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South African Historical Journal
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South African Railways Postcard
Calendars, 1961 to 1984
Jeanne Van Eedena
a University of Pretoria
Published online: 14 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: Jeanne Van Eeden (2014) South African Railways Postcard Calendars, 1961 to
1984, South African Historical Journal, 66:1, 79-103, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2014.891645
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2014.891645
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South African Railways Postcard Calendars, 1961 to 1984
JEANNE VAN EEDEN*
University of Pretoria
Abstract
This article focuses on a series of postcard calendars produced by the South African
Railways (SAR) between 1961 and 1984. As a state-owned organisation, the SAR
played a decisive role in conceptualising the metanarratives South Africa con-
structed of itself from 1910 onwards. This was achieved, for example, through an
extensive visual archive of documentary photographs of South Africa, commis-
sioned by the SAR. In addition to a range of ‘publicity propaganda’material, from
about the 1920s to 1984 the Publicity Department of the SAR intermittently
produced postcards, calendars and postcard calendars as cheap and accessible
promotional material. An analysis of the postcard calendars between 1961 and
1984 uncovers three thematic clusters: the natural world; the world of culture; and
related to this, the world of technology, modernity and progress. In colonialist
discourse, images of nature/‘primitivism’were frequently offset by images that
proclaimed the advantages of culture/modernity/technology, and this legacy
manifests in the postcard calendars discussed in this article. The article suggests
that the SAR had vested interests in how (white), middle-class South Africans
imagined the country and how it was portrayed for international audiences.
Key words: postcards; national identity; propaganda; South Africa; tourism
Introduction
From the 1920s to about 1984, the Publicity Department of the South African Railways
(now Transnet) intermittently produced postcards, pictorial calendars and postcard
calendars that were used to encourage tourism, both nationally and internationally. As a
state-owned organisation, the South African Railways (hereafter SAR) played a consid-
erable role in establishing patterns of travel and tourism that were part of the broader
discourse of how South Africa represented itself. Although postcards have only recently
started to become objects of serious study, it has been recognised that because they are
accessible, portable and affordable products of popular culture, they play an important part
in the circuit of culture
1
that helps construct narratives such as nationhood. The SAR
*Email: jeanne.vaneeden@up.ac.za
1. S. Hall, ed., Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997).
South African Historical Journal, 2014
Vol. 66, No. 1, 79–103, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2014.891645
ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686
© 2014 Southern African Historical Society
http://www.tandfonline.com
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generated an enormous amount of publicity material from 1910 onwards that, in conjunc-
tion with state-sponsored journals such as Lantern and Panorama
2
and bodies such as the
South African Tourist Corporation (Satour), created a propagandistic discourse about
South Africa.
In this article, I focus on the postcard calendars that were produced by the SAR
between 1961 and 1984, a period when tourism in apartheid South Africa was the almost
exclusive domain of ‘white elite culture’.
3
What made these calendars unique was their
format, which comprised a calendar consisting of 24 sheets, two for each month, with the
postcard on the top half and the calendar on the bottom. The sheets were perforated,
allowing the postcards to be ‘detached after the lapse of the dates on the lower portion’
4
(Figure 1). These postcard calendars were widely distributed free of charge to employees
of the SAR, recipients to the South Africa Railways Magazine andtopatronsatthe
various SAR travel and tourist bureaux in South Africa and abroad.
5
The text for the
calendar of 1966 states explicitly: ‘We acknowledge, frankly, that the calendar has been
designed to stimulate the urge to travel …[and] enjoy South Africa’sscenicbeauties.’The
large numbers of these postcards with perforated edges found during the course of this
research demonstrates that people did not discard them after the expiry of the calendar
but did indeed keep them, as was intended.
The images on the SAR postcard calendars can be classified as topographical
postcards, generally defined as comprising ‘views of beaches, piers and promenades at
seaside resorts or of mountains, lakes and forests […] tourist centres […]urbanstreet
scenes and general views’.
6
It is suggested here that the SAR postcards both formed and
reflected popular middle-class ideas about the landscape and unspoilt nature, as well as
the advances of modernity in the form of bustling cities, industries, bridges, dams, and
above all trains. The ensuing dyad of nature/culture ties in with a far older colonialist
discourse, and implicitly underlies the argument in this article.
7
Postcards themselves
2. Lantern was published between 1951 and 1994, whilst Panorama started in 1956 and ended in 1992. See
L. Groenewald, ‘Cloudless Skies Versus Vitamins of the Mind: An Argumentative Interrogation of the
Visual Rhetoric of South African Panorama and Lantern Cover Designs (1949–1961)’,Image & Text,20
(2012), 50–86.
3. G. Visser and C.M. Rogerson, ‘Researching the South African Tourism and Development Nexus’,
GeoJournal, 60 (2004), 201.
4. Transnet Heritage Library, Johannesburg (hereafter THL), SAR Departmental Reports Submitted in
Connection with the Preparation of the General Manager’s Report for 1960–1961, 18. The depiction of
dual modes of transport in this image, namely road and rail, was an important trope in the manner in which
the SAR was publicised, for example in the paintings by C.E. Turner for the Illustrated London News (‘Rail,
Road and Air Travel Through the Varied Scenery of South Africa: the Union’s Splendid Coordination of
Transport services’,Illustrated London News, 12 October 1935).
5. Y. Meyer, Information Specialist, THL, personal communication, 10 October 2012. The travel bureaux
were located in, in order of founding, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, London, Lourenço
Marques, East London, Port Elizabeth, Bulawayo, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Windhoek, Pietermaritzburg,
and George.
6. C.W. Hill, Picture Postcards (Aylesbury: Shire, 1987), 7.
7. Jeffrey Meikle investigates the utopian impulse in the Curt Teich postcards produced between the 1930s and
1950s in the USA and there are a number of similarities between these postcards and the SAR postcards
discussed here, both of which seem to have mediated the land(scape) for a middle-class audience: J. Meikle,
‘A Paper Atlantis. Postcards, Mass Art, and the American Scene’,Journal of Design History, 13, 4 (2000),
267–286.
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are generally considered to be a significant index of modernity, echoing the modernity
reflected in mass transportation and communication systems, rising literacy, tourism,
and mechanical means of reproduction.
8
Figure 1. ‘A goods train near Gouda, C.P.’SAR postcard, 1977. Courtesy of Transnet Heritage Library.
8. N. Schor, ‘Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900’,Critical Inquiry, 18, 2 (1992), 209, 211.
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The first postcards were produced in Austria in 1869 and they immediately became
popular as a cheap, accessible and efficient form of communication. For almost 20 years
they existed as plain correspondence cards, with no pictures. The picture postcard was born
in 1889 with the Paris Exhibition and initially featured lithographic images, engravings and
line drawings until improved and affordable technology made it possible to mass-produce
photo-postcards around 1900.
9
With the introduction of the so-called divided back format
in 1902, the picture side (the recto) became more important than the verso on which the
message was written.
10
The earliest postcards in South Africa, Transvaal Republican
stationery cards with pictures on the verso, date from 1896.
11
Foster points out that from
the early years of the twentieth century postcards were not only the foremost form of
everyday communication, but were also the ‘main source of cheap, readily-available images
of South Africa’.
12
The photographic medium was easily able to ‘pass itself off as a
replication of the “real”’ and a reliable source of knowledge, without disclosing its latent
ideological message.
13
Consequently, postcards became one of the most important
mediums through which people literally worked out how to visualise their world.
14
Not
only did postcards construct social ideas of nature, more importantly, in most cases they
also created a ‘network of nationally shared images’.
