François le Vaillant and the myth of the noble savage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inheriting a dualistic value system, Europeans often perceived the people they encountered on their voyages of exploration in terms of Manichean polarities of good and evil. Thus, the concepts of the noble and ignoble savage were born. Stereotypes of the ignoble savage dominated writing about southern Africa for much of the colonial period and even later. However, the French explorer and disciple of Rousseau, François le Vaillant, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century temporarily overturned the dominant notion by depicting black subjects beyond the colonial borders as being inherently noble, despite some contradictions in his work. Others, such as the liberal-minded Thomas Pringle, followed his example of portraying indigenous inhabitants positively, but by the 1840s the tradition had largely died out owing to ideological pressures required to justify increased imperial domination of the subcontinent. Only with the revival of Liberalism by writers such as William Plomer in the 1920s, did the enlightened legacy of le Vaillant again begin to assume an important role in South African literature.