northward, upward: stories of train travel, and the journey towards white south african nationhood,...

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Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 296e315

Northward, upward: stories of train travel,and the journey towards white South African

nationhood, 1895e1950

Jeremy Foster

Department of Architecture, College of Art, Architecture & Planning, Sibley Hall,Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

Abstract

Rhodes’ ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ vision was more than a road, rail and telegraph route linking the twoextremities of imperially-controlled Africa; it was also an imaginary axis that gathered around it a range ofcultural ‘epiphenomena’ during the early twentieth century. This paper examines one of these, accounts ofthe Cape-to-Rand railway journey, which first appeared in the 1890s, and became a common trope intravel-writing about South Africa until after World War II. These accounts, which appeared in everythingfrom personal memoirs to travel books and were written by visitors as well as South Africans, helpedlocalize and naturalize the ‘spatial story’ of imperialism during the period when South Africa was emergingas a modern, autonomous nation. A recurring set of textual strategies in these accounts rehearseda particular bodily subjectivity towards landscape, while at the same time incorporating the new nation’sphysiographic regions into a historically and geographically-legible whole. The Cape-to-Rand railwayjourney became a discursive trope in which culturally-constructed ideas about landscape and identity wereprotected and saved.� 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: South Africa; Travel-writing; Imaginary geographies; Landscape; Railways; Cultural identities

The map collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from tradition,and others produced by observation; .(it is) a totalizing stage on which elements of diverseorigin are brought together (that) pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity.theoperations of which it is the result or necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. Thetour describers have disappeared.1

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297J. Foster / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 296e315

Introduction: ‘The wonderful northbound train’2

In 1893, 6 years before the outbreak of the South African War, Special Correspondent for TheTimes in South Africa wrote:

Up to the Karoo! It means up from Cape Town which is on the level with the sea, toa plateau topping the summit of Table Mountain, and maintaining throughout the extent ofhalf a continent an elevation of from 3000 to 6000 feet. The principal climb is done in the first12 hours of a railway journey. The train leaves Cape Town at nine in the evening. Throughthe night the traveller.hears an almost human groan and strain of the engine as it toils upthe heavy way. There is even a point at which his dreams fill themselves with a futile senseof pushing. The slow pace, the many stoppages, the sounds of voices.combine to convey theimpression that every official and servant of the road is lending muscle to assist thelocomotive.In the morning.he wakes to find himself upon the Karoo.

The effect is magical. The world of trees and towns has been left behind; he is up in thecountry of the mountain tops. On all sides they stretch away, peak behind peak, and rangebehind range, in every variety of shape and colour, from the clear browns and purples of thenear foreground, to the liquid blues and melting heliotrope and primrose of the horizon.3

The writer continues, musing on the character of the country the train traverses in order toreach the ‘mining centres’ of the interior, where the ‘still unproved goldfields of Mashonaland’beckon beyond the horizon.

This is the earliest traceable account of the train journey north from Cape Town,a narrative which would become a commonplace of travel-writing about South Africa for atleast the next 5 decades. Apparently unaffected by the South African War, the creation of theUnion in 1910, and South Africa’s weakening links with Britain, versions of this accountswould resurface, sometimes in full-blown form, sometimes as isolated paragraphs or sentencesin geographical descriptions of the region, or personal memoirs.4 In 1924, we encountera remarkably similar passage:

Gradually the train pushes its way deeper and deeper into the hills, which now begin to closein on each other, and soon.the long climb.begins. At first sight it seems that there can beno way out, but presently the train is seen to be rounding the foothills, all the time climbingnearer and nearer to the summit. The orchards in the valleys below grow smaller andsmaller.until at last they pass out of sight altogether as the train tops the Pass.Eventuallythe mountains disappear, and in their place is a limitless plain, stretching in bleak andseemingly barren monotony as a far as the eye can see. It is the Karoo.5

An extended example of the Cape-to-Rand account appears in a chapter entitled ‘Northwards’in Dorothea Fairbridge’s 1928 book ‘A Pilgrims Way in South Africa’.6 Fairbridge begins withseveral paragraphs devoted to the settled landscape the train passes through when leaving CapeTown: the ‘rich vinelands and orchards of Paarl’; the ‘radiant crimson and gold’ of the vines inautumn. Near Tulbagh, she notes an ‘old thatched homestead, peaceful and lovely amongst thetin roofs of the newer houses’, and at Hex River, the ‘splendid peaks lightly touched with snow,looking down on the fertile valley at their feet, where corn and fruit come to perfection’,

298 J. Foster / Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2005) 296e315

a description confirmed by contemporary paintings showing the railway line such ‘The Summit ofthe Hex River Pass’ by Montague Black (Fig. 1).

‘After Hex River’, however, ‘the country changed, and the land grew drier and drier as weclimbed higher, and more and more arid as we neared the Karoo. At Touw’s River, 2552 feetabove the sea, the air struck cold after the mellow warmth which we had left at the Cape, and anunpleasant little wind was blowing the dust about. An uncanny contrast to the land from whichwe had come, with its spreading oaks and rich vineyards.’7 Fairbridge expatiates on the apparentdreariness of this expansive, semi-desert region: ‘There was a desolate little farm homestead insight, with a windmill, but not a green leaf to indicate that it ever drew any water from the depthsof the earth’. This, however, was only ‘a superficial impression’; the austere monotony was ‘notwithout charm; .[t]here are people who love the Karoo, to whom its fine pure air is as the breathof life.. The great plains have charm for them which they miss when they come from its vastemptiness to the life of cities, or even of rich farming districts’. Upon arrival in Johannesburg,Fairbridge’s account turns from the beauties of the empty veld to the necessarily utilitarianlandscape of compounds, mine heads and planned workers housing.

Fairbridge’s account, like others before and after her, infuses the landscape seen from the trainwith poetic dimensions. The reader’s sense that the physical journey was also a rite of passage,invested with idealistic significance, is reinforced by implications of onwardness and incompleteness

Fig. 1. ‘The Summit of the Hex River Pass’, original painting by Montague Black. Reproduced courtesy of Transnet Heritage Museum

Library, Johannesburg.


in the narrative; the sweeping northerly views afforded by the house in which the author staysin Johannesburg imaginatively extended journey up from the coast on into Rhodesia(‘Mashonaland’) and Victoria Falls.8 Cognate resonances were also implicit in the attentionpaid to the passage through the mountains, and the emphasis that the journey was one from sea-level to an elevated region, a theme echoed in images reproduced in newspapers such as theIllustrated London News (Fig. 2).

Seemingly, these connotations of ‘northwardness’ and ‘upwardness’ were not undermined bycontemporaneous accounts of southward, downward journeys. Four years before Fairbridge,another traveler wrote:

We fly over the highlands of the Transvaal, the endless plains of the Karroo, and then diveover the barrage of the Drakensberg into the Hex River Valley. It is a wonderful zig-zagdown the mountain side. Mighty escarpments rise to the right glittering white with eternalsnow. Down in the valley roars the Hex River, sparkling over its rapids, rushing happily tothe sea. It is indeed a smiling valley. The hinterland is far flung and sparsely cultivated. Onceyou have left the barrage of the Drakensberg behind you, you come to intensive cultivation.Every area seems to be of some use.9

Fig. 2. ‘From Sea-Level to 900 Feet’, Illustrated London News, 14 January 1928. Reproduced courtesy of Transnet Heritage Museum

Library, Johannesburg.


