HEROIC PIONEERS, OCCLUDED ‘NATIVES’, AND THE VIRGIN WILD: REPRESENTATIONS OF COLONIAL ENCOUNTER IN THE LOWVELD, SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

In launching a new 'brand identity' for itself in 2007, the Mpumalanga Provincial Government settled on the catchy logo, 'A Pioneering Spirit!' and attached it to a 'branding' of the southeastern Lowveld as the 'wild frontier.' This article offers a genealogy of this representational choice, locating its genesis in the 'colonial modes of self-writing' that accompanied colonial appropriation of land, labour, and territory in the region. In the imperial travel writing of colonial encounter, the settler ethnographies of colonial expansion, and the amateur historiographies of colonial consolidation in the south eastern Transvaal Lowveld, white settlers were mythologized as heroic pioneers taming 'wild' virgin territory - a narrative that occluded any African presence through the rhetorical casting of 'natives' as nature, and a gendered re-coding of the landscape as available for the sexually desirous possession of white settler colonialism. The irony, the article suggests, is that this rhetoric of colonial encounter - 'of wild virgin veld,' of heroic pioneers, and occluded 'natives' - is the breeding ground for the marketability of place at the dawn of the postcolony.