بلايدن وماري كنجسلي

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine
McDonagh, Kings College, London; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith,
University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor,
University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that
aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the
English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to
the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies
that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by
diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at
the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and
genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only
the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All
titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both
canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.
Titles include:
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors)
‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE
Between the East End and East Africa
Heike Bauer
ENGLISH LITERARY SEXOLOGY
Translations of Inversions, 1860–1930
Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello (editors)
ILLUSTRATIONS, OPTICS AND OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY AND
VISUAL CULTURES
Deirdre Coleman and Hilary Fester (editors)
MINDS, BODIES, MACHINES, 1770–1930
Colette Colligan
THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY
Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Eleanor Courtemanche
THE ‘INVISIBLE HAND’ AND BRITISH FICTION, 1818–1860
Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism
Stefano Evangelista
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND ANCIENT GREECE
Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile
Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (editors)
LEGITIMACY AND ILLEGITIMACY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LAW, LITERATURE AND
HISTORY
John Gardner
POETRY AND POPULAR PROTEST
Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy
F. Gray (editor)
WOMEN IN JOURNALISM AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
‘Making a Name for Herself’
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors)
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle
Diana Maltz
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900
Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors)
VERNON LEE
Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Muireann O’Cinneide
ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Julia Reid
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
Virginia Richter
LITERATURE AFTER DARWIN
Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939
Deborah Shapple Spillman
BRITISH COLONIAL REALISM IN AFRICA
Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains
Anne Stiles (editor)
NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920
Caroline Sumpter
THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE
Sara Thornton
ADVERTISING, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls
Ana Parejo Vadillo
WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM
Passengers of Modernity
Phyllis Weliver
THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910
Class, Culture and Nation
Paul Young
GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION
The Victorian New World Order
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

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British Colonial Realism
in Africa
Inalienable Objects, Contested Domains
Deborah Shapple Spillman

© Deborah Shapple Spillman 2012
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For my mother and her parents,
Mary and John Kacar
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii

Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Reading Colonial Realism 1

1 Taking Objects for Origins: Victorian Ethnography and
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 29
1 Ethnographic Doubling 35
2 Of Trifles and Trade: Conrad’s Ethnography of
Colonialism 45
3 Authenticity on the Market, an Afterword 62
2 The Uncanny Object Lessons of Mary Kingsley and
Edward Blyden 74
1 If Objects Could Speak, “many a wild story
the handles of your table knives could tell” 76
2 Out of England: Objects and Others 92
3 Not “an object in the midst of other objects” 104
3 Realism and Realia in Colonial Southern Africa 123
1 Collecting Cape Colony Life 124
2 Specimens and Curiosities in Carey-Hobson’s
The Farm in the Karoo 134
3 Outside the Realist Collection: Reckless Generosity
and Other Notions of Expenditure 145
4 Curses and Gifts in Anna Howarth’s Karoo Novels 153
4 Artful Tales and Indigenous Arts in Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm 175
1 A Portrait of the Artist as a Colonial South African 180
2 Schreiner’s Grotesque Realism 190
3 Histories and “Bushman” Painters 198
Coda 217
Bibliography 225
Index 237
vii
List of Illustrations
1 Writing European, Yoruban, Nigeria, by 1900 30