15
The research for this article derived from almost 400 topographical postcards published
by the SAR between 1961 and 1984. Approximately a third of these were found in the
Transnet Heritage Library in Johannesburg and the rest were collected between 2010 and
2012 in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and the Western Cape by means of so-called ‘residual
methodology’, which focuses on artefacts that have been discarded and end up at auctions,
street markets, antique shops and specialist collectors.
16
Residual methodology implies that
only a portion of the entire data set, whose size may not be known, can be used. Twenty-four
postcards were produced for the postcard calendar each year and this means that for the
period 1961 to 1984, the total data set would comprise 552 postcards. The total of 378
postcards collected thus constitutes a 68% sample. As most of the postcards have been
9. H. Woody, ‘International Postcards. Their History, Production, and Distribution (circa 1895 to 1915)’,in
C.M. Geary and V.-L. Webb, eds, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 14–16.
10. Schor, ‘Cartes Postales’, 212.
11. A.K.W. Atkinson, ‘South African Picture Postcards’,Africana Notes and News, 25, 7 (1983), 227–228.
12. J. Foster, ‘Land of Contrasts or Home we Have Always Known?: The SAR&H and the Imaginary
Geography of White South African Nationhood, 1910–1930’,Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 3
(2003), 671.
13. P.C. Albers and W.R. James, ‘Travel Photography: A Methodological Approach’,Annals of Tourism
Research, 15 (1988), 137.
14. O. Löfgren, ‘Wish You Were Here! Holiday Images and Picture Postcards’,Ethnologia Scandinavica,15
(1985), 91.
15. G. Waitt and L. Head, ‘Postcards and Frontier Mythologies: Sustaining Views of the Kimberley as
Timeless’,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20 (2002), 320; S. Dotterrer and G. Cranz, ‘The
Picture Postcard: Its Development and Role in American Urbanization’,Journal of American Culture,5,1
(1982), 49, emphasis added.
16. S. Dubin, ‘Symbolic Slavery: Black Representations in Popular Culture’,Social Problems, 34, 2 (1987), 129.
The Internet and specifically online auction sites such as Ebay and Bid or Buy are also becoming useful
archives for researchers. See D. Gifford, ‘To You and Your Kin: Holiday Images from America’s Postcard
Phenomenon, 1907–1910’(PhD thesis, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 2011).
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removed from the accompanying calendar section, it was only possible to date about two-
thirds of them accurately, although contextual information was also useful. While the data
set is not complete, even a relatively small sample can generate meaningful interpretations.
17
This article starts with an overview of the SAR and its Publicity Department and the
manner in which it structured an emerging South African tourist gaze. Thereafter,
background is given regarding the postcards, calendars and postcard calendars produced by
the SAR from about the 1920s onwards. The discussion then turns to the postcard
calendars dating from 1961 to 1984 in terms of the three thematic clusters mentioned above.
Postcards are never merely a neutral record of the world but are ‘socially constructed and
meaningful representations’that are invariably biased in terms of things like gender, class
or race.
18
Although the SAR, and by implication the South Africa government, was not the
sole issuer of postcards as in some other countries, it nonetheless played a critical role in
establishing ideological messages that deserves further investigation.
19
Contextualising the SAR
Although the first white settlement of South Africa was initiated by The Netherlands in
1652, Britain became the dominant imperial power after 1815, and kept this supremacy
until the end of the South African War (1899–1902). The Union of South Africa was
declared in 1910 and it became an independent dominion within the British Common-
wealth during the 1920s, leading to a Republic in 1961. After Union, various white
governments enforced segregationist policies that entrenched control of the land and
economy. An initial solidarity between English and Afrikaans speaking South Africans
during the early decades of the twentieth century was offset by the rise of language-based
Afrikaner nationalism during the 1930s, culminating in the victory by the National Party in
1948
20
and the inauguration of the apartheid era (until 1994).
The SAR must be understood against this backdrop of politics and economic development
in South Africa. With the South Africa Act of 1909, the former discrete railway systems in the
country were combined into the government-controlled South African Railway and Harbour
Administration (SAR&H) under the first General Manager, Sir William Hoy, and the
Railways and Harbours Control and Management Act was promulgated in 1916. The SAR’s
control of all the harbours, train services, and motor bus services (Motor Carrier
Transportation Act of 1930), representing a virtual monopoly in terms of travel to and in
South Africa, was completed by the incorporation of the South African Airways in 1934.
The SAR was for many years the largest single corporation in South Africa that not only
totally transformed the economy, but also served as the primary employer for poor white
17. A. Pritchard and N. Morgan, ‘Mythic Geographies of Representation and Identity: Contemporary
Postcards of Wales’,Tourism and Cultural Change, 1, 2 (2003), 120.
18. Albers and James, ‘Travel Photography’, 140; Schor, ‘Cartes Postales’, 216.
19. See H.G. Lynn, ‘Moving Pictures: Postcards of Colonial Korea’,IIAS Newsletter, 44 (2007), 8, in terms of
Japan. Sallo Epstein in Johannesburg was the largest postcard publisher in southern Africa at the turn of
the nineteenth century: C.M. Geary, ‘Different Visions? Postcards from Africa by European and African
Photographers and Sponsors’, in Geary and Webb, Delivering Views, 148.
20. J. Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 250.
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workers, specifically during the impoverished 1920s.
21
The SAR laid the foundations for
overseas mail service, broadcasting, and film-making. As a ‘government within a
government’it was practically inseparable from government, and influenced almost every
aspect of South Africa’s social and economic life.
22
In particular, the SAR was used
strategically by the Union government to illustrate the material advantages of capitalism,
imperialism, urbanisation and a modern, progressive unified nation.
23
For many years the
SAR dealt with the tensions between the imperatives of technological modernisation/
progress/civilisation in relation to pre-modern landscape visions/untamed nature.
24
In this
regard, it is significant that the first generation of administrators of the SAR were
Anglophile and worked in the colonial national interest of modernisation.
25
The Afrikanerisation of government that accompanied the triumph of the Nationalist
Party in 1948 was also echoed by the Afrikanerisation of corporations and key places such
as the Kruger National Park.
26
Ideological shifts in the SAR were evident in its
participation in celebrations linked to the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument in
1949 and the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary in 1952. This saw the end the romanticisation of
South Africa as a place of personal aspiration and adventure that had characterised the
politics of conciliation for the first 40 years of the twentieth century.
27
The policies of
segregation, both in terms of the SAR workforce and its commuters, led to huge financial
losses from the 1970s onwards. In addition, the growth of individual car ownership, which
exceeded a million by 1959, led to a steep decline in the popularity of SAR rail travel and
motor coach tours with white people.
28
The SAR, as a ‘quintessential symbol of modern nationhood and agent of territorial
appropriation [and colonialism], the state-run railway’
29
needed an instrument by which to
publicise its activities. Accordingly, in 1910, the
advertising arrangements of the Administration were concentrated in a Publicity Branch at
Headquarters […Its most important task was] ordinary railway publicity work, such as the
21. Ibid., 202; J. Seekings, ‘“Not a Single White Person Should be Allowed to go Under”:Swartgevaar and the
Origins of South Africa’s Welfare State, 1924–1929’,Journal of African History, 48 (2007), 383.
22. Foster, ‘Land of Contrasts’, 661.
23. Ibid., 661, 663; J. Foster, ‘Northward, Upward: Stories of Train Travel, and the Journey Towards White
South African Nationhood, 1895–1950’,Journal of Historical Geography, 31 (2005), 304, 310.
24. Foster, ‘Northward, Upward’, 304, 310.
25. Foster, Washed with Sun, 203.
26. D. Bunn, ‘An Unnatural State: Tourism, Water and Wildlife Photography in the Early Kruger National
Park’, in W. Beinart and J. McGregor, eds, Social History and African Environments (Cape Town: David
Philip, 2003), 203.
