The Story Of An African Farm

By Olive Schreiner and Cherry Clayton

Olive Schreiner's landmark novel, a South African classic, takes place in the rural Karoo towards the end of the 19th century. The Story of an African Farm evokes the bleakness and beauty of the arid landscape, which forms the backdrop for the stories of Lyndall and Waldo, unlikely soul mates whose lives reflect their frustrated quest for a better reality and their dreams of self-fulfillment. Originally published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, the novel caused a sensation when its author was revealed to be a woman. Victorian readers were intrigued by the novel's forthright feminism and sensitivity to all forms of oppression. An informative introduction by literary scholar Cherry Clayton discusses the literary, cultural and philosophical background to the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Jan 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780868522456

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was a South African political activist and writer. Born to a family of Wesleyan missionaries, Schreiner was educated by her mother. Forced to move frequently due to her father’s inability to maintain a job, Schreiner became familiar with the landscape of South Africa and the cultural and political tensions holding together its diverse population. In 1881, she travelled to England in order to pursue her dream of becoming a medical professional, but her chronic asthma and limited finances prevented her from completing her training. In 1883, she published her debut novel, The Story of an African Farm, under a pseudonym, launching a career as one of South Africa’s leading writers. Throughout her life, she advocated for political equality for South Africa’s marginalized groups, including Afrikaners, indigenous Africans, Jews, and Indians. Combining a deep understanding of Christian morality with an active interest in socialism and the women’s suffrage movement, Schreiner is recognized as a pioneering feminist and political activist who wrote unflinchingly on such subjects as the Boer War, British imperialism, and intersectionality.

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Description

Olive Schreiner’s landmark novel, a South African classic, takes place in the rural Karoo towards the end of the 19th century. The Story of an African Farm evokes the bleakness and beauty of the arid landscape, which forms the backdrop for the stories of Lyndall and Waldo, unlikely soul mates whose lives reflect their frustrated quest for a better reality and their dreams of self-fulfillment. Originally published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, the novel caused a sensation when its author was revealed to be a woman. Victorian readers were intrigued by the novel’s forthright feminism and sensitivity to all forms of oppression. An informative introduction by literary scholar Cherry Clayton discusses the literary, cultural and philosophical background to the novel.

Title Page

THE STORY OF

AN AFRICAN FARM

OLIVE SCHREINER

Introduced by Cherry Clayton

AD DONKER PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

One of the qualities of an authentic book is that each generation, thinking itself the first to see it clearly, sees in it its own face. This is very true of Schreiner’s strong and magical The Story of an African Farm. Patient and enduring as the koppie on which its children play and pray, it has outlasted the fluctuations of taste and ideology which have determined the frameworks within which it has been praised or damned by successive generations.

When Ralph Iron’s The Story of an African Farm first appeared in January 1883 it was welcomed for its bold address to contemporary issues: the status of religious belief and the status of women. In South Africa recently a leading churchman, commenting on the relationship between Christianity and the state, pointed out that Christ was sympathetic to the poor, the sojourner, the outcast, and the woman. Schreiner’s novel, with its sensitivity to all forms of oppression – a sensitivity central to South African fiction – rightly linked the oppression of childish consciousness by an authoritarian patriarchal dogma to the social curtailment of female consciousness. Waldo’s story and Lyndall’s story are the same story, linked by their awareness that any preordained fate removes an element of free will, individual choice, and liberty of movement. The strength of African Farm lies in the honesty with which two young people fight to maintain their human integrity against the distortions of widely accepted dogmas about the right way to grow as a young woman, or as any free spirit. The story of Schreiner’s own mother, Rebecca Lyndall Schreiner, brought out to Africa as the wife of a missionary and a social adjunct (a grand piano locked up and used as a dining table, Schreiner said), but in reality both mother and teacher to the surviving eight of her twelve children, stripped of any frivolities, and vulnerable to her husband’s financial disasters, drives home the intimate connection between the structures of conventional Christianity and those of the family, and the broader social relations of women.

The Victorians responded to this message in the novel. They had been living the same distorted lives in England. It is to their credit that they took Schreiner’s novel ‘fairly on the ground on which it must be praised or condemned’, as Schreiner said of Canon McColl’s review of African Farm. They did not always agree with its answers, but they knew what the questions were. In fact they divided, as critics and reviewers, against the rock of those existential issues.

