themselves with the scientific endeavor of documenting and creating racial difference and many missionaries worked in conjunction with academic and scientific institutions.W. F. P. Burton, for example, created an entire ethnographic photographic archive for the University of the Witwatersrand in 35In one case that I have seen, photographs are used but these accompany a dramatic rendition of the text and illustrate a particular performance of the published script.The text isDramatic Illustrations of Passages from the Second Part of The PilgrimsProgressbyJohnBunyan, arranged by Mrs George MacDonald (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). As Nancy Armstrong has recently argued, there is a powerful link between photography and realist fiction.However, the former is never used to illustrate the latter. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36 See footnote 33. 12 Johannesburg.Several of these images make their way into his Lingala line-drawing illustrations ofThe Pilgrims Progress.In some cases, it is simply a matter of borrowing background.In others, the quotation is more pointed.In the case of his depiction of Vanity Fair, we see Christian and Faithful dressed in western clothing against a background of heathen figures in extravagant ritual dress (Figure 27).The codes Burton invokes for this heathen costume derive from his photographs (and ongoing study) of the Bamdudye Dancing Society, the major form of ideological and spiritual opposition to Christianity in the Luba area in South Eastern Congo where Burtonworked.37 While Austins images are less obviously ethnographic, he does at times give them an ethnographic gloss evident in comments like: This illustration gives a good idea of the various types of dress adopted by the natives and The photograph [of Vanity Fair]gives a fairly good idea of a native market.In this regard, the il lustrations provide a certain kind of evidence of native habit and dress. Austin likewise undertook the whole project because it was thought a good idea to take pictures in a native setting, with natives representing the characters.38The genre which suggested itself for depicting natives was the photograph. A second genre invoked in the photographs is that of the mission station landmark.This photographic form was well-developed and constituted one of the major vehicles through which mission periodicals acquainted supporters back home of progress.An almost standard opening for a mission periodical article on any station was I enclose a few photographs.39 Thereafter followed text which directed the readers attention to details of the adjacent photographs. Through this method, readers built up a knowledge of schools, churches, the general layout of the station, the ethnographic 37 Godby, Framing, 18; on Burton see catalogue, Nettleton, ed., Of Course you Would not Want a Canoe. For further details of bleeding between his pictures and his photography, see examples of photographs of the Bamdudye Dancing Society in his collection and his drawings for the magazine Congo Evangelistic Mission.Information from Burton material in the possession of Rayda Becker, University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, contact sheets 1 and 2 and file marked Personal on W. F. P. Burton.38 Quotations from Austin, The Pilgrims Progress, 151. 39 Missionary Herald January 1900, 19; March 1903, 146; January 1904, 32. 13 character of the surrounding people and so on.In Austins photographs, readers attention is likewise directed t o mission station features. In the next illustration we see Christian knocking at the wicket gate which is the door of the San Salvador Church; and in the fifth picture he arrives at the house of Interpreter.This character was taken by Ambrose Luyanzi.In the picture he is standing at the door of his house, which he constructed himself. Another feature of the mission station was the ruin of the Roman Catholic cathedral on its boundary.This landmark, too, cropped up in the photographs and readershave their attention directed to this feature in the photograph.Doubting Castle, the residence of Giant Despair, which is clearly seen in the background, is the ruin of the ancient Roman Catholic Cathedral, which was built during the first Portuguese occupation of San Salvador.40 As many discussions of mission photography have shown, the form was largely devoted to establishing boundaries between Christian and heathen.One strategy in this bigger framework was to personalize the convert in opposition to the anonymous heathen.The biography of the convert was one genre which undertook this work of personalization.The photographs which nearly always accompanied such texts assisted in the process of individualizing the convert.The Austin picturesinvoke this biographical convention which takes the form of a short biographical write-up about some of the actors: The making of the pictures was most interesting. It was important to secure a good pilgrim who was at once intelligent and familiar withthe story; and such a man was found in Kitomene, one of our teachers.He is a fine Christian man, and being the head man on our caravan journeys, is well acquainted with sloughs of despond, hills of difficulty and other hardships of the way. Nekaka, taking the part of Evangelist, also merited a brief biography.This character [Evangelist] was taken by Nekaka, and it would be hard to find in all Congo a man more worthy of the name Evangelist, for he has shown many of his countrymen the way to the wicket gate and has helped them in their difficult journey to the Celestial City.The Interpreter, Ambrose Luyanzi is described thus: This character [Interpreter] was taken by Ambrose Luyanzi, secretary of the native church. His knowledge of the English language is a constant source of wonder to the missionaries, and he is a master in the 40 Quotations from Austin, The Pilgrims Progress, 151. 