27. Foster, Washed with Sun,40–42, 240–241, notes that attempts were made to gloss over the differences
between whites and to establish a genealogy of South Africa as a white man’s country in the early decades
of the twentieth century.
28. B.C. Floor, The History of National Roads in South Africa (Cape Town: CTP, 1985), 4. This growing lack
of popularity of motor coach tours is reflected in the Annual Reports of the SAR in the 1970s. See also
‘Answers.com’http://www.answers.com/topic/transnet#ixzz2NiGhGpe0, accessed 16 March 2013.
29. Foster, ‘Northward, Upward’, 306. The SAR opened up the interior of the country and made it less
solitary, unspoiled and empty, but also fashioned ‘a new subjectivity toward the landscape that was
reflexive, collective, and national […creating a] shared white identification with the geographical place of
the nation’: Foster, Washed with Sun, 201, 202.
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compilation and publication of newspaper, magazine and book advertisements, the preparation of
guide-books, pamphlets and posters, and the distribution of photographs, etc.
30
Under the astute headship of Mr A.H. Tatlow,
31
the Publicity Department started to
build up a collection of visual material, leading to the ‘dissemination of photographic
enlargements of South African scenery and industries in all parts of the world […] and the
reproduction of photographs for the South African and oversea [sic] press’.
32
For many
years, the annual reports of the SAR mentioned the importance of publicity in stimulating
passenger traffic in order to develop holiday resorts but also to ‘attract visitors and
industrial investors to South Africa’.
33
The mainstay of the early publicity campaigns of the SAR was its stock of photographic
material, which numbered 20,127 negatives by 1915.
34
These images were used in
publications, posters and brochures, nationally and internationally, and were meant to
inculcate and develop ‘a spirit of interest and civic pride’in South Africans.
35
Photographic
enlargements of ‘types of South African scenery’were accordingly used to make South
Africa known to ‘the right type of people’.
36
This was the first systematic visual recording
of the country and many of the early views produced by the SAR became iconic,
establishing a ‘range of landscape motifs, effects, and points of view [that …] acquired
cultural currency’and shaped the way the landscape was seen and experienced by white
South Africans
37
for many decades.
It was repeatedly felt that an organisation was needed to take care of the Union’s
overseas publicity. Consequently, Act no. 54 of 1947 promulgated the South African
Tourist Corporation (Satour), and its office in London was opened in 1949.
38
From
30. THL, General Manager of Railways and Harbours Annual Report, 1910, 36.
31. Tatlow started his career in South Africa in Natal, and became Manager of the South African Railways and
Harbours Publicity Department in 1910. He was instrumental in publicising the Union for 20 years, and
was particularly involved with South Africa’s exhibition at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924 and
in founding publicity offices in London and New York (see note 32 below): ‘Railway Publicity in South
Africa –Publicity Manager’s Retirement’,The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 5, 3 (July, 1930), 1–9.
32. THL, Annual Report, 1910, 37 (emphasis added). Part of this initiative was also to ‘thoroughly “bioscope”
South African scenery and industries’(THL, Annual Report, 1910, 37). African Film Productions was
commissioned to produce documentary films that shaped the ‘emerging notion of the new South Africa’
and promoted tourism: E. Sandon, ‘Preserving a Heritage? South African Archive Documentary: 1910–
1940’,Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 16, 1 (2007), 51, 54.
33. THL, Annual Report, 1911, 43. This impetus was formalised at a conference organised by the Publicity
Department of the SAR in November 1919 in Johannesburg at which over 50 South African delegates
deliberated on ways of attracting tourists, farmers, settlers and manufacturers to South Africa: ‘Making
South Africa Known to Settlers and Tourists’,S.A. Railways and Harbours Magazine (January 1920), 7.
The Union’s successful participation in the Empire Exhibitions in 1924 (Wembley), Johannesburg (1936),
and Glasgow (1938) can be attributed to the role played by the SAR in the conceptualisation of the national
exhibits.
34. THL, Annual Report, 1915, 109.
35. THL, Annual Report, 1925, 28.
36. Ibid., 30–31.
37. Foster, Washed with Sun, 212, 215. The SAR was the primary commissioner of images until after the
Second World War: Foster, ‘Land of Contrasts’, 668.
38. A Century of Transport (Johannesburg: Da Gama, 1960), 203.
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the early 1950s onwards there was a clear demarcation between the mandate of
the SAR Publicity Department and Satour –the former was meant to focus on
domestic tourism and travel arrangements and the latter had to advertise South Africa
as a holiday destination overseas.
39
This distinction is important because it almost
certainly had an effect on the target market of the postcard calendars referred to in this
article.
40
The first SAR postcards and pictorial calendars
In order to trace the origins of the postcard calendars featured in this article, it is
instructive to note that in 1929 the SAR’s‘publicity propaganda material’comprised
‘brochures, photographs, picture post cards, maps, press advertisements, posters,
lantern slides and cinema films’
41
(Figure 2). In 1933, it was noted that 13,094 pictorial
Figure 2. ‘The Heads, Knysna.’Early black and white SAR postcard, ca. 1920s?. Courtesy of
Transnet Heritage Library.
39. Ibid., 202.
40. This distinction is observable in the advertising material provided for overseas periodicals such as the
Illustrated London News in the 1950s and 1960s. Satour advertised South Africa as a desirable holiday
destination, whereas the SAR stated that it would help with organising tickets, transport and
accommodation (see Illustrated London News, 5 November and 19 November 1955, respectively, for
examples).
41. THL, Annual Report, 1929, 36; emphasis added.
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postcards had been produced to attract holiday and business visitors to South Africa.
42
Postcards were mentioned again in 1952, when it was recorded that 100 sets of
postcards, consisting of 12 photographs of ‘tourist attractions in South Africa’were to
be distributed to ‘prospective visitors to the Union’.
43
In 1934, a pictorial calendar in three colours, consisting of ‘a selection of the well-known
colour-spreads published in overseas periodicals’was produced for the first time.
44
In 1940, the
Annual Report noted that the ‘Department’s pictorial calendar, of which 13,500 copies were
printed, enjoyed considerable popularity overseas and was of great propaganda value’.
45
Shortages of paper during the Second World War hampered the production of publicity
material, but by 1949 the pictorial calendar, which featured black and white photographs from
the Department’s stock, was again being produced and distributed in South Africa and
overseas.
46
By 1956, it incorporated 12 pictures in colour, which made ‘an effective contribution
to the publicity value of the production’.
47
In 1960, the centenary of the railways in South
Africa, a prestigious 52-page Centenary Calendar was produced that combined modern
pictures with historical scenes.
48
As previously mentioned, the new format of the postcard
calendar discussed in this article appearedin 1961. The last mention of the postcard calendars is
in 1982,
49
and the Publicity Department ceased to operate as a separate entity in about 1987.
The main purpose of the postcard calendar was to publicise the activities of the SAR and
to stimulate interest in travel to South Africa: it was ‘obvious that the annual circulation of
these calendars provides a valuable medium for publicising the South African Railways’.
50
In order to extend the impact of the calendars, the calendar pictures were sometimes
reprinted and distributed to, for instance, tourists ‘on visiting cruise ships as mementos of
their visit’.
51
The pictorial calendar was also distributed in the USA and to ‘members of the
British Railways Executive, travel agencies, shipping companies and numerous other
concerns’.
52
In the years following the systematic institutionalisation of apartheid and the
effective ostracising of South Africa from the international arena, the postcard calendars
continued to be distributed overseas but it seems as if the domestic market in southern
Africa became the main focus. The imperative to ‘See your own country’or ‘Know your
own country’was frequently found in the SAR’s publicity material,
53
and resonated with
the sentiment that tourism was actually a patriotic endeavour.
