Th e Dutch (VOC) trading empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries brought with it to South Africa not only the world of powerful
merchant capitalism, but it would also construct a new imaginative
geography and order of the land to that which had been known by its
ancient inhabitants, wherein the very idea of the land would be rewritten.
Many aspects of this new geography would be refl ected in representation
during VOC rule in the Cape colony, in its maps, pictures and drawings.
Within this picturing of the land, the rival indigenous presence as well
as the colony’s non-settlers inhabitants—both of whom formed colonial
‘others’—would also be depicted; although typically this visibility would
be carefully measured and managed in complex ways in both offi cial
and popular artistic representation.
While offi cial colonial and apartheid archives in South Africa lack
suffi cient, meaningful representation of marginalised groups such
as blacks, slaves, Muslims, and indigenous people, the visual sources
wherein such groups are depicted constitute another source of archive
which has still only begun to be explored comparatively and as a body
of images.
Th rough visual sources, the study analyses fi rstly the discursive,
imaginative, and physical appropriation of landscape as represented in
Dutch and British colonial-period maps and pictures in the seventeenth
to nineteenth centuries. Secondly it explores the representation of
colonial ‘others’ who are depicted therein, and to what extent it may
be possible to recover some aspects of marginalised narratives and
spatial practices. Islam at the Cape, whose history dates back to the very
beginning of European settlement but which was offi cially proscribed
for the most of the colonial period, also forms an important component
of the study, as a case study of such ‘liminal’ narratives and landscapes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/13661 |
| Date | 05 February 2014 |
| Creators | Toffah, Tariq. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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