14 art of interpretation.In the picture he is standing at the door of his house, which he constructed himself, and in his hand he holds the interpreters lamp.41 The f inal form invoked by the photographic illustrations is that of the religious tableaux or pageant.As we have seen, this genre was routinely employed by missionaries at San Salvador and indeed, elsewhere in the mission world where drama was a favored method of education and evangelism.Austins pictures were not part of a pageant although they were clearly posed for the occasion.However, so pageant-like did they appear that at least one viewer assumed that they had been taken from anAfricanChristianperformance of the story.42This anticipation of theatricality in turn relates to the high degree of spectacle and performance that viewers came to expect of colonial and mission encounters. This genre of the fictional photograph emerges then at the cross-roads of these forms ethnographic photography, the mission station photograph, the image and biography of the convert, and the religious pageant.As mission station photography, the images can be seen as evidence of mission success and the universality of Protestant belief.This idea is underlined by the collage presentation in the Missionary Herald which accompanied Austins article.The pictures are presented as a gallery of photographs with English captions, an arrangement underlining the impression that this is a universal story which is read in the same way throughout the world. Some of Austins observations re-enforce this point: In the eighth picture Christian is seen standing before the Cross. As he gazes fixedlyuponit,theburdenfalls from his back into the sepulcher.This is surely a parable of what is happening in Congo to-day.Men and women are discovering that at the foot of the Cross of the Redeemer they are losing their burden of superstition and of bondage, and all kinds of sin.43

41 Quotations from Austin, The Pilgrims Progress, 151. 42 Wilson, The Provision, 510.43 Austin, The Pilgrims Progress, 151. 15 Similarly and even possibly at the same time the photographic medium can cut across this universalistic belief and instead betoken an imaginative segregation.We (namely home viewers) have our story in painting, drawing or line-cuts.They have their story which unfolds in the ethnographic space of mission photography.This tension between identifying with and disavowing the actors in the photographs is evident as well in the mixture of the convert biography and the ethnographic photograph which positions actors as illustrations of African Christian types. As converts, the actors are personalized and furthermore, like their home audience, they are Baptist.Yet, as ethnographic objects, they are different and anonymous types.Asperformers in a pageant, the actors again proclaim their similarity to home viewers, most of whom had probably taken part in such events.However, as figures in an ethnographic space, they dramatize the belatedness of Africa.For viewers in 1923, accustomed to English illustration which showed Bunyan in a seventeenth-century setting, the English version of the story unfolds in the past.Because of their photographic medium, Austins illustrations, by contrast, suggest that for Africans the story unfolds in the present.Africa, in other words, is still in Europes past.However, for many Baptists, Bunyans story did not exist in seventeenth-century Bedford but rather in an evangelical present. For such viewers, the presentness of the picture may have heightened rather than weakened a sense of identification with the actors in the photographs.Indeed, this attempt to shift the story via its illustrations into the present may have come from Austin himself who in Africa could, through photographs, make Bunyan live in the present, a pictorial option not open to him back in England. The form of Austins illustrations was determined then by the generic competencies of the various audiences to which it was directed, namely Kongo Protestants, a home audience and missionaries themselves.Via his illustrations, these audiences could sustain different interpretations of the story and its significance.For Kongo Protestants, the illustrations converted the book into an allegory on the Buta War.For Baptistsin Britain, the illustrations could be read to demonstrate the universality of Bunyans story and the Protestantism which underlay it. However, because the illustrations were photographs, they could equally be read in a racialized way to demonstrate the ethnographic difference of African Christians.For missionaries 16 themselves, the photographs could open up ways of dramatizing and realizing the complexities of evangelical time in which Bunyans and hence Gods story is always in the present. While Austins photographs were shot in Angola, other sets of African illustration were made back in England. One such set of illustrations was that done by C. J. Montague in 1902 for the Southern African Ndebele version (Figures 40 to 47).In constructinghis images, he must have taken advice from missionaries, and used photographs, books and documents on the region he was depicting. He consequently undertook a peculiarly mission-inspired form of art, produced in one place about another, thousands of miles away and addressed simultaneously