54
42. THL, Annual Report, 1933, 61.
43. THL, Departmental Reports, 1951–1952, 14.
44. THL, Annual Report, 1934, 71.
45. THL, Annual Report, 1940, 101.
46. THL, Annual Report, 1949, 74.
47. THL, Departmental Reports, 1955–1956, 8.
48. THL, Departmental Reports, 1959–1960, 15. Because of its popularity, 30,000 Centenary Calendars were
reprinted as a centenary album in 1961: THL, Departmental Reports, 1960–1961, 16.
49. THL, Annual Report, 1981–1982, 35. It is possible that the increasingly negative economic climate in South
Africa of the early 1980s and the poor performance of the SAR necessitated the curtailment of certain
promotional activities: http://www.answers.com/topic/transnet#ixzz2NiGhGpe0, accessed 16 March 2013.
50. THL, Departmental Reports, 1950–1951, 9.
51. THL, Departmental Reports, 1957–1958, 8.
52. THL, Departmental Reports, 1949–1950, 5.
53. THL, Annual Report, 1949, 14.
54. A.J. Gross, ‘Cars, Postcards, and Patriotism: Tourism and National Politics in the United States,
1893–1929’,Pacific Coast Philology, 40, 1 (2005), 89.
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The design, production and distribution of the postcard calendars was done by the SAR
Publicity Department. The Annual Reports consistently note their good reception:
The S.A.R. Pictorial Calendar was well received, the general comment being that it was the most
attractive production of its type which had been seen in the United Kingdom. The selection of
photographs was admired by many people in the advertising world.
55
The design and journalism section of the Publicity Department used photographs ‘selected
from stocks held by the photographic section’
56
or took new ones in colour from 1956
onwards. The Annual Report remarked that ‘while these added considerably to the cost,
there is no doubt that they made an effective contribution to the publicity value of the
production’.
57
The SAR and tourism
The SAR played an inordinately influential role in South Africa in terms of not only
providing the images that encouraged people to travel, but also the means to do so by virtue
of its infrastructure and services.
58
Tourism is one of the major domains in which
photographic images are manipulated, usually in order to highlight historically constructed
gazes and glances.
59
As already mentioned, the SAR advertised its services through its
extensive visual archive that came to constitute a ‘network of nationally shared images’.As
early as 1911, the SAR noted that apart from using advertising to attract visitors, settlers
and industrial investors to South Africa, it ‘stimulat[ed] passenger traffic and […] created
an added interest in local resorts’such as Muizenberg.
60
The SAR’s early and astute
identification of seaside resorts and other leisure destinations such as the Garden Route, the
Kruger National Park and the Drakensberg established key holiday areas that continue to
be popular.
61
In 1926 there were only 6,356 tourists to South Africa, but this number grew annually by
means of the shrewd publicity campaigns by the SAR that targeted the ‘wealthy and travelling
classes’.
62
Tourism increased after the Second World War as a result of international
legislation regarding paid annual leave, more leisure time and disposable income, better
transportation, and sophisticated modes of visual marketing.
63
As previously noted, under
55. THL, Departmental Reports, 1948–1949, 10.
56. THL, Annual Report, 1949, 74.
57. THL, Departmental Reports, 1956–1957, 8.
58. Foster, Washed with Sun, 234.
59. Albers and James, 136; V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Creating a City of the Tourist Imagination: The Case of Cape
Town, “The Fairest Cape of them All”’,Urban Studies, 46, 9 (2009), 1765.
60. THL, Annual Report, 1911, 43. The illustrated articles in the South African Railway Magazine, founded in
1905, also familiarised South Africans with the scenery of their country (e.g., articles on the Drakensberg,
December 1919; Hermanus, April 1920; the Cape Peninsula, March 1925).
61. C.M. Rogerson and Z. Lisa, ‘“Shot’t Left’: Changing Domestic Tourism in South Africa, Urban Forum, 16,
2–3 (2005), 93.
62. THL, Annual Report, 1939, 108. THL, Annual Report, 1927, 31.
63. F. Ferrario, ‘Emerging Leisure Market Among the South African Black Population, Tourism Management,
9, 1 (1988), 28–29; D. Cosgrove, ‘Introduction to Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape’, in R.Z.
DeLue and J. Elkins, eds, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), 31.
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apartheid, domestic tourism was aimed at the needs of the privileged white minority who had
disposable income, mobility, and access to all manner of tourism facilities.
64
More than
100,000 visitors arrived in the 1950s,
65
although Grundlingh believes that tourism remained
relatively low on the Nationalist government’s agenda until the late 1950s when commercial
jet aircraft and improvements to roads and infrastructure were effected.
66
The Sharpeville
killings in 1960 had a temporary negative effect on international tourism. The SAR reacted
to the ‘uncertain political conditions in Africa’and the ‘falling off’of international visitors
by turning more and more to the domestic market for support for its local tours.
67
The
buoyant economy in South Africa during the early 1960s was offset for the SAR by the
realities of ‘several factors which tend to limit the extent to which traffic, especially from
overseas, can be increased’, but the political situation was not explicitly mentioned as one of
these.
68
Foreign tourists to South Africa numbered over 400,000 by 1975, but plummeted in
the aftermath of the Soweto riots of June 1976 and continued to be lower into the 1980s.
Despite this, publicity material produced during the 1960s and 1970s by Satour featured the
usual images of sun, sea, sport and wildlife as, according to Grundlingh, ‘South Africa had to
appear as an invitingly outdoor, exclusively white country’,
69
and the same tendency can be
traced in the SAR postcard calendars discussed below.
Discussion of postcards
It should be noted that the postcard calendars discussed here are without exception very
conservative in terms of their style and content. Both the form and content of the postcards
seem to have remained virtually static in the period under discussion. Indeed, without
occasional temporal signifiers, it would be almost impossible to distinguish between
postcards from the 1960s and those from the 1980s as the visual rhetoric was unchanged.
Part of the reason for this seems to be that the postcards served to capture the so-called
timeless ‘essence’of South Africa and represent it as a type of paradise that was untouched
by the political or economic realities, especially of the 1970s and 1980s. Notwithstanding
the real demographics of the country, South Africa was represented as an irredeemably
‘white’country and a white, middle class audience was naturalised as the norm. Whereas
the publicity material of the SAR in earlier years focussed mainly on familiarising South
Africans with ‘their’country, one can speculate that by the second half of the twentieth
century, and particularly as a result of apartheid politics, the emphasis shifted more to
confirming white entitlement. Political and visual conservatism often collude in establishing
the power of repressive regimes, and I believe this notion informs the SAR postcards,
specifically in terms of the inherently persuasive naturalism of the photographic medium
64. Rogerson and Lisa, ‘Shot’t Left’, 93.
65. THL, Departmental Reports, 1959–1960, 1.
66. A. Grundlingh, ‘Revisiting the “Old”South Africa: Excursions into South Africa‘s Tourist History Under
Apartheid, 1948–1990’,South African Historical Journal, 56 (2006), 105–106.
67. THL, Departmental Reports, 1960–1961, 2, 7.
68. THL, Departmental Reports, 1963–1964, 2.
69. Grundlingh, ‘Revisiting the “Old”South Africa’, 110. The Annual Reports of the SAR from the late 1960s
onwards devoted far less attention to the activities of the Publicity and Travel Department and totally failed
to engage with or refer to the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s.
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referred to above. It should also be remembered that images generated at that time would
have had to appeal to a generation that was still generally unsophisticated in terms of visual
culture and that had to be reassured of the stability of their world.
In dividing the postcards into thematic clusters, I attempted to do so in the spirit of the
times and the purpose for which in which they were created, which means, for example, that
it would have been entirely acceptable to relegate black people to ‘the world of nature’as
this was the primary mode in which they were generally represented.
