Pageant of Union

A Pageant held in Cape Town in the springtime of 1910 to celebrate the inauguration of the new state, was composed of a sequence of historical episodes. Scenes of "landfall" and "first encounter" are repeated throughout the pageant's progress: first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the 1820 English settlers. Scenes of covenant and friendship and their converse, sworn enmity, are repeated as are images of the bringing of Christianity and civilization, and of newness, dawning, light within the darkness. And overall the figure of the Queen – Britannia, Elizabeth, Victoria – dominates the passage of her heroes on the stage.

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