Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Remembering the Khoikhoi Victory over Dom Francisco de Almeida at the Cape in 1510: Luís de Camões and Robert Southey
- 2 French Representations of the Cape ‘Hottentots’: Jean Tavernier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Levaillant
- 3 The Scottish Enlightenment and Colonial Governance: Adam Smith, John Bruce and Lady Anne Barnard
- 4 African Land for the American Empire: John Adams, Benjamin Stout and Robert Semple
- 5 Historical and Literary Reiterations of Dutch Settler Republicanism
- 6 Literature and Cape Slavery
- 7 History and the Griqua Nation: Andries Waterboer and Hendrick Hendricks
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
1 - Remembering the Khoikhoi Victory over Dom Francisco de Almeida at the Cape in 1510: Luís de Camões and Robert Southey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Remembering the Khoikhoi Victory over Dom Francisco de Almeida at the Cape in 1510: Luís de Camões and Robert Southey
- 2 French Representations of the Cape ‘Hottentots’: Jean Tavernier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Levaillant
- 3 The Scottish Enlightenment and Colonial Governance: Adam Smith, John Bruce and Lady Anne Barnard
- 4 African Land for the American Empire: John Adams, Benjamin Stout and Robert Semple
- 5 Historical and Literary Reiterations of Dutch Settler Republicanism
- 6 Literature and Cape Slavery
- 7 History and the Griqua Nation: Andries Waterboer and Hendrick Hendricks
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
In a speech delivered to the South African National Assembly to mark the retirement of Nelson Mandela on 26 March 1999, South African president Thabo Mbeki referred to the victory of the Khoikhoi over the Portuguese Viceroy Dom Francisco de Almeida and his forces in Table Bay on 1 March 1510:
We are blessed because you [Mandela] have walked along the road of our heroes and heroines. For centuries our own African sky has been dark with suffering and foreboding. But because we have never surrendered, for centuries the menace in our African sky has been brightened by the light of our stars. In the darkness of our night, the victory of the Khoikhoi in 1510 here in Table Bay, when they defeated and killed the belligerent Portuguese admiral and aristocrat, Dom Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy in India, has lit our skies for ever.
Mbeki's tribute to this Khoikhoi victory is unusual, as Almeida's defeat at the Cape has been remembered only sporadically in the last 500 years. I examine three moments when it was remembered – by Portuguese writers in the sixteenth century, by British writers in the period 1770–1830, and by Southern African writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Literary treatments of the early Portuguese explorers rounding the Cape have largely ignored Almeida's defeat, and have instead repeated versions of the mythic tale of Adamastor, the exiled Titan confined to Table Mountain in eternal punishment by Zeus for threatening to rape the white nymph Thetis.
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- Information
- Imagining the Cape ColonyHistory Literature and the South African Nation, pp. 10 - 34Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011