The Story of an African Farm. Olive Schreiner
as well as attending socialist meetings. Schreiner met the publisher George Meredith, who in 1883 published her best-known novel, Story of an African Farm. A commercial and critical success, it is now seen as a defining work of early feminism – as is her later work, Women and Labour (1911).
Over the rest of her life, Schreiner made the acquaintance of a number of figures in London society, including future Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1889, she returned to South Africa to be with her family. Her brother, William Schreiner, later became prime minister of Cape Colony. Over the next few years she published two collections of short stories, Dreams (1891) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893). She also became heavily involved in politics, and was a fierce opponent of racism and imperialism. Her 1897 work Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897) was a strong attack on British rule in South Africa.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Schreiner moved back to Britain. Over the next four years she was active in the peace movement and worked closely with organizations such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Non-Conscription Fellowship. She returned to South Africa in of August 1920, and dying following a heart attack later that year.
PREFACE
I have to thank cordially the public and my critics for the reception they have given this little book.
Dealing with a subject that is far removed from the round of English daily life, it of necessity lacks the charm that hangs about the ideal representation of familiar things, and its reception has therefore been the more kindly.
A word of explanation is necessary. Two strangers appear on the scene, and some have fancied that in the second they have again the first, who returns in a new guise. Why this should be we cannot tell; unless there is a feeling that a man should not appear upon the scene, and then disappear, leaving behind him no more substantial trace than a mere book; that he should return later on as husband or lover, to fill some more important part than that of the mere stimulator of thought.
Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.
It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible kranzes by Bushmen; “of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes.” This could not be. Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings.
But, should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases and shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him.
R. Iron
“We must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; or must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions that will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be found in the cradle of the child.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville
GLOSSARY
Several Dutch and Colonial words occurring in this work, the subjoined Glossary is given, explaining the principal.
Alle wereld!—Gosh!
Aasvogels—Vultures.
Benauwdheid—Indigestion.
Brakje—A little cur of low degree.
Bultong—Dried meat.
Coop—Hide and Seek.
Inspan—To harness.
Kapje—A sun-bonnet.
Karoo—The wide sandy plains in some parts of South Africa.
Karoo-bushes—The bushes that take the place of grass on these plains.
Kartel—The wooden-bed fastened in an ox-wagon.
Kloof—A ravine.
Kopje—A small hillock, or “little head.”
Kraal—The space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches, into which sheep or cattle are driven at night.
Mealies—Indian corn.
Meerkat—A small weazel-like animal.
Meiboss—Preserved and dried apricots.
Nachtmaal—The Lord’s Supper.
Oom—Uncle.
Outspan—To unharness, or a place in the field where one unharnesses.
Pap—Porridge.
Predikant—Parson.
Riem—Leather rope.
Sarsarties—Food.
Sleg—Bad.
Sloot—A dry watercourse.
Spook—To haunt, a ghost.
Stamp-block—A wooden block, hollowed out, in which mealies are placed to be pounded before being cooked.
Stoep—Porch.
Tant or Tante—Aunt.
Upsitting—In Boer courtship the man and girl are supposed to sit up together the whole night.
Veld—Open country.
Velschoen—Shoes of undressed leather.
Vrijer—Available man.
PART I
I
SHADOWS FROM CHILD-LIFE
THE WATCH
The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karoo bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.
In one spot only was the solemn monotony of the plain broken. Near the centre a small solitary kopje rose. Alone it lay there, a heap of round ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant’s grave. Here and there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly-pears lifted their thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their broad fleshy leaves. At the foot of the kopje lay the homestead. First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffer huts; beyond them the dwelling-house—a square, red-brick building with thatched roof. Even on its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealized the low brick wall that ran before the house, and which inclosed