narratives of southern african farms

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This article was downloaded by: [Florida Atlantic University] On: 19 November 2014, At: 00:28 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Third World Quarterly Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20 Narratives of Southern African Farms Caroline Rooney Published online: 06 Aug 2006. To cite this article: Caroline Rooney (2005) Narratives of Southern African Farms, Third World Quarterly, 26:3, 431-440, DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033693 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436590500033693 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Narratives of Southern African Farms

This article was downloaded by: [Florida Atlantic University]On: 19 November 2014, At: 00:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third World QuarterlyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20

Narratives of Southern African FarmsCaroline RooneyPublished online: 06 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Caroline Rooney (2005) Narratives of Southern African Farms, Third World Quarterly, 26:3,431-440, DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033693

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436590500033693

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication arethe opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use canbe found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Narratives of Southern African Farms

Narratives of Southern African Farms

CAROLINE ROONEY

ABSTRACT This paper will attempt to specify a literary genre of farmnarrative, canonically exemplified by Schreiner, Lessing and Coetzee, in orderto raise the question of what alternative narratives there may be. Narratives ofentrapment or regression will be juxtaposed with artistic and autobiographicalexpositions offering a pioneering myth and logic, served to open up overlookedquestions of autonomy and local community. Particular attention will be givento one illustration (author will supply illustration), literally a watercolourpainting that can be seen to undo certain expectations of the farm settingestablished by the dominant literary tradition.

This article is to address a scenic narrativisation of the settler farm inSouthern Africa. In particular, I wish to talk a little about a specificwatercolour painting of a Zimbabwean farm, but will firstly provide acontext for doing so.The Southern African farm novel may be said to constitute a literary sub-

genre, the canonical Anglophone representatives of it being Olive Schreiner’sThe Story of an African Farm, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and JMCoetzee’s In the Heart of the Country. 1 Each of these three texts concentrateson the abject breakdown of a female protagonist in environments found to beunsympathetic or hostile. If a chronological, developmental analysis wereapplied to the three novels, the narrative focus that would emerge would beincreasingly on the psychic state of the protagonist, so that with Coetzee’stext, the final one of the three, the narrative seems to take place in theprotagonist’s mind or, as would be appropriate for a treatment of psychosis,the distinction between inner and outer reality collapses. With this, a realisticdepiction of everyday farm life may be said to increasingly recede.Achebe has famously maintained that Heart of Darkness uses Africa as a

backdrop for an examination of the disintegration of the European mind,2

and I wondered if a similar point could be made about the canonical farmnovels in question. However, here it may be said that the Africanenvironment is more than a backdrop in that it is given a causal role ininducing the states of the protagonists. In particular, the farm is given to usas a backwater of isolation, loneliness and boredom and as a desert ofapathy-inducing heat and aridity.

Caroline Rooney is at the School of English, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2

7NX, UK. Email: [email protected].

Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp 431 – 440, 2005

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/030431–10 # 2005 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590500033693 431

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As regards the literary background of Schreiner’s text, I think that thenovel that it may model itself on is George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Eliotbeing an obvious precursor figure for an aspiring female novelist ofSchreiner’s generation. Like Eliot’s Maggie, Schreiner’s Lyndall is a buddingfeminist frustrated by the lack of opportunities for female education and self-development within a patriarchal society. Lyndall’s close brother – sister sortof relationship with Waldo parallels that of Maggie with her brother Tom,and in both texts these paired characters die, possibly symbolising the fate ofthe brother – sister relationship as an ideal of mutuality or androgyny. Thenfurther, Eliot’s duality of characterisation, namely a serious treatment of themain characters and a comic, burlesque Dickensian treatment of the moreperipheral characters is a stylistic duality replicated by Schreiner in her text.And while George Eliot is a male pseudonym, Schreiner published her novelunder the pseudonym of Ralph Irons. And so on. It is rather intriguing toconsider therefore that the Southern African farm novel may in its inceptionderive from Mill on the Floss.Eliot’s novel begins with a lengthy glowing pastoral description of the

English countryside, an excerpt of which is:

How lovely the little river is, with its dark, changing wavelets! It seems to melike a living companion. . .As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, thedelicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks andbranches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs, I am in love withmoistness. . .3

Eliot’s opening set-piece of landscape lyricism is arguably reworked bySchreiner, as follows:

The farm by daylight was not as the farm by moonlight. The plain was a wearyflat of loose red sand sparsely covered by dry karroo bushes, that crackedbeneath the tread like tinder, and showed the red earth everywhere. . .The redwalls of the farm-house, the zinc roofs of the out-buildings, the stone walls ofthe ‘kraals’, all reflected the fierce sunlight, till the eye ached and blenched. Notree or shrub was to be seen far or near. . .the little cicada-like insects criedaloud among the stones of the kopje.4

