Decolonising Adamastor: From The Lusiads to Thirteen Cents

In 1999 and 2000, two texts appeared that aimed to grapple with post-apartheid South Africa as a new nation, and that doubled back on national myths of origin. One of these, a massive painting entitled T’kama Adamastor by Cyril Coetzee, commissioned for the William Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, focused on the figure of Adamastor that had been created by Luís Vaz de Camões in his epic poem The Lusiads (1572), but as reinterpreted by André Brink in his novel Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor (1993). In 2000, another text appeared that re-examined and reimagined creation myths, and also referenced the Adamastor story. This was K. Sello Duiker’s award-winning debut novel Thirteen Cents. As I argue, Thirteen Cents presents a radical break with the ways in which the Adamastor story has been imagined by white writers and artists. Part of the aim of the essay is to revisit and assess Andries Walter Oliphant’s critical interventions on the question of a national South African culture, and on the Adamastor story itself.