Table Mountain and the New Dawn

The full-frontal view of Table Mountain's distinctive north-facing edifice - popularized by seventeenth-century travellers and commercialized for the twentieth-century tourists not only reinforces a common 'understanding of things' but obscures problematic issues such as trade embargoes, boundary disputes, labour relations and land tenure. However, these problematic issues can also be ignored, or simply not shown as part of a given landscape, such as the conspicuous exclusion of Robben Island from commercially produced postcards during the apartheid era.

 For much of the last century, the island was used as a military installation and prison and, as a result, photographs of the island were prohibited under the Internal Security Act. More recently, former State President Nelson Mandela recalled how, during his many years of incarceration on Robben Island, he and his fellow inmates looked longingly across Table Bay at the magnificent silhouette of Table Mountain. In their eyes, Table Mountain was a symbol of the land to which they hoped one day to return. He explained how, over the centuries, the mountain had stood as a symbol of hope and freedom for Khoisan bands fighting colonial domination, for Indonesian slaves wishing to bury their leaders on its slopes, and for twentieth-century political prisoners serving life sentences on the island.

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 as an Historical Backdrop
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