This reverse sequence finds an echo in the 1940s, in H.V. Morton’s In Search of South Africa.10

Arriving in Johannesburg, the author immediately moves to Cape Town (by the downward train)from where the conventional sequence of northward exploration (and the rest of the narrative)can commence.11 Morton too records the exhilarating charge invoked by the descent through themountains after crossing the ‘lone, wild region’ of the Karoo: ‘I could feel a promise in the air,and see some clear intensity of light, which told me that we drew near at last to that wonderfulplace at the tip of Africa where the warm currents of the Indian Ocean meet the cool waves of theAtlantic.’12

Although not all elements of the story are present in every telling, they nonetheless remainremarkably constant: a railway journey that begins in Cape Town and passes through its bucolichinterland before climbing the mountains to the expansiveness of the Karoo, which is then crossedto reach the ‘mining centre’ of Kimberley or Johannesburg. Matching the mechanical logic of therailway line, this sequence never varies; it is always registered as first-hand experience. Thenarrative voice is that of the traveler, often alone, gazing out of the train window, the unfoldingdescription of the physical terrain interpellated with the associations evoked by it. This samedescriptiveereflective voice was also found in other travel accounts and memoirs written duringthe same period extolling the pleasures of train travel in South Africa, sometimes described as ‘thebest in the world’.13

While one would expect to find these kinds of sentiments in publications promoting railwaytravel (which is where some of these accounts first appeared), there were sufficient instances ofthem in travel-writing that had no such agenda to ask what it was about train travel in earlytwentieth century South Africa that appealed to so many white, English-speaking travelers e menand women, South Africans and overseas visitors? And more specifically, to ask why accounts ofthe northward railway journey from the Cape recurred again and again over a period of quitedramatic political and social transformation in South Africa, and followed such a consistentformula?

Certainly, there was nothing exceptional about the journey they described. The landscapedescribed in these accounts was simply that revealed by this commonplace journey, one that canstill be traced today: after passing through the mountains that separate the coastal belt from theexpansive, dryer interior, ‘you go up, and up (until) you at length reach vast rolling uplandsfamiliarly known as the veldt’ (as one early twentieth century description put it).14 Furthermore,by the early twentieth century, railway travel was becoming a commonplace form of travel inSouth Africa, and, because it linked the country’s two most important urban centers, the Cape-to-Rand railway line was probably the most traveled of all routes in the sub-continent. Until the1950s, when national roads and air-travel networks began to provide alternatives, it was the onlyway to travel between the two centres. All travelers to the Rand had to approach it by train, andmost white South Africans would have made this some 960 mile journey frequently during thesedecades.15

Travel-writing, geographical imagination and topography

It is precisely the banality of these facts, and the formulaic nature of these accounts that makesthem worthy of study. Given the aesthetic exhaustion normally wrought by repetition, continuous


use of the same representational motif or trope suggests some other cultural function, some otheraffective charge than that normally associated with straight-forward description. For clarity, therecurring ‘northward-upward’ account can be described as a trope, that is, a rhetorical ‘device forchanging the basic meaning of words’, a ‘semantic transposition from a sign in praesentia to a sign inabsentia’.16 Crucially, this transposition is one that reveals rather than obscures; its effects derivefrom bringing two (or more) ideas into simultaneous consciousness and holding them in an imaginedrelationship with each other; it expresses that which could not be transmitted any other way.17

This accords with recent debates about travel-writing, which emphasize that, in addition todescribing unfamiliar territory, travel-writing not only rehearses but helps construct subjectivitiesand identities as part of the act of ‘reading the landscape’. Historically, this discursiveconstruction has been linked to complicities between European masculinity and dominant modesof travel and representation that tend to frame the world as a kind of exhibition.18 Recently,however, there has been a growing awareness that the traveler’s encounter with landscape may beshaped by a wider variety of other social factors, such as race, class, and nationality,19 as well asthe shape and situatedness of the landscape encounter and its narration.20 This embrace ofsubjectivity, positionality, and representational process emphasizes that travel-writing is an act oftranslation in which there are always gains and losses. Originating in the experience of corporealsubjects traveling through material landscapes, travel-writing is caught up in a complex dialecticbetween the recognition and recuperation of difference, and always involves a loss of sensory aswell as psychic resonance.21 At the same time, travel-writing initiates a spatiality ofrepresentation. The progressive distantiation from events and scenes the travel account describes,creates a conceptual space of observation and comparison; the objects that draw travelers’attention engage different senses or are on a different scale from those typically encountered ineveryday life.22 Still relatively under-discussed, however, is how corporeal undergoing is figured aspart of this process of environmental differentiation, and how the translatory operations ofwriting develops a dialectic with the practical and imaginative contingencies of the journey.23

This elision is symptomatic of wider theoretical debates in contemporary human geographywhich, crudely stated, turn on whether the cultural construction of space and identity originates inbodily, phenomenological relations with a shared environment, or the spatialization of thatenvironment through collective discourse and practice. In the former analysis, the thinking subjectdoes not so much ‘interact with’ the whole environment, as participate in and depend on it, creatinga complicity between it and the body. In this hermeneutic, meaning is situational, found in theworld, not floating around as a transcendental essence outside of it; space and place are endowedwith cultural meaning through a ‘semantisation of usage’. Countering this construal of livedexperience as some kind of ontological datum is the notion that such apparently ‘subjective’experience is shaped by range of psychological, linguistic and ethnographic frames of reference,whose multiplicity is tempered only by the force of normative socialization which (socially)structure experience24 in terms of symbolization and icononography. The tension between thesetwo positions e fundamentally, that between individual, subjective and collective, intersubjectivescales of signification e is sustained by the underlying paradox that ‘the spatial’ is both a socially-constructed arrangement of divisions and territories, and the ontic medium of such arrangements.25

These kinds of debates suggest that emergent connections between geographical space andcultural identity can never be reduced to a discursive ‘setting in place’, and are better understoodas a promiscuous process, in which phenomenological approaches do not replace socio-political


analyses but form part of them.26 This requires setting contemporary theory’s focus on the socio-political and the discursive within longer traditions of geographical imagination, and makingspace for the embodied, phenomenological encounter with the land itself. It also requires openingup individual-scale, phenomenologically-rooted notions of landscape towards a stronger sense ofmovements within larger, discursively-constructed worlds. Shields, for example, has demonstratedhow practices, places and representations become entangled in each other, and ‘visible’, taken-for-granted geographical phenomena spatialize inherently a spatial social values and relations, even atthe same time as they help construct and validate them. Thus, place description brings situated,inhabitational undergoing into dialogue with ideas and experiences that might not otherwise bepart of that corporeal knowledge. Pre-linguistic, bodily disposition towards space and place, ismetaphorically and analogically refracted by representations in which ‘action’ and ‘memory’ areimplicitly layered and imbricated.27

