Seeing An Image At The University Of Pretoria’s Africana Collection In Context

Cover of Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa edited by Jenni Lauwrens.

Chapter 9 features Seeing An Image At The University Of Pretoria’s Africana Collection In Context by Sikho Siyotula-Siegemund

Abstract.

Seeing An Image At The University Of Pretoria’s Africana Collection In Context—Chapter 9 of Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa — contemplates The Ethnic Map of Southern Africa, a 1990 painting by Charlotte Firbank-King. The Ethnic Map is a striking visualisation of southern Africa’s long past. A copy of the painting currently hangs in the reception of the University of Pretoria’s Africana Collection. The map’s evocative use of decontextualised imagery gestures toward a history of belonging and mobility for black bodies in a past from which they have often been excluded. At first glance, the image appears as an empowering attempt to reclaim historical narratives through visual means. However, a closer reading of visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality reveals deeper entanglements with colonial modes of knowledge production.

Drawing on Mirzoeff’s distinction between visuality and countervisuality, the chapter situates The Ethnic Map of Southern Africa within broader discussions of how historical imagery is deployed to construct narratives of identity and space. While the map aspires to present an inclusive representation of pre-colonial southern Africa, it also inherits visual strategies from colonial ethnographic traditions—strategies that historically sought to classify, tribe, and spatially organise African communities. The image thus exists in tension: it embodies an earnest attempt to reimagine the past, yet it remains shaped by the structures it seeks to move beyond.

Through a combined analysis of the image’s visual logic, its institutional setting, and an embodied account of viewing it, the chapter explores how The Ethnic Map of Southern Africa functions within the post-apartheid educational complex. Rather than dismissing the map outright, this reading acknowledges its artistic and historiographical ambitions while critically examining how inherited visual frameworks continue to shape contemporary engagements with the past. Ultimately, the chapter argues that images such as Ethnic Map offer a valuable opportunity for reflection—both on the enduring legacies of colonial visuality and on the possibilities for creating new, more nuanced representations of southern Africa’s deep history.