ABSTRACT
In 1964 during an interview with Roy Newquist, Doris Lessing refl ected upon her upbringing in colonial Rhodesia in the following words: ‘I spent most of my childhood alone in a landscape with very few human things to dot it. It was sometimes hellishly lonely, but now I realize how extraordinary it was, and how very lucky I was’.2 Like other lonely geniuses of the veld before her, such as Olive Schreiner and Eugène Marais-both of whom she admired3-Lessing’s early years were spent in solitary communing with nature rather than with people, an isolation which left its mark in an intense, lifelong preoccupation with personal fulfi lment, and an almost overwhelming sense of being an outsider. Lessing’s trajectory from colonial backwater to metropolitan London and an international reputation as both chronicler and prophet of our times is well enough known. What is perhaps not so well appreciated is the extent to which what she refers to as her ‘myth country’ has remained colonial Southern Africa, and in particular that part of it once called Rhodesia, where the profound inadequacies of white settler culture led her to develop a more general sense of the inadequacies of the dominant civilisations of the world, and a consequent search for alternatives infl uenced by memories of her past, and indeed a nostalgia for idealised versions of it.
