Reading takes you there, sometimes even to places where you, the
reader, may not want to go. Someone else, someone we have never met, did
this, thought that, recorded it and related it. The reader, never
unsuspecting, willingly takes the author's hand to be led partially
blind along others' pathways, into foreign lands, or distant times in
unfamiliar landscapes. If the experience proves rich, a reader has seen
life, culture and time through another's eyes and is richer for it.
And
sometimes the experience is utterly surprising, especially when the
landscape and culture in question is one whose recent press, and
therefore the reader's assumptions, are not wholly positive. It is then
that the readers own assumptions may be questioned, even by apparently
uncontroversial subjects. And it in this respect that the reading of The
Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is thoroughly recommended.
It's
a novel published in 1883, focusing on the rites of passage from
childhood to adulthood, from naïve encounter with nature to married
expectancy of two orphaned girls, Em and Lyndall, growing up in a mixed,
though predominantly Boer, determinedly white household. Now white
South African culture of the nineteenth century has rarely commanded a
sympathetic English language press. The twentieth century's policy of
separate development, Apartheid, they called it, can be traced to the
assumptions and notions of separateness that we learn to take for
granted in the pages of Olive Schreiner's novel.
There is no
attempt to explain or justify such ideas in the book. It is no bigot's
apology for failing. What it does do, however, is portray life for this
family, and especially the two young girls within it. We grow with them
through childhood to the goal of becoming women in a small farm in the
dry karoo scrublands of South Africa. Daily life, with its wholly
obligatory chores, is almost dispassionately described. These people
were farmers, but in fact peasants in modern parlance, since they
approached the activity not as a business, but as a means of achieving
sustenance. They observed that cattle did not breed with ostriches and
that different species inhabited their own cycles and niches of life.
It's what God decreed and, though there was always space for doubt and
question, these were activities that could not publicly be expressed or
acknowledged, since the bedrock of community might be undermined.
There
was a perceived and assumed order to things, an order that had to be
obeyed, the price for non-observance being non-survival. Outsiders, like
guests at any formalised gathering where regular participants
implicitly know the rules, were always seen as potential threats. And,
when your nearest neighbour might be many miles away, separateness was
part of the assumed and inhabited landscape. And so we see the concept
applied even to the different people with whom these white farmers had
to cultivate daily contact, contact without which none of them would
have survived.
What happens to the two girls, Em and Lyndall, in
their African farm is the very substance of the book, content that only
should be revealed via the reading of the tale. Suffice it to say that
this novel about lives lived within a system of apparently rigid rules
eventually relates events that have all the characters questioning the
very basis of the assumptions they live by. Life was hard, and often
cruel. But that was the life they lived and, given their location in
place and time, it was perhaps the only life that was possible. The
Story Of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner is a book that certainly
takes the reader into its own world. It presents a life and landscape
that is both unfamiliar and little understood. By the end, we may be no
more in sympathy with its reality, but we certainly do know more about
it.
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