The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard's Adventure Fiction

Abstract

Rider Haggard's literary career began in the 1880s when public interest in Africa had reached a peak and when he himself had just returned from six years of public service in South Africa, as secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Public attention had focused on Africa during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Philip Curtin in The Image ofAfrica (Curtin, 1964) argues that it was Livingstone's report of 1857 of his missionary journey which had captured and retained the public imagination. With the political unrest caused by the first Kaffir wars, then the Zulu war, and the first Boer war whereby Britain was forced to the retrocession of the Transvaal after its annexation three years earlier, public interest was focused on Southern and Eastern Africa rather than Western Africa. Popular magazines of this period, such as the London Illustrated News, catered for public demand with years of continual reporting of savage African life using visual images supplied by travelling artists.