Cape Littoral colonial constructions of barrenness and desire in Therese Benadé’s Kites of Good Fortune and Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book

Abstract

ABSTRACT Early histories of the Cape refer to a remote littoral; uninhabitable land with a difficult terrain and hostile environment. Yet, the Cape Littoral was also described as desirable by the Dutch East India Company for its establishment as a provision fort on the sea route to Asia. This paper examines how two novels published in the post-apartheid present (Kites of Good Fortune (2004) and The Slave Book (1998)), reimagine the inventions of these two simultaneous yet contrasting positions of the Cape Littoral. I show how the representation in Kites of Good Fortune reiterates the construction of the hardships of the Cape Littoral for the colonial administrator and the manumitted slave/descendants, and consequently reproduces the oppressive exploitation of its land and wealth. I use this analysis on the colonial constructions of marginality as a basis to understand how The Slave Book unsettles constructions of inhospitability in its imagination of narratives of patriarchal white desire. The analysis exposes how the novels overlap in their representations of undesirability and hospitability. This discussion considers these narratives as representations of continued forms of violence across the Enlightenment, slavery and colonial eras, and which, through literary representation haunt the post-apartheid present. I deploy re-memory as a metaphor that demands engagement with the structural violence of slavery and colonialism.