CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.

One of the most visible symbols is, of course, Victoria herself, and a statue of the Queen stands in the garden of South Africa's Parliament, in front of what was, in the Queen's time, the main entrance to the building. An early work of Thomas Brock, later Sir Thomas and the designer of the Victoria Memorial in London, it was completed in 1889. Since it is a commemoration of Victoria's Golden Jubilee, its white marble image, now slightly weather-stained, is of an elderly Queen who stands, face averted to the right, wearing a gown and cloak decorated with Tudor roses. She holds the scepter in her right hand and a rather squashed-looking orb in her left. In a poem of 1955 called “Talking about Monuments,” Peter Blume, an Afrikaner poet, has aptly but wickedly described her as “old Miss Victoria, with her little melon.”¹

And, standing in the midst of a green lawn, shadowed by large trees, she does look rather like a hostess offering a bowl of nuts to her assembled guests. The statue, “Erected by public subscription,” is inscribed with shields at its granite base, in effect, telling viewers that they are looking at the symbol of a mighty power. But the base at the front of the statue reveals something about the past distance between South Africa and the center of empire. The Queen's death date has been miswritten in stone. Nowadays, 1902 has been etched out (although the 2 is still visible) and replaced by the correct date, 1901 (Figure 8).

The monument is shown at the height of its imperial glory in a large black and white photograph–actually three images joined together–of “Parliament draped for the memorial service for Queen Victoria,” in the Arts and Artifacts collection of Parliament. It shows the statue, pristine, white, and glowing in the midst of a large, well-dressed group of citizens, men in dark suits and women in floating light summer gowns, standing outside of the Parliament building, the pillars and portals of which are enveloped in heavy black crepe. Taken in January 1901, summer in Cape Town, the photograph is noteworthy for its multitudes of people and of wreaths, for its look of holiday rather than mourning, and for the absence of the military, surprising, since the South African War of 1899–1902 had not yet ended. On the right side of the photograph, somewhat integrated, yet slightly marginalized, are people who appear to be “colored,” that is, of mixed Malay, African, and Caucasian stock. Well-dressed, they too are part of empire and its rituals. It is a photograph that, significantly, would not have been taken fifty years later.

An easy walk from Parliament is The National Gallery of Art with two large rooms dedicated to its permanent collection of European nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paintings. Within the limited space of the gallery, European paintings in general and Victorian ones in particular (the museum has a sizable collection of the latter) have had their shares reduced. In a post-apartheid society, the gallery tries to maintain the delicate balance between Eurocentrism and displaying works derived from indigenous South African cultures, especially contemporary paintings, photographs, and craft works. The Victorian pictures were often gifts of the so-called “Randlords,” men whose fortunes came from the “rand,” the gold mines and related industries of the Transvaal, or from the diamond mines of the Eastern Cape–thus they are treasures derived from economic imperialism and the exploitation of African labor. One of the major benefactors of the gallery, Alfred de Pass, chose not to bestow his “Old Masters” on it, because he believed that “coloured people, natives, etc. could not understand them” (qtd. Tietze 19). But Sir Edmund Davis, called the “King of Chrome” and “The Napoleon of Northern Rhodesia,” did contribute richly, giving the gallery significant works by Charles Shannon and Charles Rickets; others, including Lord Leverhulme, provided paintings by Burne-Jones and other major Victorian artists.

But while people of all races look at and admire the Burne-Joneses, and perhaps glance at the paintings by Watts, Maclise, Herkomer, and Sickert, the painting at which they stop and stare–it is always on exhibition– is a strange fantasy titled “Holiday Time in Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, in Honour of the Expected Arrival of a Governor-General of UNITED South Africa” (an event which occurred eleven years after the painting was completed). Drawn initially to the picture by its brilliant colors, multiple figures and the vivid image of the actual Table Mountain with an imaginary city at its feet, some observers try to locate the “real” among the buildings, others to decipher the painting's meaning. Most remain mystified.

