Written by Lindy Stiebel of KZN Literary Tourism
The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, to explore the notion of the literary trail as a kind of pilgrimage in an effort to understand why people like to visit locations linked to writers; and secondly, to examine the first three trails constructed by the “Literary Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa” project: the reasons for the choice of writers, the constructed nature of such trails and their ‘authenticity’.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(Chaucer [1387]1970:1)
Literary trails as pilgrimage
Though Chaucer, in this extract from the General Prologue to Canterbury Tales quoted above, is describing the excitement of people in the fourteenth century going on a religious pilgrimage; there is something similar in the anticipation with which people today embark on the secular pilgrimages that are literary trails. Such journeys to visit a place linked to a writer, or which features in his or her writings, are certainly not a new phenomenon and can be understood as a form of homage, a paying of tribute by literary pilgrims to works of fiction and writers within landscapes or settings they have made famous (see MacCannell 1973 and others).
What prompts people to go on specifically literary pilgrimages, understood loosely as journeys of homage? In Chaucer’s poem, the nominally religious pilgrims have Canterbury cathedral, the final resting place of St Thomas Becket, a saint with healing powers, as their goal. They are en route to give thanks for perceived favours bestowed, to pay homage to a great man in their estimation and to enjoy doing this in the company of others like-minded (though, in reality, Chaucer describes a great many representatives of English society of his time thrown together, not all as focussed as others on their pilgrimage). The literary pilgrim is also paying homage in a sense to a writer whose writing holds particular appeal, which ‘speaks’ to the reader in some way such that a visit to a place connected with that writer is meaningful.
With those books which particularly resonate with readers – which are meaningful because they capture experiences, events, characters which mean something to their readers – the desire to visit sites linked to the writer or the book can assume the purpose of a pilgrimage as discussed earlier. Squire (1996: 120) adds another potential motive for literary pilgrimage: escapism and nostalgia for an imagined better past: “…in the late twentieth century post-industrial, post-modern societies, the lure of heritage attractions is also fuelled by widespread antipathy for the present and, correspondingly, a desire to experience an imagined past”.
Such secular pilgrimages are tied to place in the same way as religious ones are – the abstract reasons for making the journey find concrete expression in reaching a specific site; which is imbued with semiotic and symbolic significance. Religious pilgrims as those described by Chaucer are heading to the cathedral which houses the mortal remains of St Thomas Becket; their goal a mass of stone block and some bones but invested with significance beyond these mundane realities. So too the bed that Emily Brontë slept in is just that – a rather uncomfortable-looking bed – but to the literary pilgrim it signifies a) that she existed at all b) that she too slept like us despite being the creator of a work like Wuthering Heights and c) that we, ordinary mortals, might also have creative potential.
Literary trail sites
Within the literary trail, specific sites such as the writer’s birthplace or home, or whole areas/’worlds/ created by the writer or linked to the writer’s life can assume significance for the literary fan and thus merit a visit. Writers’ homes particularly attract attention – domestic spaces invite a sense of intimacy, familiarity as mentioned above. There does seem to be a particular attraction for the private spaces of writers – the home, the study, the bed, the clothes. It is as if, by appreciating the literal origins of a text – the room it was written in, the bed the author lay in, we can understand the work s/he wrote more thoroughly – as if “by gazing at a literary site – particularly one connected to the origins of an author or work – we are granted a power over the text created there, which allows us to understand it more fully than we would by reading literary criticism” (Santesso 2004: 385).
