‘This queer hieland glen’: Multilingualism and Translocal Identification in Thomas Pringle’s African Farm Poems

When poet, anti-slavery activist, and settler Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) first arrived in South Africa as head of the Scottish party of settlers in June 1820, he was led to the location of his party’s settlement in Baviaan’s River, Eastern Cape by a Dutch-African magistrate who, on gesturing towards the valley said: ‘And now, mayneer […] daar leg uwe veld — their [sic] lies your country.’ Following the magistrate’s gesture towards a six-mile-long tract, an unnamed ‘Scottish agriculturalist’ from Pringle’s party comments that the land they are to settle resembles a ‘queer hieland glen’. This moment of translocal identification, in which the Scotland that the party have left behind overlays the Africa they are emigrating into, is signalled by linguistic code-switching from English into Scots. Looking at his prose accounts of early settlement in dialogue with his two African farm poems, ‘The Albany Emigrant’ (1825) and ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’ (1834), this article explores the ways in which linguistic code-switching enables Pringle to evoke a translocal settler belonging in multiple registers. While the use of Scots alongside standard English enables him to articulate a colonial identity that is both distinctly Scottish and compatible with a broader trans-imperial Britishness, Pringle’s use of Cape Dutch has the opposite effect. As the language spoken by both Dutch settlers and the colony’s slave and Indigenous populations, the presence of Cape Dutch loan words in Pringle’s poems of settlement gestures towards a continuing Indigenous presence on unceded, settler-occupied land, a presence that Pringle’s articulations of settler-colonial world-building persistently seeks to occlude. The final section of the article examines Glasgow-based South African writer Zoë Wicomb’s critical re-visioning of Pringle’s legacy in her novel Still Life (2020) as a means of thinking through some of the legacies these myths of settler belonging continue to have in contemporary South Africa, where rival claims to sovereignty mean that the relationship between land and identity remains a fiercely contested terrain.