Table Mountain as an Historical Backdrop

The conquest of Africa has been characterized by countless encounters along the continent's vast coastline. It was here, on often inhospitable and uninhabitable beaches that natives and explorers, traders and soldiers, herders and settlers first met to barter and stake their claims. It was here that pre-colonial contact, exchange and conflict first occurred. The beach is the symbol par excellence of temporal and spatial encounters at the Cape of Good Hope. It is both the horizon and frontier - marginal space between the familiar and the strange - where Otherness was both a new discovery and a reflection of something old.

 The notion of the horizon-as-frontier enabled the traveller-settler to distinguish between home and the unknown. For them the frontier was also the perceived limit of someone else's world. It was where the Other supposedly ceased to belong: 'To be on the frontier is, in a sense, to be on the horizon. It is the space of first contact between Native and Stranger, a site of real and symbolic acts of possession and dispossession, conflict and exchange.'

The isolation of historical events, such as the arrival of the first white settlers, is usually intended to reproduce the myths of the past in service of sectional interests. Unable to admit to the presence of indigenous people, this image propagates a colonial view of the Cape as a white landscape. In his White Writing, critic and writer John Coetzee characterizes the landscape tradition as a literature of failure: the failure to imagine a peopled landscape. He writes of the two dream topographies in South African writing: the ancient empty land with which humans have no contact; and the land divided by a grid into patriarchally ruled plots and farms. In both of these topographies the issue of race is silenced. The white landscape tradition is thus haunted by the other gaze, always absent in the renderings of the land. Representations of the landscape were 'white lies' which denied one was living in someone else's country.

History and geography record acts and facts, but myth and belief explain why men act and which facts they choose to explore.

Malvern van Wyk Smith

Shades of Adamastor 1988

Table Mountain and Maps of the Cape
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