Eliot’s love of moistness and the colour green is inverted into a hateddryness and the prevalence of the colour red. The point is that the Africanlandscape is defined by appearing as precisely: ‘un-English’. Coetzee hashimself analysed this phenomenon in his White Writing, the perception ofAfrica not so much in its particularity but as a negative of England orEurope, merely un-English, un-European.5 Lessing’s The Grass is Singingalso has something of this literary provenance. She prefaces her novel withlines from TS Eliot’s ‘The waste land’, cited at length, the significantexcerpt being:

In this decayed hole among the mountainsIn the faint moonlight, the grass is singingOver the tumbled graves. . .

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and the limp leavesWaited for rain. . .6

Although Lessing cites TS Eliot, there are evident references to Schreiner’sopening description of the farm: the moonlight, the singing cicadas, thedrought-like conditions, as well as reference to gravestones (Schreiner speaksof scattered stones like a ‘giant’s grave’). Regarding Lessing’s deployment of‘The waste land’, it could be said that the spiritual and lifeless decay of theEuropean is reflected in a landscape seen in terms of aridity and nothingness.The paradox is that the death of the literary or creative imagination isequated with a literal sterility and void: you could say that Africa is given asunbearably literal, unliterary. At the same time, the equation of a state ofmind with an outer reality portends the blurring of or breakdown betweeninner and outer reality that Coetzee may be said to see the farm novel asleading to in his self-conscious literary engagement with the genre. In this,there is a strange inversion of a Romantic aesthetic: instead of an enthusiasticidentification with a spirit in all things, there is a melancholic or abjectidentification with a pervasive spiritlessness or deathliness in all things.Schreiner, in the preface to her novel, insists on the unbearable yet

unavoidable literality of Africa, writing:

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 offamiliar things. . .It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would havebetter liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattledriven into inaccessible ‘krantzes’ by Bushmen; of ‘encounters with raveninglions, and hair-breath escapes’. This could not be. Such works are best writtenin Piccadilly or the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imaginationuntrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings.7

And, Schreiner concludes that the writer ‘must paint what lies before him’. Iwill come in a moment to address settler narratives that offer themselves asfactual rather than as works of the creative imagination. But first, withSchreiner’s injunction that the writer ‘must paint what lies before him’, someattention will be given to this painting of a Southern Zimbabwean farm orsettlement (Figure 1). It is a painting of the beginnings of my greatgrandfather’s farm by his sister, and it offers itself as an archival record. Inthe left hand corner, it is described as ‘Leo’s camp from ‘‘the approach’’’ andin the right hand corner it is signed and dated ‘November 1898’.The watercolour is washed in a lemony yellow. When we think of the

African sky we may remember or envisage an almost solid, tangible blue.However, I think that the artistic vision of the painting conveys the effect ofheat on colour: the yellow gives us a sense of the heat as glare. This may recallsomething of Schreiner’s phrase ‘all reflected the fierce sunlight’, however,Schreiner immediately goes on to depict this sun-dazzle as unwelcome byadding ‘til the eye ached and blenched’. In the painting, the sky is the samecolour as the land and the effect of this is to convey an immense sense ofspace in which the proto-farm or camp almost seems to levitate. Moreover,

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the pinkish hills on the horizon are very horizontal, even the verticality ofhills is dwarfed by the sense of space. In the foreground, the green shade-providing trees stand out and the cluster of buildings nestled amongst thetrees and bushes are named in line, as follows: spare hut, pantry, storeroom,kitchen, fowl hut, native hut, fowl hut.There is another painting of the settlement done a month later which

accompanies this one. This second one is entitled ‘Leo’s camp. Front View’,and is specified as Inzingwana district, Matabeleland, and dated 6 December1898 (Figure 2). In this one we can see the main farmhouse alongside thehuts. You can see that it has the same thatched roof as the huts and the samebrown earth walls, both are made of poles and mud, but its design isdifferent: it is rectangular rather than round and has windows and a veranda.I do not know at what stage the dwellings were built. However, what doesseem evident is that we see some degree of integration between European andAfrican presence and a degree of blending in with the surroundings. Thesettlement resembles a small African village, and although the farmhouse isdistinct in style, it yet shares features with the huts and exists in a continuumwith them. The hut designated ‘native hut’ would possibly have constitutedthe accommodation of the African workers or the designation couldalternatively refer to the building’s design.The encounter with these two paintings, which came into my possession

fairly recently, was what lead me to reconsider the well-known literaryrenditions of the farm. In particular, in the paintings we are confronted withwhat appears to be a definite desire for space, freedom, independence, self-sufficiency, closeness to the land. Whilst the farm novel presents the farm as a

Figure 1.

