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 constructed
of itself from 1910 onwards. This was achieved, for example, through an
extensive visual archive of documentary photographs of South Africa, commissioned
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.