Because they are a function of time and process, such inhabitational, performative dimensionsof space and place are especially latent in verbal and textual description of landscape.28 Before theemergence of maps, the kind of knowledge we now call ‘geographical’ was mediated by travelreports, itineraries, and verbal descriptions of a particular region.29 But textual narrative alsoexposes the fundamental undecidability of all landscape description,30 whose most commonplaceform, topography, both implies a narrative that unfolds through time, and begs the question ofwhether what one discerns is ‘imposed superficially on the earth’, or ‘a hidden design already therebut covered over’.31 At the same time, however, written description can be highly effective in‘pretextually’ lending the material encounter with the terrain corroborative and imaginative depth(a capacity that is common to all landscape representation). Both writing and reading function ascontinuations of the initial inhabitation that ‘identified’ and characterized the setting. Textsdescribing landscape perform a kind of ‘figurative mapping’; authenticating the movements andrelationships that converge to form an imaginary geography, this ‘mapping’ fuses the actualterrain and the overlaid subjective meanings brought to it by a writer, or generations of writers.32

Colonial nationalism, ‘naturalization of the nation’ and railways

Questions about the effects of textual landscape description are especially pertinent in travel-writing about early twentieth century South Africa. The period from 1900 to 1930 e the timewhen the northward, upward account was most common e was also the ‘heyday of landscape’,33

a time when the discursive use of landscape as a prop of imaginary identity was most intense inSouth Africa. Promoters of white Union immediately after the bitter South African War foundthat feelings of attachment to the sub-continent’s landscape were a persuasive means forencouraging a divided white population to identify with a ‘white man’s land’ that neverthelessneeded to remain a loyalist part of Empire.34 This geographical imaginary borrowed the anti-modern nostalgic pastoralism and environmental determinism then prevalent in Britain, whichcast South Africa as an imaginary ‘South’ where metropolitan society could be rejuvenated.35

During the early decades of the twentieth century, this imaginary appealed to a broad spectrum ofautochthonous and immigrant white South Africans, because it addressed a number ofendogeneous realities: the sub-continent had until recently been a frontier society; the newnation’s borders were still undecided; and the deep divisions left by the War e as well as linguistic


differences e complicated the construction of a shared white ‘narrative of descent’.36 Thegeographical imaginary of a ‘white man’s land’ also emphasized that the indigenous Africanpopulation would be, at best, second class citizens of this new nation.

After Union in 1910, South Africa’s early colonial nationalist governments, supported by itslargely English-speaking urban mercantile constituency, continued to use this imaginaryborrowed from metropolitan Britain to foster a white ‘South Africanist’ identity whosegeographical allegiances were simultaneously larger and smaller than the nation. Colonialnational ‘South Africanism’ was a patriotic rather than nationalist identity that above all soughtreconciliation between English and Afrikaner. It glossed over ethnic and racial aspects of imperialideology and assumptions that the Empire was pre-eminently a union of people of British blood;instead, it put its faith in the notion that place-based identities, rather than an imposed, pan-imperial identity would be the key to the Empire’s survival.37 Thus, as in Canada, not religion,not language, not race (until the mid-1920s, the two ‘races’ of South Africa were seen asthe English and Afrikaner), but the land itself came to be seen as a significant determinant ofthe future character of South African society.38 All the authors of the Cape-to-Rand accountsappear, to a greater or lesser degree, to have subscribed to this ‘South Africanist’ vision of the newnation.

In the search for a persuasive ‘narrative of descent’, the discourse of patriotic ‘SouthAfricanism’ initially focused on the long-inhabited, Anglo-Dutch pays of the Western Cape, butafter World War I, the imaginary home of this hybrid white identity was increasingly seen as theuntamed, ‘limitless’ and supposedly empty interior of the sub-continent.39 In this, white SouthAfricans followed the pattern seen in other settler societies, where the relationship betweena nation’s identity and its territory came to be construed in terms of what Zimmer has callednaturalization of the nation.40 In this archaicizing imaginary, which stresses the regenerative effectsof untamed nature upon civilization, nature is understood to determine culture rather than theother way around, and ‘landscapes of identity’ become, explicitly, unimproved landscapes ofimmersion and contemplation, not working landscapes. Although the proponents of thisimaginary only dominated white politics until 1924, their ideas lived on in white cultural discoursefor decades, and were taken up and adapted by Afrikaner nationalists, who argued the volk weredivinely ordained to govern South Africa because of their unique historical relationship with itslandscape. Until World War II, however, the relationship between landscape and white culturalidentity was better expressed by the charismatic figure of Jan Christiaan Smuts. A Boer-veteran-turned-imperial-statesman who moved easily between the corridors of power in London and hisHighveld farm, Smuts’ patriotism was based in a traveling subjectivity, and expressed throughcommunion with nature and landscape rather than ethnic badges or inheritances. His ‘love of thesoil’ was practical as well as emotional; paradoxically, it served as an exemplar of commonalityand reconciliation precisely because it was local, personal, solitary and contemplative.41

As is often the case, many of those who promoted unmediated communing with the ‘nature’ ofthe national territory as the basis for a shared cultural identity did not themselves live face to facewith it; they only encountered this territory when they traveled between South Africa’s largestcities e by train. In South Africa, as elsewhere, railways played an ambiguous but important rolein forging relations between the imagined community and its national territory. During the 1910sand 1920s, the state-run South African Railways (hereafter SAR) opened up previouslyinaccessible regions to urban residents who were likely to appreciate these regions as landscape


(that is, in primarily aesthetic terms), and often used photography and advertizing to exploit thisaesthetic appeal and increase traffic. At the same time, however, the scale, regularity and ubiquityof railway infrastructure were difficult to reconcile with an aesthetic construal of landscape. Thesecontradictions were especially strong in South Africa, where the railways were consciously used byearly Union governments to demonstrate the material benefits of imperialism and forge the idea ofa modern, unified nation,42 even at the same time as the identity associated with that nation wasimagined in terms of personal, subjective communing with an unaltered, pre-modern landscape.43

It is precisely these tensions between technological modernization and an archaicizinglandscape vision that lay at the heart of the Cape-to-Rand account, and made it such a persistentgenre in South African travel-writing during the first half of the twentieth century. As recurringstories that attempted to reconcile subjective and intersubjective dimensions of geographicalsignification, these travelers’ tales also became profoundly ‘topographical’ narratives that helpedforge a shared, proto-national geographical imagination. More than just descriptive appropria-tions of a new nation’s landscape, they were an important means by which a geographicalsubjectivity was worked out and discursively naturalized. In order to understand this, we need tore-read the northward, upward account in terms of three interlocking and mutually-supportingimperatives: as a story of corporeal undergoing, as geo-political narrative, and as representation ofliminality.

The train journey as a story of corporeal undergoing

One of the metropolitan inheritances ‘South Africanist’ geographical subjectivity needed todisavow was the bourgeois economy of the body, which imposed a critical distance betweenreflection and corporeal participation.44 White South Africans’ problematic history and lack ofshared language threw an emphasis onto the bodily participation as primary form of identificationwith, and characterization of landscape.45 This deepened the naturalist tradition of landscape assignifier of character, or a metaphor for a state of mind, in terms of what Benjamin called the‘auratic’, a quality in inanimate objects tied to their existence in unestranged, lived time and place,and cognate with ‘presence’ or ‘closeness’.46

Although Benjamin felt ‘aura’ was threatened by most forms of modern representation, heargued that it was saved in verbal stories that were bound up with, and mediated, the rhythms ofthe world of which they spoke.47 Benjamin argued that the art of storytelling was the repetition ofa recognizable trope, with subtle modifications, each teller overlaying the basic structure witha transparent veneer of their own retelling. This was because the storyteller’s fundamental rolewas forging and sustaining a community by passing on knowledge, or wisdom; the function of thestory is to ‘give counsel’, to help its audience know how to act. Both kinds of storyteller identifiedby Benjamin e the traveler returning home from afar, and the tiller of the soil who stays athome e use the story to incorporate into everyday life experiences that are ‘other’ to or ‘absent’from it. The former is concerned with that which is spatially absent e i.e. distant, foreign andexotic, the latter with that which is temporally absent e i.e. belonging to the past.

