A Kingdom for the Taking: Colonial Self-Imagining and Contemporary Responses to Swaziland

Abstract

In the introduction to their Companion to Travel Writing (2004. Cambridge: CUP) Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs observe that ‘travel writing is best considered as a broad and ever-shifting genre, with a complex history which has yet to be properly studied’ (p. 10). Their general conclusion applies specifically to a country like Swaziland, whose literary archive has remained outside of any extensive scrutiny, despite its varied (and largely neglected) record of colonial travel writing. This article examines various rhetorical strategies deployed by Edward Fox in one chapter of his relatively recent travel narrative, Obscure Kingdoms (1993. London: Penguin), to show how it carries strong traces of earlier accounts of the country. As well, despite the protean form of travel writing, or more properly because of it, other kinds of writings find features within form that they are able to adapt and exploit for their own purposes. Along with accounts like Fox's narrative, other contemporary responses to Swaziland include local and global media representations of the country's customs and traditions, which also employ conventions established in colonial travel writing. A marked feature of much of this writing is the assumption of a kind of entitlement that appears in varying degrees between a muted nostalgia and a kind of superior petulance or ridicule, perhaps best exemplified by the crass racism of Jas Cavanagh's Adventures of an Insurance Salesman (1924. Connecticut: Juta), where the main character is proclaimed the ‘Duke of Swaziland’ by ‘King Buno.’