The following themes were accordingly identified in the images on the postcard
calendars: land- and sea-scapes; flora and fauna; indigenous cultures; monuments, heritage
and public buildings; leisure and tourism spaces and activities; cities, roads, industry
and dams; and SAR-related topics (e.g., trains, harbours, motor coaches, and airplanes)
(Table 1). These themes were then arranged in three broad clusters: the natural world; the
world of culture; and related to this, the world of technology, modernity and progress.
70
A
stratified sample was drawn from the subgroups in the clusters. Yet again, the sample
seemed to be representative enough to attempt to answer the question of how the SAR
represented the country through the medium of postcards and to be able to understand how
issues of power might have informed this representation. In other words, the sample is
sufficient in order to determine which images and identities are foregrounded and which are
silenced, omitted or marginalised.
71
Following the pioneering work of Albers and James, the majority of postcard studies
combine quantitative with qualitative analysis.
72
Quantitative content analysis is useful for
Table 1. Thematic clusters in the SAR postcards. (Compiled by author).
The world of ‘nature’
Wildlife, birds, flowers 30
Black people 10
Land- and sea-scapes (15 with humans) 69
109
The world of ‘culture’
Leisure activities 45
Tourism resorts, game parks, hotels, parks 15
Monuments, public buildings 28
88
The world of ‘technology and progress’
Cities, industries, dams 36
SAR: station buildings, people on trains 37
SAR: trains, motor coaches, harbours, airplanes, heavy road transport, lighthouses 108
181
Total 378
70. C.K. Corkery and A.J. Bailey, ‘Lobster is Big in Boston: Postcards, Place, Commodification, and
Tourism’,GeoJournal, 34, 4 (1994), 491–498 identify similar attributes: heritage; shopping; academe;
tourism; night scenes; and the metanarratives of science and technology.
71. Pritchard and Morgan, ‘Mythic Geographies’, 121.
72. See Corkery and Bailey, ‘Lobster is Big’; Dubin, ‘Symbolic Slavery’; M. Markwick, ‘Postcards from Malta.
Image, Consumption, Context’,Annals of Tourism Research, 28, 2 (2001); Pritchard and Morgan, ‘Mythic
Geographies’.
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establishing the frequency of certain visual elements (e.g., images of technology) and
works best when the categories for coding are already interpretive.
73
Semiotic analysis
can then be used to reveal how recurring codes operate to encode ideological meanings
(e.g., who or what is absent or erased from representation) and deals with latent,
symbolic and metaphorical intentions.
74
Content analysis does not generally reveal much
about the production or audience of visual images, and is most useful when it is combined
with intertextual cross-checks to enhance reliability.
75
Some scholars hold that the
production, collection and reception of postcards is just as important as the interpreta-
tion of their visual imagery as these interrogate notions of authority, originality, class,
gender, and power.
76
The postcards discussed in this article were all produced and
disseminated by the SAR. Although patterns of consumption have not been established,
it is indicative that so many postcards have survived, suggesting that they were not
necessarily considered to be transient. More research is needed in order to ascertain more
clearly how these postcards ‘worked’as opposed to what they ‘meant’,
77
but they are
read here contextually as products of culture that encapsulated and reflected an
ideological imperative.
The world of ‘nature’
Like many other countries that bear a colonial legacy, South Africa has consistently been
represented by stereotypes that align it irredeemably with the natural, unspoilt world of
wildlife and ‘primitive tribalism’.
78
This romance of the land and exotic otherness is again
and again offset by the rhetoric of development, modernity, civilisation, and industrialisa-
tion (see below). Consequently, the ‘predominant set of codes through which South Africa
has been represented and imaged is through variants of a dichotomy between the conditions
of “modernity”and “primitiveness”’.
79
For the colonialist and tourist, ‘Africa’was the
quintessence of untamed and unspoilt nature and ‘pristine peoples’; accordingly, African
culture and history have usually been considered less compelling than its wildlife
80
73. G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2012),
87, 91.
74. Albers and James, ‘Travel Photography’, 145–149; P. Raento, ‘Tourism, Nation, and the Postage Stamp:
Examples from Finland’,Annals of Tourism Research, 36, 1 (2009), 129.
75. Rose, Visual Methodologies, 86; S. Jokela and P. Raento, ‘Collecting Visual Materials from Secondary
Sources’, in T. Rakic and D. Chambers, eds, An Introduction to Visual Research Methods in Tourism
(London: Routledge, 2012), 67.
76. D. Prochaska and J. Mendelson, ‘Introduction’, in D. Prochaska and J. Mendelson, eds, Postcards.
Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park, PA., Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), xi–xii.
77. D. Prochaska, ‘Thinking Postcards’,Visual Resources, 17 (2001), 383.
78. C. Rassool and L. Witz. ‘South Africa: A World in One Country. Moments in International Tourist
Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modern’,Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 143, 36 (1996), 336.
79. Rassool and Witz.‘South Africa’, 364. This discourse was already apparent at the Wembley Empire
Exhibition in 1924 and the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg in 1936: J. Woodham, ‘Images of Africa
and Design at the British Empire Exhibitions Between the Wars’,Journal of Design History, 2, 1 (1989);
C. Coe, ‘Histories of Empire, Nation, and City: Four Interpretations of the Empire Exhibition,
Johannesburg, 1936’,Folklore Forum, 32, 1/2 (2001).
80. W. Van Beek. ‘Approaching African Tourism: Paradigms and Paradoxes’, in P. Chabal, U. Engel and L.
De Haan, eds, African Alternatives (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 154, 162–163.
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(Figure 3). Lowenthal points out that in ‘new’places such as America and Australia, the
natural past is usually accorded more prominence that the cultural past, helping to locate
‘roots in nature’.
81
This colonial tradition of essentialising Africa as the site of exotic
animals negated human presence
82
or reduced it to tribal clichés, as well as establishing
nature as the site for nostalgia. Grundlingh asserts that during the 1960s, South Africa as a
tourist destination was still principally associated with outdoorism, primitivism, wildlife
and leisure.
83
The extant SAR postcards of animals (30) depict only two sites: the Kruger National Park
(KNP) and the Etosha National Park, South West Africa (now Namibia, but part of South
Africa until 1990). In other words, this vision of wildlife in its ‘natural’state is already a
mediated construct. Proclaimed in 1926, the KNP became the focus point of an imaginary
geography based on pristine, untouched nature under the custodianship of white man
that was used to bolster ideas of national identity and unity between white people in
Figure 3. ‘S.A. Railway motor coach in the Kruger National Park.’SAR postcard, 1974. Courtesy
of Transnet Heritage Library.
81. D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53–54.
82. J. Nederven Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992), 35.
83. Grundlingh, ‘Revisiting’, 110–111.
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South Africa.
84
The SAR organised package tours to the KNP in the 1920s; as roads and
hotels were still in their infancy, the tourists slept on the trains.
85
The SAR thus played a strategic
role in the construction of the KNP as a tourist destination, and this is reiterated in Figure 3 that
shows a SAR motor coach there in 1974. The size and majesty of the elephant signify the
world of nature, and although it is benign, it nonetheless dwarfs the tourist bus. The visitors
represent the domain of modernity and culture. This is embodied by the two tourists taking
photographs from inside the bus, which also underscores the spectacularisation of Africa.
It was stated above that black people are represented in the SAR postcards in the
domain of nature. This alludes to the fact that so-called tribal people are generally depicted
literally ‘rooted in the soil, subsumed in nature, an extension of another natural world’to
suggest their supposed closer association with nature.
86
Meikle confirms that ‘native’
people are invariably objectified as ‘part of the landscape […] exotically fascinating and
wholly “other”’; their faces are averted and they are only seen from a distance.
