Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) en die Boesmans

Abstract

Pringle's Bushmen poems, his short story about Pangola and his autobiography, Narrative of Residence in South Africa (1835) offer particularly interesting, often conflicting, perspectives on the situation of the Eastern Cape Bushmen in the early nineteenth century. As a gentleman settler farmer, minor Romantic poet and a pro-abolition journalist his views of the Bushmen changed as easily as so many different cloaks around the shoulder. Born in the year of the French Revolution and as a child of Enlightenment ideas, the ideas about the equality of all humankind, reflected in his poetry, were totally foreign to the colony. Yet in his autobiography the threatened settler farmer's view of the Bushmen "freebooters" stands in stark contrast to the philanthropic ideas expressed in his poetry. Of particular interest is the discovery that the sympathetic short story about the Bushmen and their plight in "Pangola - an African tale" is fictionalisation of a factual passage in the autobiography, dealing with the settler farmers' troubles. The two texts vary greatly in their outlook on the Bushmen. Because the Pangola story was reprinted in a footnote at the back of the Pereira & Chapman publication of Pringle's poems, it has received very little attention. Yet this is probably the earliest
South African story in which a white author portrays a black main character.