Victorian England was interested in what the novel said. The fact that it was set in the distant Karoo instead of Piccadilly gave it an added charm, as did the soon discovered fact that the literary armour of Ralph Iron concealed a vulnerable and ardent colonial girl. A certain glamour was added to judicious morality and literary talent. As soon as there was glamour and femininity there was also patronage: the novel became ‘more remarkable’ for being the work of a young woman, but it also betrayed the faults of a beginner; there were ‘faults of proportion and perspective’, or the story was too vague, the characters were ‘minds rather than bodies’. These criticisms persisted until recently. The novel has always been associated with a visionary strength and a mental power larger than, or imperfectly realised in, its actual form.

As the central Victorian conflicts receded or became flattened in the early decades of the twentieth century, Schreiner and her work became increasingly detached, in the public view, from both given social realities and the actual texture and shape of her specific written works. Her writing was increasingly mined for valuable nuggets, noble thoughts, and pieces of local colour. A black American, Howard Thurman, who encountered Schreiner’s hunter allegory in 1925, in one of those memorable life-changing moments which many first readings of Schreiner seem to produce, went on to read and anthologise from Schreiner’s oeuvre, eventually producing a ‘Schreiner Reader’ called A Track to the Water’s Edge in 1973. The collection, sincerely presented, values Schreiner’s timeless effectiveness and her belief in the unity of human life, valorises her allegories at the expense of her fiction, and perpetuates a strand of mystic religious feeling which was only one aspect of her writing. The selections from African Farm are the most abstract or morally epigrammatic moments of the narrative, lifted out of their context for their human wisdom, their ‘abiding statement’. The selective and anthologising habit has never died, being perpetuated by collections such as Neville Nuttall’s The Silver Plume (1956). Nuttall also wanted to separate the gold from the dross, considering much of Schreiner’s writing ‘mawkishly introspective and comparatively worthless’, and choosing pieces from her non-fiction and fiction which are ‘of permanent value’. Extracts from African Farm are cosily retitled: ‘Old Otto’, ‘Bonaparte Blenkins and the Bears’, and the volume ends with ‘The Hunter’s Allegory’.

Nuttall’s South African anthology was echoed by Uys Krige’s Olive Schreiner: A Selection (1968), showing that a subfusc Victorianism could continue within the colony as well as without. Nobody ever minded that the highest praise for Schreiner’s spiritual intensity could co-exist with patronising and dismissive comments about her flaws as a novelist. She could not create character; she mixed ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters; her ‘digressions’ were ‘irrelevant’, or if they were relevant they were nevertheless repetitive; she had no sense of form. Critics wrestled about whether African Farm was a novel of ‘plot’ or ‘character’, and said that if it was hard to say what the novel’s ‘theme’ was, the fault must rest with the novel. Nobody ever questioned, or even defined their own assumptions about what a novel is, or which criteria might be appropriate to its assessment. Second-rate criticism made the novel seem second-rate. Schreiner was a genius; she was even the only genius the colony had produced, but she was a hopeless novelist. She was ‘really’ a poet, or ‘really’ a visionary, or ‘really’ a sociologist. No one seemed to consider that all of those abilities may be of use to a novelist, may be subdued by a writer shaping a specific narrative, may in fact be indispensable components of the hybrid art of the novel.

In fairness it should be said that such distortions, when the critic stands back from the novel, are common, or were common until more sophisticated investigations into the art of narrative became available. Nevertheless, between the mental vigour of the Victorian response and the recent decade of more scrupulous and sensitive critical studies there was a noticeable flatness, colonial excesses along with colonial patronage. Francis Brett Young’s 1927 introduction to African Farm is representative. It begins with an extended description of South African geography (‘And this is called the Great Karoo’); goes on to the ‘one writer of genius’ produced in South Africa; when he thinks of Olive Schreiner he does not see Olive Schreiner but ‘a vision of the Great Karoo’; the ‘pure artist’ was later ‘obscured’ by the propagandist and feminist; her asthma was compensated for by ‘the joy and comfort of an ideally happy marriage’; and finally this ‘clumsy book, a crude book, a book that is full of striking incongruities and immaturities’ and yet bears ‘the incontestable stamp of genius’ is praised in a rush of oxymorons as ‘an imperfect masterpiece perfect of its kind’.