87
This
concurs with the 10 SAR postcards that depict black people. Four postcards show
fishermen at the Cape, one shows labourers in a vineyard, another show workers in a pinery
(Figure 4) and one shows herders with their cattle. One postcard depicts an Indian spice
seller in Durban and another shows a ‘typical’Ndebele woman in front of her homestead
with its characteristic mural decoration. One postcard shows two immobile figures in the
Zululand landscape (captioned ‘Zululand’), and the last depicts an ostrich race, which was
often enacted for tourists in the Oudtshoorn district.
The colonialist trope of ‘industrious blacks’overseen by benevolent and paternalistic
white people (Figure 4) was typical of the manner in which the SAR represented black
people as either ‘anthropological curiosities’or as ‘noble savages’, neither of whom could
challenge white hegemony.
88
Despite the fact that they are engaged in productive tasks,
they are positioned as technologically backward, anonymous ‘types’closer to nature than
to culture. This is underscored by the caption of the postcard: ‘The golden harvest.’The
black women, one of whom is bare-breasted,
89
are intermediaries for the bounty of nature
they carry on their heads. The domain of white hegemony is suggested by the white
(presumably) farmer and his wife. They stand separate from the labourers in the fields and
they present a pineapple to a white female visitor, adorned with a token ‘native’grass hat.
The wealth of the farmer is suggested by the extent of the pineries and it is probable that it
is his imposing house that is situated on the far horizon.
90
84. See J. Carruthers, ‘Dissecting the Myth: Paul Kruger and the Kruger National Park’,Journal of Southern
African Studies, 20, 2 (1994), 263–283. Foster (Washed with Sun,69–71) suggests that the identification of
white South Africans with wild animals was expedited by their ‘erasure of indigenous human inhabitants in
favour of indigenous fauna’.
85. Foster, Washed with Sun, 200–201.
86. Markwick, ‘Postcards from Malta’, 428.
87. Meikle, ‘A Paper Atlantis’, 274.
88. Foster, Washed with Sun, 227–228, 256. See also ‘Native Types and Life’,S.A. Railways and Harbours
Magazine, December 1920, 1021–1025.
89. The partial nudity of the black woman again served to establish her otherness and ‘primitive’state at a time
when images of nudity of white women were subject to strict state censorship.
90. The trope that featured the romance of the productive land was very common in SAR ‘publicity
propaganda’during the 1920s that sought to attract Europeans to settle in South Africa. ‘Making South
Africa Known’,S.A. Railways and Harbours Magazine, January 1920, 7.
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The last group of postcards that deal with nature portray the landscape. The notion of
landscape as a vehicle of ideological statements regarding ownership, inclusion, and
entitlement is important and is validated by the large number of postcards in this category
(69). The politics of colonialist and capitalist expansionism was extended by the capacity of
powerful institutions, such as the SAR, to impose its view on landscape or to manipulate
images of it.
91
Foster structures a compelling argument concerning South African nation
building as instrumentalised by the SAR’s visual archive and shows how the lure of wide
open spaces came to be associated with South Africanism throughout the first half of the
twentieth century.
92
The manner in ‘which all whites came to identify with and “place”
themselves in the imagined nation of South Africa’was intimately related to the way in
which the visual representation of the shared territory was entrenched in visual and textual
reiterations.
93
The Publicity Department of the SAR played a crucial role in this, not only
by documenting the country visually, but also by creating iconic views that formed a
conceptual prism through which notions of nationhood and the idea of South Africa as a
Figure 4. ‘The golden harvest. Pineries near East London.’SAR postcard, ca. early 1960s. Courtesy
of Transnet Heritage Library.
91. S. Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 16.
92. Foster, Washed with Sun,73–74.
93. Ibid., 46–47, 64.
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‘white man’s country’were read.
94
The landscape views of the Cape Peninsula and the
Drakensberg, for example, established landscape preferences that contributed to the
narrative of white South African identity (and ‘network of nationally shared images’) deep
into the second half of the twentieth century.
95
The identification with the (white man’s) land had to be supported by the physical
exploration and embodied experience of it; ‘the land itself came to be seen as a significant
determinant of […] South African society’.
96
Thus it was that the invitingly empty landscape
became the stock in trade of SAR imagery as it allowed an imaginary and idealised
geography of the national whole, ‘grounded in the scenic’, to take root.
97
Crais observes that
the myth of the empty or vacant land betokened both geographical emptiness and unused
land in addition to the literal empty land in which indigenous people are rendered invisible.
98
Typical of this trope was the expansive panoramic view, usually from a promontory, of the
immensity of the countryside wherein the people gazing at the land ‘could feel comfortable
in their possession of it’.
99
This trope continued to be important throughout the period
discussed in this article and features in a significant number of postcards, suggesting the need
to confirm white presence visually in the land during a period of growing political unrest.
The women who confidently take in the vastness of the Blyde River Canyon in the
Eastern Transvaal (Figure 5) assert and legitimate the right to white presence and
ownership. They are characteristic of the modern tourist who consumes landscape
aesthetically as a leisure activity; they take in the land laid out like a panorama for their
evaluative gaze. Their possession is performed by means of vision and technology –the
woman on the left wields the arch-weapon of the tourist, the camera. This comparison is
not gratuitous –Susan Sontag notoriously described the camera as a ‘predatory weapon’
and pointed out that photography developed simultaneously with modern tourism.
100
Unsurprisingly, there are no comparable SAR postcards wherein black people enact their
right to the land in a similar way; all the landscape postcards in this sample convey the
same one-sided view of the land.
101
94. Ibid., 40–42, 49, 86–87.
95. Bickford-Smith, ‘Creating a City’, 1770; J. Pickles, ‘Images of Landscape in South Africa with Particular
Reference to Landscape Appreciation and Preferences in the Natal Drakensberg’(PhD thesis, University of
Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1978).
96. Foster, ‘Northward, Upward’, 302–303.
97. Gross, ‘Cars, Postcards’, 79.
98. C.C. Crais, ‘The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’,
Journal of Social History, 25, 2 (1991), 257. This resonates not only with the rhetorical strategies of colonial
discourse but also with the landscape vision of contemporary South African painters such as Jacob Hendrik
Pierneef (1886–1957). Pierneef’s 30 large landscape panels commissioned by the SAR for Park Station in
Johannesburg, completed in 1930, totally erase black people from the South African landscape.
99. Meikle, ‘A Paper Atlantis’, 273. Views from the top of Table Mountain in Cape Town were especially
iconic and can be found in numerous postcards from the early years of the twentieth century even before the
SAR started its visual archive.
100. S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 9, 14. This association is underscored by a travel
advertisement by the SAR in 1957: ‘En onthou: ‘n reisiger sonder ‘n kamera is soos ‘n jagter sonder sy
geweer. BRING U KAMERA SAAM! (‘Remember, a traveller without a camera is like a hunter without
his gun. BRING YOUR CAMERA! My translation): Lantern, October 1957, 6.
101. For more on the manner in which landscapes were represented in SAR postcards, see J. Van Eeden,
‘Surveying the “Empty Land”in Selected South African Landscape Postcards’,International Journal of
Tourism Research, 13, 6 (2011), 600–612.
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The world of ‘culture’
The world of ‘culture’as represented in the SAR postcards is related to notions of class,
constructed national identity, conspicuous leisure and ‘leisure imperialism’.
102
South Africa
is yet again depicted as an exclusively white country; as Grundlingh remarks in the context
of Satour marketing, ‘black people did not make a guest appearance, nor did they even
appear as a kind of animated geographical background’.
103
The reality that black labour
made possible the leisured entitlement of the minority of the population is totally elided.
