Northward, upward: stories of train travel, and the journey towards white South African nationhood, 1895–1950

Abstract

Rhodes' ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the two extremities of imperially-controlled Africa; it was also an imaginary axis that gathered around it a range of cultural ‘epiphenomena’ during the early twentieth century. This paper examines one of these, accounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey, which first appeared in the 1890s, and became a common trope in travel-writing about South Africa until after World War II. These accounts, which appeared in everything from personal memoirs to travel books and were written by visitors as well as South Africans, helped localize and naturalize the ‘spatial story’ of imperialism during the period when South Africa was emerging as a modern, autonomous nation. A recurring set of textual strategies in these accounts rehearsed a particular bodily subjectivity towards landscape, while at the same time incorporating the new nation's physiographic regions into a historically and geographically-legible whole. The Cape-to-Rand railway journey became a discursive trope in which culturally-constructed ideas about landscape and identity were protected and saved.