I’ve written before about Kath Bode’s work resurrecting lost fiction from colonial period Australian newspapers.

At the time, I did say that in one sense it wasn’t a surprise, newspaper fiction had been a major event in the mid to late nineteenth century in the English speaking world.

However, one great gap has always been what was happening in colonial South Africa – clearly there were newspapers and magazines, and no reason to expect that the demand for content was any different, but the lack of digitised resources means that it’s difficult to investigate electronically what was going on.

Happenstance is a wonderful thing however.

I was searching Google Books for something entirely different, and came across a South African book,

Life & travels in the northwest, 1850-1899 : Namaqualand, West Coast & Bushmanland

which, according to the preface, has been compiled from official reports and from magazine and newspaper articles of the time.

So, if people were writing about their travels and explorations, there’s a good chance that they were also writing short stories and novellas about their experience of life, and that these were turning up in the newspapers and magazines of the time …