Imagining the Cape Colony: history, literature and the South African Nation by David Johnson (review)

There is an argument that South Africa or its story, like that of colonial Latin America, missed the eighteenth century, moving directly from Dutch mercantile colonialism of the early seventeenth century to pre-industrial British imperialism in the early nineteenth. David Johnson suggests not only that post-apartheid South Africa is rediscovering the Enlightenment as a phenomenon bearing on contemporary polities, but also that Enlightenment thought engaged with South Africa in significant ways. His book offers a reading of ‘the histories and literature of the Cape Colony during the period 1770-1830 through the critical lenses of the post-apartheid South African nation’ (1). The book is structured around its entry into two distinct but related debates: first, how, and whether, metropolitan (‘northern hemisphere’) ideas of nation, particularly those of revolutionary United States and France, were transmitted to the colonies.

Benedict Anderson is an important reference, but David Johnson raises two objections to Anderson’s argument for ‘colonial nationalisms’. There are indigenous, pre-colonial imaginations of community and it was the British Empire, rather than the USA or France, which gave South Africa and its other colonies and dominions their models of national identity. The second debate, which enters directly into contemporary politics, asks how our reading of the colonial past is informed by our sense of the post-apartheid present. In his introduction David Johnson quotes Benedict Anderson’s expression of his dismay at the post-Cold War ‘decay’ of Third World nationalisms, and he is aware of the difficulties of juxtaposing the Cape colonial past with the post-apartheid present, which requires both an ‘understanding of the intervening years’ and a reconciliation of the general theoretical formulations with ‘the specific histories and literatures of the Cape Colony’ (5). Both writings offered as fact, history, and texts offered as fiction, literature, can be said to construct Frederic Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ rather than simply to embody or represent it. Perhaps because he is concerned with ‘consciousness’(see Landau) and with the implications of these writings and texts for South Africa now, David Johnson is not concerned to distinguish between ‘sources’ and ‘histories’ (Hamilton et al 2010:2).

In 1510 a flotilla of Portuguese ships returning to Lisbon from Cochin put ashore at the Cape for water and met and bartered with a group of Khoi. What followed is unclear, but in a skirmish the Khoi prevailed, driving the Portuguese back to their ships, and killing 65, including the retiring Viceroy Almeida. President Thabo Mbeki in 1999 declared that this ‘victory … has lit our skies for ever’ (10). In a reading of accounts of the event which stretch from sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicles through Robert Southey to André Brink’s The First Life of Adamastor – whose narrator T’Kama bears a name perhaps transliterated from da Gama – David Johnson shows that Mbeki’s invocation of Almeida’s defeat displaces da Gama’s mythical encounter with Adamastor in Camões’s Lusiads ‘with the indigenous history of the first moment of black anti-colonial struggle’ (28).¹ The conclusion is that the rhetorical and political contexts ‘obscure the dissonance between the inclusive ideals of the African Renaissance and the structural exclusions generated by South Africa’s economy and the ANC’s commitment to capitalism’ (31).

Johnson’s illustrative coverage of the history, literature and anthropology of the Cape by European observers continues with his focus on the Cape ‘Hottentots’ through the lens of a sequence of French eighteenth and nineteenth century writers, not all of them visitors, including the Enlightenment’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François le Vaillant. Early accounts of the ‘Hottentots’ suggest an anarchistic resistance to protocapitalist work timetables; although le Vaillant’s account is inconsistent, he acknowledges the Hottentot communities’ egalitarianism and lack of greed. David Johnson quotes Kolb’s story, taken up by Rousseau, of a ‘Hottentot’ convert rejecting Christianity, to the disappointment of van der Stel, with the words: ‘My resolution is to live and...