Terra Nulla: Contesting the South African Colonial Landscape Miriam Aronowicz, University of Toronto To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change. We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom. That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict, and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression. - Nelson Mandela, Inauguration Address, Pretoria, South Africa, 10 May 1994 When one speaks of landscape, or a landscape tradition, it is generally in reference to the European concept of placing land at a distance in order to look upon it. The term does not have an equivalent in any of the indigenous South African languages.i Nonetheless, landscape, land, and habitat are indelibly connected to the South African psyche and sense of place. Yet landscape as a field of artistic inquiry is still dominated by European models. Therefore, the African landscapes that most commonly circulate are generally pastoral or plantation scenes created by Europeans for Western audiences, or images embedded with a problematic colonial gaze. Unquestionably, these types of work are crucial to the larger narrative but their over representation continues to bolster the myths of the colonial imagination while reinforcing a primitive paradigm. The notion that non-western peoples are marginal to the advancing world and remain represented, collected, and studied as distantly eroded cultures of the past is what James Clifford calls the “salvage/pastoral setup,” something this paper aims to avoid.ii i Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2006), 229. ii James Clifford, “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 122. 1 Essentially always an “instrument or agent of cultural power,” landscape is now accepted as an active rather than passive entity.iii The postmodernization of the field has demonstrated that issues of race, class, and gender are always interwoven and encoded into the physical terrain.iv Thereby, any image of landscape is always a representation of itself and simultaneously an image of something else.v Far before the establishment of any South African landscape tradition, South Africa’s problematic history of segregation was intimately tied to the nationalization of nature. Hence, the remnant of a hedge of almonds that now stands in Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch Gardens remains one of the most pertinent symbols of the land’s relationship to imperial power. The story of the hedge begins in 1660 when the first settler Jan van Riebeek planted it. Initially the Khoikhoi, who inhabited the land upon the Dutch arrival, willingly traded their sheep and cattle for the tobacco and copper offered to them by the Dutch East India Company. In 1659 when the Khoikhoi realized that the Dutch settlement was a permanent encroachment on their land they attacked the settlements in fierce resistance. The conflict led Jan van Riebeek to plant the nine- kilometer long wild almond hedge to protect the Dutch settlement from the “African Hottentots.” Only granting the Khoikhoi limited access to the land through select checkpoints along the hedge’s borders, the almond hedge became the epitome of landscape as a tool of social control. David Goldblatt’s photograph of this tangled semi-tended bush belies what is namely a cordon sanitaire, the original symbol of oppression and containment that characterized the South African landscape.vi The historical specificity of his title, Remnant of a hedge planted in 1660 to iii W.J.T. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-2. 4 Dianne Harris, “The Postmodernization of Landscape: A Critical Historiography,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:3 (1999): 435. Harris describes the postmodernization of landscape as a broad range of theoretical developments that include semiotic and linguistic theories which stress the contextualization of texts, feminist and postcolonial theories which focus on the margins of society; poststructuralism works to unmask the pretended neutrality of a space, as well as variations of theories of relativism and Marxism. See Harris, 435. v W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscapes,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 8. vi Okwui Enwezor, “The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation: Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History,” in Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, ed. Sophie Perryer (New York: Museum for African Art, 2004), 28. 2 keep the indigenous Khoikhoi out of the first European settlement in South Africa (1993), also clearly illustrates Mitchell’s argument that the image of landscape is essentially always a representation of something else. In this example it becomes the symbol for the intersections of land, space, place, and power that defined South Africa for centuries. To quote Michel de Certeau, for the purpose of this paper “space is a practiced place.”vii In addition, Irit Rogoff states that “power produces a space which then gets materialized as place.”viii Thus, essentially the South African landscape is a place that becomes an activated space through movement, narration, symbolism, and signs. Since the end of apartheid, the South African landscape legally became a shared place. This paper begins to address the ways in which modern and contemporary South African artists use the land as a tool to renegotiate space and place in the country’s post-apartheid terrain. Beginning with South Africa’s early colonial landscape tradition and moving on to consider South Africa’s most prominent contemporary artist, William Kentridge, I explore landscapes as spaces of memory. Departing from the early colonial landscapes artists’ problematic renderings of space, I address how contemporary artists reclaim the genre, finding their own tools and languages with which to speak to the land and reactivate its sites of trauma. The trajectory of South African colonial landscape art is often compared to the colonial art of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.ix Its national landscapes are problematic constructions of colonial spaces rendered through naturalized idyllic and emptied nature. The earliest documented landscape paintings in the western sense of the term date to the arrival of the first South African settlers in 1652, and were basically travelogues and documentary images of vii W.J.T. Mitchell, preface to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), x. viii Irit Rogoff, introduction to Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 22. ix For more information see Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 3 the new uncharted lands.x As the tradition of landscape painting began to gain prominence in Europe, documents began to emerge indicating an artistic crisis in the colonies. According to nineteenth-century sources there was an inability to locate established European painting conventions within the new African terrain. One of the first explorers to leave a comprehensive account of his experience in the vast hinterland of South Africa was the British researcher and painter William Burchell. Arriving at the Cape of Good Hope between 1811 and 1813, his initial stop was in the place that is now the Botanic Gardens, on which he commented: The view from this spot…is the most picturesque of any I had seen in the vicinity of Cape Town. The beauties here displayed to the eye could scarcely be represented by the most skillful pencil; for this landscape possessed a character that would require the combined talents of a Claude and a Both.xi His initial reactions to the South African landscape are recorded only in words, yet in the words of an enthusiast whose first descriptions seemed to have located the Western tradition of the picturesque. Yet, as soon as Burchell left Cape Town his writing changed, showing disenchantment with the “desolate, wild and singular landscape,” that characterized the majority of the land. He writes, “in Africa we look in vain for those mellow beautiful tints with which the sun dyes the forests of England.”xii Thus, despite his initial exposure to the land, the majority of Africa did not correspond with the established conventions of the British picturesque. According to Burchell it was missing the deep greens that characterized northern European landscapes, the foliage lacked luster because of the dry climate, the light was too bright and the absence of water created a lack of reflective surfaces and atmospheric moisture. The significance of Burchell’s x For the purpose of this paper I am beginning the history of landscape tradition in South Africa with the first European settlement. Yet, as a disclaimer, that is not to say that the history prior to the settlement is not worth studying. There are studies on South African indigenous San Rock Art which point to a long-standing tradition of art on the continent prior to the first settlement.