God’s Stepchildren: The “Tragedy of Being a Halfbreed” in South African Literature

Abstract

In the summer of 1487, a Portuguese explorer named Bartolomeu Dias set sail from Lisbon in search of two legends—a king named Prester John and a passage to India. He travelled southeast along the coast of Africa, dropping anchor at different bays but moving steadily, albeit unknowingly, toward the tip of the continent. In a surprise squall lasting almost two weeks, Dias lost sight of the coastline and, in an ironic moment of anticlimax, circumnavigated the continent without realizing it. Later he touched land and grasped that he had completed one of his objectives. Unable to press on to Asia or trace the mythical Christian king, Dias turned around. But he made one more significant discovery before sailing back to Portugal, a promontory that he named Cabo das Tormentas or Cape of Storms. This rocky peninsula, where two oceans almost meet, eventually became known as the Cape of Good Hope, part of the larger Cape forming Africa’s southwest extremity.

Slavery bequeathed to the Boer, and to South Africa mainly through him, its large Half-caste population: a population which constitutes at once the most painful, the most complex, and—if any social problem were insoluble in the presence of human energy and sympathy, we might add—the most insoluble portion of our South African national problem.

—Olive Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa