Writing on the earth : Early European travellers to South Africa

“Writing on the earth” (Van der Watt, 1993:23): Early European travellers to South Africa The issue o f land in South Africa has always been problematic. This is to be expected in a country whose history has been one o f colonisation, contested borders and, in the more recent apartheid past, o f legalised removals o f people from the land. In recent post­ colonial theory too, the notion o f spatiality has proved to be significant: to write a history o f a country and its people is to write a spatial history through the processes o f naming, mapping, classifying and painting. Our project in this article is to explore some o f the ways in which early European travellers to South Africa traced their presence in this country, and in so doing began a chapter o f “writing on the earth", the ideological marks o f which linger on into this century.


Introduction
The issue o f land in South Africa has always been problematical -to whom does it belong, who may live where, by what nam e should it be known?In a history which has been one o f colonisation, contested borders and, in the more recent past, o f mass displacements o f people in the failed apartheid project o f social engineering, the contested nature o f South A frica's land is under standable.Currently, formerly displaced persons are undergoing the lengthy procedure o f reclaiming land.
In recent post-colonial theory too, the notion o f spatiality has proved to be significant: to write a history o f a country and its people is to write a spatial history, an account o f the experience o f its land, its ownership, appropriation, its nam ing.Our project in this article is to suggest some o f the ways in which early European travellers traced their presence in South Africa, a land foreign Literaior 17(1) April 1996:91-101 ISSN 025S-2219 to them , and in so doing began a chapter o f "writing on the earth" ( Van der Watt, 1993:23), the ideological marks o f which linger on in this century.

Language and place
Out o f an abstract perception o f space "out there" comes a perception o f place.
As Noyes (1993:122) in a review o f Paul C arter's influential book The road to Botany B ay comments á propos the imperial enterprise: " ... from an initial apprehension o f the space o f the new land, various practices are developed which produce places.These places exist by virtue o f their ability to be integrated into the social structure and adm inistrative apparatus o f Empire".
Such organisation o f place from space is done through language; language which anchors that light abstract balloon o f space to a concrete set o f compass points.As Coetzee (1988:7) remarks: "This landscape rem ains alien, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it" .The question o f course is which language?Whose language?For the travellers from Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that question was not hard to answer, indeed it would not have arisen as a question at all.Confident o f their place and function in the world, they were well equipped to encounter the unknown and render it knowable in European terms.

Naming
The prim ary act o f reducing an unfam iliar land to fam iliar or at least recognisable status is by naming.Again Noyes (1993:122): One o f the most fundamental gestures in which the explorer creates permanent significance is by tying personal experience to the landscape in the act o f naming.It is the name which gives space history.The name grants space significance by suspending the temporality implied in the very act of naming.
Not only is the nam ing o f landscape features done for the discoverers themselves but for their peers, for in m any cases travellers were travelling with an official task in m ind, or with a view to publishing for a European readership their travel journals, maps and sketches.As examples, see Choisy (1687), De La Loubére (1691), De Rennefort (1710) and Sonnerat (1782) as representative o f the many seventeenth and eighteenth century French travellers, most of whom were on official voyages to the East, with the exception o f Tachard (1688) and Lacaille (1776) who had specific m issions to South Africa.The irony involved in nam ing after "discovering" notable geographical features was that such features mostly had a "native" nam e and were known to the indigenous people.The French m issionnary Arbousset (1836:113-114) illustrates this point in the account o f his "discovery" o f principal river sources in South Africa tlirough which he claims to offer ... to geographical science our tribute of information, which is calculated to settle some questions, which, till now, have remained unsolved (...).We have satisfied ourselves that the rivers of which we are about to speak (...) take their rise in a mountain which the natives call Polling (...) but which we have designated in our map by the name of 'Mont aux Sources' *.
This irony is compounded by the joy certain travellers report as being expressed by their bearers and guides at finding what they already knew was there.Pratt (1992:205) Said's (1993:xxii-xxiii) notion o f rival geographies.This rivalry in nineteenth century explorers to Africa seems a little lopsided, however, as the Europeans cleariy had faith in their own authority in possessing the master discourse in so far as their nam ing and thereby dominance went.Said (1993:xxiii xxiv) continues: In your narratives, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point o f energy that made sense not just of colonising activities but o f exotic geographies and people.

