This article traces the historical and conceptual development of mountain figurations within the European social imaginary, exploring how mountains are not only physical terrains but also symbolic and rhetorical sites. Using the analytic of figurations from new materialism, the article demonstrates how mountains become subordinate to the political and discursive functions that they perform within a collective. In particular, it examines how the Romantic sublime and picturesque traditions transformed mountains from perceived sites of danger and desolation into elevated spaces of transcendence, creativity, identity formation and ecological aesthetic value. The analysis begins with the master narrative of'mountain gloom' to 'mountain glory', as articulated by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, and it traces how Romantic poets, scientific alpinists and mountaineers embedded mountains within discourses of national identity, exploration and individual enlightenment. These figurations not only influenced environmental aesthetics but also prefigured conservation movements in Europe and North America, particularly through figures such as William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. The articlethen movesto the South African contextto examine theways in which these inherited aesthetic values have informed conservation practices within the colonial and postcolonial periods. It reveals how early conservation efforts were shaped by imperial logics, and that the inherited modes of aesthetic appreciation worked in the service of alienating indigenous people from nature and the land, resulting in forms of'colonial conservation' that continue to structure the limits of environmental citizenship today. Finally, it argues that constructing pathways to more inclusive forms of environmental citizenship requires that we more directly interrogate and disrupt the representational legacies that continue to underwrite conservation practices within the present moment.
This article examines the tactical and symbolic use of the rugged landscape of the Baviaanskloof as a site of resistance (referring to the skirmish), a site of concealment (pointing to hiding away) and a site of memory (citing the enduring oral histories that preserve this event) during a minor skirmish between a group of Cape Rebels and the Willowmore District Mounted Troops (DMT), duringthe duringthe South African War (also known as the Anglo-Boer War), which took place between 1899 and 1902. Rather than treatinggeography as a passive backdrop, this research positions landscape as an active agent in shaping insurgent tactics, hiding and survival. Using interdisciplinary historical research and theoretical frameworks on memory, fate of place, and terrains of resistance, it interprets terrain as a lived, remembered, and contested space, showing how the mountainous interior of the Cape Colony, with the Baviaanskloof as an example, became a landscape of resistance. Drawing on the experience of a Cape Rebel, my maternal great-grandfather who served under Commandant Gideon Scheepers, the article demonstrates that resistance relied not only on ideas or military capability but on the ability to read and use terrain, as revealed through the skirmish at Vensterklip. In doing so, this article contributes to the orographical humanities and critical geographical histories of war and memory, employing orography to explore how mountains shaped the lived experience, mobility, and resistance of both Cape Rebels and Imperial forces during the South African War.
Much of South Africa's cinema has prioritised the human as the subject matter. While this has promoted narratives on social, economic, political, cultural and other aspects of everyday human life, missing from the country's cinematic purview are films focused on planetary well-being in the context of everyday life. This article makes a case for Qwaqwa: Place of Barriers and Bridges (2025) as exemplary of how the mountain cinema genre in post-apartheid South Africa has shifted attention towards the planet's well-being. Through a bifurcated discussion of the visual and ecological representation of mountains, the article adopts the Anthropocene as a theory for visual analysis of ecological cinema. It critiques this film as usable material for imagining sustainability, conservation, resilience and regeneration-the new critical paradigms about our planet today-and in cautioning us towards the benefit of rethinking Africa's biospheric priorities.