Zemgulys (2000) points out that the domestic site was not always available for literary fans. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century that authors’ homes in London became fully accessible to the public:
By 1919, private societies, municipal government, and tour book writers had identified for the public and preserved as memorials the homes of writers, artists, statesmen, and scientists; their publications mapped London through literary and historic associations – including associations with events in fiction. (2000: 57)
Both Virginia Woolf and Henry James spoke disparagingly of those literary pilgrims who invested birthplaces with great significance, or perhaps, more precisely, of how birthplaces were presented: “The mere thought of a literary pilgrim makes us imagine a man in an ulster looking up earnestly at a house front decorated with a tablet, and bidding his anaemic and docile brain conjure up the figure of Dr Johnson” (Woolf Essays). Both writers lamented, in effect, the kind of literary museum presentation that discouraged thought, favouring rather an imaginative interaction with an authorial birthplace, a less ‘managed’ approach: James could vividly imagine Hawthorne’s hometown Salem, and Woolf herself visited the Bronte parsonage at Haworth, afterwards commenting how seeing Charlotte Bronte’s personal effects moved her.
Authenticity is important here – it is important to have these domestic sites presented as authentically as possible, to be presented “faithfully and to convey the ‘atmosphere’ in which the writer lived” (Herbert 1995: 13). This is ruined by the literary pilgrim’s suspicions, when for example a number of supposed competing houses ‘where X lived’ are offered up like so many fake ‘pardons’ offered by Chaucer’s Pardoner, or so many pairs of Sheba’s Breasts in Africa (six at last count). Authenticity is vital to make the tourist experience worthwhile – the reason people leave their homes to tour is, according to Fawcett and Cormack, to find recreation and leisure but also to search for “authenticity…something that is not adequately provided in the experiences of everyday life” (2001: 687-688). For the literary pilgrim, there is value in the belief that one is standing overlooking a view that was central to the writer whose book describing the same scene you hold in your hand; or see the chair they sat in whilst writing their masterpiece.
Beyond the domestic sites are geographic areas described within books as ‘setting’ or whole areas which become identified with a writer – such as Wordsworth’s Lake District or the Yorkshire moors of the Brontës, or Anne of Green Gable’s Prince Edward Island or Rider Haggard’s ‘Africa’. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawa county and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex have the additional complication of being fictional areas, yet based on known locations in their home lands of Mississippi and Dorset respectively. Literary pilgrims in such cases have the double task of superimposing the fictional versions both in name and altered locations onto the real landscape they visit.
South African examples of ‘worlds’ or extended settings might be Herman Charles Bosman’s Groot Marico district, Richard Rive’s District Six in Cape Town, the Sophiatown of the Drum writers’ era (though neither District Six or Sophiatown survived the Group Areas Act of the apartheid era) and Soweto in Johannesburg.
Constructing literary trails in KwaZulu-Natal
The three trails that have been constructed – on Rider Haggard, Alan Paton and writers of the Grey Street area in Durban – have all been done under the auspices of the Literary Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal research project funded by the National Research Foundation. This is a five year project started in 2002 which is part of an umbrella niche research area entitled “Constructions of identity through cultural and heritage tourism”. The bulk of the project funding has been earmarked for student bursaries whilst the rest has gone towards constructing resources to foster literary tourism : notably a Literary Map of KZN featuring 50 writers linked to the province (see www.literature.kzn.org), a website hosting academic papers drawn from workshops held by the project (see www.literarytourism.co.za), documentary films made of selected writers, and literary trails.
KwaZulu-Natal is a particularly rich province culturally speaking, offering a wide range of writers both black and white, male and female, writing in English and Zulu predominantly – Alan Paton, Roy Campbell, Mazisi Kunene, Ronnie Govender, Gcina Mhlope, Daphne Rooke to name but a few. Efforts by scholars to encourage literary tourism in this area inevitably lead one to consider a research agenda; within the Literary Tourism in KZN project this has a threefold purpose involving firstly, the creation of a literary archive of local writers both past and present; secondly, the recording of selected writers and their works on film, and thirdly, the establishment for locals and visitors alike of routes which bring together writers and the places about which they write – a literary map of the region. Such a research agenda carries with it complex questions: how to define a ‘local’ writer? how to understand the uses a writer makes of place? who should be featured and why? what is the interface between literary tourist and writer? How do the issues of authenticity and commodification make themselves evident in literary tourism? These issues I have addressed elsewhere (Stiebel 2004). Suffice it to say here, however, that these issues also arise with the construction of the literary trails made by the project to which I will now turn.
