Realism and Realia in Colonial Southern Africa

Abstract

The natural and social landscape that Wilhelm Joest traversed while traveling through British southern Africa in the mid-1880s evinced decades of conflict between African and European residents that rivaled the atrocities Conrad, Kingsley, and Blyden observed in Central and Western Africa. Southern Africa underwent an exceptionally rapid and excessively violent development in the second half of the nineteenth century, following its emergence within a predominately capitalist market as the world’s primary supplier of diamonds, after their 1867 discovery in Kimberley, and of gold, which led to the 1886 foundation of Johannesburg. Behind these well-known events lies a lengthy history of struggle over the land, its resources, and its objects that characterized colonial relations in southern Africa throughout the century. What perhaps distinguished Cape Colony from other British occupied territories in Africa at this time was the level of systematization achieved in “setting up the machinery” for “a hierarchy of extortion.”1 While this machinery existed most visibly at the administrative and legislative level, its effects reverberated in other discursive forms as well – from the representational strategies of museum displays to those of ethnographic and imaginative writing.KeywordsPhysical RelicGift ExchangeWhite SupremacyInterracial MarriageAfrican FarmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.