A life elsewhere: figurations of the journey in Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

Abstract

Abstract Wilma Stockenström’s novel The Expedition to the Baobab Tree provides a first-person account of a fifteenth-century slave woman who was abducted in childhood from her forest village, sold in a Swahili coastal city to a succession of masters, and has come to inhabit the hollow of a baobab tree in the interior of the land after a failed expedition to find a trade route to a mercantile city rumored to be located in the distant northwest of the continent. The life story of journeys undertaken by the narrator is mirrored in the formal crossings of genres that include slave narrative, colonial travelogue, adventure fiction and nature writing. Taking as point of departure the English translation of an Afrikaans novel, and the implication of an Afrikaans writer’s use of a first-person point of view in telling the life story of a slave woman, the paper discusses the significance of the novel’s crossing of linguistic, cultural, and generic boundaries, and relates this to its thematic preoccupation with the crossing of the boundary between culture and nature.