This is a rich and learned but sometimes frustrating book. Foster's question is whether something in the South African landscape itself stimulated a collective response among whites (actually British immigrants). His answer is that bodily experiences of the landscape interacted with memory and values to create a specifically South African identity.
The author is a South-African-born architect and landscape architect who frames his book with dense discussions of critical theory. His influences are wide, including J. M. Coetzee, Michael Pollen, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A fundamental formulation comes from Eric Kaufman, who has distinguished between ‘nationalization of nature’ (an imaginary that exalts the imprint of national culture on passive nature) and ‘naturalization of the nation’ (an imaginary that stresses the regenerative effects of wild nature on national culture). The first imaginary is strongest in the countries of Old Europe; the second, which gives primacy to nature, is strongest in former colonies. This book describes the experiences of British ‘traveling subjects’ in the first decades of the twentieth century who collectively moved from natural imaginings of South Africa as a European-like Cape littoral to an indigenized version known as the ‘cult of the veld’.
Washed with the Sun summarizes the story of white politics and Anglophone national identity well. Other writers, including David Hughes, Lance van Sittert, and David Bunn, have also worked through the relationship between whiteness and the African environment, but the book at hand focuses on the early twentieth-century shift in Anglophone identification to the interior savanna. Evidence for this changing aspect of white South Africa is drawn from landscape painting, photography, travel writing, domestic architecture, monuments, museums, the view from a train, and texts.
Foster's argument is that material facts of the natural environment are taken up by humans through lived, tactile, multi-sensory experience. Architectural theory about the bodily experience of buildings influences the analysis. The relationship between landscape and human selves is interactive, and that between representation and lived experience is dialectical. Nationally significant landscapes were created through collective imaginings but, still, something really was out there in the veldt. Compared with other landscapes, the veldt is more starkly lit, more dramatically shadowed, more overwhelming at twilight, and has a stronger line of horizon. The book engages with the veldt mostly through the representations and reactions of travelers and immigrants, who constantly returned to its characteristics. British South Africans took the feelings they had under that broad sky, facing the wide horizon, and used them to create a distinctive national character.
The second half of the book offers place-specific ‘soundings into some of the multiple layers of geographical and cultural meaning making at work in white South African society’ (p. 88). The ‘soundings’ are usually associated with an individual's experience of a place and are plumbed in: Baden-Powell's besieged Mafeking, the northern escarpment as described in John Buchan's book The Africa Colony, the mansions designed by Herbert Baker and others along Parktown Ridge, the Komati Valley as painted by Bertha Everard, and the landscape made emblematic through railroad travel. This is a good-sized and diverse set of cases, and Foster works out each thoroughly. He does not shrink from empirical research or theoretical consideration of the secondary topics arising in each chapter. The many, many black-and-white photographs and dozens of color plates testify to the thoroughness of the book.
The chapters on Herbert Baker (and the architecture that followed him) and on Bertha Everard best convey the book's assessment of bodily experiences of landscape. Foster's analysis of the design, location, and use of materials in Baker's buildings delivers good evidence for his assertions that British aesthetics were attenuated and bodily experiences of the landscape were powerful. Compared with Baker, Bertha Everard is a minor historical character but, through empathetic discussion of her paintings, Foster shows us how an immigrant woman reflected upon herself through the landscape of her new home. These chapters are well written and compelling. To this reviewer's mind, the chapters on Baden-Powell and Buchan were less successful, relying on extended and difficult theoretical exposition with weaker evidence, and delivering tenuous conclusions. The extended analysis of Baden-Powell's map of the territory surrounding Mafeking requires his later persona as founder of the Boy Scouts to explain its impact on the British imagination during the war. Foster's theoretical excurses are far-reaching and well informed, but some passages are mystifying.
Much of the book is intriguing and impressive. Yet its focus on British South Africans is a limitation not entirely explained. Its starting point – a refusal to make race or South Africa's status as a ‘uniquely flawed society’ (p. 4) central – is legitimate. But, the particular nature of race in South Africa never becomes a significant aspect of the analysis. Readers will note that ‘white’ in Foster's usage means ‘of European heritage’, not ‘differentiated from black’. In this book, white South African identity arose through an attenuation of British heritage in a new, sunny, grassy, high country. The social realities and indigenous inhabitants of that country do not figure strongly. As a telling indication, consider that the First World War battlefield at Delville Wood in France (where South Africans died in great numbers and where a Herbert Baker monument was built) figures more prominently than the landscapes of all the black reserves within the country itself.