Although at first glance the accounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey seem to have little incommon with the Benjaminian ‘story’ (they were in the first instance, written, not told), theyrecuperate many of its qualities. They were formulaic narratives that handed on feelings


associated with landscapes of the European-colonial past (Table Mountain, Cape Town, the oldhomesteads of Tulbagh) and linked them to the unfamiliar landscape of the interior (the ‘limitless’Karoo, the raw ‘mining centers’, the ‘as-yet unproved goldfields of Mashonaland’). They stageda dialogue between the disposition of the imperial ‘traveler’ (‘every area seems to be of use’) andthe autochthonous ‘tiller of the soil’ (‘there are people who love the Karoo, to whom its fine pureair is as the breath of life.’). Similarly, although the train would seem to have estranged thetraveler from the landscape by encouraging them to see it as a distantiated panorama,48 this wasrepeatedly countered in the Cape-to-Rand stories by the recurring motif of the corporeal effects oftrain travel: the sensations of distance, light, temperature, and dust, alongside asides concerningthe author/travelers need to ‘fold a rug between his nether person and the scorching leathercushions’.49

The accounts also frequently reconstruct the stream of the author/traveler’s consciousness inresponse to the landscape, which not infrequently involved meditations on their own cultural‘place’ in it, largely through reference to spatially and temporally ‘absent’ landscapes known tothe traveler. Placing the reader in the train carriage, these interpellations rehearsed a kind ofreverie in which the landscape outside the train window became a fleeting object of contemplationwhich contrapuntally conditioned the travelers thoughts, shot through with affective associationsthat are hard to prise apart from its visual aspect.50 This oscillation between description andreflection replicated the experience of long-distance train travel in South Africa where, after thefirst few hours of gazing out of the window, the traveler is lulled into a dream-like state by theregular beat of the train’s wheels that measured out and harnessed the great distances, viscerallyincorporating them within the traveler’s body.

This integration of the sensory effects and first person stream-of-consciousness into thenarrative exemplified another aspect of the Benjaminian ‘story’, which ideally refracted therhythms of its content as well as those of the situation in which it was (or purported to be) told. Italso reminds us that for Benjamin, the ideal situation for telling and listening to stories is whenlisteners are in a relaxed, distracted state. The ‘rhythms of travel’ in these accounts invited thereader to imagine themselves on a train, perhaps slipping in and out of conversation with theirfellow travelers, as it climbed through the mountains and crossed the Karoo.51 Like Sartre’smountain climber who forgot the map once he started to climb,52 the reverie-immersed railwaytraveler implicitly came to know the landscape primarily through its haptic, somatic andkinesthetic qualities, albeit as mediated by the train. The ‘rhythms of travel’ authenticated thepersonal, solitary and contemplative musings evoked by the journey, and recuperated the‘auratic’e presence in time and space e as integral part of the journey and the topography itrevealed. Thus, unestranged experience supposedly threatened by modern travel was saved andnaturalized as part of the described landscape.

Perhaps the most subtle e and therefore ‘telling’ e expression of the Cape-to-Rand journey asa story of corporeal undergoing occurs in instances like the opening quotation, in which theauthorial ‘body’ empathetically fuses with that of the straining locomotive, and the railwayapparatus is appropriated as a means for the author/traveler to viscerally embrace an unknownand apparently limitless region. This is echoed in a slightly later account of the journey across theKaroo, which described the railway line as ‘(winding) away.in the distance, unfenced andunembanked, a light streak in a barren land’.53 This passage postulates a prosthetic way thetraveling subject might insert itself into an otherwise forbiddingly spacious and arid landscape.


A minimalist (i.e. ‘unfenced’ and ‘unembanked’) passage through the land that juxtaposed sleek,man-made infrastructure with wild, unimproved nature transposed metaphysical longings forunion with nature. Crucially, the vehicle of this union was that quintessential symbol of modernnationhood and agent of territorial appropriation, the state-run railway.

The train journey as geo-political narrative

Together, these textual effects in the Cape-to-Rand accounts e the undergoing of the journeypositing a corporeal relationship with the landscape, the railway apparatus becoming a means ofgrasping an empty, unknown territory e allude to fundamentals of environmental perception,that is, establishing an existential foothold in the world through identification (knowing ‘how’ weare in a certain place) and orientation (knowing ‘where’ we are).54 A sense of belonging is usuallyunderpinned by what Lynch called a strong ‘environmental image’, a mental construct thatmediates feelings of psychological well-being and security and facilitates existential orientation inthe world, yet is founded in concrete objects of identification.55 Extrapolated to the scale of theregion or nation, this ‘environmental image’ takes on qualities of an imaginary geography,a shared cultural eidolon composed of characterful and meaningful locales. It could be argued theaccounts of the Cape-to-Rand railway journey helped construct such an ‘environmental image’through a cognate form of imaginative participation. Like the train-mediated undergoing thatlimned an identificatory, corporeal relationship between traveler and landscape, the narrative’sorientational effects grew out of a metaphorical fidelity to spatio-temporal relations. As in classicalrhetoric, the ‘meaning’ of the each part of the account was contingent on its place in a ‘largerwhole’. A trope’s fusion of apparently ‘incommensurate’ languages of signification e place-basedidentity, corporeal undergoing e goes beyond objects described or ideas raised, to encompass thestructure and movement of an entire story.56

It is no coincidence that the emergence of the Cape-to-Rand accounts coincided with theexpansion of imperial railways into the sub-continent’s interior just before the South African War.The geographical narration of South African nationhood was framed by the spatial semiotic ofEmpire as a series of contiguous territories brought under the homogenizing dominion ofa metropolitan seat of finance and government.57 By the turn of the twentieth century, thissemiotic had become implicit in books, maps, engravings and photographs that helped sanctionBritain’s self-appointed role of civilizing and settling large parts of the world. It had also given riseto a geo-political rhetorical formation e what De Certeau called a ‘spatial story’ e in whichenlightened imperialism was constantly moving outwards, pushing back frontiers of ‘darkness’.58

In Southern Africa, this ‘spatial story’ deepened and extended that already established by earlierEuropean ‘discovery’ (by the Portuguese) and colonization (by the Dutch) of the sub-continent,and established a pattern of Europeans cleaving to the coastal margins and looking to the sea thatconnected them to the metropole, leaving the interior undeveloped and ‘unilluminated’.

When embittered Dutch farmers had trekked into the interior in the 1830s, this spatial storystarted to harden into a northesouth imaginary which cast ‘unenlightened’ Boers as retreatingfrom British administration. At the end of the nineteenth century this same geo-politicalimaginary was invoked by proponents of British annexation to mask their more instrumentalgoals of securing control of the diamond and goldfields (itself foreshadowed by the British


colonies’ construction of railways into the interior). This northward ‘spatial story’ was alsofamously elaborated by Rhodes’ fantasy of a chain of British-controlled territories spanning thelength of Africa, from the Cape-to-Cairo. Rhodes’ vision may have been fed by intimations of theAfrican continent’s still unrealized economic potential, but it also tapped into the self-consciouslyhistoricist underpinnings of the Empire59 whose intellectual apologists believed that the Britishhad inherited the burden of civilizing and settling the margins of the world from the Greeks andRomans. Geographical facts seemingly confirmed this vision: Britain not only controlled the twoends of the Cape-to-Cairo route already,60 but this axis led to the epicentre of the ancientcivilizations which were the exemplar of British imperialism, the Mediterranean. A key stoppingpoint along the way was Victoria Falls, whose ‘discovery’ became such an important episode inthe unfolding of imperial imagination, and to which Rhodes insisted the railway be constructedclose enough to allow its spray to fall on passing trains’ windows.61

Historically, all of these European ‘spatial stories’ about the sub-continent originated at itssouthern end, and moved northward. The project of civilizing and settling the continent (imperialwhite South Africa’s self-identified raison d’etre),62 logically, started from a place that had thestrongest ties with, and most resembled, the metropole. Until 1930, Cape Town was largestEuropean settlement in the continent, and, as we have seen, it remained the gateway to and fromSouth Africa for all who traveled between the sub-continent and Europe until the 1950s. Thus, theCape-to-Rand railway journey was not only geographically contiguous with the first segment ofthe Cape-to-Cairo journey, it spatialized a similar neo-Hegelian, civilizationist teleology, and it iseasy to see how the two trajectories became intertwined with each other in white colonial nationalSouth African’s imagination. The poetics of this overlap were captured by John Buchan’sdescription of post-War South Africa, in which he argued that the ‘romance (of the) great arteriesof the world which traverse countries and continents, unite different zones and climates, and passthrough extreme variations of humankind.blows most strongly on the paths which point to thePole-star’. Of all such roads that passed ‘through the widest extremes of weather (and carried)the direct impress of the shaping and audacious spirit of man’, Buchan argued, the greatest wasthe ‘Great North Road’ from the Cape to Egypt.63

Although this poetic intertwining of geographical and historical imagination in the Cape-to-Rand and Cape-to-Cairo ‘spatial stories’ made it possible for the former to stand for the latter, itdid so as more than just a synechdoche. The Cape-to-Rand journey not only linked ‘historical’imperial port-of-call and inland, elevated settler city-in-the-making within a single narrative, italso rhetorically rehearsed a way of getting from the one to the other. The journey itself,metaphorically, enacted a new identity, inviting the reader to abandon (or at least bracket)a subjectivity founded on habit and memory (i.e. tradition), and to embrace one characterized byinitiative, self-discipline and a sense of possibility (i.e. modernity). The Buchan passage capturesthe sense in which ‘northwardness’ was more than a compass direction and vector of geographicalmovement, but a psychogeographic disposition or orientation. The Cape-to-Rand accountsimultaneously invoked and grounded the essentially ‘homeless’ spatiality of imperialism, andtransposed it into a distinctly ‘South African’ way of inhabiting the sub-continent.

Here, it is useful to remember that the Cape-to-Rand journey was not only northward, butupward. Upwardness, the attainment of elevation, has both physical and psychic connotations;phenomenologically, it is registered in terms of overcoming e gravity, and objects that thwart andimpede. In this light, frequent references in the Cape-to-Rand accounts to the exact elevation of


a particular station, the struggle of the train as it climbed to the elevated interior (echoed by its‘joyous’ return to the coast), or indeed, glimpses of the train turning on itself as it found its waythrough mountains, were not accidental.64 The northbound train was not only a surrogate for thestriving, forward-looking traveler/citizen, but its route became a Proustian ‘way’, simultaneouslya subjectivity and a ‘place’. Crucially, this route was, pace Buchan, one that passed througha sequence of widely divergent situations, and therefore tested stamina and worth. This ‘passingthrough’ was simultaneously spatio-temporal and ‘biographical’; it called into being e or foundede within the same representation, both the character of traveler/citizen and the landscape. Thisimagined (national) ‘character’ was not only tied to sequence but also the manner of theovercoming required along the way. (In dramatic hermeneutics, ‘character’ is response tochanging circumstance, and is only revealed through ‘undergoing’.)

This reading of the northward, upward journey as a form of dramaturgical enactment allows usto unpack the full affective charge of the Cape-to-Rand accounts. Like white history, the narrativeof enactment ‘began’ in Cape Town, which, because of its European aspect and role as the naturalpoint-of-entry from Europe, was implicitly the point of departure for any description of thecountry. For similar reasons, the Western Cape hinterlands, whose climate, vegetation andseasons resembled southern Europe and which had been the home of nineteenth century Anglo-Dutch culture, are surrounded by a nostalgic sense of leaving behind something reposeful andfamiliar. This was followed by the effortful overcoming of the obstacle of the mountains which,much like the Alps that ‘revealed’ the Italian campagna to earlier European travelers,65 disclosedon their far side a kind of ‘land of promise’. In South Africa, however, this ‘land of promise’ wasemphatically not some landscape of dolce far niente, but the Karoo, an empty, infertile and‘uncanny’ region which attracts an extraordinary amount of attention in most accounts. Afternoting its archaic, inhospitable character e ‘a most ghastly place’ (like) ‘the morning afterCreation.just Nature, all red and naked’66 e most authors hinted that longer acquaintance (ofa lifetime, or even a day) would bring unexpected rewards. As one author wrote: ‘I wondered if,after all, the finest sight to be seen from the railway in South Africa is not, perhaps, a sunset on theGreat Karoo’.67 It should not surprise us to find that upward trains were scheduled to enter theKaroo at dawn, and left it at dusk.

Within the overall narrative of the Cape-to-Rand account, then, the crossing of the Hex RiverMountains and the Karoo played a crucial rhetorical function; they were unavoidable butnecessary rites that invoked both self-sufficiency, and the perseverance needed to overcomedeeply-rooted challenges to inclusive white nationhood.68 The Karoo became a landscape to begot through, somewhere between the ‘fond remembrance’ of the sheltered Cape valleys and theelevated metropolis of the Rand, which was reached on the second dawn of the journey. (Textualreminders that Johannesburg was ‘higher up than Zermatt’ drew on European notions of highplaces as locales where omniscience is granted, and transcendence is achieved.)69 On the Rand, itis rhetorically postulated, sentimental memory would be reconciled with practical action,facilitated by a benign climate and the riches beneath the African soil rendered valuable throughthe deployment of European technology and know-how. The terminus of the Cape-to-Rand isfigured as a physical and mental locale where an accommodation might be found betweenimperial memory and modern nationhood.

Thus, the topography of the Cape-to-Rand train journey metaphorically mediated a ‘journey tonationhood’ that helped sketch out and naturalize a future based on modernity and practical


action. Breaking down the dichotomous relationship between coastal margin and elevatedinterior, and overcoming topographical obstacles and empty space along the way, it renderedgeographical space legible and lent the journey itself affective meaning.

