ABSTRACT
Looking to the figure of the nineteenth-century newcomer to the Cape Colony, this chapter sets about charting the process of spatial re-emplacement. It helps the reader to understand the travelling body as a matter of various perceptual and practical competencies: to focus on the drifting mass of the subject’s sensory surfaces as well as on the meanings of the physical world that surround it. The chapter looks to the appeals and intentions that come to connect that sensory surface to its world of surrounding meanings. It begins with the figure of the traveller borne by ship from Europe and on the lookout for the celebrated promontory of the Cape of Good Hope. Early nineteenth-century British South Africa inherited from its Dutch administration little in the way of a road system outside the immediate enclave of the Cape Peninsula.