Therefore, before looking at the trails in any detail, two issues referred to above need to be raised. The first to consider is the choice of subject: why, for example, a Rider Haggard trail, an Alan Paton Pietermaritzburg trail and a Grey Street trail which are the three trails the project has seen fit to develop thus far? The reason for choosing to do trails on Haggard and Paton is primarily the tourist potential of these two writers in their close links with particular KZN places. Paton is one of South Africa’s best known writers following his success with Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). Rider Haggard’s popularity in his day as a bestselling writer of exotic African romances has continued into the present – King Solomon’s Mines (1885) has never been out of print and even in the academic world postcolonial scholarship on Haggard is thriving (see Chrisman 2001, 2003, Monsman 2006). His links to the Anglo-Zulu battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift – which feature in his novels The Witch’s Head (1884), Black Heart and White Heart (1896) and Finished (1917) – both important sites for cultural tourism in KZN, allow for ‘spillover’ tourism, as opposed perhaps to dedicated literary pilgrims’ visits. A few, disconnected efforts by tour operators (some poorly informed) to capitalise on ‘Haggard links’ also meant there were already some existing sites which could be authentically linked together. That there has been in the past interest in visiting ‘Haggard’s South Africa’ expressed by the Rider Haggard Society in England also contributed to the initiative to construct this literary pilgrimage. Expertise was also available to compile trails for these two writers: the Haggard trail was constructed by myself and Stephen Coan both of whom had published a book on Haggard in Africa (see Coan 2000, Stiebel 2001); whilst the Paton Pietermaritzburg trail was compiled by Jewel Koopman of the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archive based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’ Pietermaritzburg campus.
The Grey Street trail recently completed and launched under the direction of Niall McNulty, research assistant to the project, and is the first to feature an area common to a number of published writers both during and after the apartheid era. Reasons for choosing to do a trail on this area speak to the project’s desire not only to promote ‘standalone’ writers but to foster awareness of local writers less well known. The Grey Street area already has a tourist presence in terms of various ‘cultural’ tours which visit its markets and mosque. It is very possible that existing tourists would be interested in the literary trail as an additional feature. The Haggard and Paton trails would attract literary pilgrims who already know and respond to these writers’ works; the Grey Street trail hopes to develop a literary interest in lesser known writers.
The second issue to consider is the constructed nature of these trails true – it is suggested above – of all literary trails. In effect, we have, as Robinson and Andersen suggest, created a narrative of our own which gives a circularity and neatness to Haggard’s time in KZN, a continuity to Paton’s life in Pietermaritzburg and a linkage between writers’ lives in Grey Street that is not strictly true of the reality of the assembled lives and their trajectories. The trails create a sequence that is in the interest of the tourist who is taken on a more or less convenient circular route around the province, city and area respectively, stopping off at places with a ‘Haggard link’, or a ‘Paton link’ or a ‘Grey Street writers link’.
What, in summary, would the literary pilgrim find on each of these trails? Each trail begins with a short biographical note about the writer or the area to be visited. Then one is taken through a series of places to visit connected to the writer/s with short quotations from relevant texts accompanying the places. A map and photographs illustrate the pamphlet and contact details are provided for the various stops along the way. All three trails developed thus far are designed to be self-guided though to be accompanied by an informed guide could add to the visitor’s experience.
Given the focus of this conference on the 19th century, I will only look at the Haggard trail in any detail. In summary you can read that Haggard visited South Africa three times on British government business (Coan and Stiebel 2005). Most notably, his first visit to South Africa from 1875-1881 featured KwaZulu Natal prominently and it is this period that provided the information and inspiration for his subsequent bestseller ‘African’ texts (such as King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1886), Alan Quatermain (1887) and Nada the Lily (1892)). However, lesser known details about Haggard’s life – such as his meeting with John Dube, first president of the ANC, and their discussion about the plight of the Zulus – provide another angle on this writer of adventure stories set in a romanticised African landscape.
