Capturing and Losing the ‘Lie of the Land’: Railway Photography and Colonial Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

In this chapter, the author considers publicity photographs generated by the South African Railways (SAR) in the early twentieth century. Exploring the ‘use of landscape photographs by the SAR to reinforce a fragile vision of White cultural unity’, he brings together two travel narratives – one constructed by the railway journey itself, the other constructed by the photographic publicity. The SAR was formed by fiat, as part of the constitution which created the Union of South Africa in 1910, by consolidating the former colonial and republican railways into a state-owned corporation. During the early years of nationhood, the ideological position of the South African state – and, by extension, that of the SAR&H administration – was an ambivalent one. The Union of South Africa had come into existence in 1910 with an idealistic constitution that attempted to overcome the fact that it was, in the words of one historian, ‘a state without a nation’.