Remembering the Khoikhoi victory over Dom Francisco Almeida at the Cape in 1510

Abstract

The general issue of how key moments of anti-colonial struggle are remembered in different colonial and postcolonial contexts is considered in relation to the specific case of the Khoikhoi victory over Viceroy Francisco Almeida in Table Bay on 1 March 1510. The contrasting literary and historical versions of the Khoikhoi victory are examined in three contexts: first, in the sixteenth-century Portuguese writings of the poet Luis Vaz de Camões and the chroniclers João de Barros, Fernão Lopez de Castanheda, Damião de Goís and Gaspar Correa; secondly, in the writings of British intellectuals of the period 1770–1830, including Robert Southey, William Julius Mickle and William Robertson; and thirdly, in the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern Africans, including historian George McCall Theal, novelist André Brink and South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to the AHRC project ‘The Indian Ocean: Narratives in Literature and Law’, which funded research trips to Cape Town and Lisbon. I am grateful too to Richard Brown, Anita Pacheco and Kelwyn Sole for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Thabo Mbeki, ‘A Farewell to Madiba! Statement of the President of the African National Congress’, Cape Town, 26 March 1999, www.info.gov.za/speeches/1999/990326530p1001.htm

2. João de Barros, Da Asia: Of the deeds which the Portuguese performed in the conquest and exploration of the lands and seas of the East [1553], in Records of South-Eastern Africa: Vol 6, G M Theal (ed and trans), Cape Town: Struik, 1964 [1900], pp 298–306. For Barros's biography, see C R Boxer, João de Barros. Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia, New Delhi: Concept Publishing House, 1981.

3. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese [1551], in Records of South-Eastern Africa: Vol 5, G M Theal (ed and trans), Cape Town: Struik, 1964 [1901], pp 466–469. For Castanheda's biography, see Ana Paula M Avelar, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda: Historiador dos Portugueses na Índia ou Cronista do Governo de Nuno da Cunha? Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 1997.

4. Damião de Goís, Chronicle of the Most Fortunate King Dom Emanuel of Glorious Memory [1566], in Records of South-Eastern Africa: Vol 3, G M Theal (ed and trans), Cape Town: Struik, 1964 [1899], pp 134–140. For de Goís's biography, see Elizabeth F Hirsch, Damião de Gois. The Life and Thought of a Portuguese Humanist, 1502–1574, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967; and Marcel Bataillon, Damião de Goís: humaniste europeén, Paris: Jean Touzot, 1982.

5. Gaspar Correa, Legends of India [1858], in Records of South-Eastern Africa: Vol 2, G M Theal (ed and trans), Cape Town: Struik, 1964 [1898], pp 45–47. For Correa's biography, see Aubrey Bell, Gaspar Correa, London: Oxford University Press, 1924; Gaspar Correa, The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama and his Viceroyalty, H E J Stanley (trans and intro), London: Hakluyt Society, 1869; and Murray Kriegel and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Unity of Opposites: Abraham Zacut, Vasco da Gama and the Chronicler Gaspar Correa’, in A Disney and E Booth (eds), Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia (Vasco da Gama Quincentenary Conference), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 48–71.

6. Castanheda identifies their landing place as Table Bay; Barros as Saldanha Bay. Karel Schoeman explains the apparent confusion—the watering place in Table Bay for much of the sixteenth century was known as Aguada de Saldanha (at the intersection of the present-day Adderley and Strand Streets in central Cape Town). See Karel Schoeman, Armosyn van die Kaap: Voorspel tot Vestiging, 1415–1651, Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1999, p 15.

7. Barros, Da Asia, p 298.

8. Castanheda, History, p 468.

9. Correa, Legends, p 46.

10. Correa, Legends, p 46.

11. De Goís, Chronicle, p 136.

12. Castanheda, History, p 468. Note that ‘Hottentot’ was the pejorative European term used to describe the Khoikhoi.

13. Barros, Da Asia, p 302.

14. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, T S Presner (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, p 76.

