ABSTRACT
The Scottish Border poet Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) occupies a special role in the fiction, and creative imagination, of Zoe Wicomb. Thomas Pringle was a poet, journalist, settler and activist for the abolition of slavery who was born into a farming family. The usefulness of Pringle to an activist literary history became apparent in South Africa, when a revisionist reading anxious to align itself to resistance to apartheid led to the publication of a new anthology of Pringle's poetry by Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman, African Poems of Thomas Pringle. Pringle hears the voices of the Grigalach echoing in Makanna's battle cry, another translocal insight. Clearly, Pringle used his African experience and angular, Scottish vision to open new perspectives on the social and ethical subject-positions of Africans in the early nineteenth century. In the context of metropolitan British perceptions, he leant his weight to an ideal of cultural sovereignty that was not well understood in the political project of emancipation.