Classifying
One o f the most im portant tools for ordering these "exotic geographies" and ultimately laying the foundations for the assurance o f the later nineteenth  Delegorgue (1990:221), who derives from his bearers both literal and emotional support, as when crossing leech-infested marshes in Natal he comments: "1 decided that it would be more convenient to have my men carry me across.They found these baths delightfully refreshing".
Literator 17(1) April 1996:91-101  ISSN 0258-2279 century travellers in Africa was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus' system of classification o f plants, The system o f nature (1753).^His classification system was designed to enable the natural historian to make order out o f chaos, to be able to assign a place in a hierarchy and a Latin name to every living plant.Parallel systems were also proposed for anim als, m inerals and eventually humans with "genetic" characteristics included.The language he chose for this system was Latin, with secular European "comm on" names: One by one the planet's life forms were to be drawn out o f the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European based patterns o f global unity and order.The (lettered, male, European) eye that held the system could familiarize ('naturalize') new sites/sights immediately upon contact, by mcorporating them into the language of the system (Pratt, 1992:31).
In a sim ilar vein, the French Jesuit astronom er Lacaille, who was on an official scientific mission to the Cape between 1751 and 1753 drew up a comprehensive catalogue o f 9766 planets visible from that geographical region.By this token he had realigned the known European planetary grid to accommodate the unknown African skies.The repercussions for extended imperial sea travel were immense.
Before Linnaeus' system had taken hold, travellers to the Cape could engage on the terrain o f Said's "rival geographies" in a less lopsided manner.The French traveller T avem ier (at the Cape in 1649) is able to show respect and gratitude to the KJioikhoi for their potentially hfe-saving skills in the use o f medicinal plants (Tavem ier, 1679:562) and also for their use o f the "snake-stone" as a remedy for snake bite (compare Forbes, 1965:321-322 When the heat of the day had passed, we made our way east-northeast, through an extremely arid country, leaving the immense chain of mountains to our right: forty miles away we observed another chain of mountains to our left.Though this country has an exhemely arid appearance, it nevertheless abounds in plants of the euphorbe class, in orpin, mezembryanthimum, and several species of geranium (Paterson, as quoted in Pratt, 1992:51).
The land is seen through a powerful, knowledgeable, ordering grid which tames the potentially threatening "other" land hinted at in Paterson's repetition (and subtextual fear?) o f "extremely arid country".

Order through mapping
In tandem with the confidence and power that nam ing accrues to the namer faced with seeming chaos, the process o f mapping is instrumental in "writing on the earth" .A map is a source o f power through knowledge; it is the imposition o f order on the unknown but suspected disorder o f the blank page.
It is never a neutral activity, for the mapper brings a subjective gaze to bear upon the space and selects that which is im portant to be mapped according to previously established subjective criteria.
Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world.But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them.They are, in this sense, less a representation of part o f the earth's surface than a representation of the system o f cognitive mapping which produced them (Penn, 1993:23).
W ith mapping, however, the empiricist thrust o f the Linneaen system o f classifiying is given an extra political edge, especially with the age o f imperialism and later colonisation for "the systematic surface m apping o f the globe correlates with the expanding search for commercially exploitable resources, markets, and lands to colonize, ju st as navigational m apping is linked with the search for trade routes" (Pratt, 1992:30).Setting o ff for the eastern frontier, Barrow proceeded to record in the most selfeffacing and, to his m ind therefore, scientific manner, information about the land he covered: its geography, flora and faima, yet, interestingly enough, relatively little about its indigenous inhabitants.Also in later maps (for exam ple those o f Delegorgue, 1847) the exotic anim als take precedence over the, to him, less interesting hum ans, as reflected in the title: "Carte (...) indiquant les lieux q u'habitent les diverses éspéces d 'animaux" .W here Barrow does mention inhabitants, it is in regard to the borders o f the map which he drew, implying "that they m erit consideration prim arily because o f their potential to contest or disnipt the boundary line" (Penn, 1993:31).This detailing o f hum an presence only in relation to the m argin o f the map unw ittingly illustrates the borders' frailty and arbitrariness.Van der Watt (1993:30) asserts that "The borders become lines o f demarcation between 'here' and 'there', between us and them, culture and savage nature.Self and O ther" .
The O ther is invisible until s/he is a threat, thereafter his/her presence is to be meticulously noted and ordered.

