Chapter 16 - Plants in the Literatures of Southern Africa

Summary

This chapter focusses on ubiquitous plant presences in some of the literatures of southern Africa, essentially of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both Indigenous societies and incursive colonial regimes depended fundamentally on plant life for shelter, food, materials, and aesthetics of belonging. Colonials imported numerous alien species, both deliberately cultivated and inadvertently ‘released’, with incalculable impacts on the subcontinent’s variegated local environments. The governing divide between ‘indigenous’ and ‘alien’, however, is complicated by sundry blurrings and ironic cross-overs. These dynamics, affecting commercial, societal, and emotional dimensions alike, are explored through some selected nodes, particularly the iconography of Eden or Arcadia; the complex aesthetic ecology of the suburban garden; and the treatment of trees, especially the native yellowwood and the alien jacaranda.