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

Abstract

From the 1820s onwards, a new political culture was gaining ground in both Britain and the colonies. Associated with economic transformations and the rise of the middle class to political power, 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. 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 'South African Commercial Advertiser', which started in 1824. It shows that the Cape Constitution of 1853 was based upon a definition of the public which the 'Advertiser' had put forward during the previous three decades, namely, a definition centred on the rights of rational propertied men. The 'Advertiser''s public sphere excluded women and the black underclass. The free press saw the beginning of the end of an autocratic 'ancient regime style' of goverment, but it saw 'rational men' as the inheritors of this new earth. Its racial aspect might be more subtly articulated - especially in the early decades - but it was nevertheless increasingly present...