The work is by a little known Victorian painter named James Ford, born in Cornwall, resident in Cape Town and dead in the local poor house by 1910. Little is known about his life, but he was probably brought over from London's South Kensington Department of Science and Art to teach at the Cape Town School of Art in 1880. He lost his job there, and spent nine years (from 1891–99) completing the painting, finishing just before the South-African War erupted. The painting is a vision of a utopian Cape Town, radically improved by the triumph of Empire. Initially on display in the Standard Bank Building (which still stands) when the first shots were fired, it was viewed by some 5000 people at a shilling a head–though to Ford's dismay, he could not persuade Cecil Rhodes or anyone else to pay the 5000 pounds sterling he had asked for it.

The picture is a strange combination of imperial and progressive elements. Amid glorious buildings, most of which never existed in Cape Town, are portraits of actual inhabitants as well as of figures that might have come from a Victorian comic novel.²

A combination of Cecil Rhodes's vision of a vastly expanded British empire and a virtual encyclopedia of the great architectural styles of the past, it reproduces, in its foreground alone, the Paris Opera House, the Edinburgh monument to Sir Walter Scott, and several segments of Renaissance Florence. Like William Morris in News From Nowhere, Ford has created a world of the future based on nostalgia for a mythic past (Figure 9).

Ford's politics are clear, and his work is laden with political and social commentary. He advocates the federation of all the “colonies,” aspired to by the British, disavowed by the Boers, and not to be achieved until 1910. His holiday is to celebrate a UNITED (he capitalizes the word) English-speaking and -thinking nation. Many of the 438 figures it depicts are those who would shape the imperial history of Southern Africa in the coming decades. Present are Paul Kruger, leader of the Boer forces and President of the Afrikaner Transvaal Republic, a major opponent of federation, and Joseph Chamberlain, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, and one of federation's major architects; they are portrayed standing amicably near each other while being painted by Ford –self-depicted as an elderly man in a red cap (Figure 10). An elegant pier in the foreground is named for Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for the British Colonies in South Africa, another major supporter of federation, and later famous for his “kindergarten,” the group of brilliant young men he brought with him when he came to “rule” and “restructure” the colonies. His pier at the Cape Town harbor, erected only in Ford's mind, has had its airy foundation stone laid by Lady Milner in the presence of the Prince of Wales, or so inscriptions on the painting tell us.

But the major homage is to Cecil Rhodes. The painting boasts an imaginary statue of him (a real one stands in the “Company Garden” near Parliament), an equally imaginary Rhodesian pier and pavilion, and an image of his actual yacht, “The Pride of Table Bay.” Rhodes may need no introduction, except a reminder to Victorianists that in addition to his other activities, he was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, though forced to resign in 1895 for his role in the Jameson Raid–his attempt, successful in the end, to precipitate the South African War. We learn from the painting that there are “Grand Concerts Daily and Bands Nightly in the gigantic Rhodesian Pavilion on the Pier Head, C. J. Rhodes' Gift on his Marriage Day.” One wonders if this is an “in joke,” for the picture is full of visual and verbal wit, or a gesture on Ford's part to suggest that in his imperial wonderland even the hyperactive Rhodes would have the time to marry and enjoy “the tranquility of domestic life” (Hall 3).

Like Rhodes himself, the town's inhabitants are all depicted in a holiday mood. A troop of red-coated British Cavalry rides bicycles instead of horses down the right side of the painting. A regiment of Scottish pipers, on the left side, entertains the crowd. Caucasian, African, and colored Capetonians mingle and interact, and all are having fun! Children roll hoops; dogs of every size and shape cavort around the painting: a woman punts; there are boats filled with holiday-makers on the water and liberated women riding bicycles and horses on the land. Sailors dance with their partners; a fiddler, and a “colored” minstrel band provide the music. A man displays his trained bear; a clown prances; a pretty girl sells flowers; a beggar approaches two swells. People, including women and children, smoke cigars! There are drunks too; one is being escorted out of the painting by two policemen; another few lean tipsily against a building.