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place of European self-imprisonment, a claustrophobic place that cannot beescaped from, the paintings rather seem to suggest a contrary desire to getaway from European modernity. In fact, it is said that Leo was something ofa recluse. To briefly continue this story, Leo’s first son was born on the farmshortly after the time of these two paintings, in 1899. The child’s mother diedwhen he was an infant and he was, it is recounted, handed over to the care ofthe African farm workers, whereby Ndebele became his first and onlylanguage until he was sent to school at about the age of six. Although he thenlearnt English, he continued to speak fluent Ndebele, his mother tongue, allhis life.I recount this anecdote since it says something a little different about the

usually framed possibilities of settler experience. Gayatri Spivak, in an essayentitled ‘Resident alien’, offers a reading of Tagore’s novel Gora, a narrativein which an Irish boy is brought up by an Indian family. Of it, she says that itis a ‘singular’ text, a ‘peculiar riff’, seen as a literary experiment inreimagining Indian nationalism.8 However, this question of a certainnativisation of the settler may not merely be a quirk of the literaryimagination. Furthermore, whilst Schreiner testifies to the literality of hernovelistic authority against fantastic stories, there are other strands of settlerdiscourse that would undermine her claim to privileged first-hand factuality.Simply, it’s possible that supposed fiction can be fact, and supposed fact aquestion of literary imagination.There are two strands of discourse as alternative to the anti-pastoral novel

that I will sketchily refer to here: settler poetry and pioneering farm

Figure 2.

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reminiscences. Whilst the canonical farm novel is decidedly un-Romantic,this can be in sharp contradistinction to settler poetry. For example, in ananthology entitled Fifty Years of Rhodesian Verse, published in 1938, poemafter poem celebrates the African veldt or bush landscape where theoverwhelming ideology is one of a rejection of European modernity. Thisanthology is published to commemorate 50 years of settlement and theReverend Arthur Shearley Cripps provides an introduction to it, in which heexplains that the poems are not written in the modern style of an Eliot butrather in a neo-Georgian pastoral mode. Cripps goes on to state:

Africa has changed much in my lifetime: the glory and loveliness of old Africahave been passing away at a great pace in this present generation’s sight. . .

[A]t least the blue and golden skies of day and those blue and silver night-skies. . .are too far out of reach for Africa’s gold-seekers and diamond-huntersand Big-Business agents from overseas to get at them, and to spoil them.

Let us Europeans, who love Mother Africa as her loyal guests, try our very bestto help her to keep all of hers that is worth keeping!. . .Moreover Africa’s owngreat Pastoral Poet Theocritus teaches Africans not to give up on their owncountry’s real music, but, loving it, to glorify it. . .9

So, the settler and the native are to join forces in maintaining an authentic,unspoilt Africa, and many of the poems presented do echo this supposedrejection of capitalist modernity. For example (and this is a typical example)in CC Woolacott’s ‘Tranquility’ it is written:

River and trees make gentle melody;From airy heights a bird’s song trembles down.These are our music now—forgotten beThe tawdry jingle of the distant town.10

Of course, colonialism as an economic venture is disavowed in thesesentimental lyrics, but the affective investment in the worshipped land assanctuary from despised modernity is yet worth noting. Moreover, ratheroddly, a number of the settler poets adopt African masks and personae inthese poems: in Greta Bloomhill’s ‘Matabele Lullaby’, you find an Africanmother singing to her child; in ‘T’’s [sic] ‘Nkosikaas’s Keys’, an Africanservant mocking his employer madam; in Cullen Gouldsbury’s ‘The MwaviTree’, an African man singing of his traditional customs, amongst otherexamples. Traditional Africans in keeping with a God-blessed land aretreated implicitly as guarantees against the Eliotic waste land of lost vitalityand spirit. At the same time, the settlers pose as the manly, heroic guardiansof this uncorrupted legacy, without questioning how inheritance of it is justassumed. There is possibly something Rousseau-like and nostalgic in thisneo-primitivism, where the African emblematises the harmonious, naturalbeing and, regarding a European discourse of authenticity of the thirties, asanalysed by Adorno, there is the question of a transplanted, anxiousdiscourse of authenticity or pseudo-authenticity in the face of capitalist

