Truly South African voices
Olive Schreiner's novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883) is generally considered to be the founding text of South African literature. Schreiner was born on a mission station and worked as a governess on isolated Karoo farms, an experience that informed the novel. It tells the story of several characters representing aspects of South African society of its day. Lyndall, the young heroine, is the focus of Schreiner's feminist concerns. Bonaparte Blenkins is a portrait of the "imperial rogue" and thus allows Schreiner to express her nascent anti-colonial ideas (she later supported the Boers in their war of freedom against Britain). There is also Tant Sannie, the Boer woman, the kindly German Uncle Otto, and Otto's son Waldo, who expresses the universal themes of the novel in his concern with spiritual meaning.The novel draws on the post-romantic sensibility of Wuthering Heights, and depicts rural South African life with authenticity and brio. It has been criticised for its silence with regard to the black African presence in South Africa, but it is still a key text in the formation of a truly South African voice. Schreiner's other work includes a critique of Cecil John Rhodes's brutal form of colonialism, Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897), and the polemical Women and Labour (1911).
For biographical information on Schreiner, visit Emory University's English Department's website.
For an overview of her writings, see African Literature by Women
Douglas Blackburn had a certain amount in common with Schreiner, yet he was also a very different kettle of fish. He was a maverick British journalist who came to South Africa when the Transvaal was still a Boer republic, and stayed during the Anglo Boer War and beyond. In several newspapers, he denounced British colonial attitudes as well as satirising Boer corruption. He wrote two novels set in this world, Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp (1899) and A Burgher Quixote (1903), capturing with a great deal of sly humour the personality and situation of the Boer at the time.
His later novel Leaven (1908) is a moving denunciation of "blackbirding" and other iniquitous labour practices, and is one of the first South African novels to portray what life was really like for peasants forced into urban labour. Love Muti (1915) attacks British colonial attitudes. Blackburn is not read much today, but his work is an important contribution to a developing South African literature - and style. Herman Charles Bosman, for one, seems to have learned from Blackburn's ironic humour.