Again, in fairness, it is true that Schreiner herself validated some of these attitudes. She told the zealous and flattering Arthur Symons that the hunter allegory was the core of the book; she agreed with Havelock Ellis that Blenkins was drawn crudely, ‘from the outside’; she is apt to speak of genius as distinct from concrete embodiments of it (outside the novel, that is; inside it Lyndall knows better and advises Waldo that genius is the ability to pursue one thing concentratedly); she herself called it a crude book, lacking the aspect of formal beauty. But we do not have to believe her, as so many critics have. The history of the novel’s criticism provides a wonderful illustration of the maxim that we should trust the tale and not the teller.

Later introducers of the novel have been far more sophisticated and generous than Francis Brett Young. Prefaces to the novel have their own interesting history, and are tied up with the history of later South African writers’ responses to the book. Response to the novel has had breadth and variety, as Schreiner indicated when she told Ellis about the enormous number of letters she had received from readers (in those days readers wrote to authors, as in Catcher in the Rye, to tell them how their lives had been changed by reading their work, a habit authors must be glad has almost died out). Letters came from a range of social classes, from ‘a coalheaver to a poet’. In my own experience this is still true of student responses to the novel, often personal, mixed, critical, and fresh. But writers, especially writers born in South Africa and trying to transform its colonial realities into fiction, have offered key responses to the novel, recognising it as a forerunner in the way it seized imaginatively on stubborn or apparently poor local terrain. The fear that the local terrain was untenable for the novelist was in itself a symptom of a colonial unease about belonging, or lack of confidence in the power of the writer’s imagination to operate in isolation from a metropolitan tradition.

Many South African writers have recorded their reactions to African Farm and paid tribute to it. Geoffrey Haresnape has tracked the involvement of the 1920s Voorslag group with Schreiner’s image as pioneer and liberal hero. (Voorslag magazine published a piece on ‘The Soul of Olive Schreiner’ and an article on From Man to Man.) Roy Campbell’s poem, set on Buffelskop, where Schreiner is buried, typically sees her as gigantically martyred (‘the insulted tomb’) but also as a sustaining example. William Plomer, more self-consciously literary, took The Story of an African Farm with him to his African farm, Marsh Moor, and turned out a minor satire, ‘Portraits in the Nude’, which plays with some of the moods and with the truncated episodes of African Farm. Plomer’s book on Cecil Rhodes continues Schreiner’s vision of him as a crude imperialist. Van der Post saw that with African Farm English literature in South Africa ‘suddenly becomes profoundly indigenous and the imagination is native’. Alan Paton recorded the debt of South African writers to Schreiner as ‘lonely forerunner’ and he responds to Schreiner in a personal and emotional way, with a strong sense of her suffering (Paton shared Schreiner’s early rage at authoritarian parents). He says of Schreiner’s life: ‘Something had gone wrong, and could not be put right again, except by the intervention of some grace in which she no longer believed.’ Paton’s sympathy, and his difference, are rooted in the Christian framework she had rejected. Bessie Head, a writer who might be expected to be antipathetic to the liberal tradition which is so often taken as Schreiner’s definitive and limiting framework, has recorded her sense of debt and her sense of similarity to Schreiner as a pioneer, as someone who wrote against the odds. The colonial predicament fosters a sense of isolation and difficulty – the subject of African Farm – which becomes the common ground of its writers. South African writers have seen in Schreiner a more extreme case of their own plight, and in African Farm have admired what she could produce out of that plight.

