In 1986 a Cabinet Minister of the South African-appointed Transitional Government of National Unity in Namibia stated that Namibia could not afford 'the luxury of a Wild West open range situation where every Tom, Dick and Harry comes and goes as they please'. The Minister was referring to Namibia's southern border with South Africa.
What lies behind this view is an image of Namibia as a frontier in popular South African imagination.
This book is about the projection of these frontier images in literature set in Namibia and what these metaphors reveal.
Dorian Haarhoff explores the dynamics of eighteenth-century Dutch journals by hunters and explorers, nineteenth- century British travelogues, German colonial literature written between 1884 and 1915, and twentieth-century South African fiction in English and Afrikaans.
In addition, he provides a survey of indigenous literary response, interpreting Namibian literature as 'illuminating the silences in the frontier texts as a denial of frontier metaphor'.
