The Press at Work: Five Snapshots

To understand the place and role of Gakaara Wanjaũ in the development of a print culture in Central Kenya, it is useful to start with a contrast between the story of the small press that he set up in the provincial town of Karatina in 1971 and the familiar, sometimes apocryphal stories of how the printing press arrived in Africa and the aura that surrounded it. In general, the arrival of the missionary printing press in Africa was seen as the triumphant arrival of a technology which, to borrow the words of Michel de Certeau, writing in a different context, was capable of ‘reforming society’, transforming ‘manners and customs’ and ‘remodeling whole cultures and nations’ (1984: 166). For example, when the missionary John Ross conveyed a printing press to the Lovedale Mission in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1823, he had no doubt that the machine would create new Christian subjects – it was God’s gift to ‘the world of readers, who become the men of action, for evil as much as for good’ (Shepherd 1940: 400).