2 Man’s Cloth (1998–2001) by El Anatsui 63
3 Detail of Man’s Cloth 64
4 Mavungu, Nganzi, Democratic Republic of Congo, by 1900 78
5 Henry de la Beche, Awful Changes, 1830 86
6 Interior of the South African Museum, circa 1880 128
7 San painting near Windvogelberg, copied by
George W. Stow 176
8 San painting, copied by Helen Tongue 179
9 Photographic detail of the Beersheba commando scene 190
10 Detail of the Beersheba commando scene, copied by
Patricia Vinnicombe 199
11 Rod’s Room, Roderick Sauls, District Six Museum,
Cape Town, South Africa 218
viii
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book began, as one might suspect, with an object, a short factual
narrative, and the question of how to connect the two. Contrary to
what one might expect, it did not begin in London or Cape Town but
rather in Berlin a dozen or so years ago. The varied and dispersed routes
of colonial exchange had brought to the center of former imperial
Germany a woodcarving from British West Africa as well as the report
of a traveler recently returned from Cape Colony. The one provided an
African view of Europeans, the other a European perspective on Africans
under British colonial rule. The questions that emerged concerned
not only how to bring perspectives like these closer together, but also
how to avoid reinstating the conceptual and temporal divide between
African objects and European writing, between ostensible pre-texts and
texts, prehistory and history, that had informed much of nineteenth-
century Anglo-European thought. Fortunately, for me, anthropologists,
archaeologists, historians, artists, scholars of postcolonial and African
studies, and museum curators had since at least the 1980s been help-
ing to rewrite the history of European colonialism and its founding
assumptions from multiple, divergent positions. The present study is
both inspired and humbled by their work.
Reading the works of British authors from Joseph Conrad to Anna
Howarth against nineteenth-century African essays, folklore, paintings,
sculptures, and recorded testimonies, this book highlights how conflicts
over the material world impacted British literary realism in colonial
Africa. Such conflicts help direct our attention toward tensions between
Victorian and African perceptions of objects and practices of exchange,
tensions that resonate formally in realist narratives. Considering
objects as sites of communication and conflict between Africans and
Victorians represents one way of attending more fully to the divergent
histories informing British writing about Africa, even in those instances
where certain histories remained largely unwritten. Rather than serv-
ing as purportedly self-evident facts lending authority to narratives,
literary objects instead function in colonial realism as sites of inquiry
and interpretive struggle. What constitutes an object? How are objects
central to the formation of individuals, their communities, and their
liberties? What role do objects play as they move between societies and
their different systems of value as commodities, as charms, as gifts, as
ix
x Preface and Acknowledgments
trophies, or as curses? Nineteenth-century British authors attempting to

transport narrative realism to the colonies confronted such questions
directly and indirectly as they struggled to represent competing forms
of material investment that characterized colonial and postcolonial life
in Africa.
This book moreover began with chapters never written and ideas
developed from the fragments of former research. Its thoughts have
been a long time in sedimenting, and its debts, therefore, run deep.
I would like to begin by thanking the various libraries and museums
that have granted me access to their archives and collections over
the years: the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) and the
Library at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin; the British Library and
the former Library at the Museum of Mankind in London; the Harold
Strange Library of African Studies at the Johannesburg Public Library;
the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown; and the
National Library of South Africa, the Manuscripts Department at the
University of Cape Town Library, as well as the Library of the Iziko
South African Museum in Cape Town. I am particularly grateful to Rina
Krynauw, former librarian, and Sven Ouzman, curator of pre-colonial
archaeology, at the Iziko South African Museum and to Andrew Martin
and Ann Torlesse at the National English Literary Museum for their
generous attentiveness to my inquiries and requests. Grants from the
following institutions helped to make this research possible: German
Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst),
the University of Oregon, and the Oregon Humanities Center.
Numerous institutions and individuals have kindly allowed me to
reprint the copyrighted material appearing in this book. The publishers
and I would like to thank El Anatsui, the District Six Museum in Cape
Town, Paul Grendon, the Iziko South African Museum of Cape Town,
the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the
University of Oxford, the Rock Art Research Institute/SARADA (South
African Rock Art Digital Archive) at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg, Roderick Sauls, and the Trustees of the British
Museum in London. We additionally wish to thank Art Resource in
New York; the Ethnological Museum, State Museums of Berlin, Prussian
Cultural Heritage Foundation (Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz); and the Prussian
Cultural Heritage Image Archive (Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz,
or bpk). Part of an earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in Nineteenth-
Century Literature 59, no. 1 (2004), and part of Chapter 2 was published
in Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 2 (2011) and appears by
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
permission of Cambridge University Press. Every effort has been made

