Abstract
In 1945, the South African writer and journalist Herbert Dhlomo wrote an article in The Democrat where he stated: “Obliged to live as a begging worker in the city and a comparatively free kraal-head in his rural home, the tribal African has a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence”. Ten years before, in 1935, he had published a short story, “An Experiment in Colour”, in which the protagonist changes from black to white (and back) after discovering a miraculous serum, thus acquiring a double identity very much like Jekyll’s – and similarly socially destructive. The short story is challenging: as a cultural ‘product’ of two prominent South African missionary institutions (American Board Mission and Glasgow Missionary Society), Dhlomo had imbibed the project of a thorough reformation of the ‘Bantu’ man – that ‘great change’, both in the private and in the social sphere, that only Christianity could put in motion. And yet, from the very beginning of his literary production, Dhlomo has responded to the missionary project in an ambivalent way. ‘An Experiment in Colour’ is both a dystopic literary response to contradictory social pressures, and a disquieting narrative that denounces alarming social problems.
Highlights
In 1945, the South African writer and journalist Herbert Dhlomo wrote an article in The Democrat where he stated: “Obliged to live as a begging worker in the city and a comparatively free kraal-head in his rural home, the tribal African has a Jekylland-Hyde existence”
The first and most straightforward connection has to do with the theme of the short story itself, which deals with a young South African scientist determined to solve the racial problem through the biochemical manipulation of certain glands, with the effect of changing a black man into a white and vice versa
The religious authorities of the manifold missions that had proliferated in the southern part of Africa since the beginning of the nineteenth century contributed in due course to shape a class of South African black writers, journalists and, in a word, intellectuals, among whom Herbert Dhlomo is highly representative
Summary
In 1945, the South African writer and journalist Herbert Dhlomo wrote an article in The Democrat where he stated: “Obliged to live as a begging worker in the city and a comparatively free kraal-head in his rural home, the tribal African has a Jekylland-Hyde existence”. There are two ways in which Herbert Dhlomo’s first published work of fiction, the short story “An Experiment in Colour” (1935), can be associated with the issue of social planning – with the idea that entire communities of people can be transformed and re-shaped by implementing specific projects for human development.
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