Travels into the interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope Vol II (VRS III No 3)

Franis Le Vaillants Journey into the Interior of Africa via the Cape of Good Hope (1790), is one of the most important eighteenth-century accounts of a visit to southern Africa. The first volume (published in a new English translation by the Van Riebeeck Society in 2007) is taken up with an account of his journey eastwards to Koks Kraal, on the western bank of the Great Fish River where he remained between October and December 1782. This volume is very different and is substantially given over to a description of the indigenous peoples that he encountered at Koks Kraal. In this way, Le Vaillant speaks to the intellectual climate of Europe, feeding the Enlightenment readers hunger for the classification of knowledge across a broad spectrum of human activity. But the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century was complex, for, alongside the cult of reason, it also celebrated the unrestrained expression of emotion and the lyrical description of nature.

Hardcover. English. Historical Publications South Africa (formerly VRS). 2021. ISBN: 9780994720771. 204 pp with colour plate frontispiece, occasional further illustrations and charts in text. Good with dw. Book No: 20035