“Washed with Sun”: Landscaping South Africa’s Hinterlands

This chapter takes up Jeremy Foster’s evocative description of South Africa’s landscape as “washed with sun” (Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), that of the entwining of natural beauty with political turmoil, to reflect on the shifting spatial thematics of two contemporary South African non-fiction writers and academics, Rob Nixon and Jacob Dlamini. What happens when we view certain locations described in their respective works (a small desert town vs. a township) through the prism of hinterlands? Hinterland thinking opens up new understandings of those places inflected by the rural and urban and highlights the importance of human/non-human relations, with Nixon and Dlamini operating as each other’s hinterland. Landscaped memories of hinterland childhoods are also employed to say something about political becoming and the past in South Africa today.