to at least three audiences, mission, convert and home supporter.The set of images he produced bears traces of his attempts to manage the contradictory demands of this task. The first of these traces comes in the frontispiece which like thousands of other editions, carries an image of Bunyan.This tradition goes back to the seventeenth century and in its classic form, shows Bunyan asleep and dreaming.His head rests in the palm of his hand.Below him is a cave-like den which Bunyan aficionados would recognize as his prison.Above his head, in the top half of the image, the dream/story unfolds and we see Christian setting out on his journey (Figure 48). In selecting this image to launch the text, Montague orients the book for British readers and provides a framework of familiarity within which they can read the non-English object in their hands. Yet, the image while broadly similar to its original counterpart also has some significant differences (Figure 49).In the Montague edition, Bunyan lies in his characteristic posture, head in hand.However, rather than sleeping, he is awake and is writing with a quill in a book.The character in the dream space above his head has also changed and we now have an Africanrather a European Christian.The reasons for these alterations are not hard to fathom having a white man sleeping in public in a colonial context would hardly provide a propitious beginning for a mission text.Likewise, the image of Bunyan writing, embodies the idea of this seminal Protestant text authoring the experiences of African converts.Europe writes, and Africa reads. 17 A British reader who knew their Bunyan well would have had no difficulty in recognizing the fifteen images that follow. They represent well-known scenes in the story and some, like Evangelist pointing the way to the Shining Light, bear a resemblance in their composition to earlier British versions of this picture, like Coppings (Figures 32 to 35). Yet, there is much localdetail that such a reader might have missed.Montague, however, assisted English viewers and theChronicle of the LMS in1902, ran an explanatory article on his illustrations.Rather like Austin, he invites viewers to regard parts of his images ethnographically.In relation to the first picture of the hero setting out, Montague says: Christian starts from a kraal, where the careless of his race are typified by a group around a cooking pot eating skoff.In the picture of Hill Difficulty readers are invited to observe Mistrust who wears charms around his neck to counteract the baleful influences of witches, night animals mostly, who are supposed to be in league with the resentful dead.44 Very attentive LMS readers with a particular interest in Carnegies station at Hope Fountain may also have recognized a section of one illustration that comes from Carnegies book,Among the Matabele, published in 1894.45The text includes an illustration entitled A Matabele Village46 and Montague uses this as the background to his rendition of the Slough of Despond. Carnegies book, published in the lead up to the Ndebele uprising of 1896/7, forms part of standard mission/white settler historiography on the warlike Ndebele whom both groups had a shared interes t in conquering.47 The book is a fairly typical piece of mission ethnography which seeks to typify the savage and heathen customs of the Ndebele.Through his illustration, Montague links the two texts, namely Carnegies treatise on the Ndebele and the translation of The Pilgrims Progress. In the first, the reader experiences life among the heathen Ndebele.In the second, through the images, the reader lives briefly amongst the convert Ndebele. 44 Montague, Bunyan for the Matabele, 252-4. 45 D. Carnegie, Among the Matabele (London: RTS, 1894).46 Carnegie, Among the Matabele,30. 47 Ranger, Revolt,36-7. 18 There is a further link between these two texts which again only close LMS followers of events in Matabeleland would have noticed. The figure of Evangelist bears a more than passing resemblance to Carnegie himself. To equate the two was not Montagues intention.For him, Evangelist, is a sturdy missionary in travellers outfit, instead of the seventeenth century divine that two centuries of illustrators have made us familiar with.48Nonetheless, the question of whether Evangelist was David Carnegie must surely have arisen, particularly for readers in Matabeleland. If Carnegie is Evangelist, then who is Christian, who is Faithful, who is Hopeful and so on?Might they not also be real people and hence African Christians at Carnegies station, Hope Fountain?As with Austins photographs, the possibilityof this book as a biography of notable African Christians opens up. A further imprint of convert interpretation on Montagues illustrations is the final scene in which Christian and Hopeful hand over their documents at the gates of heaven.This scene, very popular amongst African Christians, foregrounds the magical perception of documents inherent in Bunyans text where documents behave like fetishes or talismans and in this instance, cause the gates of heaven to open.While European illustrations of the text often included this final scene at the gates of heaven, these images never showed the characters holding documents.Hence, left to his own devices, Montague would probably never have thought to include the documents in his portrayal of this scene. However, possibly via Carnegie, African interest in this scene was conveyed to the artist and has left its impress on the illustrations.That this imprint was reasonably strong can be seen from the fact that Montagues illustrations made their way into the Zulu edition.Harriet Colenso who had good links to Zulu Christians, wrote to Montague requesting permission to use the pictures which in her assessment had delighted people.49 Montagues pictures thus have their being in the multiple audiences for which he produced his images.While he modeled his work on existing British traditions of Bunyan illustration, the nature of the audiences to which he spoke determined a 48 Montague, Bunyan for the Matabele, 251.49 Harriet Colenso to Mr Carnegie, 26 February 1903, Natal Archives Depot, Colenso Collection, A 204, Vol. 74.I am indebted to Jeff Guy for giving me the location of this letter. 