Pessoa, Anon, and the Natal Colony" Retracing an Imperial Matrix

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Fernando Pessoa’s years in Durban (1896–1905) have often been sidelined by critics. Conversely, the memory and reception of Pessoa in South Africa have been slight, sustained by only a few individuals. By contextualizing Pessoa’s placement in the historically peculiar Natal Colony, and by reading some early work by Pessoa’s English literary persona Charles Robert Anon against the backdrop of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), this article adds to the emergent understanding of the Durban years as deeply formative for Pessoa’s work. It is here, not least, that we can trace the early formation of the imperial view of history that also becomes a strange limitation to his thinking. The “empire” as a frame of reference, an object of desire, a cause for ridicule, and a lofty ideal, recurs repeatedly in Pessoa’s writing, and even when Anon expresses severe criticism of British imperial conduct, he remains beholden to an imperial optic, almost by default restricted to a white outlook on events in southern Africa. We find thereby in the early work the makings of an imperial ambivalence that is then dispersed and refracted through multiple poetic voices in Pessoa’s oeuvre.

KEYWORDS: Fernando Pessoa, Charles Robert Anon, Roy Campbell, Natal Colony, Anglo-Boer War, imperialism