The train journey as liminal space of representation

This aspect of the Cape-to-Rand account returns us to epicentre of the northward, upwardjourney, the traveler ‘lulled to a drowsy ecstasy by the rocking train’.70 Unable to see exactlywhere the train was taking them (though hypnotized by occasional glimpses of the linedisappearing into the veld on curves), the author/traveler placed his or her trust in thetechnological agency of the South African Railways. In return, they were rewarded with anunfolding panorama that seemed, subjectively, to be discovered to them alone. With time on theirhands, and loosened from themselves, they fell to communing with the evanescent terrain slidingpast the window, open to what it told them. Both this invisible act of passing by71 and thetraveler’s story operated at the overlap between ‘unconsciously explored space’ (i.e. practice,habit) and ‘consciously explored space’ (i.e. ideology, description).72

This overlapping between the ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ space was not only a consequencein the corporeal circumstances of the journey, but also the positionality of the (white, English-speaking, colonial national) traveler/authors. Journeying between the imperial, coastal port-of-call and emerging interior metropolis, nostalgic memory and the potentiality of modernnationhood, the territory these urban author/travelers were describing e the ‘white man’s land’ ewas, ultimately, one they did not physically inhabit, and which their language only inadequatelydescribed.73 This sense of being ‘between worlds’ was mirrored by the fact that their journey was,like most of train journeys, an interval in the social fabric, in which individuals were temporarilyliberated from the normative practices and codes of daily life. The train compartment suspendedeach travelers’ social status e as ‘South African’ or imperial traveler, English-speaker orAfrikaner e and instead offered them a temporary, socially-unifying, sense of communitas thatwas, crucially, contingent on the way the train provided an exterior vantage point, a retreat fromand re-aggregation of the realities of living in South Africa.74

There was, in other words, much about the Cape-to-Rand train travelers’ situation that wasreminiscent of a state of liminality, which Turner associated with rituals and pilgrimages.Simultaneously outside and inside the national territory, and enfriezed by photographic scenes ofSouth Africa horizontally-aligned with the view from window, the increasingly-segregated SARtrain compartment provided a temporary but powerful sense of white solidarity.75 Over the courseof 30 hours, the traveler ‘passing by’ was (re)positioned relative to the national territory in a waythat was cognate with the transformation of the locally-attached individual into a patriotic citizenof a new nation. Simultaneously incarcerational and navigational, the SAR train compartmentbecame a liminal space, in which ideas and values latent in everyday life could be rehearsed,represented, and shared.76 The identity mediated by the experience of the train journey wascognate with being ‘in transit’, between Europe and Africa, simultaneously ‘British’ and ‘SouthAfrican’. First-hand accounts of this journey mediated this liminal subjectivity because, like otherforms of landscape representation, they functioned intersubjectively, as both mnemonic aids topersonal memory and anticipatory guides to future feeling and action.


The train journey across the arid Karoo and empty Highveld also posited an imaginative fusionof geography and history in which South Africa became a ‘frontier of civilization’.77 The ‘passingby’ of the railway journey juxtaposed dreams with technology, contemplation with movement eand, in South Africa, ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ with ‘untamed nature’. The forward movementof the train, like that of history, gave shape to what would otherwise have simply been unrelated,episodic experience. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the constantly changing view of thenation’s terrain from the carriage window and the visceral ‘rhythms of travel’ intimated thatdespite their aestheticized distance from it, the author/traveler was not an outsider in thislandscape. In addition to positing a sense of white communitas founded on the sharedappreciation of the same ‘untamed’ landscape, the northward, upward train encouraged a hopefulview of South Africa’s political and racial future. As the 1893 author quoted at the outset recalled,the experience of the journey into the interior filled him with:

a sense of travel in its positive sense.as the hours pass by and the clear noonday light beginsto deepen into sunset, you realize that you are going into a new country, and your feeling offellowship is stirred for the man in the wagon, who like yourself, has felt the attraction thatlies on the other side of the Karoo.78

This effect remained true some 30 years later, when another traveler observed: ‘From behinda train window. a man becomes an optimist’.79

Conclusion: the Cape-to-Rand journey as ‘lieu de memoire’

In my reading of the Cape-to-Rand account as a window onto the imaginative andrepresentational practices mobilized in the formation of geographically-based identities, I haveattempted to tease out what Nora has called ‘the links between the material base of existence andthe most elaborate productions of thought and culture’.80 I have tried to show how, in theseaccounts, the interplay between representation and geographical imagination mediated a range ofcultural memories and desires set in motion by the corporeal circumstances of travel. In them, wesee evidence of Harrison’s argument that the most powerful ‘effects’ of landscape representationoften derive from its non-cognitive content, that is, from metaphoric appeals to bodily experience.Harrison argues that it is in the automatism and involuntariness of these appeals that we find‘signs of the body’s resistance to ideology’, and that ‘(i)t is precisely at those moments whendistinctions between the technical and the metaphoric become hardest to sustain that the effects oflandscape are most vivid, and the legacies of landscape most pertinent’.81

The ‘landscape’ called into being by the Cape-to-Rand account, then, was one in which thetechnical and metaphorical were inseparable. Simultaneously, an assemblage of material andcultural practices, a geographical space of representation and a medium of cultural discourse, this‘landscape’ was not constructed de novo by these accounts, but neither did it exist before theadvent of the scheduled northbound train. As in all topographical description, this significationwas ultimately aporistic (i.e.‘.did you make that up, or did you find it?’). Consequently, thedurability of the discursive trope that mediated this ‘landscape’ derived as much from social andideological circumstance as from the materiality of the journey it referenced. Like the Benjaminianstory that transmits values during periods of cultural change, the northward, upward account was


told over and over again with only minor modifications. Situating and ritualizing lived experiencein historical time, it helped white South Africans negotiate the problematic transition to modernnationhood by saving a dimension of landscape experience e the ‘auratic’ e deemed to bethreatened by future arrangements. Consistently subjunctive e the implied mood is usually one ofsupposition, hypothesis, and possibility82 e these accounts refracted the underlying uncertaintythat haunted the political project of the ‘white man’s land’. For many Anglophone colonialnational South Africans and their overseas supporters, the state of becoming was, in a sense, theideal ‘state of the nation’. A subjectivity always ‘in transit’ avoids both the stagnation of beinghome-bound and the alienation of homelessness, but disappears when one commits to a city,region or country. Constant retelling the story of the journey discursively perpetuated this liminalsubjectivity,83 and re-inscribed the sub-continent’s topography as one of future possibility andpotentiality.