Both Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson have written prefaces to African Farm. Both of them have shared Schreiner’s dual life in South Africa and England. Lessing’s account of Schreiner’s life and output is vigorous and just; she sees African Farm as one of those books on the frontiers of the human spirit, though she too brushes aside its possible formal crudities. She points out that African Farm is Schreiner’s essential legacy, and that ‘the great influence she had is hidden from us in the events she helped to shape’. This is a crucial insight, and a corrective to those who believe, with hindsight, that they are free enough of subsequent history to judge Schreiner’s limitations, as thinker and writer, perfectly, for the first time. Jacobson’s preface, from its striking opening statement that ‘a colonial culture is one which has no memory’ to his judgement of Schreiner as guilty of a form of escapism in the ‘lacerated self-exaltation’ with which the fable of the hunter evades any direct confrontation of social problems, exemplifies a characteristic modern overturning of Victorian taste. The hunter allegory which so moved Schreiner’s contemporaries has now become the most suspect element of the novel, because the social and political challenges of South African society have to be effectively met. This demands a much more direct social intervention than the Victorians did. They wanted to be uplifted; modern demands for political relevance and the direct representation of ‘race relations’, the foregrounding of injustice to the indigenous population, are more literal-minded and a-historical. The fact that the ‘black people’ are only ‘part of the background’, as they were on a Karoo farm in the late nineteenth century, can become damning in our time. Schreiner’s differentiated groups, from the sycophantic farm flunkey, the Hottentot ‘satellite’ to Tant’ Sannie, to the ‘Kaffirs’ whom Sannie excludes from Christian service, to the ‘Bushman’ artist with whom Waldo identifies, become subsumed under the supposedly egalitarian umbrella term ‘black’. Schreiner’s novel shows that brutality and illiteracy tend to produce dishonesty, flattery, vengefulness, and a further brutality to others. The labourers on Schreiner’s farm exploit old Otto’s kindness; the herdsman’s wife becomes sullen under ill-treatment; the Hottentot servant is delighted at Otto’s downfall; the herdsman goes home to beat his wife and dog. In this respect it is Schreiner who is the hard-headed realist and we who are the soft and self-deceiving liberals. The novel contains a profound critique of exploitation and possession by displacement, but it does not say that people become noble under brutal treatment. The ‘noble savage’ is one of the myths explicitly dispelled within the novel, both by Waldo’s brutalising experience as manual labourer and by Lyndall’s critique of the noble African worker.

Such political judgements have their rights – in South Africa literary judgements are political judgements – but they tell us more about the tightening of a political climate than they do about Schreiner’s novel. The process is well illustrated in two different judgements of Schreiner’s position within South African fiction, offered in 1973 and 1980, by Nadine Gordimer. In 1973 Gordimer praised African Farm’s movement beyond the question ‘What does a man make of life in South Africa?’ to the ‘eternal question: What is the life of man?’ The novel’s intellectual curiosity, its ‘glorious irrelevancies’, its feminism, are seen as strengths stretching the novel beyond the simply parochial, reminding us that though we live within a particular set of social laws and ideals we ‘have not contracted out of the wider human condition’. But in 1980 Gordimer sees Schreiner’s feminism as irrelevant to the actual problem of the country, argues that ‘her wronged sense of self, as a woman’ was secondary within her historical situation, and judges her far more firmly for abandoning the quest to find a form of fiction adequate to contain ‘the South African experience’ (as if this experience were monolithic and unchanging). Gordimer concludes that Schreiner’s failure to develop her ‘synthesis of life and work’ meant that she could not succeed in ‘raising the consciousness of the oppressed from out of the colonial nightmare, and that of the oppressor from out of the colonial dream.’ If anyone has the right to this judgement it is Gordimer, with her own politically sensitive and finely honed fictional oeuvre, but such a judgement forgets that the very freedom which gives a modern woman writer the right to education and self-expression had to be earned in its time, and that people like Schreiner helped to earn it for others. Their circumstances were deeply crippling; African Farm is precisely about the desire for self-fulfilment and the forces which made it almost impossible. The point to be made here is that in the years between Gordimer’s first and second judgement neither Schreiner nor her novel changed; political pressures on and within South Africa did.

In the past decade there have been critical breakthroughs in the discussion of African Farm by critics who love the book and whose critical insight is equal to their affection, without the need to dismiss and patronise found in earlier commentators. Critics have become sensitive to both the formal qualities of the text and the way in which those formal qualities embody its historical moment. The novel has been seen in relation to the pastoral genre (Tony Voss); the critical preface has been perceptively tied to the actual qualities of the novel’s structure (Robert Green); and the discontinuities of the novel have been shown to stress the ‘colonial otherness’ of experience at the very moment that one era of South African history was making way for another, the process of industrialisation and the shaping of a political entity whose future development has become our painful history (Graham Pechey).

