Introduction / Introducing the painting / From cartoon to canvas, a documentary text with photographs / Refiguring colonial identity: Cyril Coetzee's answer to Amshewitz and Gill / Myth of origin / Reimagining the past: André Brink in conversation with Reingard Nethersole -- Other Ethiopians: sideway glances at fiction, history and myth in "The first life of Adamstor" / History on white linen / Ptolemy, paradise and purgatory: Portugal and the African imaginary / Inventions of Africa / Preller's "Discovery" / Alchemical passage to India: Camoeseana and the De Bry Company's "Petits Voyages" / Animals, Arcadia, allegory & c / Blowing away footprints: the Smuts Hall windows and the politics of the public commission