By Europe, out of Africa : white women writers on farms and their African invention

381 Pages·1996·13.6 MB·English

by  Lewis, Simon

BY EUROPE, OUT OF AFRICA:
WHITE WOMEN WRITERS ON FARMS
AND THEIR AFRICAN INVENTION
By
SIMON LEWIS
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1996
UNIVERSITYOFFLORIDALIBRARIES
s
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am massively indebted to all around me for being able
to produce this dissertation: family, teachers, and friends,
as well as those writers and scholars I have come to know
only through their work.
To start with the last first, this dissertation is its
own kind of homage to Olive Schreiner and Karen Blixen whose
lives and writing give it its subject. Although, in my
analysis of their work, I am frequently critical of them, I
have never lost the initial admiration for them as women and
as writers that I formed when I first read them well over a
decade ago. I am all too well aware that in applying the
20/20 vision of literary hindsight to their work I have
applied the kind of scrutiny that, applied to my own work,
would set it at nothing.
My indebtedness to literary scholars is abundantly
apparent throughout the text: I depend heavily on the
insights of Susan Horton, Robert Young, and Terence Ranger,
for instance, in my analysis of Schreiner's and Blixen'
inventions of "I," "farm," and "Africa." Transference to
"Africa" of Edward Said's insight that Orientalism as a
discourse had material effects means that much of my work is
underpinned by his work and that of Valentin Mudimbe My
.
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greatest debt, however, is to Raymond Williams, whose
arguments in The Country and the City are crucial to this
study. In addition, Williams' reluctance to rule out
"experience" lends theoretical credibility to my musings in
Section 1, while his proto-postcolonial insights on emergent
and vestigial, resistant and alternative culture color my
observations on the cultural role of history and literature
in inventing colonial and postcolonial Africa. Furthermore,
Williams' method, his socially committed scholarship, and
his stylistic clarity provide a model I can only dream of
emulating
As for teachers, I have been extremely fortunate to
have had one source of inspiration after another in the
guise of school teachers, particularly Richard James and
Simon Taylor, my professors both at Oxford and the
University of South Carolina, and colleagues in the teaching
profession such as Christopher Dixon, Bernard O'Keeffe, and
Stephen Walsh. At the University of Florida, among talented
and lively fellow graduate students, I benefitted enormously
from a committed faculty. Special thanks for guiding my
work are due to the indefatigable Elizabeth Langland, as
well as to Amitava Kumar, Dan Cottom, Alistair Duckworth,
Hunt Davis, and John Mason.
For financial support, I am grateful to the University
of Florida for a Grinter Scholarship and Kirkland
Dissertation Fellowship. The latter allowed me to
in
concentrate exclusively on research and writing, a luxury I
will not have again for some time. For their daily support
with my irritating requests for paper-clips, envelopes,
travel-grants, disc-formatting and so on I thank all the
English Department office staff.
My education depended largely on my parents' decision
to foot the bill at two excellent independent schools in
South Africa and England, and their support throughout my
Oxford career allowed me to stay on at Worcester College
when my not having met the residential requirements in
England debarred me from receiving a mandatory grant. So
much hinges on their practical support and the convictions
behind it that I can only assume that they know how grateful
I am. And not only for that.
Likewise, any expression of gratitude to my wife Janet
can never really match the debt I owe her. Without her
prompting I would never have gone to Tanzania, without her
prompting I probably would not have come back to graduate
school; without her propping I wouldn't have been able to
write this. And without her, I would certainly not have
been able to enjoy the very special company of Megan and Zoe
that simultaneously makes this project worthwhile and keeps
it in perspective.
IV
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii
ABSTRACT vii
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
THE INVENTION OF THE "I" 13
Of Masks, and Masques, and Masquerades 41
The Whites of Their "I"s: Miming Alterity
from a Position of Racial Power 68
Notes 86
CHAPTER 2
THE CHILDLESS MOTHER AND MOTHERLESS CHILD, OR THE ORPHANHOOD
OF THE WHITE WOMAN WRITER IN AFRICA 94
Notes 124
CHAPTER 3
THE POLITICS OF LANDSCAPE IN
THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM 129
Notes 166
CHAPTER 4
FROM MOO MOO TO MAU MAU: OLD MACDONALD AND KAREN BLIXEN 173
Notes 194
CHAPTER 5
VIOLENCE AND VOLUNTARISM:
THE WILL TO POWER AND THE WILL TO DIE 198
Notes 232
CHAPTER 6
X-ING OUT AFRICA TO PRODUCE SOMETHING NEW 238
Notes 273
v
CHAPTER 7
HEART OF AFRICA/OUT OF DARKNESS:
CULTURE AND OTHER WEAPONS OF STRUGGLE 280
Notes 317
CHAPTER 8
GRAVES WITH A VIEW:
ATAVISM AND THE EUROPEAN HISTORY OF AFRICA .... 323
Notes 347
CONCLUSION: PLAYING TOO LIGHT, TOO LATE 352
REFERENCE LIST 357