15. Barros, Da Asia, p 306.

16. Correa, Legends, pp 46–47.

17. Bell, Gaspar Correa, pp 62–63.

18. De Goís, Chronicle, p 139.

19. For discussion of Camões's sources, see Rebecca Catz, ‘Consequences and Repercussions of the Portuguese Expansion on Literature’, in G D Winius (ed), Portugal, The Pathfinder. Journeys from the Medieval toward the Modern World 1300–ca. 1600, Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1995, pp 329–340.

20. Luis Vaz de Camões, The Lusiads, L White (trans), Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 5. Of the many available translations of The Lusiads, I have used White's for its determination to ‘err on the side of plainness’ (p xxii).

21. Camões, The Lusiads, p 107.

22. Camões, The Lusiads, p 204.

23. David Quint, ‘Voices of Resistance: The Epic Curse and Camões's Adamastor’, Representations 27, 1989, pp 118–141, p 134.

24. For a survey of how the Old Man's speech has been interpreted over the centuries, see Gerald M Moser, ‘What Did the Old Man of the Restelo Mean?’ Luso-Brazilian Review 17, 1980, pp 139–151.

25. Camões, The Lusiads, p 195.

26. Camões, The Lusiads, p 227.

27. Camões, The Lusiads, p 228.

28. For this episode, see Aubrey Bell, Luis de Camões, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923, pp 132–137; and more generally on Camões, Henry H Hart, Luis de Camoens and the Epic of the ‘Lusiads’, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. For a good sample of more recent scholarship, see the Special Issue on Camões of Portuguese Literary and Cultual Studies 9, 2002.

29. John de Oliveira e Silva, ‘Moving the Monarch: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in Camões's Lusíadas’, Renaissance Quarterly 53(3), 2000, pp 735–768, p 739.

30. Quoted in Fidelino Figueiredo, ‘Camões as an Epic Poet’, Romantic Review 17, 1926, pp 217–229, p 218.

31. M M Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, C Emerson and M Holquist (trans), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, p 14.

32. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p 158.

33. On the contending factions in Portugal's ruling class of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Luis Felipe Thomaz, ‘Factions, Interests and Messianism: The Politics of Portuguese Expansionism in the East, 1500–1521’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 28(1), 1991, pp 97–109; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 38–57; and Shankar Raman, Framing ‘India’. The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp 55–60.

34. Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique, London: Hurst and Company, 1995, p 14. On Portugal's ostensible motives for their ‘voyages of discovery’, see C R Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825, London: Hutchinson, 1969, pp 17–18; and G V Scammell, The First Imperial Age. European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400–1715, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp 51–70.

35. Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668, London: Routledge, 2005, p 15.

36. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, London: Verso, 1997, p 119.

37. Gil Vicente, Three Discovery Plays, A Lappin (ed and trans), Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1997, pp 203, 209.

38. Camões, The Lusiads, p 97.

39. Neil Larsen and Robert Krueger, ‘Camões’ Os Lusiadas and the Break-up of Epic Discourse’, Revista Camoniana 5, 1984, pp 69–85, p 70.

40. Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africa, and Asia the Great, London: R Everingham, R Scot, T Basset, J Wright and R Chiswell, 1677, p 19.

41. Translated and reprinted in R Raven-Hart (ed), Cape of Good Hope 1652–1702. The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonisation as Seen by Callers: Vol 2, Cape Town: A A Balkema, 1971, pp 490–491.

42. See for example Lord Viscount Strangford's Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens: With Remarks on his Life and Writings (1804) and John Adamson's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens (1820).

43. See for example Arthur Costigan's Sketches of Society and Manners in Portugal (1778),

44. See for example Richard Cumberland's Memoirs (1806) and William Beckford's Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834).

45. See for example Byron's Childe Harold (1809).

46. For biographical details, see J J Caudle, ‘Mickle, William Julius (1734/5–1788)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18661 (accessed 25 May 2007).

47. William Julius Mickle, The Lusiad; or The Discovery of India. An Epic Poem. Translated from the Original Portuguese of Luis de Camoëns, Oxford: Jackson and Lister, 1776, p lxx.