The leisure activities in which white people participate in the postcards include fishing,
pony trekking, horse racing, bowls, golf, yachting, and of course swimming and lying on
the beach. The people depicted at the beach are invariably young and attractive (Figure 6)
and embody the stereotypical connotations of sun, sex, sea, and sand. The two female
figures in Figure 6 are dressed in scant bikinis and pose at the exclusive Clifton Beach. Its
sought-after bungalows and flats form the backdrop and establish a clear class position for
the beach on which only white people enjoy themselves.
Figure 5. ‘The Blyde River Canyon near Pilgrim’s Rest, E. Tvl.’SAR postcard, ca. early 1960s.
Courtesy of Transnet Heritage Library.
102. M. Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and
Servility’,Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), 322.
103. Grundlingh, ‘Revisiting’, 110.
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The people who participate in the other activities are commonly depicted as older or
more sedate, such as those playing bowls at a resort in the Drakensberg (Figure 7). All the
figures are contained within the confines of the neatly clipped lawn and the surrounding
hedge, which establish a border with untamed nature in the background. It is perhaps
significant that the activity they participate in has no resonance with the majestic mountain
backdrop; that is, they are not shown climbing the mountain or enjoying the view. Most of
the people who are depicted in postcards showing tourism resorts or sites, game parks,
hotels and parks fall into this age (and class) category.
The postcards that depict monuments and public buildings offer an exclusive view of
white, primarily Afrikaner, settlement, heritage and culture: the Union Buildings in
Pretoria, the Huguenot Memorial in Franschhoek, statues of Afrikaner heroes like Paul
Kruger, J.B.M. Hertzog and J.G. Strijdom, the Pretoria City Hall, the Public Library in
Johannesburg, Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, the University of South Africa in
Pretoria, various (mainly neo-Gothic) church buildings, and iconic Cape Dutch houses
such as Groote Schuur in Cape Town. Only one postcard depicts a ‘Bantu church, De Beers
Diamond Mine, Kimberley’, and even this can be read as an expression of the penetration
of white capital rather than being a testament to black culture.
The world of ‘culture’represented in these postcards is constructed on a network of
signifiers that operated within the circuit of culture to convey specific class and race
Figure 6. ‘Clifton Beach, Cape Town.’SAR postcard, 1971. Courtesy of Transnet Heritage Library.
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positions. First, as mentioned previously, the SAR expedited the development of many
holiday resorts by its network of trains and motor coaches that linked these spaces of
pleasure to the metropole.
104
The idea of middle-class travel purely for leisure purposes was
a new phenomenon that was made possible by the railways. Second, this urbanised middle
class could afford to travel and had the leisure time to do so. Third, the habit of retreating
to nature for leisure was also related to a class position.
105
Pickles has pointed out that a
preference for the Drakensberg in the 1970s was aligned with a specific socioeconomic
profile consisting of well-educated, English-speaking, high income professional urbanites,
usually married but with few children (Figure 7).
106
Contrary to this, the Natal South Coast
appealed to younger, single, lower-income English- and Afrikaans-speaking holidaymakers
Figure 7. ‘Cathedral Peak, Drakensberg, Natal.’SAR postcard, 1971. Courtesy of Transnet
Heritage Library.
104. Fashionable seaside resorts such as Sea Point and Muizenberg were linked by rail to Cape Town in order to
facilitate the spending of leisure time. Foster, Washed with Sun, 210–211. Some of the earliest roads in
South Africa were also built with the idea of leisure in mind. As early as 1908, the Cape Peninsula Publicity
Association and the Cape Automobile Club lobbied for better roads to enable tourism around the Cape
Peninsula. Work started on the All Round the Cape Peninsula Road in 1913 and it was completed in 1923:
R.H. Johnston and D. Stuart-Findlay, The Motorist’s Paradise: An Illustrated History of Early Motoring in
and around Cape Town (Cape Town: Tandym, 2005), 50–52.
105. Raento, ‘Tourism, Nation’, 137, 142; Löfgren, ‘Wish You Were Here’, 92.
106. Pickles, ‘Images of Landscape’, 340–341.
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who had less formal education and were employed in production or clerical work.
107
These
patterns of consumption had been established from the beginning of the twentieth century
when Durban, for example, was developed as a coastal resort by the Durban Corporation
specifically to draw people from the industrial interior of South Africa.
108
The scene in
Figure 6 of upmarket Clifton is therefore not typical of the SAR postcards, most of which
do indeed concentrate on popular beaches in places such as Durban.
Fourth, these landscape preferences were underscored by the production of postcards for
the domestic market that reflect this ‘shared or similarly grounded consumption of
culture’.
109
From the early twentieth century onwards, real photo postcards were embraced
by upwardly mobile consumers and became markers of cultural capital.
110
Lastly, the
process of forging national identities is related to the construction of shared narratives and
memories; so, for example, the Cape Dutch architectural style was elevated from the early
decades of the twentieth century to an iconic ‘national style’based on a putatively shared
white heritage.
111
Heritage sights could accordingly project ‘a hegemonic official discourse
of nationalism’, and gables ‘became emblematic of an idealised and romanticised
history’.
112
The Cape Dutch style that featured at the inter-war year Empire Exhibitions
and on SAR posters with other popular images such as ‘Bushman’paintings and the
Drakensberg
113
thus created a social imaginary of white South Africa, as previously
suggested.
The world of ‘technology and progress’
The postcards in this cluster deal mainly with the promotion of the SAR as a corporation
and give an overview of its activities in terms of road, rail and air transport systems. The
ideological propositions that underlie this are related to the discourse of technology,
modernity, and progress, as indicated previously. Meikle observes that the Teich postcards
celebrate modernity through the representation of roads, bridges, dams and industrial
facilities, betokening a glorious future ‘through technological progress’.
114
This tendency is
equally observable in the SAR postcards –36 of them show cities, industries and dams,
with an emphasis on dramatic skylines and cities shimmering at night. It is fitting that
Johannesburg, as the ‘endpoint of economic progress’
115
and the modern city of gold,
features in the majority of the postcards, displaying its brash pride in industrialism and
progress.
107. Ibid., 353.
108. P. Joyce, ed., South Africa’s Yesterdays (Cape Town: The Reader’s Digest Association South Africa,
1981), 51.
109. Markwick, ‘Postcards from Malta’, 419.
110. Prochaska and Mendelson, ‘Introduction’, xiii; Corkery and Bailey, ‘Lobster is Big in Boston’, 492.
111. Foster, Washed with Sun, 17, 58.
112. M. Pretes, ‘Tourism and Nationalism’,Annals of Tourism Research, 30, 1 (2003), 127; N. Coetzer, ‘A
Common Heritage/An Appropriated History: The Cape Dutch Preservation and Revival Movement as
Nation and Empire Builder’,South African Journal of Art History, 22, 2 (2007), 174.
113. THL, Annual Report, 1935, 76.
114. Meikle, ‘A Paper Atlantis’, 274–275.
115. Foster, Washed with Sun, 214.
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Nonetheless, the majority of the postcards (145) that epitomise modernity and progress
deal directly with the SAR. This is appropriate, as the formation of the centralised SAR in
1910 was intimately linked with the expansion of the mines and agriculture and ushered in
the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation that made the Rand the economic hub of
South Africa.
116
The SAR played a very complex role, both social and economic; its
railway system linked the mines and related industries on the Highveld with the coastal
harbours, signifying modernity, but at the same time this system made possible new forms
of leisure and travel that expanded the horizons of South African citizens. The Western
metanarrative of modernity was connected with technology, and created a narrative
wherein trade and cooperation became hallmarks of civilisation.
117
The SAR illustrated the
material advantages of capitalism (and, to a lesser extent, imperialism) and became ‘an
iconographic symbol of the progressive white state […] overcoming practical and
ideological opposition to modernization in backcountry areas’.
118
The SAR was an
instrument of social change and reconstruction, helping to promote a common white
identity based on the imperatives of modernity; photography and the railways, as joint
icons of modernity, worked in tandem to advance modernisation and nation building.
