‘The South African “Children of the Mist”’: The Bushman, the Highlander and the Making of Colonial Identities in Thomas Pringle's South African Poetry, 1825–1834

Abstract

This article examines the circulation of the first anglophone poem to be written in the voice of an indigenous southern African, Thomas Pringle's 'Song of the Wild Bushman', in the newspapers and periodicals of Britain and the Cape Colony in the years preceding the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1834. In both the Cape and Britain, Pringle positioned the poem in dialogue with contemporaneous travel writing in order to reflect critically upon the relationship between colonists and indigenous peoples in Britain's fledgling settler colonies. By placing the poem in the newspapers and popular periodicals of both Britain and the Cape, Pringle was able to disseminate to a range of colonial and metropolitan readers an image of a trans-imperial Britishness that could accommodate a range of national and colonial identities, including those of the European and indigenous subjects of the expanding British Empire.