Writing to order

Writing to order

Much of the correspondence and other paper-work (orders, bills and ledgers) to be found in the remaining papers from the Emagusheni trading station (now in the far east of the Eastern Cape, then in the eastern area of the independent polity of Pondoland) can be summarised as ‘writing to order’, in being concerned with the ordering of goods, recording sales, making or chasing payments and so on. At a distance, there were people who wanted to order goods from warehouses (such as Randles Bros in Durban) in order to sell them locally; and there were other people at a remove also (in the area around the trading station), who wanted to purchase the same goods and used the trading station as their intermediary. The existence of supply available locally may not have created but certainly it facilitated demand, for gin, brandy, blankets, sugar and other favoured goods. The result constitutes the trading station as a particular kind of scriptorium, a concept which has been used elsewhere in the WWW research and publications as well. That is, the ontological basis of the trading station was as a system of exchanges and associated with a particular kind of format or kind of writing, recognisable as indeed orders, bills, ledgers and so on. If a blanket, sugar or gin was wanted, then an order had to be made in a form which made clear the goods wanted, the quantities, how payment might be made, and implicitly also how delivery was to be managed; and so these orders came to take on a broadly formulaic character, although many of them retain strong letter-like features as well, and indeed are couched in the broad form of a letter. And the white people who ran the trading station similarly produced recognisable kinds or genres of writing, such as items that are versions of ledgers and order-books. And ‘versions‘ because they are unruly in the way that they were kept and do not conform to strict notions of what these should be like.

‘What has this to do with whiteness?’, readers might be asking. A little, or a lot. A little because people of different skin colours made such orders in very similar ways, although the other fuller correspondence in this collection was largely conducted between the white traders and storekeepers. A lot because of precisely this division of activity. And a lot also because the Africans who were writing such orders were of a considerably higher status in local terms. Pondoland was still an independent African polity in the 1880s and its Great King and other members of the ruling elite composed most of the Emagusheni customers, and in some cases they traded on their power and status so as to secure goods at a cheaper price or indeed no price at all.

Last updated:  12 February 2021


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