Abstract
Southern African rock images captured the imagination of many Victorians, from geologists like George William Stow to the celebrated author Olive Schreiner. Whether considered residual traces of a Paleolithic human prehistory, works of art or ornamentation, functional signage, or objects of anthropological inquiry, these images stirred debates over how to regard them and, by extension, the land on which they rested. Painted or chiseled upon the rocks that form an integral part of the regional landscape, the images, according to Stow, testified to the intimate connection between the land and the creative productions of southern Africa’s earliest native inhabitants: the Bushmen, also known as the San.1 In The Native Races of South Africa, published posthumously in 1905, Stow observes: “[T]he ancient Bushmen themselves have recorded [their occupation of the land] upon the rocks, in their paintings, their sculptures or chippings, and stone implements, which are as much their unquestionable title-deeds as those more formal documents so valued among landowners in more civilized portions of the earth.”2 Although framed within European conceptions of property rights, Stow’s reading nevertheless accounts for the San’s distinct sense of belonging on the lands they inhabited.
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Notes
The names “Bushmen” and “San” are both controversial. See Paul S. Landau, “With Camera and Gun in Southern Africa: Inventing the Image of Bushmen, c. 1880 to 1935,” Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. Pippa Skotnes (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), 141.
Robert J. Gordon and Stuart Sholto-Douglas, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass, 2nd edn (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000).
David Lewis-Williams, “Introduction,” Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa, ed. David Lewis-Williams (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000), 2. Throughout my discussion, I use the term “Bushmen” when discussing Schreiner’s fictional representations and “San” when referring to the historical peoples generally accredited with having produced rock art.
George W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country, ed. George McCall Theal (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1905), 4–5; Stow died in 1882, the year before the publication of Schreiner’s novel.
Sven Ouzman, “Indigenous Images of a Colonial Exotic: Imaginings from Bushman Southern Africa,” Before Farming 1, no. 6 (2003): 7.
Artist and curator Pippa Skotnes makes this point when describing the significance of San folklore, which she suggests the popularity of rock paintings have overshadowed. Pippa Skotnes, “‘Civilised Off the Face of the Earth’: Museum Display and the Silencing of the/Xam,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (2001): 299–321.
While Gerald Monsman has considered the rock paintings and Waldo’s woodcarvings “imbedded self-references” to the novel, Cherry Clayton has discussed these visual works as comparable productions of “primitive artist[s].” See Gerald Monsman, Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Landscape and Power (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 81; and Cherry Clayton, “Forms of Dependence and Control in Olive Schreiner’s Fiction,” Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler, ed. Malvern van Wyk Smith (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), 25. Other critics, such as Joseph Bristow and Loren Anthony, acknowledge Waldo’s apparently primitive affinity with his southern African environment; Anthony, moreover, reads the paintings as the sign of a repressed pre-colonial history. Anthony’s study, however, emphasizes the limitations of Schreiner’s critical vision and her inability to reconcile herself to the colonial past she inherits. See Joseph Bristow, “Introduction,” in Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xv. See also Loren Anthony, “Buried Narratives: Masking the Sign of History in The Story of an African Farm,” Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 4, no. 2 (1999): 12. Carolyn Burdett similarly considers Waldo “a kind of met- onym for the African landscape,” as he “is portrayed as intimately related to the land.” See Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 41.
See Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), especially 120–42.
Irene E. Gorak also recognizes in Schreiner’s work an emergent postcolonial consciousness: “Schreiner shows that colonization has imported into Africa its own conflicts, its own anxieties, its own inner darkness. To light up this darkness with a hand-made, hand-held torch: this, as she sees it, is the fearful but necessary task of the newly awakening postcolonial self.” See Irene E. Gorak, “Olive Schreiner’s Colonial Allegory:’The Story of an African Farm,’” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 23, no. 4 (1992): 71.
Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 27.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 87. While adopting the phrase “South Africa(n)” prior to the foundation of the Union in 1910 may now be considered anachronistic, it was frequently used in the nineteenth century both as a general geographic marker (like “West Africa”) and as the signal for an emerging national identity. Despite the difficulties involved in disentangling place from identity, I try to use the phrase “southern Africa(n)” in contexts emphasizing the former.
Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 97.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 199.
In a letter to Henry Norman, Schreiner reflects on Lyndall’s apparent ability to overshadow her male counterpart: “I was glad especially that you felt interested in Waldo, because few people care for him so much as for Lyndall, and I am fond of him.” See Olive Schreiner, Letter to Henry Norman, 22 May 1884, Olive Schreiner Letters. Volume 1:1871–1899, ed. Richard Rive (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 41. Among her contemporary readers who did care for him, however, were her future husband, the farmer and later anti-war activist Samuel Cronwright, and her militant, acquisitive friend- turned-nemesis Cecil Rhodes. As she reveals in an 1892 letter to her publisher T. Fisher Unwin, Schreiner took her character Waldo seriously and hoped his story would particularly speak to working class male readers: “I insisted on An African Farm being published at 1/- because the book was published by me for working men. I wanted to feel sure boys like Waldo could buy a copy, and feel they were not alone. I have again … allowed it to be printed at 3/6 as I felt sure most poor lads would have it within reach.” See Olive Schreiner, The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920, ed. Samuel C. Cronwright-Schreiner (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1924), 209. As the first edition of a single volume novel generally cost nearly twice as much, Schreiner often struggled with her publishers to ensure that the work would reach its intended audience.
Doris Lessing, “Introduction,” The Story of an African Farm (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 7, 9.