119
Although this nation-building imperative was certainly different in the second half of the
twentieth century, the SAR was still able to harness and manipulate images that served the
needs of the new Republic.
The first group of postcards deals with SAR station buildings, but also deals with the
social face of the Corporation. The majority of the images (17) therefore feature
satisfied clients enjoying their journeys on the luxurious Blue Train, Drakensberg
Express and the Trans Karoo. They are shown in relaxed circumstances, eating,
drinking and socialising, and the emphasis falls on culinary excellence and exceptional
service (Figure 8). They seem to avow the same class position and are all white –even
the bartenders and waiters are exclusively white. Two similar postcards show well-off
diners in the prestigious Blue Room Restaurant and Bar in the old Johannesburg
Station building. The rest of the postcards show various SAR stations buildings,
principally the new Johannesburg Station (as another signifier of modernisation) and
scenes depicting white people making travel bookings in SAR travel offices. These
postcards also continue the narrative of leisure time and affluence discussed under the
‘world of culture’above; the trains depicted are luxury overnight trains, not short haul
(sub)urban or commuter trains, and thereby support the connotations of wealth and
travel for recreation rather than work purposes.
The last postcards show the workings of the SAR: its trains, motor coaches, harbours,
airplanes, heavy road transport, and lighthouses. The trains (28) shown here hurtle through
various South African landscapes;
120
nine of them are steam-driven, and luxury passenger
116. Foster, Washed with Sun,34–36.
117. Coe, ‘Histories of Empire, Nation and City’,7.
118. Foster, Washed with Sun, 203; Foster, ‘Land of Contrasts’, 661. This was particularly important in
establishing modern forms of agriculture, and here the SAR again played a key role by commissioning
documentary films that championed new methods and at the same time, ‘promoted a modernised Afrikaner
national identity’: Sandon, ‘Preserving a Heritage’, 60.
119. Foster, ‘Land of Contrasts’, 660.
120. These images are typical of earlier SAR iconic images of trains winding their way north through the Cape
mountains: Foster, ‘Northward, Upward’, 311, 315 note 86. See also note 4 above.
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trains are counterbalanced by a few goods trains (Figue 1), which are seemingly indicative
of a thriving economy. It was previously mentioned that the SAR motor coaches played an
important role in supplementing train services. The first road service dates from December
1912 and linked the station at Bot River with the village of Hermanus in order to develop it
Figure 8. ‘Fare for gourmets on the Drakensberg Express train’. SAR postcard, 1979. Courtesy of
Transnet Heritage Library.
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‘as a holiday and seaside resort’.
121
Motor coach tours were still attracting more than
32,000 people in 1982, but by 1987 efforts ‘to penetrate the local market […did] not live up
to expectations’.
122
The 27 postcards that depict motor coaches are shown as a vehicle
towards leisure and tourism at places such as the Drakensberg, and when people are shown,
they are again exclusively white. The harbours (27) include all the major docks in South
Africa and attempt to convey the image of a vibrant economy, which is of course at odds
with the reality of the situation during the 1970s and 1980s when international boycotts
severely curtailed harbour traffic to South Africa. Ten postcards dealing with the SAR road
transport service mainly depict abnormal loads in transit, and 18 postcards show various
South African Airways airliners, from a Boeing 707 (1966) to an Airbus A300 (1982). The
narrative is again one of being up-to-date in terms of technology and offering the best to
SAR clients. This cluster ends with three postcards of lighthouses around the South African
coastline.
Conclusion
I have suggested in this article that the SAR played a significant role in creating a positive
view of South Africa from 1910 onwards and that this continued into the second half of the
twentieth century. In this respect, the SAR was part of a wider network of corporations and
governmental organisations that generated an official discourse about South Africa. Albers
and James note that it is important to establish who produced the postcards, in what
context, for what market, and to ask whose ideological interests they served.
123
The
discussions above established that the SAR was the sole producer of the postcards and that
they were intended primarily as promotional material and for the tourism sector. As
intimated previously, the conservative and unchanging nature of the postcards suggests that
this was an homogenous market that required familiar or conventional images that did not
disrupt its sense of complacency. Not surprisingly, postcards have always been associated
with nationalistic self-promotion and propaganda and generally reflect the preferences and
views of those who purchase them.
124
In order to draw definitive conclusions about the ideological narrative constructed by
the SAR postcards, it would be necessary to have a complete data set for a longitudinal
study. The only two years that are complete, with 24 postcards, are 1980 and 1984, and the
records for the early 1960s are very fragmentary. Nonetheless, an interesting tendency can
be observed by comparing 1966 (15 postcards) with 1980 and 1984. In the earlier years,
leisure activities and spacious landscapes seem to have been given precedence, whereas in
1980, 14 postcards depicted the world of technology, mainly SAR-related, and in 1984, this
had risen to 18. This may be indicative of a growing emphasis by the SAR on promoting its
own activities, rather than publicising the country, as well as a growing emphasis on
121. A Century of Transport, 72.
122. THL, Annual Report, 1982–1983, 23; THL, Annual Report, 1986–1987, 31.
123. Albers and James, ‘Travel Photography’, 138, 150–151. Even though contemporary commercial postcard
ranges such as those produced by Artco, Art Publishers, and Protea Colour Prints seem to have generated
very similar images of South Africa, the SAR calendar postcards were different in that individual postcards
could not be selected and bought.
124. Schor, ‘Cartes Postales’, 213; Jokela and Raento, ‘Collecting Visual Materials’, 54, 57.
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domestic tourism. It could also be read as an attempt to demonstrate that South Africa was
economically strong, despite the international boycotts.
From the early decades of the twentieth century, it was imperative for South Africa to
position itself as a metropolitan, modern country in order to offset implied back-
wardness.
125
The oscillation between characterising the country as sophisticated but at
the same time as part of ‘primitive’Africa, underlay most of the material directed at
tourists, reassuring them of the presence of Western luxuries and infrastructure. This need
to modernise was paradoxically accompanied by the rise of nostalgia for premodern
experiences,
126
probably exemplified best by a retreat to nature. The official metanarrative
produced by powerful bodies such as the SAR during the second half of the twentieth
century did not necessarily produce explicit propaganda for the government, but did
attempt to ‘direct the tourist gaze’and create a ‘positive’view of South Africa.
127
According to Groenewald, the magazine Panorama failed ‘to contextualise their relentlessly
positive reportage, and [were] selective in their portrayal of cultural experiences within
South Africa’,
128
and the same can be stated about the concurrent SAR postcards. They
represent an idealised and unchanging image of the past and of a glowing future, directed
by the imperatives of modernisation, but neglect to engage with current realities.
129
So, for
example, the gradual rise in black tourism in South Africa from the beginning of the
1980s
130
does not manifest at all in the SAR postcards. It can thus be suggested that the
SAR’s own history and apartheid ideology predictably informed the production of these
postcards that ‘show the skyscrapers and the prosperity of Johannesburg and Pretoria, but
not those who built them’.
131
125. Rassool and Witz, ‘South Africa’, 359.
126. Foster, Washed with Sun,39–40.
127. Grundlingh, ‘Revisiting’, 108–109.
128. Groenewald, ‘Cloudless Skies’,61–62.
129. South Africa has now become a destination for new kinds of tourism such as ‘dark tourism’that focuses on
sites where resistance to apartheid, punishment and incarceration took place: Visser and Rogerson,
‘Researching the South African’, 204. This has led to the rise of postcards that depict places such as Robben
Island as well as formerly taboo scenes such as township life.
130. Rogerson and Lisa, ‘Shot’t Left’, 101; Ferrario, ‘Emerging Leisure Market’,23–38.
131. Nederven Pieterse, White on Black, 107.
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