48. Mickle, The Lusiad, p 208.

49. Barros, Da Asia, pp 304–305.

50. Mickle, The Lusiad, p ii.

51. Mickle, The Lusiad, p i.

52. William Julius Mickle, Almada Hill: An Epistle from Lisbon, Oxford: W Jackson, 1781, p 30.

53. William Julius Mickle, A Candid Examination of the Reasons for Depriving the East-India Company of its Charter, contained in ‘The History and Management of the East-India Company, from its Commencement to the Present Time’ [1779, by James Macpherson]. Together with Strictures on some of the Self-contradictions and Historical Errors of Dr. Adam Smith, in his Reasons for the Abolition of Said Company, London: J Bew and J Sewell, 1779, p 17.

54. Mickle, A Candid Examination, p 20.

55. For sympathetic accounts of Robertson, see Stewart J Brown (ed), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; and Karen O'Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment. Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 163–170.

56. William Robertson, An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, London: A Strahan and T Cadell, 1791, p 133.

57. Robertson, An Historical Disquisition, p 134.

58. Robertson, An Historical Disquisition, pp 134, 145.

59. Robertson, An Historical Disquisition, p 134.

60. Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization. From Virgil to Vietnam, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997, p 216.

61. See W A Speck, Robert Southey. Entire Man of Letters, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, pp 62–65 and pp 83–87; and Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

62. Robert Southey, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey: Vol 1, John Wood Warter (ed), London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856, p 21.

63. Tim Fulford, ‘Heroic Voyagers and Superstitious Natives: Southey's Imperialist Ideology’, Studies in Travel Writing 2, 1998, pp 46–65, p 49.

64. Robert Southey, New Letters of Robert Southey: Vol 1 1792–1810, K Curry (ed), New York: Columbia University Press, 1965, p 337.

65. See R A Humphreys, Robert Southey and his ‘History of Brazil’, London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Council, 1978.

66. Robert Southey, ‘Review of John Barrow's An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa’, The Annual Review and History of Literature for 1804, 3, 1805, pp 22–33, p 24.

67. Southey, ‘Review of Barrow’, Annual Review, p 24.

68. Southey, ‘Review of Barrow’, Annual Review, p 27.

69. Southey, ‘Review of Barrow’, Annual Review, p 28.

70. Southey, ‘Review of Barrow’, Annual Review, p 33.

71. Although neither discusses Southey's writings on the Cape, there are useful accounts of Southey on empire in Carol Bolton, Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007; and David M Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy, Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2007.

72. William Tytler, Principles of Translation, London: T Cadell and W Davies, 1797, p 36.

73. Lawrence Lipking, ‘The View from Almada Hill: Myths of Nationhood in Camões and William Julius Mickle’, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 9, 2002, pp 165–176, p 166.

74. Mickle, The Lusiad, pp 208–209.

75. Rose Macaulay, They Came to Portugal, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1946], p 97.

76. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, pp 57–58. See also Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

77. On Britain's many colonial wars throughout this period, see Byron Farwell's Queen Victoria's Little Wars, New York: Harper and Row, 1972; and Alan Thomas and Ben Crow, Third World Atlas, 2nd edn, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997.

78. Robert Southey, ‘Observations on Mr. Mickle's Lusiad, with the Portuguese criticism on that translation’, The Monthly Magazine and British Register 2, November 1796, pp 787–789, p 787.

79. Robert Southey, ‘Review of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Luis de Camoens by John Adamson’, The Quarterly Review, 27 (April 1822), pp 1–39, p 25.

80. Robert Southey, ‘Review of Poems from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens by Lord Viscount Strangford’, Annual Review 2, 1803, pp 569–577, p 577. Southey was not alone in rating Mickle above Camões. See R A Davenport, ‘Life of Mickle’, in The British Poets. Including Translations. In One Hundred Volumes: Vol LXVI Mickle and Smollett, Chiswick: C Whittingham, 1822, p 21.

81. Southey, ‘Review of Memoirs’, p 21.

82. Southey, ‘Review of Memoirs’, p 20.

83. Quoted in Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Orientalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p 61.

