Reading Olive Schreiner Reading W. E. B. Du Bois

Abstract

In October 1905, the South African novelist Olive Schreiner received a copy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Schreiner, whose thinking about race in South Africa had been developing considerably since the landmark publication of The Story of an African Farm (1883), found herself deeply moved by Du Bois’s book. In a letter to her friend Edward Carpenter she wrote that, “the book makes me feel so much that sometimes I can’t look at it; it seems to come from within me.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, whose central political issue Du Bois had predicted would be “the problem of the color line,” Schreiner found Du Bois’s formulations startlingly apt as she attempted to come to terms with the particular racial crisis South Africa confronted between the end of the South African War (1899–1902) and the formation of the Union of South Africa (1910). Both in content and style, Souls resonated deeply with Schreiner as she wrestled with the “native question” in pre-Union South Africa. Very little notice has been taken of Schreiner’s reading of Du Bois, however, even though her transnational, transracial identification exemplifies the kind of crossnational anticolonial interdiscursivity that Elleke Boehmer and other critics have drawn attention to over the last decade or so. This essay first suggests reasons for the lack of attention to the Schreiner-Du Bois connection and then goes on to analyze the connection’s significance in relation to the com plex discourses of race, class, gender, and nationality and their intersections with systems of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century.