Cape Town
Cape Town was the port through which most nineteenth-century travellers entered southern Africa, and the novels written about the region begin there. Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm takes the Karoo as its subject, while Haggard's King Solomon's Mines sends an expedition into the interior from the colony.
The National Library has two centres, one in Cape Town and one in Pretoria, and its collections include early colonial printing and newspapers. For readers interested in how the interior was imagined, the travel accounts and the mission archives are as revealing as the fiction.
A library to check
- National Library of South Africa — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Cape Town
- The Story of an African Farm — Olive Schreiner, 1883. The first great South African novel, and still the most quoted one.
- King Solomon's Mines — H. Rider Haggard, 1885. A fast, unapologetic adventure that shows exactly how the imperial imagination worked.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.