The trail leads one from Durban, the port town and obvious beginning for Haggard arriving by sea in 1875 and tourists arriving by air in 2006 (or already living in Durban for locals keen to try this out). We dispel the myth of the Rider Haggard house on the Berea beloved of estate agents (he did not own property in Durban) and point out it was Allan Quatermain, Haggard’s fictional hero, who was said to keep a house on the Berea. From this starting point the route leads to Pietermaritzburg, the administrative capital of the region in 1875 where Haggard as an employee of Sir Henry Bulwer stayed at Government House (now part of UNISA). From there we proceed to Estcourt where one of several pairs of Sheba’s breasts can be seen – we use the word ‘allegedly’ to indicate doubt on this issue. Newcastle is a natural night stopover as Haggard’s farmhouse Hilldrop is maintained as a B&B establishment replete with Haggard memorabilia. This house is renamed Mooifontein, referring to Haggard’s novel Jess (1887) and was a place of marital happiness as it was here that his only son Jock was born. From the homestead, Haggard could hear the battle of Majuba fought and it was in this house that the peace terms of the First Anglo-Boer War were negotiated and signed, the house having been rented from the Haggards for this purpose.
The next day sees the traveller moving on to the battlefield of Isandlwana featured, as mentioned earlier, in some of Haggard’s novels and a popular tourist attraction in its own right. The stop at Mkuze where Tshaneni or Ghost Mountain, featured in Nada the Lily, is found highlights the constructed nature of the trail plus the power of the creative imagination – as powerful as Haggard’s description of the mountain and surrounding terrain is, he never actually visited the area. The local hotel Ghost Mountain Inn will not be pleased to have this pointed out as they make much of the association with Haggard as a physical visitor to the region, whereas here, in fact, is an example of a writer creating an environment in his mind, presumably reconstructed from accounts he had heard during his young adult days in Natal. Zululand he only visited in 1914, some years after writing his novels about the area. The good news for this hotel, however, is that it would be a good overnight stop on the route, with the third day bringing the constructed loop to a close in Durban, via Eshowe – featured in Finished.
Alan Paton was the next choice for a literary trail – specifically his years and connection with the city of Pietermaritzburg. The trail takes visitors to the birthplace of Paton at 19 Pine Street (in fact next door as the trail points out though his early childhood years were spent in this house), to the Christadelphian Ecclesia in Boom Street where his parents worshipped, his first school, a succession of parental homes, then to Maritzburg College where Paton was both schoolboy and ultimately teacher (Koopman 2006). Other stops include the Tatham Art Gallery which houses two paintings Paton donated, the former headquarters of the Liberal Party of South Africa of which Paton was Chairman and President until it forced to close by the Nationalist Government in 1968. The Alan Paton Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal is the trail endpoint – after matriculating at Maritzburg College, Paton went on to become a student at the then Natal University College (now UKZN) from 1919-1924.
When Paton died in 1988 at the age of 85, his wife donated his papers to the Archives of the University of Natal – these valuable papers form the nucleus of the Alan Paton Centre, together with the entire contents of his study which is reconstructed as authentically as possible in this building. Obviously Paton’s important years outside Pietermaritzburg – his years at Diepkloof reformatory which directly fed into Cry, the Beloved Country, his time at Ixopo, the setting for the same novel, and his later years in Botha’s Hill, Durban – do not feature on this trail. Carol de Kock, currently working on her PhD on Paton and literary tourism is to develop this extensive trail in years to come.
