‘Would the real James Bruce please stand up?’ Bruce's Travels to discover the sources of the Nile (1790) in Alexander Murray's edition of 1813

Abstract

This article explores the special status of the concept of ‘Ethiopia’ in the history of the European discourse of Africa, and pays particular attention to the production and transmission of James Bruce's Travels to discover the sources of the Nile (1790), notably as re-edited and augmented by Alexander Murray in 1813. The examination of the dialogic nature of Murray's encounter with Bruce's text leads into a consideration of the problems of textual authority and editorial diplomacy, and of the authenticity and value of subsequent scholarship that relies on such redactions and fails to return to original texts. The more specific concern with Bruce and Murray broadens into a consideration of more recent examples in Africanist discourse of questionable inferences drawn from non-authoritative ‘primary’ texts. Two examples are the use J. M. Coetzee makes of R. Raven-Hart's fragmentary anthologies Before van Riebeeck (1967) and Cape of Good Hope 1652–1702 (1971) in White writing (1988) to support oft-quoted observations about wholly pejorative depictions of the Khoisan in the discourse of the Cape, and Mary Louise Pratt's similar reliance, with similar results, in Imperial eyes (1992) on an inadequate and adumbrated English rendering of Peter Kolben's seminal study of the Khoisan, Caput bonae spei hodiernum (1719).