to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked
the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements
at the first opportunity.
I would like to thank the English Department at the University of
Oregon for providing me with the resources, time, and guidance for
making this book possible. My departmental chair, Harry Wonham, has
been unflagging in his support over the past five years, and for this I am
exceedingly grateful. I am honored to have had the chance to exchange
ideas with the many talented graduate students at Oregon, and I would
especially like to thank those students with whom I have worked most
closely: Megan Benner, Andrew Grace, and Brian Psiropoulos. For their
general support and encouragement I wish to thank Liz Bohls, Lisa
Gilman, Tres Pyle, and Bill Rossi. Several colleagues have moreover read
and commented on portions of this project and its supporting materi-
als, and for this I am most grateful to Lara Bovilsky, Sangita Gopal, Paul
Peppis, Mark Quigley, and Ben Saunders. I especially wish to express my
sincere gratitude, which I will likely only ever be able to pay forward
rather than in return, to my now retired colleague, mentor, and gener-
ous reader of many pages, Dick Stein.
Individuals from other institutions have also greatly helped to shape
this project. For reading each page of this book while offering criticism
and support at every stage of its development, I am deeply indebted
to Elaine Freedgood. From her guidance as a dissertation director years
ago to her help in seeing this new project into a book, I know of no
adequate way to express my gratitude. For offering wisdom as a disser-
tation director and graduate chair, generous support, and innumerable
cups of coffee over the years, I also wish to extend my heartfelt thanks
to Liliane Weissberg. Both have inspired and motivated my work
beyond compare. Many other people kindly extended to me their time
as well as their thoughts in response to earlier versions and developing
fragments of chapters. Nina Auerbach, Rita Barnard, Rita Copeland,
Henrika Kuklick, Catriona MacLeod, and Christina Poggi deserve my
special thanks. For illuminating comments in response to my work on
Conrad at an earlier stage, I would like to thank Keith Carabine, Chris
GoGwilt, and the Joseph Conrad Societies of both the United Kingdom
and America. For his professional insights and advice over the years,
I am grateful to Jerry Singerman. Finally, I would like to thank Joseph
Bristow, editor of Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Culture, and Paula Kennedy, head humanities editor at Palgrave
Macmillan, for their most generous support of my work.
xii Preface and Acknowledgments
Friends and family members have contributed to this book more

than they may know. Jonnie Léger, Guinevere Narraway, and Monica
Popescu each helped me to feel at home while performing research
abroad. Sari Kawana, Alex Neel, and Gregory Wolmart provided their
insights at various stages of this project, and they each remain in my
thoughts. Jenifer Presto has offered her counsel and wit while serving as
my culinary guide to Eugene. Carmen Lamas and Colleen Terrell have
offered many years of company and good humor, which have always
been a pleasure to return. I am grateful to Bob and Cid Spillman for
recently welcoming me into their family and even going so far as to
read some of this book. Immeasurable gratitude I owe to my brother
and my mother, Kevin and Janice Shapple, for standing by me, even
when across the country. Lastly, I thank Peter and Samantha Spillman
for helping to make even the cloudiest of Northwest days sparkle.
Introduction: Reading
Colonial Realism
Their nerves and sinewes are not alienable, as their

money and goods.1
When passing through King William’s Town on an 1884 expedition

through British southern Africa, the ethnologist and collector Wilhelm
Joest encountered a troubling scene that would later return to haunt
him. Fixing his acquisitive gaze on an elaborately ornamented article
of traditional Xhosa leatherwork worn below the waist, Joest repeatedly
tried and failed to purchase a particularly desirable exemplar from an
elder member of the community. Six months later, one of Joest’s British
allies managed to secure him such an item at roughly the price of “an
entire European suit.”2 Within several weeks, Joest received five more
by mail and lamented how his demand for the object had likely effected
the production of multiple “spurious” works no more valuable to him
than the “Zulu curios” crafted for travelers in Natal or the increasingly
numerous artifacts decorated entirely with European glass beads.3
Voicing the familiar concern of nineteenth-century salvage ethnogra-
phers over the loss of an idealized authenticity, Joest, with a degree of
preemptive nostalgia, anticipates the day when “all originality will be
lost.”4 The autochthony of African artifacts – whether identified by their
design, purpose, or intended market – is nevertheless not the only form
of lost originality haunting this encounter. Joest’s moment of mingled
despair and wonder at perceiving material traces of his own European
presence in Africa is a familiar scene in late nineteenth-century colonial
literature, one in which signs of cultural intermingling place in ques-
tion the originating imperial myths of European “racial purity” and
“cultural priority.”5 This scene echoes in a variety of narratives: from
Marlow’s puzzled response to a thread of white worsted worn about an
1
2 British Colonial Realism in Africa
African laborer’s neck in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to

