Rendering the Cape-as-Port: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms/Good Hope, Adamastor and Local-World Literary Formations

Abstract

This article charts the tropes through which the Cape-as-port is rendered across five and a half centuries: Sea-Mountain, Cape of Storms and Cape of Good Hope. These tropes coalesce and draw apart in the monstrous manifestation of the promontory and its tempests that takes the shape of the epic figure of Adamastor. They are found to encode an ambivalent orientation between African and maritime, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and are suggestive of a formative worlding of the local literary scene from offshore. The article proceeds to propose that the intersecting portal comprising the Cape – at the seam of the world-system and the boundary of Africa – provides an entry point into current debates on world literature, and invites modes of reading that are simultaneously close and distant, local and global.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback; the special issue editors and convenors of the ‘Cape Town and Durban as Indian Ocean Port Cities’ workshop, at which an earlier version of this paper was presented; past colleagues at Stellenbosch University – Achille Mbembe, Grace Musila and Sarah Nuttall – with whom I began the project of ‘Thinking from the Cape’; my colleague at the University of Cape Town, Harry Garuba, for conversations about his project on ‘African Literatures and World Literary Debates’; and others at UCT and elsewhere who form part of the ‘African Textualities: Mobilities, Translations, Frames’ project, in which some of this material was discussed. This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 87809) and the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC) based in the Research Office, University of Cape Town. I appreciatively acknowledge both.

Notes

¹ Notable exceptions are found in crime fiction set in post-apartheid Cape Town and preoccupied with trafficking and policing the borders of the neoliberal state. I have attended to this fiction elsewhere; see M. Samuelson, ‘(Un)Lawful Subjects of Company: Reading Cape Town from Tavern of the Seas to Corporate City’, Interventions, 16, 6 (November 2014), pp. 795–817; M. Samuelson, ‘Sea Changes, Dark Tides and Littoral States: Oceans and Coastlines in Post-Apartheid South African Narratives’, Alternation, 6 (2013), pp. 9–28.

² A. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 74.

³ I borrow here the terms used by Clare Anderson in her contribution elsewhere in this issue.

⁴ This observation was first made in a keynote address at a conference convened around the writer Zoe Wicomb and the topic ‘The Cape and the Cosmopolitan’ in 2010. See A. Gurnah, ‘The Urge to Nowhere’, Safundi, 12, 3–4, (2011), pp. 261–75. Gurnah has referenced Mauro’s mappa mundi in a short story, focusing in on the recorded passage around the Cape; see A. Gurnah, ‘Mid Morning Moon’, Wasafiri, 26, 2 (2011), pp. 25–9.

⁵ L. Camões, The Lusiads, trans. L. White (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), Canto 1, stanza 1. I depend entirely on White’s translation. For some discussion of alternative translations, particularly of Canto V, which concerns the rounding of the Cape, see M. van Wyk Smith, ‘Introduction’, in his compilation Shades of Adamastor: An Anthology of Poetry (Grahamstown, Rhodes University and National English Literary Museum, 1988), pp. 1–37.

⁶ Camões, The Lusiads, Canto I, stanzas 19, 43.

⁷ Stephen Gray does note this, but it is Da Gama’s epic performance before the King of Malindi that interests him, rather than its setting; see S. Gray, ‘The Myth of Adamastor in South African Literature’, Theoria, 48 (1977), pp. 1–23. Wilma Stockenstrom expands on the possibilities of this launching point for South African literatures, when the Da Gama fleet is observed from an unspecified location on the Swahili coast, in W. Stockenstrom, Expedition to the Baobab Tree, trans. J.M. Coetzee (London, Faber & Faber, 1983 [first published in Afrikaans]).

⁸ J. Blackmore, Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 118, 105.

⁹ Camões, The Lusiads, Canto 5, stanza 50.

¹⁰ Ibid., Canto 5, stanza 41. In Blackmore’s translation: ‘Since now through my forbidden bounds you break / And to sail through my vast oceans dare, / Which long while I have guarded nor allowed / By strange or native shipping to be plowed’.

¹¹ Gray, ‘The Myth of Adamastor’; see also S. Gray, Southern African Literatures: An Introduction (Cape Town, David Philip, 1980).

