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The Photographic Presentation of South Africa, 1874 and 1923
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2010
Extract
What is, and was, South Africa? This is clearly not a question which has a single answer, nor has it ever had one. On the one hand, there is a constitutional answer. In these terms, South Africa did not exist before the creation of the Union in 1910 and since then has been the state created then, transformed into the Republic of South Africa in 1961 and transformed once again with the ending of white minority rule in 1994. On the other hand, there are innumerable answers, effectively those to be found in the minds of all South Africans, and indeed all those foreigners who have an opinion about the country. Nevertheless, these opinions are not random. Clearly, there are regularities to be found within them, such that it is possible, in principle, to describe at the very least the range of answers to this question which were held within particular groups of the population, either within the country or outside it, and also to use specific sources, emanating from a single person, or group of individuals, as exemplary of the visions held by a far wider group.
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- Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2001
References
Notes
1 Bunn, David, ‘ “Our Wattled Cot”: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringles's African Landscapes’ in: W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago/London 1994).Google Scholar
2 Most notably in C. Louis Leipoldt's evocations of the landscape of the Cedarberg and Clanwilliam district in the western Cape, the area where he grew up. See Kannemeyer, J.C., Leipoldt: ʻn Lewensverhaal (Cape Town 1999).Google Scholar
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4 The Story of an African Farm, first published in 1885.
5 E.g. Toorberg (Cape Town 1986), Kikoejoe (Cape Town 1996).
6 References A45-Xg-48 and A50-XPVf-106. My thanks to Ms Mieke Jansen for alerting me to these volumes, and for comments on the manuscript of this article.
7 The album actually referred to this place as Wippener, presumably because the Cape Town compilers were unaware of the correct spelling of this recently founded town.
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14 These photographs were after all presented in the interval between the Rand revolt of 1922, a major strike largely about attempts to reduce white labour participation in the gold mines, and the formation of the Pact government in 1924, whose programme saw a major institutionalisation of segregation.
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