84. For more on this point, see Nigel Leask, ‘Southey's Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America’, in L Pratt (ed), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p 135.

85. Rupert Hart-Davis (ed), Thomas Love Peacock: Memoirs of Shelley and Other Reviews, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970, p 128.

86. Lord Byron, The Major Works, J McGann (ed), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p 428.

87. Jacques Derrida, ‘La loire du genre/The Law of Genre’, Glyph Textual Studies 7, 1980, pp 176–232, p 207.

88. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p 54.

89. Robert C-H Shell, Edward Hudson and Raymond Hudson (eds), Out of Livery. The Papers of Samuel Eusebius Hudson 1764–1828, Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, forthcoming, p 221.

90. John Philip, Researches in South Africa; Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of The Native Tribes: Vol 1, London: James Duncan, 1828, p 3.

91. See Malvern Van Wyk Smith (ed), Shades of Adamastor: Africa and the Portuguese Connection. An Anthology of Poetry , Grahamstown: NELM, 1988, pp 73–77.

92. ‘Adamastor: The Titan of Table Mountain’, Cape Monthly Magazine 5(29), May 1859, pp 310–317.

93. G M Theal, The Portuguese in South Africa, Cape Town: Juta, 1896, p 113. Theal's views were shared by the major English historian of Portugal, R S Whiteway, The Rise of Portuguese Power in India 1497–1550, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co, 1899, p 25.

94. G M Theal (ed and trans), Records of South-Eastern Africa: Vol 8, Cape Town: Struik, 1964 [1902], p 387.

95. Theal, Records: Vol 8, p 408.

96. John Buchan, Prester John, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956 [1910], pp 27–29.

97. Buchan, Prester John, p 95.

98. On the context of Theal and Buchan, see Philip Henshaw, ‘The “Key to South Africa” in the 1890s: Delagoa Bay and the Origins of the South African War’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24(3), 1998, pp 527–544.

99. John Purves, ‘Camoens and the Epic of Africa, Part 1’, The State 2(11), November 1909, pp 542–555, p 544.

100. John Purves, ‘Camoens, Part 1’, p 550.

101. John Purves, ‘Camoens and the Epic of Africa, Part 2’, The State 2(12), December 1909, pp 734–745, p 744.

102. Purves, ‘Camoens, Part 2’, p 745.

103. Luis C Lupi, Portugal in Africa. The Significance of the Visit of the President of the Republic to the Overseas Provinces, Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar, 1957, p 13.

104. Lupi, Portugal, p 36.

105. Sidney R Welch, South Africa under King Manuel, 1495–1521, Cape Town: Juta, 1946, p 153.

106. Welch, South Africa, p 479.

107. Van Wyk Smith, Shades, p 112. A number of South African scholars have reflected on Campbell's poetry, with most praising his poetry while regretting his politics. See Stephen Gray, Camoens and the Poetry of South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University, 1980; Jeremy Cronin, ‘Turning Around: Roy Campbell's “Rounding the Cape”’, English in Africa 11, 1984, pp 65–78; Michael Chapman, ‘Roy Campbell, Poet: A Defence in Sociological Times’, Theoria 68, 1986, pp 79–93; and Jonathan Crewe, ‘The Spectre of Adamastor: Heroic Desire and Displacement in “White” South Africa’, Modern Fiction Studies 43(1), 1997, pp 27–52. Cronin is the most hostile critic of Campbell and (to me) the most persuasive; Crewe the most typical in his bifurcated discussion of Campbell's poetry in the text and Campbell's politics in the footnotes. Also of interest is the chapter ‘The Adamastor Story’ in George Monteiro, The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996, pp 120–131; and Nicholas Mezhuzen's comparative study, Ordering Empire. The Poetry of Camões, Pringle and Campbell, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.