But it is not only an earlier critical blindness which needed to be lifted; African Farm has also been surrounded by a cluster of prematurely dogmatic and misleading information which became confirmed by endless repetition. Much of this disinformation stemmed from SC Cronwright’s dogmatic turn of mind in deciding on the shape of his wife’s literary production, his need to be definite in the face of confusing or inadequate evidence. He wanted to pinpoint exactly which early manuscript must have become African Farm, and decided that the work she called ‘Thorn Kloof’ must have been an earlier version of African Farm. Everyone has repeated this ‘fact’, but there is actually no evidence to support it, and what evidence there is points the other way. The farm in From Man to Man is called Thorn Kloof, and the story Schreiner called by that name was probably an early work which later meshed with a story called ‘Wrecked’ to form the double narrative which made up ‘Saints and Sinners’, later titled From Man to Man in SC Cronwright’s posthumous publication (1926). The only early title which Schreiner mentions for African Farm was ‘Lyndall’, a loose labelling by heroine which may well have been its only name until the later title was given. This fits Schreiner’s writing habits, the organic process by which early titles of stories were subsumed under a more comprehensive title when the parts of the narrative had grown together. Thus when ‘Thorn Kloof’ or ‘A Small Bit of Mimosa’, the narrative of two girls growing up on an English South African farm, had meshed with ‘Wrecked’, the story of Bertie as a woman destroyed by sexual honesty in a hypocritical society, the more comprehensive title was ‘Saints and Sinners’ or ‘The Camel Thorn’ (the latter is the title which actually appears on Schreiner’s manuscript).

Cronwright’s assumption about titles blurs the relationship between the two novels. Thorn Kloof was an anglicised South African name for a farm owned by the Cawood family. They later bartered this farm for Ganna Hoek, where Schreiner visited the Cawoods (when she was teaching the Fouché children on the adjacent Klein Ganna Hoek), and on which she later lived as friend and governess in 1879. Thus Thorn Kloof was associated in her mind with an English colonial family whose lifestyle was attached to the Victorian metropolitan model, particularly in the social constraints operating on young women like the Cawood daughters Schreiner taught. This became the central subject of From Man to Man, in which two sisters follow the alternative careers of respectable marriage and sexuality outside marriage, both of which are seen as deeply damaging fates, given the hypocrisy of Victorian conventions and the punitive behaviour they sanctioned.

African Farm also contains the sub-theme of talented English womanhood going to waste in Lyndall’s story, but her story is only a part of the prototypical South African racial and national conglomerate which we find on this farm. Lyndall is an elf in hiding, imprisoned by the gross realities of a more entrenched and brutal South African order represented in Tant’ Sannie’s rule on the farm. The farm landscape is very different from the more cultivated Thorn Kloof in the other novel: here all is elemental, exposed, red sand and pigsty, with only the koppie as a low sentinel. Lyndall’s story is attached to Schreiner’s experience of the ‘Dutch’ or Boer lifestyle which she gained as governess to the Fouchés. The Boer wedding of Part Two provides a point of social stability in the novel but also the kind of social stasis which Waldo and Lyndall’s life instinct tells them may mean an entrapment worse than death. Just before leaving South Africa for England in 1881 Schreiner writes in her journal: ‘Annie Fouché is to be married next month. They wanted me to stay for the wedding, but be it to me death or what, I can’t wait. I am driven on.’

The title ‘Thorn Kloof’ which Cronwright too readily appropriated for African Farm is thus a key to the difference between the two novels which she extrapolated from her enormously creative years as governess in the Cradock area between 1875 and 1881.

Another problem concerns the date of the novel’s composition. One version supports the legend of the child genius who completed a masterpiece at seventeen or twenty-one; another maintains that this was not the case and she was really quite an old lady of twenty-six when the novel was completed. Either way, one would think, a certain youthful efflorescence was in fact the case. But the truth is that Schreiner wrote drafts of the novel from an early age until a later one, and did not work continuously at it, nor can its composition be tied to any one farm, though Cronwright is anxious to point out the very room in which she sat writing the whole novel, mud floors, rain, and leaking roof notwithstanding. It does seem likely that Klein Ganna Hoek was where a lot of the work was done, but she herself told Ellis that ‘I began An African Farm when I was almost a child, but left it for some years before I finished it’ and that ‘it was just one of the stories I had been writing ever since I was five years old, and its kind reception at the hands of the critics surprised me much’.

