Launch of A Pole under the Southern Cross: Antoni Rehman’s Journey through South Africa, 1875-1877 (translated and edited by Michal Lesniewski and Weronika Muller).
Speech by Prof Howard Phillips (Chair of HiPSA)
With this, the 107th volume in the 107 years since HiPSA’s predecessor, the VRS, was founded in 1918, HiPSA once more underlines the particular niche the society has long filled as the premier provider of edited, previously inaccessible primary historical source material on southern Africa.
In this particular instance the volume is the first English translation of the first full-length book in Polish on South Africa, published in 1881, Antoni Rehman’s account of his journey through the region in 1875-1877. Rehman was a botanist eager to investigate the impact of geography on plant life in an area which could not have been more different from the eastern European zones where he had already conducted a similar inquiry. Happily for historians of southern Africa, he was also interested in people, animals and the environment, so his account is filled with his encounters too with a range of locals – white and black – with observations about the migration of already dwindling herds of wildlife, with his astonishment at the hustle and bustle of the new, five-year old Kimberley after weeks spent getting there through the parched Karoo and, of course, his professional fascination with the region’s ‘exotic’ and diverse plant life. As the leading historical botanist of southern Africa, Peter Linder puts it in his introduction to this volume, “this trip falls into the same genre as La Vaillant, Thunberg and Burchell, as a broad natural history exploration tour”.
Thanks to the deft editorial work of the book’s two Warsaw University-trained editors, Michal Lesniewski and Weronika Muller, Rehman’s lengthy botanical content has been extensively trimmed to yield a volume rich in material covering social, environmental, zoological and economic history too. To them both must go HiPSA’s thanks for this, along with its gratitude to the herbaria in Zurich and Lviv which still hold the original botanical specimens Rehman collected in southern Africa and the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow which holds his cultural artefacts collection. Images from these are reproduced in the volume, towards the publication of which the Polish Dept of Foreign Affairs made a generous subsidy available.
Thank you