But how about widening the subject beyond the dead white male category? This is where ‘constructing’ trails becomes especially significant because part of a trailmaker’s brief in KZN might be to foster a tourism interest where one doesn’t seem ‘obviously’ to reside, as previously mentioned: instead of working on ‘famous’ standalone writers – inevitably in South Africa during apartheid those who had access to educational and publishing opportunities – who are few and far between; how about selecting an area where a number of linked (or not) writers might have lived, live or write about? This was the motivation behind the construction of the Grey Street trail (McNulty 2006). Featuring writers such as Aziz Hassim (Lotus People), Dr Goonam (Coolie Doctor), Phyllis Naidoo (Footprints in Grey Street) and Imraan Coovadia (The Wedding), this trail is a walkabout in an area once a hotbed of political dissent during the apartheid years. Grey Street is tied to the history of the Indian population in Durban. First brought to South Africa by the British in the 1860s to work the sugarcane fields, the Indian population in Durban is now the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. The most famous Indian immigrant to Durban was the young lawyer Mahatma Gandhi who arrived in 1893 and worked for 21 years in Natal. Grey Street exists today as the old Indian business and residential area of Durban and the cultural heart of the KwaZulu-Natal Indian community.
What of future literary trails? Other areas in KwaZulu-Natal with literary trail potential, in that they are linked to writers and/or their writing, include Inanda which already has an existing cultural heritage trail for tourists but could make more of the writing of John Dube, Credo Mutwa, and Mewa Ramgobin, and even of Mahatma Gandhi given the heritage site of Gandhi’s original printing press en route; Pietermaritzburg which, besides the Paton trail, could feature Bessie Head’s birthplace, places linked to Tom Sharpe, James McClure and the Dhlomo brothers born nearby; whilst similar links could be made in ‘Cato Manor’ area for writers like Ronnie Govender, Mi Hlatswayo and Kessie Govender.
But this is all in the future which may or may not come to pass – readers with enough enthusiasm for writers whose works they enjoy remain the driving force: the literary pilgrims, like the assorted band in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with which my paper began. Positively speaking, literary tourism might become a part of what Robinson called a ‘new’ literacy wherein “new audiences for creative writings are being forged, arguably reflecting new ways of storytelling and a shift, not back to the oral traditions whose passing was mourned by Benjamin (1936) and Ong (1982) but forward to a genesis of multimedia, hypersensory ‘traditions’” (2003:73).
The work of the Literary Tourism in KZN project with its linked writer/place website, documentary films, student projects and trails might be seen as a step in the direction of such a ‘new’ literacy with its next generation of readers who might wish one day to visit places because of what someone once wrote about them.
Bibliography
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Coan, Stephen (ed). 2000. Diary of an African Journey: the return of Rider Haggard. Scottsville: University of Natal Press.
— and Lindy Stiebel. 2005. Rider Haggard Literary Trail. www.literarytourism.co.za
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Herbert, David. (ed.) 1995. Heritage, Tourism and Society. London: Pinter.
Koopman, Jewel. 2006. Alan Paton’s Pietermaritzburg Literary Trail. www.literarytourism.co.za
McNulty, Niall. 2006. The Grey Street Literary Trail. www.literarytourism.co.za
Robinson, Mike and Hans Christian Andersen, (eds.) 2003. Literature and Tourism: essays in the reading and writing of tourism. London: Thomson.
Santesso, Aaron. 2004 “The Birth of the Birthplace: Bread Street and Literary Tourism before Stratford”. ELH 71: 377-403.
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Stiebel, Lindy. 2001. Imagining Africa: landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African Romances. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
— 2004. “Hitting the Hot Spots: Literary Tourism as a Research Field with particular reference in KZN, South Africa”. Critical Arts. 18(2):31-44.
Zemgulys, Andrea P. 2000. “’Night and Day is dead’: Virginia Woolf in London ‘literary and historic’”. Twentieth Century Literature 46 (1): 56-77
This article was first published in scrutiny2 vol 12 no 1 2007.
