The First Life of Adamastor

The First Life of Adamastor has its origins in an act of rescue: what, wondered André Brink, lay behind fragments of myth that have been handed down about the mountains of the Cape?

Adamastor, the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocks of the Peninsula, first appears in European literature in the sixteenth century - much about the time of the first known contact between seagoing European explorers and the natives of Southern Africa. How Brink asks, would that meeting have looked from the landward side? What role would the visitors take in the mythology of an utterly different culture, with its own deities, its own accumulated story?

The result is an extraordinary creation, moving, richly inventive, unashamedly ribald and potentially explosive. Hunting for the source of the fissure that, from that first encounter, runs through the country to this day. André Brink has unearthed from the sun-carved land itself the missing meanings of a myth that has waited five centuries to be invented.