The pilgrim's progress.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2004. The portable Bunyan. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 314 p. Price: R180,00. ISBN: 1-86814-403-8.

Hofmeyr's main argument is that Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress should not be marvelled at as a quintessentially English book that yet has a universal appeal. Rather, she contends, the book was not only portrayed as universal under the pressures of nonconformist evangelism in Africa and elsewhere, but was in fact appropriated by Africans, and other colonial subjects, who did not always share the missionaries' agenda or interpretation. Only after this, she argues, was The pilgrim's progress reappropriated and reinscribed as English and white within the new field of English Literature studies.

The body of Hofmeyr's book is divided into three unequal parts, which the introduction and conclusion place firmly in a post-colonial framework--although the introduction in particular is perhaps too self-consciously aware of the alternatives to every choice made. In the first part, four chapters on "Bunyan in the Protestant Atlantic", Hofmeyr explores the use made of Bunyan by nonconformist missionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. In the central section, five chapters on "Bunyan, the public sphere, and Africa", she discusses African appropriations and (re-)interpretations of, and borrowings from, both the text and illustrations of The pilgrim's progress. The final part of the book, "Post-Bunyan", comprises one chapter, "How Bunyan became English", in which she draws together the threads of her main contention.

The book includes two appendices ("Bunyan translations by language" and "A social profile of Bunyan translators"), twenty figures, substantial notes, a thorough bibliography and an adequate index.

Throughout the book, Hofmeyr supports her arguments by general examples pleasingly justified and exemplified by detailed historical case studies of specific instances and individuals. These histories are of course mediated via the bleak gaze of post-colonialism, in which human socoi-political history is reduced to cynical and interested negotiations and manoeuvrings between individuals or groups, all alike devoid of altruism or sincerity.

Occasionally, however, the histories--interesting and well-presented though they are--do not definitely support her argument, and the author is reduced to speculation:

   Because evidence on Fuller's translations is limited, so it does
   not allow us detailed insight into whether he carried forward any
   'Jamaican' inflections of the text
   [of The pilgrim's progress] ....

   As an evangelical Jamaican Baptist, Fuller would almost
   certainly have seen Bunyan as one of the 'messages' that he
   was carrying to Africa ... His Cameroonian translations of
   Bunyan may have aimed for a similar outcome in which his
   Duala Baptist converts could read the text as a story about
   themselves and their struggles. Such a translation strategy
   would, of course, unmoor traditional conceptions ... (p. 93-94;
   italics--MdP-H).

Together with the admission in the first sentence quoted, the modal auxiliaries and adverb I have italicised make this substitution of speculation for evidence clear.

Occasionally Hofmeyr reveals a haziness about historical details not central to her discussion, as when she writes: "In keeping with Elizabethan vagrancy laws, Christian, a masterless man, must carry a 'pass' to indicate that he has permission to be travelling" (p. 142). Surely Restoration legislation would be more relevant?

The writing is sometimes marred by misused words and abused metaphors. One of the most glaring of the latter is: "The pilgrim's progress came to Africa orbited by its own galaxy of visual confetti" (p. 175). The inappropriate juxtaposition of the astronomical terms galaxy and orbit (to say nothing of the bathetic addition of confetti) cannot but jar.

Perhaps it is pedantic to be reminded by "celibate and unmarried" (p. 171) that the original meaning (and still one of the meanings) of celibate is unmarried. The sentence, " ... everyone sang hymns from memory, since to deem to hold a hymnbook was 'an unpardonable affectation'" (p. 245), suggests that two constructions have been conflated and that proof-reading has been hurried--which happens to all of us.

But it also seems to me that Hofmeyr uses creole and its derivatives rather casually and distractingly. Admittedly, creole can be a vague word. According to my New shorter Oxford English Dictionary, it can mean, "in the West Indies, Central or Sourth America, a person descended from European settlers or a person descended from black slaves". Nevertheless, the phrase " ... a world of African creole spiritual experience" (p. 87) is not clear. What kind of person is an African creole? The dictionary offers no meaning for creole (applied to a person) in Africa. If she intends to convey that Jamaicans might have a special insight into the hybridities (of any kind) that might have arisen in colonial Africa, there are better ways to express this. A few pages later Hofmeyr describes a religion emphasising personal revelation as "this creole Christianity" (p. 90). It is not quite clear whether she means Christianity hybridised with other Jamaican religious traditions, or the Christianity of the creole people of Jamaica; perhaps the latter, since her next paragraph begins, "In the records of Jamaican slave Christianity ... " (p. 91). The reason I keep suggesting that creole might mean hybrid for Hofmeyr, is this sentence: "The episode [in Pilgrim's progress, where Christian must show his certificate at the gates of heaven,] also dramatizes a creolized view of literacy and documents that draws together 'African' and 'European' understandings" (p. 92). Since she clearly means hybrid, surely this would be less open to misunderstanding than a technical sociological and linguistic term?

On the whole, however, Hofmeyr's book offers a thought-provoking thesis competently argued.

Reviewer: Michele du Plessis-Hay Department of English, Potchefstroom campus, North-West University