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- Convenor:
-
Kai Easton
(SOAS)
- Stream:
- Literature, media and the visual arts
- Location:
- G2
Short Abstract
none
Long Abstract
This panel looks at the cultures of travel, from colonial times to the present day, from the Cape to Cairo. What ideas of 'Africa' do each of our respective travellers have as they criss-cross countries or, as in the case of Mary Hall, even a whole continent? What genre do they choose for their narration, and how much do they address - as the geographers Duncan and Gregory have put it - the physicality of travel? Does 'travel', as bell hooks suggests, necessarily carry with it the 'taint of imperialism'?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper long abstract
Narratives of travel and theoretical discourse on the Diaspora and Black Atlantic often privilege male subjects, focusing on men who choose to travel in the case of the former or men who are forced to migrate in the case of the latter. How then do theories of the Diaspora and Black Atlantic relate to those who lack the resources to relocate or are not forcibly relocated, particularly the women who remain at home? In Southern Africa generally it is men who migrate as laborers or intellectual workers. Typically it is women who carry the responsibility of raising children and keeping family ties while waiting for their men to return, even if for short and infrequent visits. South African Lauretta Ngcobo's novel And They Did Not Die and Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and Zimbabwean J. Nozipo Maraire's Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter and Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins illustrate how women keep, or attempt to keep, relationships and community in the face of migrations and across borders. This paper explores theories of Diaspora and the Black Atlantic in relation to the women in these texts. It focuses particularly on migrations in the area of the Matopos Hills and Bulawayo, Yvonne Vera's home and the setting for her novel The Stone Virgins.
Paper long abstract
The title of Mary Hall's travelogue, A Woman's Trek from the Cape to Cairo (London: Methuen, 1907) suggests an arduous journey by foot by a woman on her own. It also suggests that we will learn something of the Cape and Cairo. But these two key sites are only marginal as it turns out - noteworthy enough to be mentioned, but of little interest to Hall, because of their proximity, in character, to Europe. Hall describes her comfortable travel in the introductory pages - by train, boat, and Cape cart; and she informs us that the African Lakes Corporation will supply her with a staff and camping equipment, taking her as far as Lake Tanganyika. It is this area - the 'unknown country' of Stanley and Livingstone's Central Africa - that truly interests her. How then does the 'Cape-to-Cairo imaginary' - as Peter Merrington has called (2001) the imperial dream of Cecil Rhodes - play itself out in the narrative of this woman travelling across Africa, and 'alone' into the interior? If we compare it to the account of her male predecessors - Ewart Grogan and Arthur Sharp - the first men who actually trekked from the Cape to Cairo, can we identify, as Sara Mills (1991) has questioned, 'a specifically female genre of travel writing?'
Paper long abstract
By the 1930s travel in Africa had changed fundamentally, rendering once remote areas accessible by plane, train or car. Concomitantly, European colonial administrations and technologies had irrevocably changed the traditional modes of life of African societies. Travel had ceased to be exploration in the nineteenth-century sense, and the serious traveller sought not so much to discover what remained unknown as to record what seemed fast to be disappearing. Accounts of journeys undertaken in the 1930s to 1950s are marked by nostalgia for modes of life that were being eroded by the inexorable advance of modernity, even as these accounts participate in the process of exposing, engaging with and translating the primitive, rendering it capable of discursive assimilation by the very modernity these accounts seek to resist. My paper examines Thesiger's The Danakil Diary and Van der Post's Lost World of the Kalahari in the light of these concerns, focusing in particular on the rendering of the nomadic life not as an alternative to modernity but as an alterity, as that which cannot be assimilated even as it is subjected to European modernist forms of understanding and made meaningful. The writings are uneasily positioned, simultaneously representing the primitive as radically other, and rendering problematic such representation as a problem of translation, of carrying over or transferring phenomena from one symbolic code to another.