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modernity at stake.11 Related to this poetic treatment, is a more heroicdiscourse.Blair Rutherford, in his recent anthropological study of the Zimbabwean

farm, identifies a discourse of pioneer stories, stories told of farmingsettlements. Features of this discourse are said to be emphases on: ruggedindividualism and independence, hyper-resourcefulness, adventurous survi-val, triumphant encounters with the wild, especially marauding animals (iethe kind of story Schreiner maintains could only come from the fantasies ofthose living in Piccadilly or the Strand), where this lifestyle is bound up withassertions of paternalistic responsibility for African workers, colonialist aswould-be guardian. Of this discourse, Rutherford writes:

[I]t situated the story-teller and the farm on an advancing border of civilisation,bringing modern order to the bush, while at the same time it nostalgicallyinvoked a simpler time compared to the hustle and bustle of ‘modern times’.These stories thus tended to signify the modernity of the white farmerscompared to, and incorporating, workers and, simultaneously, the differencebetween white farmers and ‘modern times’.12

In regard to this, the ideological paradox is of the pioneer-settlers thinking ofthemselves as superior to Africans because modern, but superior tometropolitan Europeans because quasi-Africanised escapees from modernity:more modern than the Africans, seen as needing to be guarded or supervised,less modern than the corrupt Europeans. Rutherford speaks of this genre ofpioneer discourse as invariably male, excluding female voices, however, itdoes not seem that he himself actively seeks out the narratives of the women.Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, may beconsidered to belong to this resourceful, adventurous (etcetera) pioneertradition as opposed to the alienated farm narrative of Schreiner, Lessing andCoetzee.Fuller is unflinchingly honest in the depiction of her family’s blatantly

racist attitudes, their sense of civilisational superiority, yet what isinteresting is that contradictions emerge. For instance, we learn that herfamily choose to live in areas deemed uninhabitable for white people inaccordance with her father’s stated objective to leave behind ‘the maddingcrowd’ of European modernity.13 Accordingly, apart from their owncompany, the family are often solely in the company of their workers,rounding up cattle, fighting off dangerous animals, going on huntingexpeditions with them. While the Fullers seem to be fairly poor, they alsoseem to opt for a simple back-to-nature lifestyle, for instance, living inthatched huts at one point. Fuller distances herself from what sheconsciously rejects as African superstitions at the same time that the verybeliefs she disavows start to pervade her thinking.14 In some ways, Fuller’smemoir has the opposite dynamic to that of Godwin’s Mukiwa, anotherstory of an African upbringing, where it is probable that Fuller would havebeen aware of this text in coming to write her own.15 Godwin has a moreliberal upbringing, but he becomes increasingly bitter over and alienated bywhat he sees as a baffling and repellent postcolonial African rejection of a

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redemptive European modernity. Fuller, brought up with a crude racistrhetoric, finds everyday life repeatedly and confusedly contradicting herconditioning: her narrative is highly ironic in this respect, presenting a so-called civilised lifestyle as a bit of a mockery and showing the adoption offorbidden identifications at work. It can be noted in passing that a latershort story of Fuller’s explicitly dramatises this transgression of identity,ending with the assertion: ‘Years later, I recognised that moment as the firsttruly African thing I ever did. It was the thing that made me change from aPom to a munt’.16 The confusion is signalled by the pejorative slang for‘African’ being retained.Fuller’s farming narrative also contains an account of her mother’s

breakdown, but it is not the farm life that seems to cause it—so much as griefoccasioned by the death of children—and Fuller’s story ends with her motherovercoming her madness through embracing an ethos of practical survivalassociated with the everyday challenges of rural life. Whilst earlier in the textit is maintained that ‘The valley represented the insanity of the tropics soprecarious for the European psyche’,17 this folkloric generalisation orreceived truism is implicitly undermined by the numerous accounts of stoicpersistence that follow and with which the account ends. This narrative of thesettler farm can neither be reduced to the myth of dangerous regression northat of the pastoral idyll, and the feminine voice of the narrative may even beheard to turn the heroic, pioneer stance into something amusingly camp attimes.In conclusion, what this has been speculatively trying to sketch is that in

the canonical literary novels rural settler culture is given as abject partlythrough feelings of cultural inferiority in relation to a European scene of highculture as an aspirational horizon. In the pioneer memoir, anxiety overcultural philistinism is not as prevalent as a deeply ambivalent reaction toEuropean modernity. Furthermore, beyond a refining of generalisations, itremains important to attend to a particularity of experience that defiesreduction to ideologies that would, one way or another, retrospectivelyrender the settler farm as foredoomed to failures of non-belonging or non-integration.There are many other stories yet to be told—or discovered. As a kind of

postscript, it can be added that Mary Robinson, the painter of thewatercolours, also wrote a diary of the months of her stay at Leo’s camp, asonly found out after the above had been written. While this unpublisheddocument cannot be reproduced here, a few brief excerpts from dated entrieswill be tacked on for the glimpses of possibly unexpected scenes that theyafford.

