On 18 November 2003, South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki delivered a speech to France's National Assembly in which he asserted the connection between eighteenth-century European history and twentieth-century South African politics. According to Mbeki, under apartheid, those struggling against ‘racist white minority rule […] would indentify with the French Revolution and draw inspiration’, and after the end of apartheid, those struggling for economic justice required ‘a realignment of power and what Robespierre called the empire of reason […] our own Age of Enlightenment, with its own Jean-Jacques Rousseau’. As Mbeki was asking for French investment in Southern Africa, his words might be construed as no more than strategic flattery. But his views are shared by many scholars of the eighteenth century, and are expressed concisely in the title of a recent collection of essays, Postcolonial Enlightenment, in which the editors declare that ‘Postcolonial theory invites us to reconsider the Enlightenment both as an eighteenth century phenomenon and as a concept that bears on modern political formations’.

This book takes up the invitation to reconsider the Enlightenment as both an eighteenth-century phenomenon and a concept bearing on modern political formations by reading the histories and literatures of the Cape Colony during the period 1770–1830 through the critical lenses of the post-apartheid South African nation.