The perceived ‘naturalness’ of this subjectivity (which was also a disposition towards animagined territory) increased with the weight of this repetition over time, as well as the fact that somany white South Africans made the Cape-to-Rand journey themselves.84 It was also reinforcedby a wider web of ‘epiphenomena’85 associated with Rhodes’ Cape-to-Cairo axis and Buchan’s‘Great North Road’, several of which were mediated by the railway. One of the first large quasi-national events to capture the imagination of the whites living in the sub-continent, and describe itas a cultural space, was the ritualistic journey Rhodes’s funeral train made from Cape Town toBulawayo in 1901. From the 1920s onwards, one of the most iconic images of the SAR’scomprehensive, internationally-used photographic archive, which re-appeared in more guises andcontexts than any other, was that of the passenger train winding its way northward, up throughthe Cape mountains.86 And until recently, the Cape-to-Rand trains remained both importantagents, and consequences, of another peculiarly South African habit: the government’s yearlymigration between its legislative and administrative capitals of Cape Town and Pretoria. But theromance of Rhodes’ imaginary was refracted by other epiphenomena too, such as the northward,continent-raking views of many Herbert Baker buildings,87 and early white South Africanhistorians pre-occupation with Masonic history and symbolism iconography, believed to haveoriginated in Egypt.88

During a period when the sub-continent was being transformed from a loose association ofpastoral societies into a single modern, capitalist, urban-industrial nation-state, this array ofepiphenomena helped the northward, upward trope become an integral part of white SouthAfrican imaginary geography. Although it characterized one particular ‘way’ as significant, andmarginalized others, the journey became an important means by which the larger nationalterritory was socially spatialized. Transcending its original moorings, and becoming reinforcedeven as it was distorted, reversed, questioned and modified,89 the northward, upward journeybecame a synechdoche for a shared spatiality, an example of the ‘pathway’ or ‘concentrated node’whereby imagined nations’ forge links with their national territory through the circulation ofmemory.90 Like Nora’s lieux de memoire e cultural locii that compensate for modern society’sloss of a shared milieux de memoire e the northward, upward journey was not only a physicaltopography, it was also an idiom and event that could accommodate different readings over time.In this sense, it could be argued, it lent the southenorth axis some of the same culturalconnotations in South Africa as the eastewest axis did in North American during the nineteenthcentury.91


Roach has argued that lieux de memoire are shared imaginaries in which culturally-constructednarrative are protected and saved, ‘vortices of behaviour [that] canalize needs, desires and habitsin order to reproduce them’.92 It is hard to resist the conclusion that the durability of the Cape-to-Rand account was inseparable from its ability to save and reproduce the multi-scalar, involuntary,bodily ‘pleasures’ of the railway journey e pleasures that would have been inaccessible to almostall who were not white. Crucially, though, the Cape-to-Rand account embedded, as part ofa ‘white South African’ disposition, a trope that is inchoate to modern culture itself: theimpossible quest for authentic experience.93 The landscape described in this account was at oncean object of desire and an object that manifested the lack that fed that desire.

Notes

1. M. DeCerteau (S. Rendall transl.), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, 1984, 121.2. The phrase is Kipling’s.

3. Letters from South Africa, London, 1893, b-2. I am indebted to Jessica Dubow for bringing this text to myattention.

4. See for instance: R.A.W., Travelling by train: Veldside vignettes in variety, South African Railways & HarboursMagazine (July 1929) 1146e1147 (hereafter, Magazine); G. Gardner, Round in three thousand, Magazine

(December 1926). Travel in South Africa, SAR&H Publicity Dept. booklet, Johannesburg, 1921; F. Bell, SouthAfrica and the lure of the sun, Magazine (February 1928) 228e236; W.L. Speight, The true land of hope and glory,Magazine (July 1925) 703e710; S. Kirkland, From the carriage window: scenic pageantry beside the line, Magazine

(October 1930) 1445e1448.5. The Sunshine Route: 5,000 Miles Through South Africa Over the South African Railways, Johannesburg, nd;

Ca.1935, 27e28.

6. D. Fairbridge, A Pilgrims Way in South Africa, London, 1928.7. D. Fairbridge, A Pilgrims Way in South Africa, London 1928, 29e30.8. For a discussion of this, see J. Foster, Landscape phenomenology and the imagination of a New South Africa on

Parktown ridge, Journal of African Studies 55, 2 (1996) 93e126.9. V. Stent, The rush to the sea, by the Union Limited, Magazine (January 1924).10. London, 1948.11. By this time, it was possible to fly to South Africa from Europe.

12. Morton, In Search of South Africa, 10.13. See for instance W. Holtby, In praise of trains, in: P. Berry and A. Bishop (Eds), Testament of a Generation: The

Journalism of Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby, London, 1985, 276e278.14. R. Fuller, South Africa at Home, London, 1908, 3.15. The destination shifted from Kimberley to Johannesburg as the reach of the railways increased.16. Y. Lotman (A. Shulman transl.), Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Bloomington, 1990, 39.

17. Or, as David Lodge puts it, ‘no message that is decoded without effort is likely to be valued’; see his Modes ofModern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature, Ithaca, 1977, 119.

18. See for instance T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Berkeley, 1991.19. See for instance A. Blunt and G. Rose (Eds), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies,

New York/London, 1994; G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining ofMasculinities, London, 1994; S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, London,1991; R. Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure, London, 1997; G. Kearns, Imperial travel:

geography and travel in the work of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder, Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers, NS 22 (1997) 450e472.

20. See for instance P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Exploration of Landscape and History, New York, 1988,

230e260; J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape & the Sense of Place, 1730e1840, Cambridge, 1972, 84e97.


21. J. Duncan and D. Gregory, Introduction, in: J. Duncan and D. Gregory (Eds), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel

Writing, London, 1999, 4e5.22. J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London, 1990, 12.23. Though see J. Foster, John Buchan’s Hesperides: landscape rhetoric and the aesthetics of bodily experience on the

South African Highveld, 1901e3, Ecumene 5, 3 (1998) 323e347.24. R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London, 1996, 17.25. R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London, 1996, 8.26. B. Bender, in: B. Bender and M. Winer (Eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, Oxford, 2001, 8e13.27. See for example, D. Atkinson and D. Cosgrove, Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city, nation and empire at

the Vittorio-Emmanuele II monument in Rome, 1870e1945, Annals of American Association of Geographers 88(1998) 28e49.

28. A ‘performative’ is ‘a contingent act.that makes something happen that was not predictable from the elementsthat were there to start with’; J.H. Miller, Topographies, Berkeley, 1995, 157.

29. See for instance, C. Jacobs, Mapping in the mind: the earth from ancient Alexandria, in: D. Cosgrove (Ed.),

Mappings, London, 1999, 24e49.30. On the ambiguous relationship between landscape representation, experience and imagination, see J. Corner, The

agency of mapping, Mappings, 221e225.31. Miller, Topographies, 252.

32. Thus, for many people, Mississippi’s ‘character’ is inseparable from that evoked by Faulkner’s Yokanpatawphanovels, Dorset’s identity is bound up with Hardy’s Wessex, and Paris is irrevocably recast through the eyes ofBalzac and Proust. Miller, Topographies, 16.

33. J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven, 1988, 5.34. S. Dubow, Colonial nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the rise of ‘South Africanism’, 1902e1910, History

Workshop Journal 43 (1997) 53.

35. See B. Schwartz, The romance of the Veld, in: A. Bosco and A. May (Eds), The Round Table: The Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy, London, 1997, 65e125.

36. See B. Nasson, The South African War/Anglo-Boer War, 1899e1902, and political memory in South Africa, in:

T. Ashplant, G. Dawson and M. Roper (Eds), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, London, 2000,111e127. On the concept of ‘narrative of descent’, see P. Duara, Historicizing national identity, or who imagineswhat and when, in: G. Eley and R.G. Suny (Eds), Becoming National: A Reader, Oxford, 1996, 168.

37. See P. Henshaw, From the borders to the berg: John Buchan, nature, empire and South African nationalism,

Journal of African Studies 62, 1 (2003) 3e32.38. See E. Kaufmann, Naturalizing the nation: the rise of naturalistic nationalism in the United States and Canada,

Comparative Studies in Society and History (1998) 689.

39. See S. Dubow, Imagining the New South Africa in the era of reconstruction, in: D. Omissi and A. Thompson (Eds),The Impact of the South African War, Basingstoke, 2002, 86e87.