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 371
vi
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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
BY EUROPE OUT OF AFRICA:
WHITE WOMEN WRITERS ON FARMS AND THEIR AFRICAN INVENTION
By
Simon Lewis
August 1996
Chairperson: Professor Elizabeth Langland
Major Department: English
By Europe out of Africa: White Women Writers on Farms
and their African Invention analyzes the cultural role of
white women writers on farms in Africa, paying particular
attention to the inventive oscillations in their work.
Focussing on Olive Schreiner and Karen Blixen, but extending
beyond them to Elspeth Huxley, Doris Lessing, and Nadine
Gordimer, the study takes its structure from Blixen's famous
opening to Out of Africa. "I had a farm in Africa," and
deconstructs the apparent simplicity and certainty of that
statement
Section one shows how the ability to talk as "I"
involves complex negotiations of racial, gender, and class
identity. While Blixen's African experience enables her to
forge an aristocratic identity by representing the loss of
her farm in terms of pastoral elegy, the mission-raised
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Schreiner presents her farm with relentless realism, looking
for her Utopia in the future when women can take their place
in the world without restriction.
Section two, leaning heavily on the work of Raymond
Williams in The Country and the City looks at the politics
,
of landscape in Schreiner and Blixen, attempting to weigh
the ideological baggage that comes with literary accounts of
rural life in English. A comparison between Elspeth
Huxley's detective fiction, Doris Lessing's The Grass is
Singing, and Blixen's account of the death of a Kenyan farm-
laborer called Kitosch shows how the European discourses of
ethnography, detective fiction, and colonial law all work
together to claim disciplinary control over Africa and
Africans
Section three argues that "Africa" is a European
invention, remarkably consistently used by Europeans as a
site to write their own history. Ranging from images of
Africa in Vergil and Petrarch, through what Martin Bernal
calls the "fabrication" of Ancient Greece from 1785 on, to
the canonical status of the racist image of Africa in Heart
of Darkness this section concludes that Europeans have not
,
just written themselves through "African" experience, but
attempted to write themselves into the African landscape
through their graves and memorials.
vm
INTRODUCTION
By Europe, Out of Africa: White Women Writers on Farms
and Their African Invention analyzes the cultural roles
played by white women writing on or about farms in South and
East Africa, focussing mainly on Olive Schreiner and Karen
Blixen, but with additional reference to Elspeth Huxley,
Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and others. By decoding the
apparent simplicity of Karen Blixen's famous opening to Out
of Africa--"! had a farm in Africa"--this study reveals the
underlying complexity of the politics of colonialism and
imperialism. Its three sections explore the manner and
effect of the various inventions--of "I", "farm," and
"Africa"--in the writers' work: the first section addresses
the ambiguous position of the colonial woman, simultaneously
subject to Victorian and colonial patriarchy yet
participating in the subjugation of a local black
population, simultaneously at home and not at home in
Africa; the second section traces how a tradition of the
English pastoral influences and shapes representations of
the African landscape, at times facilitating the occupation
of the land by creating an occupation called farming;
finally, the third section undertakes a very broad
historical investigation of the invention of "Africa" by
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European discursive practices, situating Blixen's and
Schreiner's work in relation to the European memory-bank of
literary and historical tradition that has tended to forget
indigenous African experience.
In the past, critics have generally looked at the
writers in this study separately, or in terms of their
specific physical location, or in terms of their location
within specific literary traditions. In the case of Olive
Schreiner that has meant a split between the work of those
critics who see her as primarily South African, the pioneer
of a South African literary tradition, and the work of those
critics, mainly outside South Africa, who place her writing
and her politics in a British tradition. The split is
perhaps an inevitable one, reflecting the actual splitting
of her life between physical residence in South Africa and
physical residence in Britain as well as the intellectual
ambivalence created by being an "English South African."
Following the work of Homi Bhabha in particular,
however, that very "ambivalence" in the colonial and
postcolonial situation has become of central importance,
countering the potential totalization of foundational
studies of colonial discourse such as Said's Orientalism.1
In foregrounding such ambivalence, I am also picking up on
the earlier insights of Raymond Williams in his accounts of
the many layers of any given "culture," with residual and
emergent traces, and alternative and oppositional practice