the exasperation Mary Kingsley recounts in Travels in West Africa (1897)
when a Fang chief offers her an old shilling razor in trade to the doubly
uncanny scene in Anna Howarth’s novel Jan, an Afrikander (1897) when
the English protagonist discovers a copy of a photograph of his uncle
in an African landowner’s collection. Such moments of narrative crisis
invoked by objects serve to undermine notions of authority – literary
and ethnographic as well as ontological and political – founded on
presumed boundaries between self and other.
Joest’s encounter represents a related, often less tractable source of
anxiety in late nineteenth-century colonial literature about Africa: the
possibility of indigenous resistance.6 His attempt at purchasing the
object constitutes an act of diversion; that is, of wresting the object
from its normal path of circulation within the community while
drawing it into a more extensive and inclusive European system of
commoditization. Resistance to such exchanges historically served as
resistance to the imposition of European values on African communi-
ties, one of the very means through which an imperial culture inscribes
its authority. When Joest’s British ally questioned the older Xhosa man
eventually lured into the transaction whether he would not rather have
enough money to purchase a complete suit to replace the traditional
leather article designed to cover a single bodily organ, the British consul
introduced to the man an alternate system of value and meaning.
Proposing the article’s exchangeability for more material, a foreign cur-
rency, or a familiar sign of European civilization draws both object and
owner into a European market economy as well as a symbolic system
of European cultural capital.7 According to Joest, the younger, more
Europeanized segment of this Xhosa community – “das moderne Jung-
Kaffraria” (modern Young-Kaffraria), as he somewhat ironically refers to
it – “would have sold its [article] gladly enough, if it had not long since
thrown out as worthless this last remnant of its heathenism.”8 Whereas
Joest attributes this failed exchange to the communal elders “who still
adhere faithfully to the customs of their fathers” and to “superstition,”9
present-day anthropologists remind us how such encounters may high-
light “the different systems of commoditization of different societies”
as well as the different kinds of object relations that attend them.10 In
this regard, Mary Kingsley’s anecdote about the colonial official newly
arrived in West Africa who baulked at accepting five women as part of a
local chief’s payment for a fine, a payment she deemed of “good value
and quite correct,”11 offers an illuminating, contemporary counterpoint
to Joest’s frustrated narrative. Not only may societies identify different
items as singular and “publicly precluded from being commoditized”

or ascribed a common exchange value,12 but they may also recognize
different forms of objects and practices of exchange.
Joest’s reading of this forestalled exchange as evidence of an adherence
to authentic traditions within the community therefore tends to
overshadow the possibility of alternate values and interests underwriting
the transaction within a community undergoing radical change follow-
ing the last of the Xhosa Wars against British colonists in 1879. Given
that the Xhosa had engaged in the exchange of consumer and durable
goods with Europeans for decades, the elder Xhosa man, contrary to
Joest’s perception of him, may well have been aware of the ways in which
resistance to exchange could inflate the value of a desired object in the
collector’s eyes as well as in the emerging European market he repre-
sented. Early Xhosa trade with Europeans, as historian Jeffrey B. Peires
explains, was largely speculative in that the Xhosa exchanged one form
of currency (often cattle) for another (usually beads or buttons); while
appearing to sell their cattle to Europeans for trifles in the south, they
in fact exchanged the currency they acquired for profit further north.13
As long as the Xhosa could restrict trade with Europeans to the acquisi-
tion of indigenous currency, explains Peires, they could preserve their
independence.14 While by the second half of the nineteenth century
the Xhosa had been forced into trade for European manufactures and
subsistence items, and eventually for European currency, they remained
astutely attuned to the politics of exchange. King William’s Town by
the 1880s had moreover developed into one of Cape Colony’s most
productive centers for European and African trade as well as a desirable
destination for European travelers, featuring middle-class social attrac-
tions and premier hotels. An emerging tourist market in African artifacts,
as Michael Stevenson has noted and Joest’s narrative anxiously affirms,
thus further complicated late nineteenth-century exchange in the south-
eastern Cape.15 If the commodity frequently served as “the site of the
production of misunderstanding and contradiction” between European
colonists and the Xhosa, as historian Clifton Crais suggests,16 it also
served as the site of struggle and negotiation registering multiple levels of
conflict. If capitalist commodity culture shaped late nineteenth-century
European realism, as literary and cultural critics have suggested, then
this culture’s uneven and contested development in the colonies may
have produced different forms of realism in which objects and others
prove less alienable – economically and semiotically – than realist texts
generally require.17 Over the next few pages, I will be returning to several
foundational arguments about the formal effects of capitalist commodity
culture on realist narrative that help to foreground the relation between

realism and alienability. I will then outline a method that combines
recent theories on the relation between objects and narratives with a
postcolonial response to realism that enables us to address the aesthetic
and historical complexities characterizing literary realism in a colonial
context where capitalism represented neither the only nor even the domi-
nant system of social organization, value, and exchange.
Critics of realism and of the realist novel in particular have proposed
its formal as well as conceptual relation to European market capitalism
in the nineteenth century. Fredric Jameson observes how “mimesis is
associated with realism … and thereby with the threatening dynamic of
the market.”18 While realism may assume multiple guises, its mimetic
function in nineteenth-century texts generally follows a set of histori-
cally contingent conventions for creating an imagined world that stands
in for or metaphorizes a posited, equally as mediated, world of refer-
ents.19 Realism, for Georg Lukács, was the literary form that emerged
in an attempt to represent the totality of social relations, the sense of
which had been lost – or rather obscured – under market capitalism.
Yet if the market threatens to reduce singularity to homogeneity, so, in
a way, does literary realism. To recall a comparison between semiotics
and economics once drawn by Ferdinand de Saussure, the substitu-
tive strategy whereby objects of the referential world are imaginatively
abstracted from their various contexts and transformed into literary
objects as signs that enter into semantic and rhetorical exchanges with
other signs resembles that of capitalist commodity exchange. Objects in
realist novels, as signs, possess a duality similar to that of commodities,
which enables them to appear sufficiently similar as well as sufficiently
different in order to assume a relational value.20 The value of the sign,
like that of the commodity, moreover emerges through a relation that
locates the source of value outside of the sign.21 In both the linguistic
sign and the commodity form this relation is often naturalized,
rendered invisible, to the extent that signs and commodities both
appear to possess value in themselves. The realist object as naturalized
sign as well as the sign of an often mundane object ultimately assumes
a kind of transparency, no matter how conflicted, upon which the rep-
resentational strategies of nineteenth-century realism depend.
Realism’s relation to market capitalism emerges still more clearly when
considered in contrast to the romance. The realist novel, for Lukács,
represented an aesthetic form in which the whole exceeded the sum
of its parts, providing a sense of completeness and immanent mean-
ing in a society whose dominant economic and social order no longer
afforded such arguably idealized experience. Potentially liberating in

