François Le Vaillant’s Journey into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope (1790), is one of the most important eighteenth-century accounts of a visit to southern Africa. The first volume (published in a new English translation by the Van Riebeeck Society in 2007) is taken up with an account of his journey eastwards to Kok’s Kraal, on the western bank of the Great Fish River where he remained between October and December 1782.
Kok’s Kraal
This volume is very different and is substantially given over to a description of the indigenous peoples that he encountered at Kok’s Kraal. In this way, Le Vaillant speaks to the intellectual climate of Europe, feeding the Enlightenment reader’s hunger for the classification of knowledge across a broad spectrum of human activity. But the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century was complex, for, alongside the cult of reason, it also celebrated the unrestrained expression of emotion and the lyrical description of nature.
Here again Le Vaillant provides his readers with the intriguing material they sought. In doing so he claims to be giving a truthful description of peoples and places. Yet the authenticity of one whole episode in his narrative, his expedition across the Great Fish River, is profoundly suspect. It is equally unlikely that Le Vaillant wrote the final text of his narrative, which is full of the wit and indirect allusions that characterized good style in the Parisian salons, of which Le Vaillant had little knowledge. Overall, it is a complex and fascinating story, written by a complex and fascinating story, written by a complex and fascinating man.
Wildebeest and Buffalo (drawing by Le Vaillant)
Engraving
François Vaillant was born in Suriname (Dutch Guiana), the son of a French lawyer who was the French Consul in the Dutch Colony. Growing up amid forests, François, like his parents, took an interest in the local fauna, collecting birds and insects. His family returned to France in 1763 when he was 10 years old. In 1772, François joined the Berry cavalry regiment as a cadet officer in Metz but was eventually rejected as an officer because he was not tall enough. He married and moved to Paris in 1777. Presumably he intended to make a living out of the trading of bird and other natural history specimens, which he preserved using an arsenic-based soap developed by a friend of his. By 1780 he had established a reputation as a bird taxidermist and collector in Paris.
In 1780, he set out from Holland for the Cape to collect specimens of birds and animals from this distant and (to him) exotic region. Le Vaillant (as he renamed himself during his travels) is justly famous as the founder of South African ornithology. Still, he was far more renowned and influential in his time for writing the book “Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique” (“Travels”) that appeared in 1790 and put South Africa firmly into the European imagination. In France it was warmly reviewed by the Moniteur, the publication of the Revolutionary Parliament. At the same time, King Louis XVI, an avid hunter, had a lavish map based on the travels specially commissioned for him.
Verhuil, now Bethulie
Colesberg, Nachtmaal
Travels” was republished numerous times in France and rapidly translated across Europe, becoming one of the most influential pieces of writing about South Africa ever. It was the first lavishly illustrated account of a hunting expedition; the first safari or travel account that used the freedom of wilderness to attack civilised conventions; the first highly critical account of Dutch colonialism and the brutality of settler expansion; the first detailed ethnological account based on fieldwork. Though Le Vaillant’s account influenced significant South Afican literary genres and themes, the book itself has long remained out of print in English and French. The new translation of the two volumes (HiPSA Vol II – xx and this one) is prefaced by intoductory sections that places Le Vaillant in his historical and intellectual context and discusses the literary and historical importance of the Travels.
Map of Le Vaillant’s Journey
Edited and translated by D.J. Culpin
D.J. Culpin is Extraordinary Professor of French at the University of the Western Cape and was previously Reader in French at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He specialises in French literature and ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the literature of ideas and travel narratives. His publications include a monograph on Marivaux, a student guide to La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1995), and a critical edition of Charles Perrault’s Les Hommes illustres (2003), as well as articles in journals such as French Studies and the Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France. He has also published a translation and critical edition of the Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Eole by C.E. Boniface (2012), the first French book published in South Africa. Professor Culpin previously taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Wales, Lampeter, and has held Visiting or Research Fellowships at the Universities of Oxford, Adelaide, Cape Town and Johannesburg