108. See Lesley Witz, ‘Eventless History at the End of Apartheid: The Making of the 1988 Dias Festival’, Kronos. Journal of Cape History 32, 2005, pp 162–191. The main historian of the Portuguese in Southern Africa after Welch was Eric Axelson, who provides a neutral description of Almeida's death in Portuguese in South-East Africa 1488–1600, Cape Town: Struik, 1973, pp 111–113.

109. This artwork is discussed in sympathetic detail in Ivan Vladislavic (ed), T'kama-Adamastor. Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting, Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2000.

110. Van Wyk Smith, Shades, p 35.

111. Brink mentions Almeida's death briefly in his essay ‘A Myth of Origin’, in Vladislavic, T'kama-Adamastor, p 41, but moves swiftly to a lengthy discussion of Adamastor. For Brink on the relation between History and Literature, see André Brink, Reinventing a Continent. Writing and Politics in South Africa, 1982–1995, London: Secker and Warburg, 1996, p 191.

112. Brink with R Nethersole, ‘Reimagining the Past’, in Vladislavic, T'kama-Adamastor, p 57.

113. André Brink, ‘A Myth of Origin’ in Vladislavic, T'kama-Adamastor, p 46.

114. André Brink, The First Life of Adamastor, London: Vintage, 2000 [1993], p 102. Brink was a finalist in the 2004 Literary Review Bad Sex Award. For details, see ‘The Bad Sex Award Winner and Longlist’, Guardian, 14 December 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/dec/14/awardsandprizes.badsexaward

115. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen, 1981, p 107.

116. Van Wyk Smith, Shades, p 162.

117. James Greene, ‘Camões’ Birthday’, in Van Wyk Smith, Shades, p 199.

118. See Jared Banks, ‘Adamastorying Mozambique: Ualalapi and Os Lusiadas’, Luso-Brazilian Review 37, 2000, pp 1–16.

119. Kelwyn Sole, Projections in the Past Tense, Johannesburg: Ravan, 1992, p 41.

120. Kelwyn Sole, Land Dreaming, Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2006, p 75.

121. O J O Ferreira, ‘Adamastor, Gees van die Stormkaap’, Tydskrif vir Volkskunde en Volkstaal 49(1), 1993, pp 20–47, p 40.

122. Mbeki's ideas on the African Renaissance are set out in two collections of his speeches: Africa: The Time Has Come, Cape Town: Tafelberg/Mafube, 1998; and Africa: Define Yourself, Cape Town: Tafelberg/Mafube, 2002.

123. For a longer-term perspective on Mbeki's African Renaissance, see Mark Gevisser, The Dream Deferred. Thabo Mbeki, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007, pp 322–326; and for the immediate political context of its launch, see William Gumede, Thabo Mbeki and the Soul of the ANC, Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005, pp 202–204.

124. For sympathetic commentaries on Mbeki's project of the African Renaissance, see W M Makgoba (ed), African Renaissance: The New Struggle, Cape Town: Mafube/Tafelberg, 1999; and M M Mulemfo, Thabo Mbeki and the African Renaissance: The Emergence of a New African Leadership, Pretoria: Actua Press, 2000. For critical accounts, see E Moloka and E Le Roux (eds), Problematising the African Renaissance, Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2000; and P Vale and S Maseko, ‘Thabo Mbeki, South Africa and the Idea of an African Renaissance’, in S Jacobs and J Calland (eds), Thabo Mbeki's World, London: Zed Press, 2002, pp 121–142. My own arguments are set out in detail in D W Johnson, ‘Migrancy and Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance’, in S Gupta and T Omoniyi (eds), The Cultures of Economic Migration, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp 127–140.

125. Mbeki, Africa: The Time, p 242.

126. Mbeki, Africa: The Time, p 243. Mbeki's rhetorical references and the consensus of historical scholarship are not always in agreement. Most historians believe that the Battle of Omdurman (1898) ended in a victory for Kitchener's British Army.

127. Mbeki, Africa: The Time, p 287.

128. For a detailed elaboration of this argument, see Martin Legassick, Towards Socialist Democracy, Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2007.

129. Gumede, Thabo Mbeki, p 204.

130. Quoted in Vale and Maseko, ‘Thabo Mbeki’, p 129.