¹² Camões, The Lusiads, Canto 5. Part of the turn taken here is that of keeping the sea and the passage into the Indian Ocean in view, rather than allowing them to become a mere metaphor through which questions about land and belonging are presented, or reducing the central scene of this great maritime epic to an allegory of the encounter between Europe and Africa. Here, albeit in different ways and to distinct ends, I follow Bernhard Klein, who has recently refocused attention on the centrality of maritime endeavour in the epic; see B. Klein, ‘Camões and the Sea: Maritime Modernity in The Lusiads’, Modern Philology, 111, 2 (2013), pp. 158–80. It is also for this reason that this article does not engage with Andre Brink’s Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1993 [published simultaneously in Afrikaans]), in which a mere ‘breeze’ attends the reduction of Camões’s awful monster from epic portent of maritime transgression to the bathetic farce of a large-membered Khoikhoi man thwarted in his love for a European woman.

¹³ J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’,in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 7.

¹⁴ Van Wyk Smith, ‘Introduction’, Shades of Adamastor, pp. 18, 19, 23.

¹⁵ Klein, ‘Camões and the Sea’, p. 174.

¹⁶ Blackmore, Moorings, pp. 134, 142.

¹⁷ The aetiology Adamastor provides for his grotesque form and querulous nature is that out of longing for the sea-nymph Thetys he allowed himself to be diverted from launching war on the oceans, and through trickery was cast into stone, in which state he suffers the agonising fate of being eternally surrounded by her elusive, fluid form.

¹⁸ C. Schmitt, Land and Sea, trans. S. Draghici (Washington, Pluto Press, 1997 [first published in German, 1954]), p. 18.

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 31, 46.

²⁰ H. Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas; or, The Right which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade, trans. R. van Deman Magoffin, ed. JB Scott (New York, Oxford University Press, 1916 [first published in Dutch, 1633]).

²¹ For the way in which the conventions of the nautical log continue to determine the production of the journal ashore, see A. Delmas, ‘The Role of Writing in the First Steps of the Colony: The Journal of van Riebeeck, 1652–1662’, in N. Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town, Royal Netherlands Embassy, 2007), pp. 500–512

²² C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London, Hutchinson, 1965).

²³ H.B. Thom (ed.), Journal of Jan van Riebeeck (Cape Town, Balkema for the Van Riebeeck Society, 1952–1958).

²⁴ N. Worden, ‘Introduction’, in N. Worden (ed.), Cape Town: Between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town, (Auckland Park, Jacana Media, 2012), p. ix.

²⁵ A. Barnard, South Africa a Century Ago: Letters Written from the Cape of Good Hope 1797–1801 (Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1925), p. 32.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 37.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 49.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 199.

²⁹ K. Ward, ‘Southeast Asian Migrants’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town: Between East and West.

³⁰ Camões, The Lusiads, Canto 5, stanza 65.

³¹ Gray, ‘The Myth of Adamastor’, p. 2.

³² Van Wyk Smith (ed.), Shades of Adamastor, p. 35.

³³ Gray, ‘The Myth of Adamastor’, p. 19.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 18–19.

³⁵ J. Cronin, ‘Turning Around Roy Campbell’s “Rounding the Cape”’, English in Africa, 11, 1 (1984), pp. 66, 68.

³⁶ A. La Guma, A Walk in the Night (Nottingham, Trent Editions, 2006), p. 71.

³⁷ Ibid., pp. 86-87.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 96.

³⁹ Van Wyk Smith (ed.), Shades of Adamastor, pp. 204–5.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 206–7.

⁴¹ Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000); M. Castells, ‘The Space of Places, the Space of Flows: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age’, in S. Graham (ed.), The Cyber Cities Reader (London, Routledge, 2004), pp. 82–93. For further commentary on how these metaphors resonate in post-apartheid fictions of the Cape, see Samuelson, ‘(Un)lawful Subjects’.

⁴² D. Sleigh, Islands, trans. A. Brink (London, Secker and Warburg, 2004 [first published in Afrikaans, 2000]).

⁴³ M. Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problem’, Journal of World History, 17, 4 (2006), p. 354.

⁴⁴ Sleigh, Islands, p. 385.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 747.

⁴⁶ I. Shukri, The Silent Minaret (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2005).

⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 66, 67.

