Vulnerable Margins

In her biography of Doris Lessing, Carole Klein refers to Lessing’s ‘painful sense of not belonging’, ¹ and a childhood in which ‘family life revolved around English values and customs that had little meaning to a girl who roamed the African veld’. ² These words provide a paradigmatic starting point for discussion of the lives and literary representations of English-speaking South African settlers. They inhabited an in-between state, their mental landscapes deeply divided between the marginalised land of settlement and the imagined community of the original homeland – a mythologised connection that appealed even to settlers who were born in South Africa and had never visited so-called ‘home’. It was sufficiently noteworthy for Patricia Pifer, an American newly settled in the little town of Nigel, south of Johannesburg, to mention it in a letter to her mother-in-law in 1933: ‘All we have heard about here is England and the Prince of Wales – always something about him.’ ³ However, the England of idealised origin was also the England that utilised colonies to dispose of its human excess, and many settlers of English descent were disowned by the homeland before they had set foot in Africa. They were for the most part members of the working classes for whom colonisation was an answer to unemployment. Sarah Gertrude Millin describes the 1820 settlers as ‘humble people mostly’, ⁴ and ‘bound to be chiefly those who have little to lose by going away’. ⁵ The colonies continued to tempt those who saw little opportunity in their country of birth. According to Drury Pifer, Patricia’s son: ‘The Africa of 1932 promised an outside chance to marginal people, those willing to hock everything and borrow to pay their passage, those willing to bet everything on a letter or a rumor.’ ⁶ A particular attraction was that marginality in the homeland could be transformed into superiority in the colonies. John X Merriman, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, remarked in 1908 that white workmen who had been located in the lower classes in Europe were ‘delighted on arrival here to find themselves in a position of an aristocracy of colour’, ⁷ yet marginalisation was not so easily escaped as Merriman’s comment might suggest. The colonies were always regarded as peripheral, and Ann Laura Stoler identifies a shift in thinking in the early twentieth century that ‘focuses not only on the Otherness of the colonized but also on the Otherness of colonials themselves’. ⁸ The South African settler is clearly not African, but is not authentically European either. This uncertain identity finds particular representation in English language settler fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through metaphoric concern with bodily coherence and integrity, expressed through obsessive attention to miscegenation and the associated imagery of disease.