Sept. 24th.

The camp’s outside appearance was a collection of neat square and round huts.But when one entered the dining room one was taken back to civilisation andhome. There was the table bright with white linen, silver and flowers, thesideboard bright with silver and glass and the walls covered with photographsof the home faces. All was so bright and pretty.

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Dec. 19th.

[I]t was pretty to notice how the country grew more grassy to the west of thecamps and more bushy to the east. The police built new huts in a new placewhile I was there, and Sikombo, who took a promenent [sic] part in therebellion [Matabele rebellion] and is one of the head chiefs in Matabeleland hashad a hut built for himself near by, that he may always have somewhere to staywhen he comes. This man paid us more than one visit. Another chief came too,but I forget his name.

January 1st 1899

We went to the right of Mshete’s (he is an induna and relative of Lobengula)present kraal and passed his old one. The latter is the prettiest scene I had seenup here. . .The walls were of red earth only, beautifully smooth and with an archof lighter earth round each door. This prosaic description can give you no ideaof the beauty of the scene—the bright sunshine, the brilliant red of the grain-vessel, the softer red of the two roofless huts; then the deserted look of thelonely place and, what particularly struck me, the familiar look of the forms ofthose two huts—as though they were of Egyptian or Syrian people. I wanted tosketch the scene, but left it for another day. . .I had made various sketches ofthese views and of the camp. They give one an idea of the country, but do notdo it justice of course.

It isn’t The Story of an African Farm, nonetheless it is a story of an Africanfarm.

Notes

1 See: Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971; DorisLessing, The Grass is Singing, Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1973; JM Coetzee, In the Heart ofthe Country, London: Secker & Warburg, 1977. This article will not take into account a study of theseparticular texts alongside other works by the writers concerned where, in particular, Lessing’s TheGrass is Singing may be said to differ from her other early treatments of rural Africa.

2 C Achebe, ‘An image of Africa: racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Hopes and Impediments:Selected Essays, 1965 – 1987, Oxford: Heinemann, 1988, pp 1 – 13.

3 G Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, London: Dent, 1966, pp 3 – 4.4 O Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p 38.5 JM Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven & London: YaleUniversity Press, 1988.

6 Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1973, p viii.7 Schreiner, pp 27 – 28.8 G Spivak, ‘Resident alien’, in DT Goldberg & A Quayson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism, Oxford:Blackwell, 2002, p 49.

9 A Shearley Cripps, Fifty Years of Rhodesian Verse, Oxford: Blackwell, 1939, p 19.10 CC Woolacott, ‘Tranquility’, in Rhodesian Verse, p 116.11 See T Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, London: Routledge, 2003. Without being able to discuss

this adequately, whilst Cesaire has spoken of fascism as colonialism returning to Europe, a colonialismand a fascism of the thirties might be considered in terms of mutual yet distinctively divergentresponses to an authenticity in jeopardy. It can be but noted in passing that there is a distinction to bemade between an authenticity accorded to the European self and one accorded to the native other.

12 B Rutherford, Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers in Postcolonial Zimbabwe,Harare & London: Weaver Press & Zed Books, 2001, pp 82 – 83.

13 A Fuller, Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, London: Picador, 2002. TheFullers’ Zimbabwean farm is said to be remote, ‘without the hope of television reception’ (p 155). Theymove to Devuli Ranch, said to be in bold letters ‘Not Fit for White Man’s Habitation’ (p 167). Of theirrelocation to Malawi, it is said: ‘our farm is remote’ (p 231). Moving to Mozambique, it is remarked:

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‘That’s the best part. There’s no one there’ (p 267) And the final move to a Zambian farm is because itis ‘Far from the madding crowd’ (p 309).

14 She writes: ‘I should have been a Coming-Back Baby, but I didn’t believe what some Africans say’ (p35), whilst yet seeing the death of her siblings in these terms. And, she formulates her ambivalentresponse to her violation an African taboo concerning the touching of grave pottery, as follows: ‘Andthen I think of Richard dead and Mum gone crazy. And I think that if I hadn’t touched the things ofthe dead we wouldn’t be having all this bad, bad luck’ (pp 207 – 208).

15 P Godwin, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, London: Picador, 1996.16 A Fuller, ‘Fancy dress’, in Writing Still, Harare: Weaver Press, 2003, p 78.17 Fuller, Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, p 47.

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