MARGARET HANZIMANOLIS

Southern African Contact Narratives: The Case of T'Kama Adamastor and its Reconstructive Project

[I]n the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and in its finalities, narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity (Achille Mbembe 3).

Contact narratives that elaborate early European encounters with regions and peoples later colonised are commonly formulated in terms of explanatory myths that elaborate an `originary' site. Because these chosen scenes interrupt what is most often a long line of possible foundational moments, examining which scenes are chosen and how they are cast into iconographic terms can expose cultural anxieties. This essay will examine the deformative particulars that adhere to one contemporary South African painting concerned with contact narratives and colonial tropes. It will then be shown how the persistence of these deformations, specifically as they are applied to the body and its reproductive capacity, signals a reluctance, on the part of the formerly dominating culture, to relinquish command of certain enclaves of influence, in this case commemorating public art in South Africa.

A Gesture of Belonging

Three years ago a large, well researched and privately funded painting was hung on the North wall of the University of Witwatersrand Cullen Library in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was commissioned in order to complete a trilogy of paintings, all of which in one way or another were meant to `commemorate specific historical events' in South Africa (Nethersole 33) by putting forward one version of the several strands of colonial mythography available to illustrate a theme that was relevant to late twentieth-century South Africa but drawn from some early contact narrative. The trilogy of paintings includes `Colonists 1826' by Colin Gill (1934), `Vasco da Gama: Departure for the Cape' by J.H. Amshewitz (1935), and most recently `T'Kama Adamastor' by Cyril Coetzee (1999).