T'kama -Adamastor

T'kama-Adamastor, Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting, University of the Witswatersrand, introduction, notes, bibliography, figures, index, profusely illustrated, 188 pages, 270 x 310mm, condition: very good.

In 1995, Cyril Coetzee, the artist, was commissioned to produce a painting for the reading room of the William Cullen library at the University of the Witwatersrand. He chose as his subject the figure of Adamastor, which looms large in South African literature, making its grand entrance into literary history in The Lusiads, the national epic by the Portuguese poet Camões published in 1512. Adamastor appears in canto V of this great poem, when Vasco da Gama and his fleet approach the Cape of Storms on their historic voyage to India. A cloud in the shape of a monstrous being suddenly towers over them.

The giant reproaches the Portuguese sailors for intruding into his domain, and prophesies shipwreck, catastrophe and death for all those bold enough to sail around the Cape. In the famous passage of the "epic curse", he threatens to unleash his fury on those who come after Da Gama. When Da Gama demands to know who the monster is, he replies bitterly: "I am that vast, secret promontory/ You Portuguese call the Cape of Storms..."

The artist came across André Brink's short novel, 'The First Life of Adamastor T’kama.'. Brink's central character is a Khoi chief – and also a reincarnation of Adamastor. In a parody of the "discovery", he retells the story of the original colonial encounter "from the perspective of the 20th century". It was exactly the kind of contemporary reworking of the story of Adamastor that became the painting of Cyril Coetzee's.

Professor Stephen Gray has described the Adamastor story as the "root of all subsequent white semiology invented to cope with the African experience". But, as he comments more wryly, it is also "after all, only a highly decorated way of explaining the largeness of Africa and the roughness of rounding the Cape on a bad night". This was the ironic tone Coetzee has wielded against the overpowering myth. (T'kama -Adamastor, Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting)