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Housouana Woman, engraving from Travels into the Interior of Africa Via the Cape of Good Hope by Le Vaillant
Le Vaillant is moved “to the very depths of soul” by this display of selfless egalitarianism. Throwing himself into the arms of the chief, who had also shared his brandy, he “flooded his venerable face with … tears”.Travels into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope His “almost savage” childhood in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana , partly accounts for his free spirit and love of the wild.
In a pre-photographic age he gave vivid pictorial expression to Africa’s startling realities. He was a gifted illustrator, and broke new ground by mounting his specimens, preserved with arsenic soap, in lifelike poses., notes that the samples Le Vaillant gathered on his three South African forays between 1781 and 1784 provided 10% of the collection of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and almost all its African birds.
But he also runs into the smoking ruins of settler homesteads destroyed by “Caffres” – Xhosa – during the First Frontier War. The Cape administration is presented as powerless to check “the abuse and cruel tyranny of the colonists”, while Jan van Riebeeck is shown as a devious trickster who “covered the lip of the poison cup with the honey” of brandy and tobacco.
In the Gonaquas’ lost Eden, perfect equality and shared resources “ensure that everybody’s fate is exactly the same”. This includes the chief, who is installed by the tribe rather than by succession, and obeyed only if his counsel is considered valid. Matrimony among the Gonaqua followed the Rousseauian model of a “marriage of the heart”. Lacking all sacramental significance, it needed only mutual consent to transact or dissolve.
The precise nature of his liaison with Narina is left teasingly unclear. In one erotically charged scene, the naked Gonaqua women, gambolling and “diving with marvellous skill” in the Groot Vis River, submerge themselves out of natural modesty when he approaches. Retrieving herLater, this “beautiful prankster” teases him, a non-swimmer, by holding out on the opposite bank with a bird he has shot.
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