⁴⁸ R. Brownlee, Garden of the Plagues (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, 2005).

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 135.

⁵⁰ See G. Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2014).

⁵¹ Y. Christiansë, Unconfessed: A Novel (New York, Other Press, 2006).

⁵² Ibid., p. 66.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 283.

⁵⁴ See P. Harries, ‘Making Mozbiekers: History, Memory and the African Diaspora at the Cape’, in B. Zimba, E. Alpers and A. Isaacman (eds), Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa (Maputo, Filsom, 2005); P. Harries, elsewhere in this issue; N. Worden, elsewhere in this issue.

⁵⁵ J. Cronin, ‘Creole Cape Town’, in S. Watson (ed.), A City Imagined (Johannesburg, Penguin, 2006), p. 52.

⁵⁶ Christiansë, Unconfessed, p. 66. On Cape slavery as laboratory for apartheid, see Baderoon, Regarding Muslims, and P. Gqola, What Is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010).

⁵⁷ K. S. Duiker, Thirteen Cents (Cape Town, David Philip, 2000).

⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 105, 106.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 132, 160.

⁶⁰ Ibid., pp. 162, 163.

⁶¹ D. Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature and the South African Nation (Cape Town, UCT Press, 2012), p. 27.

⁶² D. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 4; D. Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

⁶³ Damrosch, How to Read World Literature.

⁶⁴ C. Prendergast, ‘The World Republic of Letters’, in C. Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London, Verso, 2004), p. 4

⁶⁵ C. Prendergast, ‘Introduction’, in Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature, p. viii.

⁶⁶ F. Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, in Distant Reading (London, Verso, 2013), pp. 43–63.

⁶⁷ F. Moretti, Distant Reading.

⁶⁸ On the former as an entry point into the ‘cultural logic of global literary studies’, see I. Baucom, ‘Globalit Inc.: Or, the Cultural Logical of Global Literary Studies’, PMLA, 116, 1 (2011), pp. 158–72; on the latter, see D.A. McDonald, World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in Cape Town (New York, Routledge, 2008).

⁶⁹ See, particularly, S. Best and S. Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations, 108, 1 (2009), pp. 1–21.

⁷⁰ See, inter alia, S. Nuttall, ‘The Rise of the Surface: Emerging Questions for Reading and Criticism in South Africa’, in A. van der Vlies (ed.), Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012).

⁷¹ This particular archive of world literature, which renders the ‘worldings’ produced by rounding the Cape could also house, inter alia, Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’, Melville’s Moby Dick, Conrad’s The Nigger of Narcissus, Gandhi’s Autobiography, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture.

⁷² E.W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London, Random House, 1991), p. 35.

⁷³ E. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London, Verso, 2014).

⁷⁴ For a resonant argument made regarding the South African national context, see C. Coetzee, Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2013).

⁷⁵ Camões, The Lusiads, Canto 5, stanza 39.

⁷⁶ A. Krog, Body Bereft (Cape Town, Umuzi, 2006) pp. 76–81.

⁷⁷ Camões, The Lusiads, Canto 5, stanza 43.

⁷⁸ Ibid., Canto 5, stanza 40.

⁷⁹ See Jonathan Crewe’s evocative reading of Campbell’s poem as figuring not only the problematic of white belonging in Africa but, more profoundly, Campbell’s own identification with Adamastor as he sought to negotiate what we might describe as his position in local-world literary formations vis-à-vis his ‘sense of geographical displacement and his relatively high visibility in Anglo-American literary circles’, while revealing ‘global structures’, including histories of slavery and emancipation, that embed in and extend beyond the Cape: J. Crewe, ‘The Specter of Adamastor: Heroic Desire and Displacement in “White” South Africa’, Modern Fiction Studies, 43, 1, (1997), pp. 39–40, 45.

⁸⁰ Z. Wicomb, October (Cape Town and New York, Umuzi and New Press, 2014).

⁸¹ With her first book, titled You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1988), Wicomb established herself as an essentially provincial writer, but she went on to win the inaugural Windham Campbell Award, which sought to establish itself as a ‘global writers’ prize’ in 2013.

⁸² Wicomb, October, p. 13.

⁸³ Ibid., p. 195.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 260.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 261.

⁸⁶ The model evoked here is that suggested in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York, Columbia University Press, 2012).