28 - Twilight of the Old Gods

Summary

A SOUTH AFRICAN LADY WRITER LIVING IN LONDON COMPLETED an angry novel in February 1897, and sent it to Fisher Unwin, who bravely launched her book upon an unsuspecting public. Some years earlier Olive Schreiner had made an agreeable reputation with an autobiographical novel of life on a South African farm, a simple and yet lyrical account of rustic fortitude and human error. People had spoken of a South African Bronte, and had hoped for more.

But her new book, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, was rereceived with regret, even with a sense of outrage. It was unashamedly political. It bitterly deplored what Englishmen were doing in the newly discovered lands north of the Limpopo river. Many were shocked by the frontispiece, a photograph which showed white fanners in Matabeleland standing with evident satisfaction, as of a good day's work well done, round a tree from whose branches three Africans were hanging by the neck.

Critics disliked this brash excursion into politics under the guise of art, while the residents of South Kensington, where it was stated in the preface that the author was living, were startled to discover a neighbour of such virulence, not to say doubtful patriotism. Miss Schreiner's new book was considered in the worst of taste and really quite hysterical, suggesting as it did that if Christ the Lord came back to earth He would actually support the Matabele and Mashona, and not the English. This was far more of a new thought then than later, and it was appreciated even less. Bold men who had gone out to civilise Africa at the risk of their lives should not, it was said, be attacked in this way, even if some of them might be wild fellows not too nice in their methods: for you cannot, after all, make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Today one can see all this rather differently.

In 1893 the Ndebele or ‘Matabele’ cattle-raising state in the western and west-central areas of what would become Southern Rhodesia was invaded by troops of the British South Africa Company. This armed occupation of ‘Matabeleland’ had been initially undertaken to establish control of a country thought to be rich in minerals, especially gold; but the nature of the occupation changed almost from the start.