40. See O. Zimmer, In search of natural identity: Alpine landscape and the reconstruction of the Swiss nation,

Comparative Studies in Society and History (1998) 637e665.41. S. Dubow and S. Marks, Patriotism of place and race: Hancock on South Africa, in: D. Low (Ed.) Keith Hancock:

The Legacies of an Historian, Melbourne, 2001, 163.42. Dubow, Imagining the New South Africa, 83.

43. On the role of railways in nation-building, see J. Foster, ‘Land of contrasts’ or ‘home we have always known’?: theSAR&H and the imaginary geography of white South African nationhood, 1910e1930, Journal of South AfricanStudies 29 (2003) 657e680.

44. Bourdieu, quoted in Shields, Places on the Margin, 96.45. See Foster, Land of contrasts, 19e20.46. W. Benjamin introduced the notion of ‘aura’ in The work of art in the age of reproduction, Illuminations, London,

1970; H. Arendt (Ed.), (H. Zohn transl.), 217e252. For recent discussion of this topic see A. Benjamin, Art,Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference, London, 1991; A. Latham, The power ofdistraction: distraction, tactility and habit in the work of Walter Benjamin, Environment & Planning D: Society and

Space 17 (1999) 451e473.


47. See W. Benjamin, The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov, Illuminations, 83e107.48. For a discussion of the multivalent effects of train travel, see W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The

Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1986.49. Holtby, In Praise of Trains, 278.

50. The great twentieth century landscape designer Geoffrey Jellicoe equated ‘the most agreeable landscape sensation’ ethat of perambulating on a terrace overlooking a view e with the view from the railway carriage. In both of thesesituations, he argued, ‘we rely on our subconscious to keep our faculties alert, and allow our mind to wander ontoagreeable subjects if the landscape is good; disagreeable if not’. See his Studies in Landscape Design, Oxford, 1960,

82e3.51. See for instance Kirkland, From the carriage window.52. See J.H. van den Berg, The human body and the significance of human movement: a phenomenological study,

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 7 (1952) 169e171.53. P. Kerr (Lord Lothian) quoted in Dubow, Imagining the New South Africa, 83.54. C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, New Haven, 1980, 20e21.

55. K. Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge, MA, 1960, 1e13.56. Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, 115e116.57. I. Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, Princeton, 2000, 167.58. See De Certeau, Everyday Life, 115e130.

59. See P. Merrington, A staggered orientalism: the Cape-to-Cairo imaginary, Poetics Today 22, 2 (2001) 323e364.60. Egypt had been occupied by Britain since 1882.61. See J. McGregor, The Victoria Falls 1900e1940: landscape tourism and the geographical imagination in Southern

Africa, Journal of South African Studies 29 (2003) 717e738.62. See for instance S. Dubow, A commonwealth of science: the British Association in South Africa, 1905 and 1929, in:

S. Dubow (Ed.), Science and Society in Southern Africa, Manchester, 2000, 66e99.

63. J. Buchan, The Africa Colony: Studies in Reconstruction, London, 1903, 146e148.64. Because a train’s performance is sensitive to gradient, one of the arts of laying out the line is the attainment of

elevation without excessive divergence from the most direct route.

65. C. Chard and H. Langdon (Eds), Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600e1830, New Haven,1996, Introduction.

66. Quoted in Dubow, Imagining the New South Africa, 83.67. Kirkland, From the Carriage Window, 1448.

68. The Karoo was the ideal landscape of ‘possibility’ precisely because, historically, it was without Africanpastoralists.

69. S. Schama gives as examples of this Ovid on Mount Olympus, and Petrarch on Mount Ventoux; see Landscape and

Memory, London, 1995, 419.70. Kirkland, From the carriage window, 1445.71. De Certeau, Everyday Life, 97.

72. Benjamin, Some motifs in Baudelaire, Illuminations.73. As J.M. Coetzee has argued, the central problem of twentieth century English South African writing was whether

a European language e and by extension, culture e could ever find a home in Africa. White Writing, 176.74. Or a ‘decentering/estranging device which allows an exterior vantage point from which to judge success and failure’.

See V. Turner, Dramas, Fields & Metaphors, Ithaca, 1974, 13e14.75. South African trains only became fully segregated in the 1920s. See G.H. Pirie, Racial segregation on South African

Trains, 1910e1927: entrenchment and resistance, South African Historical Journal 20 (1988) 75e93.76. This is epitomized by the account in which three different passengers discuss the relative merits of various parts of

South Africa visible from the train. See Kirkland, From the carriage window.77. De Certeau, Everyday Life, 111e114.

78. Letters from South Africa, 5.79. R.A.W., Traveling by Train, 1146.80. Quoted in L. Kritzman (Ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past eVol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, New

York, 1996, xvexxiv.


81. C. Harrison, The effects of landscape, in: Mitchell (Ed.), Landscape and Power, 211e212.

82. Websters New World Dictionary.83. ‘Habit enframes our contemplation, providing a space in which doubt may end’. See P. Harrison, Making sense:

embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2001) 512.

84. Collective memory is most powerful when it originates in joint action; see M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory,L. Coser (Ed.), Chicago, 1999.

85. For discussion of this concept, see Merrington, Staggered Orientalism.86. See Foster, Land of contrasts. These images echoed commissioned paintings that appeared in the Illustrated London

News and The Sketch during the 1920s.87. First seen at Rhodes’ house ‘Groote Schuur’ in 1899, and repeated later in the memorial to him built nearby, as well

as houses on Parktown Ridge in Johannesburg. See Foster, Landscape Phenomenology, 104e112. The poetics of

this landscape gesture were captured by Violet Markham’s description of Groote Schuur. ‘In front lies that vastexpanse of country over the Cape Flats to the distant Hottentot’s Holland Mountains, the beauty of which eludesdescription. Once long ago.the owner who loved it with so deep a passion said to me that he thought God in

Heaven had no scene so fair to look upon as that view from the house. The bronze figure on the galloping horsefronts the far horizon with eager challenge. The hand of the rider is shading his eyes and he is looking fixedly,intently, towards the north. [At night] (u)nder the full splendour of the moon, the questioning, impatient figure onthe horse flung its perpetual challenge across the heart of Africa into a night which was as clear as day.’ See The

South African Scene, London, 1913, 24.88. P. Merrington, Pageantry and Primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge, and the aesthetics of Union, Journal of South

Africa Studies 21 (1995) 650e651. These two phenomena converged in the glyph Baker used on the title page of his

biography of Rhodes and the walls of South Africa House in London and Rhodes House in Oxford, whichincorporated the Southern Cross, the source of the Nile, the Mountains of the Moon and the Zimbabwe bird.

89. On this phenomenon, see Shields, Places on the Margin, 207e251.

90. N. Johnson, Cast in stone: monuments, geography and nationalism, in: J. Agnew (Ed.), Political Geography: AReader, New York, 1997, 361.

91. In North America, Thoreau observed, ‘we go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature,

retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure’; quotedin E. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Bloomington, 1993,250.

92. J. Roach, Cities of the Dead, New York, 1996, 27e28.93. This is the overall argument in J. Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism: Literature, and the Ways to

Culture, 1800e1918, Oxford, 1999.

northward, upward: stories of train travel, and the journey towards white south african nationhood,...

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