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"The affections of a man of feeling in the midst of the wilderness": François Le Vaillant on the South African frontier. François Le Vaillant, Travels into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. Vol. 1 . Trans, and ed. Ian Glenn. Van Riebeeck Society second series 38. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2007. ISBN 0-9585134-2-2. 194+lxvpp.
Concluding his Introduction to the first volume of this welcome new translation of Le Vaillant' s Travels, Ian Glenn declares: "Le Vaillant is much more our contemporary than Schreiner or many later writers seem to be" (lxiii). Earlier Glenn sums up the double disadvantage that has for decades militated against the proper recognition of Le Vaillant' s importance in our literary traditions: "Right-wing settler ideology disqualifies Le Vaillant as meddling creole Frenchman, or presents him [. . .] as simple adventurer and naturalist, while a later generation of anti-colonialist discourse critics is happy to present him in the right-wing' s simplified, politically censored version [Glenn is referring particularly to the Library of Parliament's edition de luxe of 1973] to prove that there was only one mode of colonial Africanist discourse" (lix) - a mode only and obviously Eurocentric to the core.
Glenn and his able assistants, Catherine Lauga Du Plessis and Ian Farlam, have done much to correct these oversimplifications and biases. The new translation itself, by which any such edition must stand or fall, is beautifully idiomatic, accessible and faithful to the infectious (if sometimes naïve) energies of the author. Sometimes it is almost too good to be true. Does Le Vaillant really produce the wonderful black comedy of: "A cannonball cut off his head and carried away his reply" (30)? And does he actually claim that in the Tsitsikamma "you cannot walk one pace [sic] there without coming across a thousand [sic] swarms of bees" (76)? The textual apparatus is impressive and detailed, and bears witness to many years of scholarly effort, although some recent works of South African scholarship in the field seem to have slipped through the net - see Works Cited at the end of this review.
The editors have restored the full text of the 1790 edition which had been extensively cut and bowdlerized in the earliest English translations and...