John Barrow's travels to and along the borders of the Cape Colony at the turn of the nineteenth century mark a decisive change in the possibilities of Southern African space. Although critics have approached Barrow as the last in a line of eighteenth century natural scientists visiting Southern Africa, and have understood his highly formalized writing in terms of a world-appropriating Linnaean gaze, this general emphasis on Enlightenment thought elides his specific administrative functions, and the relationship of his 'administrative' travel writing to the production of colonial space. Charged by the governor to map the colony definitively after the British had acquired it from the Dutch, as well as to placate and threaten frontier populaces, Barrow's travelogues ultimately amount to a rewriting which governs the spatial imagination of the colony and its gradual unfolding during the nineteenth century.
Colonial space is produced by writing; writing spatializes. At the Cape, imperial space is determined as productive space, and as such there are certain writings which are conducive to this productivity as well as writings which must be resisted. Narrative, as a way of explaining spaces and their relation to empire, becomes redundant, although vestiges of its presence remain. The reason for this is governmental; it is empire's fantasy that all relevancies (all data) can be traced as visibilities onto a miniature version of the colony itself - onto a map. Barrow's work must be understood in this light, as an attempt to rid the colony of story, but which at the same time manufactures the linearity it attempts to suppress.
Furthermore, it is the colony in its fixed visibility that will allow productivity. By a writing that shows what 'is', the junctures, nodes, and fissures which constitute the map and its addenda are demonstrated as being a mere record of the past - the geological blending with the anthropological - and can therefore be willfully manipulated. Yet this visible present-in-the-past is troubled by other writings within and without the colony which threaten the spaces which the British are attempting to evoke. The Dutch, relying on unstable technologies of measurement, cannot move the borders of their farms and districts properly into the wholly written and therefore perfectly visible past; their enervating and endless border disputes are, in the temporal logic which Barrow arranges, the regressive result. Similarly the Xhosa tribespeople, which in this logic cannot ever comprehend the relationship between visible mechanical movement as time (the clock), and productivity, are also necessarily condemned to a counter-productive fluidity of space. These temporal ethnographies allow the British to understand themselves as transgressive healers of others' space, and justify the remedies they prescribe.
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