Painting the landscape
In tandem with m apping and nam ing o f the land comes a frequent practice am ong early European travellers o f not only "w riting on the earth" but also sketching and painting the landscape they saw.In this vein many displayed or adopted the disembodied, passive gaze o f what Pratt (1992:7) calls "the seeing m an" : the European (male) subject o f travel w riting "whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess".
The apparent purpose o f this scanning eye is deceptively simple: land has to be seen before it can be described, and the travelled country seems to have no existence o f its own unless aesthetically observed and then transposed into text or visual image.Sometimes the pleasure o f the sight is sufficient in itself to make the journey significant, as when Burton (as quoted in Pratt, 1992:204) writes: "Truly, it was a revel for soul and sight!Forgetting toils, dangers, and the doubtfulness o f return, I felt w illing to endure double what 1 had endured ...".This seemingly open stance o f the travel w riter as passive observer conveys a sense o f innocence, as if nothing is demanded o f the land in return.But such a self-effacing attitude serves the imperial purpose by effectively presenting inform ation in such a way as to seem "natural", to have the wealth (mineral, botanical, ethnographical etc.) o f the land seen to present itself freely, rather than to have it openly recognised as potential sites o f appropriation.
To convey information in a way that would seem as natural as possible, it therefore made sense to present the unknown in fam iliar European aesthetic terms, for example by using words and phrases freely borrowed from the Romantic poetic tradition: "The waters o f the majestic river, flowing in a broad expanse resembling a smooth translucent lake, seemed, with their gentle waves, to kiss the shore ... bearing on their limpid bosom the image o f their woodclothed b a n k s..." (Burchell as quoted in Coetzee, 1988:38).
However, some features o f landscape description by these apparenfly trans parent conveyers o f information belie a neutral, unthreatening stance.The land is often physicalised through description, given female features, and often appropriated by scrutiny, as in the telling phrase o f "opening up" the African continent, where "the eye commands (...) and m ountains and valleys show themselves " (Barrow as quoted in Pratt, 1992:60).
Tlie spread-out panoram a o f new territory thus exposed is furthermore often described as seen from a hill-top, thereby suggesting a relationship of domination in which new territory appropriately takes up the lower position: The river immediately beneath us was invisible because of the steep drop; beyond was a beautiful luxuriant forest, while in the distance stretched a vast green plain, (...)■ Such a scene, which recalled the earliest days of creation, can today only be chanced upon where men are few and the innocent echoes repeat no sound of gunfire (Delegorgue, 1990:221).Coetzee (1988:46) stresses the way in which this hill-top stance o f the observer is typically linked to the painterly way in which the seeing proceeds, a process which supports the notion o f the seer's mastery over the seen (refer also Pratt, 1992:204-205).The authority o f the viewer rem ains unquestioned.As in the case o f a painting, the viewer-as-artist sees all there is to see; his particular position is offered as the only possible vantage point.The landscape is static as it is viewed only from the traveller's position.Thus fixed, the land is reduced to object-to-be-analysed by the confident gaze o f the observer.
From this it follows that the mastery o f the seer over the seen is contained in the unquestioned authority to evaluate aesthetically, thereby revealing the inter action o f aesthetics and ideology (refer Pratt, 1992:205).By inscribing the rough African landscape into the European painterly tradition o f the picturesque, where pictorial principles are conveniently used to describe the scene in terms o f foreground, middle ground and far distance (refer Coetzee, 1988:37 and 39), the landscape is thus "controlled" by the viewer: s/he only needs to see in terms o f what s/he has been taught to expect.
Litemtor 17(1) April 1996:91-101 ISSN 0258-2279 The authority o f the European gaze never falters.Even when recognising the inherent topographical difference o f the land, and even when consciously striving to establish an African aesthetic, as for instance Le Vaillant (1972:196) attem pts in the following passage, what are your [Europe's] purling streams, your cascades, your artificial mounts (...) all those objects which flatten on the sense, and fatigue the eye -what are ye when compared to the simple unaffected beauties o f Pampoen Kraal!", the resuh is little more than a modified version o f the European convention.
Colour is still defined by its lack in comparison with the hues o f Europe, as when Burchell (as quoted in Coetzee, 1988:42) writes: "In Africa we look in vain for those mellow beautiful tints with which the sun o f autumn dyes the forests o f England ..." .Similarly the open African sky, because it contrasts with the abundance o f cloud movement over Europe, is said to render the landscape static, and leads to it being characterised repeatedly as "sleeping, torpid, heatstruck" (Coetzee, 1988:43), with em phasis on its immobility.
W hile the aesthetic value o f the unfolding landscape indicates the material value o f the "newly discovered" land to the explorers' home culture, its aesthetic shortcomings point the way for social and/or material intervention (refer Pratt, 1992:205).As the observer fixes the landscape within his European aesthetic framework, he often projects possible "improvements" to be brought about in the future, as in the telling example o f a swamp "that by one single drain m ight be converted into a very beautifiil meadow" (Barrow as quoted in Pratt, 1992:61).
Such proposals for "im provem ent" or economic development are so wide spread in nineteenth century travel w riting that Pratt (1985:126) places them w ithin a special category o f "the reverie convention".They spring from felt authority concealed behind the quietly passive scanning eye.

