ABSTRACT
Historically, the land in white English South African fiction has raised hermeneutic questions: how to read it and how to find a language to speak about it. J.M.Coetzee, in his book White Writing, has described how landscape writing from the turn of the century until the 1960s either continued to adopt a European lens through which to view African landscape or announced its failure to ‘track’ the land, the refusal of the land to ‘emerge into meaningfulness as a landscape of signs’.1 After the 1960s, the question of adopting an African nationality increasingly confronted whites, and relationships to the land gave way to more overtly political concerns.2
