Detail
 

• Artist: Francois Smit
• Published in: The Sunday Independent
• Author of article: Bryan Rostron
• Date: 12/05/2007

• Paper: 280gsm 100% cotton acid free paper
• Ink: Epson ultrachrome archival pigment ink
• Image Size (printarea): 594mm x 420mm
• Frame: Optional
• Edition: Limited edition of 12

A short extract from the article

Early authors writing about the continent were no strangers to the wonders of virtual travel, writes Bryan Rostron

 
Travel writing, especially about Africa, routinely takes flight from reality with sugary, purple prose to weave a spell of excitement and the exotic. Such poetic license goes back hundreds of years, to a time when travellers could write anything they wanted as no one back home could contradict them. More recently, when I remonstrated with a photographer from a London newspaper about the sheer bunkum his colleague had written about South Africa, he laughed, “Lucky he didn’t have a photographer with him!”
The dilemma of the travel writer in Africa was succinctly outlined more than 200 years ago by the Swedish physician Anders Sparr-man, in A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (1786): “Men with one leg, Cyclops, Syrens, Troglodytes and the like imaginary beings, have almost entirely disappeared in this enlightened age. At the same time, however, many have been hitherto induced to give credit to tales almost as marvellous, with which the authors … have seasoned their relations in order to make them go down better with the public.”

While undoubtedly based on extensive, original field work, the Frenchman’s vanity (which led Barrow to sneer, “Monsieur Vaillant is a hero on every occasion”) let him down. Parisian taxidermists discovered that they could sell the returned traveller stuffed birds made up of different species: the head of one, the body of another and the wings of a third. Le Vaillant, reluctant to admit that he hadn’t seen such creatures in South Africa, promptly published his scholarly field observations of them in the wild.
One morning, he says, he was woken by a strange bird. “By its flight, however,” he assures us, “I could tell that it was a goat-fucker.”

---

Prints Remaining: 9