Myth of the "empty" landscape
But w ithin the frame o f these landscape descriptions and paintings Pratt (1992:51) is prompted to ask: "W here is everybody?".We have already comm ented on the invisibility o f indigenous African inhabitants in the maps o f Barrow and Delegorgue, that is, until the vulnerable borders are described and then the potentially troublesome "wilde Bosjemans and Hottentots" as Barrow names them appear.This myth o f the empty landscape is in a sense the reverse action o f "w riting on the earth" ; it is an erasing, a rubbing out.Tiffin and Lawson (1994:5) forward reasons as to why, in an era o f colonialism which impelled many travellers to A fiica, this myth was necessary: Colonialism conceptually depopulated countries either by acknowledging the native but relegating him or her to the category of the subhuman, or simply by looking through the native and denying his/her existence.These were necessary practices for invoking the claim of 'terra nullius' upon which the now disputed legality of imperial settlement (as opposed to invasion) was based.Only empty spaces can be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanizing the inhabitants.
The blank spaces on the map and the stylized landscape sketches and paintings call out to be peopled, but not by those currently there, rather by what Coetzee (1984:9) (Pratt, 1992:44).'^Perhaps this was possible because the rivalry over contested geographies had not yet intensified to the pitch that was to come.Linnaeus' 1759 classification o f Africans as "governed by caprice", Paterson's pronouncement o f African peoples as being "sans moeurs" or cultureless, start to change the lenses through which Europeans beheld Africans, leading ultimately to the blindness o f empty landscape in which it is only the flora, fauna and mute geology which rem ain visible to the gaze.
In conclusion, one could argue that despite the epistemological and aesthetic gains "writing on the earth" has brought in terms o f being able to identify and name plant species, in m apping the land and in painting the landscape, a high price has been paid for this.In particular the obscuring o f indigenous inhabitants in the "empty landscape" due to a "failure o f the historical .. scans the landscape with his hermeneutic gaze, but it remains trackless, refuses to emerge into meaningfiilness as a landscape o f signs.He speaks, but the stones are silent, will not come to life.Or when this is not true, when the stones seem on the point of coming to life, they do so in the form o f some giant or monster from the past, wordless but breathing vengeance (Coetzee, 1988:9-10).
N am ing, mapping, painting have all been used as ways o f keeping the monster o f chaos, the nameless dread at bay.These inscriptions have been enduring as A frica's inheritance and, in m any instances m aintenance o f colonial boundaries and borders attests.But as the title "w riting on the earth " implies, such marks cannot be perm anent as shifts in power formations re-draw, re-name and re inscribe the land to match the day.
This sharpening o f focus or purpose in m apping is evident in the work o f John Barrow, personal secretary to Governor Macartney, who in 1797 was commissioned by the British state to provide an accurate map o f the Cape in Literator 17(1) April 1996:91-101 ISSN 0258-2279terms o f its geography and general state.AsPenn (1993:28)  remarks, Barrow did not so m uch travel in the nam e o f science, as in the nam e o f colonialism.
calls "an ideal community" ."Ideal" in eighteenth and nineteenth century European terms one would imagine to mean non-African, in other words people versed in European ways and discourse rather than African culture.It is tem pting to conjecture that prior to the validity o f Linneaen systems o f classification being accepted, Africans were more positively visible to Europeans.In Peter Kolb's previously mentioned pre-Linneaen account of his travels in the Cape, his interest is in seeking out the Khoikhoi and studying their way o f life.Though he does not describe the Khoikhoi in terms o f equality with the Europeans he is able to do something that seems impossible once the classificatory grids, Latin nam es and starkly outlined maps were in place: he is able to " [insist] they be understood by Europeans in the same terms Europeans understand them selves"