Olive Schreiner, Letter to Havelock Ellis, 18 July 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 47. Roslynn D. Haynes discusses this same passage in relation to Schreiner’s Romantic exploration of childhood. See Roslynn Doris Haynes, “Elements of Romanticism in The Story of an African Farm,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 24, no. 2 (1981): 64.
The stranger’s words to the child also resonate with those of Wordsworth: “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!/On whom those truths do rest,/Which we are toiling all our lives to find.” See William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Poems in Two Volumes, vol. 2 (1807): 153.
J. M. Coetzee, “Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa,” English in Africa 13, no. 2 (1986): 4.
As Showalter has observed, the novel’s author, Ralph, its protagonist, Waldo, and its secondary character, Em, form Schreiner’s anagrammatic, if at times ironic, tribute to Emerson (Literature of their Own, 199). As her husband noted, Olive Schreiner recited lines from Emerson’s Essays “up to the day of her death.” Cited in Karel Schoeman, Olive Schreiner: A Woman in South Africa 1855–1881 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1991), 285. Following Emerson’s London Lectures of 1847, the American essayist’s works circulated widely among British readers and appealed to several generations of Victorian Skeptics. Schreiner’s mother and earliest intellectual supporter, Rebecca, read his essays in Healdtown, Cape Colony in the 1860s; Olive Schreiner read his essays in earnest a decade later (Woman in South Africa, 144).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” 1836, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 14, 9.
In a later essay from 1900, Schreiner compares the earlier movement toward independence in the United States with what seemed to her the inevitable development of South Africa as an independent nation. See Olive Schreiner, “The South African Nation,” Thoughts on South Africa (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), 367–83.
Stephen Clingman, “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s,” Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), 41.
See Mary Somerville, Physical Geography (London: John Murray, 1848).
On the representation of progressive time, see especially Patricia Murphy, “Timely Interruptions: Unsettling Gender through Temporality in The Story of an African Farm,” Style 32, no. 1 (1998): 80–101.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). This scene, as critics have suggested, also references William Paley’s famous watchmaker analogy used to argue for the existence of God in his 1802 Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature.
Schreiner’s list of readings prior to completing African Farm included the works of John Ruskin. See Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 20.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, in The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, vol. 11, eds Edward Tyar Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 169.
Schreiner’s later friendship with Eleanor Marx, as well as her courting by British socialists and subsequent disenchantment with them, is well known. Even Lyndall’s narrative of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, a “Representative M[a]n” admired in the late nineteenth century, takes the form of a working class success story. Within the novel’s harshly realist frame, however, such a romanticized figure can only exist as a parodic and sinister inversion of “the power of intellect without conscience.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Napoleon, or, the Man of the World,” Representative Men (1850; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 257; as well as Olive Schreiner’s Fiction, 63, and Progress of Feminism, 20.
Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, “A Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore and Other Texts. Second Report Concerning Bushman Researches, Presented to Both Houses of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope, by Command of His Excellency the Governor” (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, London: Trübner and Co. and Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1875), 2.
Monsman observes how Schreiner’s casting of the South African writer as painter further strengthens her connection with the Bushmen. Gerald Monsman, “Olive Schreiner’s Allegorical Vision,” Victorian Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 54.
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 185.
Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 61.
Harpham draws on the work of T. S. Kuhn, specifically The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 31–2.
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), 207.
Olive Schreiner, Dreams (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1891), 56–7.
Janette Deacon, “The/Xam Informants,” Voices from the Past:/Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, eds Janette Deacon and Thomas A. Dowson (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 13–14.
See Joseph Millerd Orpen, “A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen,” Cape Monthly Magazine N.S. 9 (1874): 1–10.
Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, “Remarks on Orpen’s Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen,” Cape Monthly Magazine N.S. 9 (1874): 13.
Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek and Lucy Catherine Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folk-lore (London: George Allen and Co., Ltd., 1911).
See Pippa Skotnes, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 12.
George W. Stow, “The Bushmen,” Athenaeum (4 August 1877): 151–2.
Mark Hutchinson, “On a collection of facsimile Bushman paintings,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 12 (1882): 464–5.
Adolf Hübner, “Eingrabungen von Thiergestalten in Schiefer auf’gestoppte Fontein’, Farm von van Zyl bei Hartebeest fontein in Trans Vaal,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 2–3 (1871): 51–3.
Gustave Fritsch, “Buschmannzeichnungen im Damaralande, Südafrika,” Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 10 (1878): 15–21.
Theophilus Hahn, “Felszeichnungen der Buschmänner,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 11 (1879): 307–8.
Roger Fry, “Bushman Paintings,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 16 (1910): 333–8.
Helen Tongue, Bushman Paintings copied by M. Helen Tongue, intro. Henry Balfour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909).
Roger Fry, “Negro Sculpture,” 1920, Vision and Design (New York: Meridian- World Publishing Co., 1956), 98–103. As Torgovnick has noted, what African artists ostensibly lacked were “the Frys of this world” (Gone Primitive, 94).
See Hübner, “Eingrabungen von Thiergestatten”; Rev. C. G. Büttner, “Bericht über Buschman Malereien in der Nähevon !Ameib Damaraland,” Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 10 (1878): 15.
Max Bartels, “Copien von Felszeichnungen der Buschmänner,” Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 24 (1892): 26–7.
Gerald Monsman, “Olive Schreiner: Literature and the Politics of Power,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, no. 4 (1988): 593.
Miklós Szalay, The San and the Colonization of the Cape 1770–1879: Conflict, Incorporation, Acculturation (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1995), 97.
Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2010), 87.
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© 2012 Deborah Shapple Spillman
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Spillman, D.S. (2012). Artful Tales and Indigenous Arts in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm . In: British Colonial Realism in Africa. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378018_5
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