Mapping Caffraria: Constructing an Appropriable World

Abstract

In this paper, I trace the political economy of the racially derogatory term ka*** across early maps and early South African farm literature, the Bantu migration, and the Khoi and San resurgence movements. I engage the map as a “controlled fiction” through which literary articulations of white entitlement and identification with the land in early farm novels, representations of rural whiteness in karoo writings, and the Khoe revival movement are framed. Harley writes, “the apparent duplicity of maps–their ‘slipperiness’ – is not some idiosyncratic deviation from an illusory perfect map. Rather it lies at the heart of cartographic representation” (Harley 2002: 36). I engage conquest, imperial expansion and expropriation as driven by a Humanist logic built on an antiblack structural antagonism and the central function of cartographic worldmaking. Maps from the early 1400 during the age of conquest detail the territory across the African continent, from contemporary Senegal to Egypt as ‘Caffraria’, a term derived alongside the international law justification for colonial expropriation of Terratorium nullius, ‘empty/unpossessed lands. I argue that through this naming, Africa and its people are thus pre-determined as ‘terra-nullius’, a metonym for emptiness and non-sovereignty. I argue that the current indigenous revival movement in Southern Africa rehearses literary constructions of the African indigene and thus calcifies the racial logics, cartographic worldmaking, and colonial justifications for the expropriation of land.