'Franklins of the Cape': The South African Commercial Advertiser and the creation of a colonial public sphere, 1824-1854

Abstract

When the first independent newspaper was founded in the Cape Colony in 1824 its editors were in no doubt of their forthcoming place on the historical stage. "What should hinder us", wrote John Fairbairn to Thomas Pringle in 1823, "from becoming the Franklins of the Kaap?"1 What was required in the colony, Fairbairn continued, in response to his friend's plan for a publication to "enlighten South Africa",2 was the presence of "rational men". Herein lies the key to an understanding of the self-proclaimed place of the South African Commercial Advertiser in the development of a political culture at the Cape. It was a process which would bear fruit in a constitution for representative government which the colony received thirty years after Fairbairn had taken on the mantle of Benjamin Franklin newspaper editor, patriot, scientific rationalist and "harbinger of liberty".3 An analysis of the Advertiser in the first decades of its publication sheds considerable light on the nature of the public sphere as established in the colony during this period as well as on the ambiguous definitions of "the people" definitions which in many ways would underpin the franchise of 1853. From the 1820s onwards, a new political culture was gaining ground in both the metropole and the colonies. Associated with the economic transformations of an industrializing metropole and the rise of the middle class to political power in both Britain and its colonial dependencies, it can be designated by the term 'bourgeois public sphere'. The press was intimately connected in both practical and symbolic ways with this new vision of political power which expressed itself in opposition to the aristocratic privileges of the ancient regime. While expressed in the language of universality, the bourgeois public sphere was also inherently exclusionary. This paper discusses the nature of this political culture as it was elaborated at the Cape and particularly as it was expressed within the pages of the Advertiser a paper which set out to re-invent selfconsciously the political culture of the colony. The Advertiser was first published in 1824 in a climate of official hostility encapsulated in the person of the High Tory and aristocratic governor, Lord Charles Somerset, who suspended the paper only a few months after it had