For as long as Europeans have subjected Africa to colonial interests, the dark continent has been a lumbering obstacle to their narratives of progress. In the process, it has of course also been a site for the projections, fantasies and ideological violations of those who managed to land on its recalcitrant shores.
Colonial representations of Africa – in travel literature, art and scientific treatises – have figured it variously as penetrable female, geographical Id, and as an intractable landscape whose properties manifested, to the minds of its colonial “discoverers”, in the physiognomy and intellectual “backwardness” of its indigenous people.
An epic painting by Cyril Coetzee, recently unveiled at Wits University’s Cullen Library, takes a chapter of this history and re-presents it with subversive wit and rich allegorical reference. Coetzee’s T’kama-Adamastor, which took three years to complete, is painted on a 27m2 canvas. Mounted on the north wall of the library’s reading room, it exists in raucous dialogue with two other massive canvases that have dominated the library walls since the 1930s.
The first – painted by Amshewitz in 1937 – depicts Vasco da Gama’s departure from Lisbon in 1497; the second, donated to the library in 1934, portrays the arrival of the 1820 Settlers at Algoa Bay.
Inspired in part by Andre Brink’s 1993 novella The First Life of Adamastor, Coetzee has created a parodic riposte to Amshewitz’s Departure of Da Gama. Departure draws its inspiration from canto four of The Lusiads – Cames’s epic poem in praise of Da Gama. Coetzee’s painting explores the ideological underpinnings of canto five, in which Adamastor, the belligerent spirit of the Cape of Storms, curses Da Gama’s endeavour.
Coetzee explains: “In Cames’s poem, Adamastor tells Da Gama he’s angry because he’s been jilted by Tethys, the moonlight white sea nymph whom he loves. As a result of her trickery, he has become the elemental spirit who guards the southern promontory of Africa, making access to its shores as difficult as possible for sailors. Obviously, for the Europeans, Adamastor symbolised the dangerous `African’ threshold they had to cross en route to India, and his presence becomes a kind of blueprint for Europe’s racist semiotics.”
In Coetzee’s fantasy narrative, which mimes the elaborate visual symbolism of 17th- century European travelogue illustrations, Adamastor is re-cast as T’kama – the Khoi chieftan and anti-hero of Brink’s novel, whose people witness the arrival of Da Gama’s ships. Tethys is refigured as a white woman off one of these ships, with whom T’kama falls in love.
As in Brink’s novel, the relationship between Adamastor and Tethys is at the narrative centre of Coetzee’s tale: their ill-fated love (T’kama has his penis bitten off by a crocodile, and is later murdered by the Portuguese) is an allegory of the violence in the encounter between Europe and Africa.
In Coetzee’s painting, T’kama’s chiefdom is a world in which the natural order is contaminated because of his amorous contact: sheep die, a jackal lurks in the shrubbery, skulls litter the earth. While the lovers are depicted in human form, the Spanish sailors are all figured as large and leering birds.
“This is also,” says Coetzee, “a reversal of the moral order, a breakdown of tribal insularity.”
Postmodernism has taught us that history is not a discrete narrative, but an accumulation of versions of events. As one of these versions, achieved through a visual story that reads, like a page, from left to right, T’kama-Adamastor is an inspired addition to the Cullen’s stuffy gallery. Implicit in its tongue-in-cheek humour is a savage critique of histories that silence and blind the “others” whom they represent, a contestation that skews our perspective away from Europe’s colonial horizons.