In this work filled with writing, viewers learn of other pleasures available to Capetonians on holiday. The Milner pier advertises performances of “The New Woman” and “A Girl of No Consequence” (both imaginary plays) and states that the all-star cast includes Sir Henry Irving as the “tragic rival” and Miss Ellen Terry as “the twin sister.” In Ford's fantasy, the greatest actors of the period have come to perform in a Cape Town which is no longer a cultural backwater.

Ford suggests that other less legitimate pastimes are also part of the holiday scene. Victorian Cape Town, unlike Victorian London, openly acknowledges sexuality. At the side of a building on the right, a man leans suggestively over a woman who may well be a prostitute. Ironically, the scene is located near a small but elegant mansion labeled “Boarding House for Maidens Only”; at the rear of the painting is a large and prison-like “Home for Fallen Women.” A bare-breasted African woman gazes–with yearning?–through a pair of binoculars at a group of naked white males swimming toward the pilings of the pier; her companion is a white clerical-looking gentleman. Is this a comment on “native lasciviousness,” part of the racism implicit in imperialism, or perhaps, on the tendency of missionaries to “go native”? However, there is wit in the reversal of the “native”- “civilized” paradigm–she holds and uses the binoculars–and in the fact that the swimmers–who should have used the pool erected by the town council–are being pursued by two large sharks. Cape Town “in a holiday mood” has let go of its inhibitions.

The glorious, progressive future that will occur when the British complete the “civilization” of South Africa is suggested by an elegant train station (resembling an Italian palazzo) bearing signs that the railway goes regularly to Rhodesia, Zambesi, and Egypt, and that “fast trains depart daily for Egypt, France and England”–in what may be Ford's tribute to the improved Cape to Cairo railway, envisioned by imperialists like Rhodes. The utopian dwellings of the future are depicted in a background row of apartment complexes, complete with fountains and gardens and in small, neat, private row houses, so minutely depicted that viewers can see the bright-colored washing hanging from clotheslines. Fields for cricket and other sports are close to the dwellings. And in the very background is Table Mountain, crossed by a brilliant rainbow, symbol of hope and promise; beneath the rainbow's arc is a helium balloon. Further to the left of the painting is another sign of progress, a tram that has emerged, steaming and shining, from an imaginary tunnel at the base of the great mountain. A train moves along the background—perhaps on its way to Cairo or even to England.

What is not present in Ford's painting is almost as important as what is. Perhaps it is to be expected that in this utopian fantasy there would be few signs of poverty or misery, and that there would be fewer colored and African residents than existed in “reality.” But it is noteworthy that among the buildings, there are only rare allusions to the Dutch colonial city and its architecture or even to the lovely Dutch Cape cottages of the area. The signs and inscriptions in this bilingual city are all in English. With the exception of the politicians assembled to meet the new “Governor-General,” few of the many figures depicted wear the garb associated with Afrikaners or have their features. Again, the motivation seems political, since the Dutch tradition had become symbolic of Afrikaner nationalism and antipathy to the British presence (Hall 3). The Dutch heritage of Cape Town has been submerged in Ford's English Victorian vision of empire, though it has not been entirely destroyed.

Similarly, the British imperial legacy in the actual city has now been muted and diminished. An old Victoria stands in the Parliament garden, but her portrait as a young Queen is hidden within the building itself. Hidden is the operative term here, for behind the false wall of the small parliamentary museum, and at present inaccessible to the public, hangs a huge portrait of the Queen (artist unknown) in full regal splendor. She is pictured at about the age of twenty-five, crowned and bejeweled, wearing a white satin gown, brocaded with the Tudor roses she adapted as her own, a scarlet order stretching from shoulder to waist, and a dark mantle pushed back. The young Victoria stands erect, and though the portrait is life-sized; the elaborate crowned gilt frame that encloses her, makes her appear even larger than life. The impact of the painting is increased by the fact that to see it one must grope one's way through an unlit crawl space– laden with vestiges of empire in the form of other portraits of later British royals. Perhaps this portrait and its surroundings are the best signifiers of the current attitudes toward the old days of Empire. Although hidden, dark, and dusty, they are still mysteriously present.