This account – one point where we have to trust the teller – fits the pattern of Schreiner’s journal entries, which are curiously silent about the writing of African Farm until she was actually engaged in revising the novel after sending it to her friends the Browns in England. The revision – and the extensive cutting which must have been largely responsible for the effect of compression and economy the novel does convey – took place in 1880 when Schreiner was with the Fouchés at Lelie Kloof, but it is quite possible, as Richard Rive has suggested, that she was doing some original composition at the same time, and that the reference to Waldo’s stranger on 21 November is to her first writing of the hunter allegory, which would explain its slightly more separable status within the novel. This would not have been the only time such later composition of an ‘allegory’, a miniature of the substance of the realistic narrative, was composed long after the main story. Exactly the same thing happened with Schreiner’s writing of the prelude to From Man to Man. The novels which were actually in the foreground of her creative consciousness from 1877 to 1879 were Undine, the apprentice work which she did not consider good enough to publish, and ‘Thorn Kloof’ which I have suggested was to be incorporated into the later From Man to Man.

This theory tallies with another interesting reality which lay behind the legend of the one-book author arriving despairingly in London and finding success with Chapman and Hall’s reader, George Meredith. She submitted two novels to Chapman and Hall (after trying other publishers) and it seems likely that From Man to Man was the one she submitted first and thought more likely to succeed. Its rejection, and her attempt to recast the book totally after that rejection, was a more significant factor in her failure to complete it in a final form than the psychosomatic explanations that have often been offered. In a sense, then, the success of African Farm was a lucky conjunction of talent and accidents, and only its retrospective career has obscured the actual position of the novel as one story among many in an amazingly fertile period of Schreiner’s life. Once the book had its deserved pre-eminence, the legends grew to fit it.

In recommending The Story of an African Farm to a new generation of readers, the best one can do with the novel itself is to stand aside and leave it to do its work. The honesty of the novel allows for an honest range of response, disagreement, conflicting judgements. Conflicting readings of reality are part of the novel’s substance and form. The stranger who interprets Waldo’s carving for him may say that there is only one white bird of truth, but we hear in the chapter called ‘Dreams’: ‘Tell me what a man dreams, and I will tell you what he loves. That also has its truth.’ Truth is seen to be partial, lost and again recovered by each individual. It is recovered most often in solitude, and one is struck in re-reading the novel by the insistence on the solitary nature of individual experience:

Perhaps she thought of the narrowness of the limits within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of mental kin, of how soon it reaches that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no fellow-footfall is ever heard.

At the same time we are shown people constantly reaching out for some sort of fellowship or community, some genuine form of sharing. But only Waldo and Lyndall occasionally reach it, and then only with each other, when both sexual desire and the desire to possess are absent. In all other cases such a reaching out – mimed by the milkbushes and prickly pears on the koppie in the opening scene – is thwarted, or stunted by indifference, social rigidity, or personal cruelty.

The linguistic dimension of the novel conforms to this colonial impasse: for colonial reality to be understood by others, it has to be translated, and something essential is always lost in the act of translation. And yet African Farm is rooted in an act of translation, from its quaint glossary of terms like benaauwdheit and brakje to the rendering, within the novel, of Cape Dutch as English. Schreiner knew this was part of her problem:

I have got into perfect despair over Tant’ Sannie sometimes – the almost impossibility of translating the low humorous Dutch into English, without losing the humour, and so having nothing but the coarseness left. I have not always succeeded. In fact, I believe low Cape Dutch cannot be translated into any language under the sun.

This dimension – the comic vigour of Tant’ Sannie’s speeches – is one of the triumphs of the novel. Not only do colonial language, culture, and experience need to be translated to the outsider, but within the diversely constituted farm a great deal of interpretation is also needed between groups. This can take comic and tragic forms. Old Otto translates between Blenkins and Tant’ Sannie; later the Hottentot servant acts as interpreter between them; very often characters have to mime to be understood. Sannie’s niece Trana does not understand that Blenkins is courting her when he bumps his knees into her, and she thinks his speeches expressing the pain of love need a patent remedy. Tant’ Sannie, above in the loft, understands Blenkins’s intentions better than Trana; she has had more practice. The narrative consists of constant acts of interpretation, the translation of one dimension of experience into another, whether it is Waldo’s stranger explaining his crude carving in refined European terms, or Waldo himself trying to read off the truth of God’s message in the open book of the Karoo landscape. Books are both open and closed in African Farm: the arduous search for book knowledge, imaged in Waldo’s night-time climb along the farmhouse roof, is as frustrated in his case as it is at Lyndall’s finishing school. Driven back upon African nature, the stars and the kloofs, they find in it both defeat and consolation.

Standing on a watershed between an old age and a new, African Farm looks in two directions at once. It seems to sniff the future