19 number of key shifts in these images.Bunyan, for example, wakes up.An African Christian interest in the documents at the gates of heaven, an angle never taken in European illustrations of this scene, makes its way into Montagues line drawings.Like the translation alongside, these images could only have been made in the international space of mission evangelicalism. * Yet, did these images matter outside Africa? Did the Africanisation of Bunyans text carry any implications for his standing back in Britain?Put another way, what is at stake in these images? As I have discussed elsewhere, the Africanisation of Bunyans text had profound implications for the ways he was read in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.50 With regard to the nineteenth century, the international mission circulation of Bunyan was ardently seized upon by Nonconformists back in Britain who were quick to advertise the successes of one of their key writers as a way of adding value to their cause.This promotion of Bunyan formed part of the broader canvas of foreign missions which became integral to Nonconformist politics in England.51Faced with social disabilities at home, Nonconformists harnessed the glamour of foreign missions as a means of raising their national profile and their political fortunes. By publicizing Bunyans successes within this same mission field, Nonconformists could portray Bunyan as universal and so, promote a treasured writer still tainted by the film of vulgarity which clung to all things Nonconformist. The twentieth-century reception of Bunyan is largely tied up with the history of English Literature as a discipline with some of its earliest practitioners evincing an 50 Isabel Hofmeyr, How Bunyan became English: Missions, Translation and the Discipline of English Literature,Journal of British Studies, 41 2002, 84-119. 51Susan Thorne, The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in aBourgeoisWorld(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238-62: Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Maughan, Mighty England. 20 interest in Bunyan as an English writer.This invention of his Englishness emerged prominently in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and initially, it drew on Nonconformist discussions regarding Bunyans universality.52 Yet, this overlap notwithstanding, there was little unanimity on the content of that universality.For Nonconformists, universal appeal lay in Bunyans evangelical Protestant message and in its ability to convert and so, include (even if only in theory) new constituencies from the colonized world.For literature professionals, Bunyans universality inhered in a white Englishness whose superiority was deemed toensure universal admiration. However, in this latter view, Bunyans function was less to draw others in than to exclude them since Bunyans power lay in its potential to confer cultural and racial distinctiveness on white Britons at home and in the Empire.At some level, these ideas of inclusion and exclusion are, of course, contradictory, yet up until the 1920s, they could co-exist, since Protestantism, whiteness and Englishness acted as interchangeable and re-enforcing categories.Within this framework, the idea that Bunyan both included and excluded constituencies dovetailed well with notions of the Imperial gifts of Christianity and civilization.Bunyan could both define the whiteness and Christianity of those who had him in their culture just as he could encompass those who did not have him and upon whom this literary and spiritual gift needed bestowing.However, with vertiginous de-Christianization particularly after the First World War, and as English literary studies became more powerful, evangelical views with their international emphasis and their hints of inclusiveness became more marginal and in some cases suspect, since they placed Bunyan in an ambiguous position by over-associating him with black colonized societies. Thisanxie ty about Bunyans universality damaging his Englishness became most apparent in 1928 with Alfred Noyes now-famous attack on Bunyan in The Bookman.53Writing against a backdrop of effusive tercentenary praise for Bunyan (born in 1628), Noyes slated him as an overrated, theologically outdated and piously 52 Hofmeyr, How Bunyan, 107-118. 53 Noyes, Bunyan. 21 repulsive writer driven by a punitively narrow set of Calvinist ideas.54His article attracted an avalanche of accusatory responses.55Noyes defended himself by explaining that he was writing secular literary criticism and contrasted his endeavors to the existing work on Bunyan, an author whose reputation has largely been built up, and is now being defended, by ministers of religion.56Assessments of Noyes intervention (whilst criticizing its polemicalcharacter) have located its importance in this secular emphasis, in turn seen as anticipating modern contemporary criticalpractice.57 One aspect of the article however that has attracted less attention is its strongly Social Darwinist emphasis (which has been excised from anthologized versions of the piece).In attacking Bunyan as fanatical, crude and superstitious, Noyes likens his work to the lowest and most squalid levels of the primitive races of Africa.Elsewhere in the article, he characterizesThePilgrimsProgress as a revelation of something dreadful and primitive and insane, something that has only half emerged from the squalor of the sub-human. Caliban crying for the Celestial City may be a subject for literature, but he is not a maker of it.He continues to stigmatize the author ofThe Pilgrims Progress as poor Caliban-Bunyan and in a subsequent piece describes his language as Hottentotish.58

