The Contact Zone in South Africa:
Gender, Empire and Sixteenth-century Portuguese Shipwreck Narratives
Van Riebeeck’s Cape settlement of 1652 is considered by historians a central founding moment in South Africa’s history, as is Bartholomeu Dias’s rounding of the Cape in 1488 and Vasco da Gama’s landfall ten years later. In an impressive feat of archival scholarship published in 1967, Major Raven-Hart expanded South African’s knowledge of early records by assembling excerpts from over a hundred and fifty lesser-known chronicles. The extracts collected in Before Van Riebeeck: Callers to South Africa: 1488-1652 provide topographical information that is relatively unremarkable—after all, cloud-bedecked Table Mountain, the duned or rocked-out seashore, the rushing or languid rivers, the smallish or largish islands have been relatively stable geographic features for hundreds, if not thousands, of years—but the proto-ethnographic data about inhabitants’ sexual organs, personal hygiene, food preferences, and language are nothing short of preposterous. Here’s Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1649: “As soon as a male child is born the mother cuts away his right testicle and gives him sea-water to drink and tobacco to chew.”
I propose there is a more reliable set of early contact narratives for understanding encounters between indigenous Africans and Europeans before and during the era of Van Riebeeck’s settlement, an important corpus of orginary history that was largely ignored by Raven-Hart and other historians of the contact zone. These are the Portuguese shipwreck chronicles, remarkable journals and reports that describe overland marches of up to 500 shipwreck survivors along the Eastern Cape and Natal coastline between 1552 and 1686. I will argue in this paper that the accounts written by Portuguese shipwreck survivors provide a contact ethnography so at odds with Raven-Hart’s extracted passages that “regional variation” does not begin to explain the difference.
Saturday
At the Mexican Press Club
The conference on Remembering and Forgetting, held in October of 2007, was itself memorable. A woman spoke on home birth, from DeAnza Community College, and Adriana Yoto presented a stunning slide show on the links between the images of colonial Britain and the marketing campaigns of the Providence Mall (and its sister malls, owned by the same company--General Growth Properties).
She and her husband and several friends created a living space in an "unused interstice" in the mall and supplied it with furniture, electricity, and a bricked up wall with lockable door. Her husband was on NPR THE STORY program last week, and two of my students in the fall 2007 college writing class (who had seen the slide show) also caught the NPR story.
The marketing campaigns of TV often emphasize social integration, while the MALL campaign, directed toward women's "colonial-style" fantasies of ease-full luxury. DEFINING YOU is a campaign for what Olive Schriener, the South African feminist, called in her 1920s book, WOMAN AND LABOR, the propensity of 'women's cultures" to thrive on a kind of parasitism.
Anne McClintock, in IMPERIAL LEATHER, also emphasized how the labor of household maintenance had to be out of sight, and that idleness was the marker by which women of class established their position.
The presentation by Adriana in Mexico City has really interested me--as the forced idleness and dissolution of women in colonial spaces, and even in postcolonial spaces--has been troubling me for some time. To see it reflected so boldly in contemporary American commercial culture is disturbing.
In a B & B in Cape Town, South Africa my "hostess" for a week--an elderly woman in a large house hoping to supplement her investment income, complained of my haircut. You're a sight, she said to me. Let me call my friend to cut you hair. Another elderly lady showed up, several hours later, and had me sit in the dining room, at the table, and proceeded to cut small bits of hair. At each fingerfull, she extended her arm out over the rug and released the hair, which drifted feather like to the floor. When she was done there was hair covering the entire dining room floor, and the domestic helper, watching from the kitchen, simply frowned slightly at the unnecessary labor. I feel sure that the women were not being unkind or sadistic. They were simply so unaccustomed to cleaning, that they were oblivous to what it would take to clean the hair up. To them it was great fun to cut an American's hair—a girlish, chattery bit of entertainment. To the domestic helper, it was two hours of tedious work. The vacuum cleaner had broken several months ago. It was 2004.
It is scenes like this, from cultures in which middle class or dominant group women play out their fantasies of childlike irresponsiblity--that the campaigns of idle unconnected luxury self-indulgence, such as Adriana has examined, grow more troubling.