An early image of apartheid and postapartheid society: Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although conspicuously missing in discussions of South African antiapartheid literature these days, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was one of the earliest novels to campaign against racial injustice in what was later to become the Republic of South Africa. Capturing a vivid sense of the emotional and psychological toll that apartheid exerted on its earliest victims, Schreiner expressed the grieviances that racial oppression engendered and attempted to nip the evil in the bud. Through examination of her novel and of its relation to later works of fiction from Africa, I argue that though her hope for a liberated future did not materialize in her own lifetime, Schreiner's place in the canon of anti-apartheid literature as well as in feminism, and the historical importance of her example, should be central to any effort to understand literature's contribution to the struggle for a free South Africa.