In some senses, the evolutionist analogies used by Noyes are unremarkable for the period and are no doubt chosen as one available register of abuse.However, given that Noyes was an arch-traditionalist and writer of intensely patriotic English verse, the article merits further attention.59Ordinarily, one might have expected someone like Noyes to embrace Bunyan enthusiastically for his Englishness. Yet, for Noyes, Bunyan is a menacing presence he is lower class, inadequately modern and insufficiently white.He consequently needs to be relegated to the outer reaches of Empire, there to dwell amongst the savages with whom Protestant missionaries had so long associated him.In this tainted Caliban-position, Bunyan has lost any claims 54 Noyes, Bunyan, 155.55 These responses appear inTheBookman 446 (75) 1928. 56 Alfred Noyes, Mr. Alfred Noyes Rejoinder,TheBookman445 (76) 1928, 104. 57 Roger Sharrock, ed., Bunyan,ThePilgrims Progress: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1976), 22.58 Noyes, Bunyan, 14, 16, 17 and Noyes, Mr. Alfred Noyes,106. 59 Entry on Noyes in The Dictionary of National Biography, eds. E. T. Williams and Helen M. Palmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1971),776-8. 22 to belonging to an implicitly white tradition.Like Caliban, he may be the subject of literature,but his literature is no longer worthy of the English tradition. It is as though Noyes wishes to erase the memory of a contaminated Bunyan from his version of white Englishness. In some respects, Noyes outburst was atypical and his attack notwithstanding, Bunyan easily secured a place in the Leavisite tradition of English Literature.As Eagleton has shown,60 this tradition was to become decisively influential from the 1930s onwards, partly no doubt because of the waning impact of Nonconformist intellectual circles precipitated in turn by the late nineteenth-centurymiddle-class defection from the chapels and public forums of Nonconformity.61Within this literary field of debate, Bunyan was to be included in the Great Tradition and was unsurprisingly canonized as narrowly white and English.Q. D. Leavis, for example, saw Bunyans enduring popularity as lying in the Biblical English he used.For her, this language was also implicitly white: the characteristic effect of reading a passageofBunya n is a stirring of the blood the Biblical phrases and cadences evoke overtones, and the peculiarly thrilling quality of the prose is due to this technique which enables a precise particular occasion to draw on the accumulated associations of a race.Bunyans work could no more than Shakespeares have been done in any otherlanguage.62

This stress on an intense Englishness continued to be accompanied by the idea of Bunyan as universal.The meaning of this universality, however, takes on a slightly different guise, best captured in F. R. Leavis comments on Bunyan.He phrased the issue thus:For what makes The Pilgrims Progress a great book, one of the great classics, is its humanity its rich, poised and mature humanity.63In this formulation, the status of Bunyans universality has modulated.Instead of connoting the concrete circulation of his texts to numerous societies, the term universality denotes something much more vague and abstract.This configuration within the 60 Eagleton, LiteraryTheory,30-37. 61 Thorne, CongregationalMissions,150-54. 62 Q. D. Leavis,Fiction and the Reading Public(London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), 101. 63 F. R. Leavis, Bunyan through Modern Eyes, (originally published in 1938)in The Common Pursuit(London: Penguin, 1952), 206. 23 Leavisite tradition of a narrow Englishness alongside an abstract and universal human nature offered possibilities for muffling the contradictions that had arisen around Bunyan.On the one hand, a stress on white Englishness rooted the writer in England whilst maintaining Bunyan as a literary icon who could confer racial distinctiveness on Britons.An ethereal universality, on the other hand, could elevate Bunyan above the black colonized societies with whom mission discourse had so long connected him.Such societies had initially provided the pre-condition for nineteenth-century ideas on Bunyans universality.Their erasure from the critical record became one pre-condition for twentieth-century Bunyan scholarship to take shape and forThe PilgrimsProgress to become unequivocally a book of England.From this vantage point (which still dominates Bunyan studies powerfully), the African circulation of The Pilgrims Progress (and the texts and images it produced) is held to be irrelevant and peripheral to understanding Bunyan. This paper has attempted to argue that the reverse is in fact true and that a full grasp of Bunyan, and indeed the English novel he is taken to inaugurate, can only be understood by placing Bunyans text in a transnational context.