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.