October 16 - 18, 2007 

Hyper-Vulnerability and Narratives of Travel in Southern Africa

This paper will explore textual and visual recreations of the contact zone in southern Africa. I will examine Portuguese shipwreck survivor narratives from the sixteenth century, recreations of key early contact scenes in Luis de Camoes’ Os Lusiadas, and selections from a later corpus of writing about southern Africa--by British women travelers. I will argue that the black peril narratives of early twentieth century South Africa echo an attachment to narratives of "female hyper-vulnerability" that were a mainstay feature of early exploration age and contact texts. 

Anxiety about women’s presence in under-regulated frontier spaces or recent European settlements in southern Africa was dramatically countered by most British women’s travel texts about this region produced in the last half of the nineteenth century. In this period of high imperialism, which produced suggestively titled works such as Charlotte Barter’s Alone Among the Zulus (1865), European women worked hard to assauge readers’ fears about women’s safety upon which other discourses foundered. These texts are important to understanding how British efforts to proclaim dominion in South Africa hinged, in part, on securing the belief that a sphere of safety or inviolability would surround women’s movements through the frontier spaces of southern Africa. 

These traveling, writing women were the vanguard force that created what was understood to be a trustworthy representation of spaces in which women might safely settle, as male travelers and hinterland explorers expended little or no effort in tracing out the social circumstances or expectations for physical safety which settler women would likely encounter should they emigrate to southern Africa. That is, male travelers evidently did not perceive their reports as addressing emigrating or soon-to-emigrate women, nor were they bent on reassuring the home-country elite about the safety of women already resident in South Africa. Inthre three time periods under discussionin this paper, I will show how the figure of the shipwrecked, traveling or otherwise self-itinerizing woman was manipulated in the service of imperial ambitions or imperial apologies.

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