its often gritty focus on the particular, the everyday, and the common,
and in its association with a kind of social leveling, nineteenth-century
realism could therefore also appear restrictive in its promise of an
aesthetic and ideological totality to which all of its parts are abstractly
and homogeneously subjected and consequently alienated from other
interpretive contexts. The romance, as considered by Jameson and
Walter Benn Michaels, instead offers “the stability of ‘uncontested
title and inalienable right’” against the threat of the market’s vicis-
situdes22; while supportive of less egalitarian property rights, romance
may provide the reassurance of stable identities shored up by inalien-
able objects. In Henry Rider Haggard’s colonial romance She (1887), for
example, there is perhaps no less alienable object than the potsherd that
inscribes the genealogy of its protagonist’s name, identity, and inherited
yet improbable quest. So invested was Haggard in the singularity of
this fictional object that he had a potsherd fabricated, somewhat
authenticated by an antiquarian, lithographically reproduced, and
appended outside of the narrative in the novel’s frontispiece.
The question of inalienability as I am invoking it ultimately resonates
in a semiotic and aesthetic as well as a social and economic sense. At
its most basic level, alienability refers to the quality of being trans-
ferable from one owner to another. Alienable objects can be severed
from their personal, social, or natural contexts and enter into discrete
exchanges. Those items deemed inalienable, according to present-day
anthropologists like Annette Weiner, possess “absolute value rather
than exchange value” that “plac[es] them above the exchangeability of
one thing for another.”23 Such objects are inalienable precisely because
they are endowed with unique values that render them non-fungible.
Whether the Elgin marbles, endangered rain forests, or feathered cloaks
of royalty, certain material objects have acquired an irreducible value
that their attendants deem worthy of preserving by keeping them out
of the commodity sphere.24 The inalienable possessions Weiner consid-
ers, in particular, “are symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical
events” that “are imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable identities of
their owners”; their loss “diminishes the self and by extension, the group
to which the person belongs.”25 When such objects do enter into circula-
tion, Weiner suggests, they retain the traces of value that characterized
their inalienability and thus generally render them worthy of recovery.
Yet as Igor Kopytoff has argued, the processes of commoditization and
singularization mutually constitute one another. As he observes of societies
with increasingly complex exchange technologies, “It is inevitable that
if worth is given a price, the going market price will become the
measure of worth.”26 As the range of inalienable objects explored in
the present study will moreover suggest, no essential connection exists
between cultural authenticity and inalienability. Imported, hybridized
objects as well as objects of more traditional manufacture and use may
prove equally resistant to European economic and semiotic systems of
value as well as to realist representation. Recognizing the distinction
between inalienability and authenticity as separate yet often overlap-
ping categories that can be employed strategically in colonial contexts
arguably creates a space for the expression of rights and claims outside
of European systems of determination, authentication, and legitimation.
In the present study, the concept of alienability concerns transferring
the right to own something as much as transferring the right to assign
meaning to it. In colonial contexts these rights often prove to be one
and the same. Rethinking theories of nineteenth-century realism as they
apply to colonial literatures ultimately involves taking into consideration
contesting and changing notions of objecthood as well as exchange.
Moments of resistance like that which Joest encountered when indi-
viduals collectively refuse to enter into a transaction often manifest
themselves in relation to an object entering into a diverted or irregular
exchange, which serves to highlight competing histories of the object as
well as ways of valuing and perceiving objects themselves. As Bill Brown
suggests in “How to Do Things with Things,” “Things and the history
in things become conspicuous in the irregularities of exchange – in the
retardation of the primary circuit of exchange wherein man establishes
objects insofar as he is established by them.”27 Brown focuses in this essay
particularly on the irregularity of misuse, whereby an object’s intended
use value is creatively transformed by finding for it a new purpose – as
when we attempt to use a knife like we would a screwdriver.28 Such
irregularities of exchange that “dislocat[e] [the object] from one system
to another,” he suggests, draw our attention to the “excess matter and
meaning” that transforms “the object, however momentarily, into a
thing.”29 While the idea of exchange in this formulation refers less to an
economic transaction than to a human’s dialectical engagement with an
object through which both object and subject are mutually constituted
and reconstituted, the irregularities of Joest’s exchange resonate in analo-
gous ways. Joest’s ultimate diversion of the object – from its place in a
Xhosa community to an international commodity sphere to a European
ethnological collection – dislocates the object from its initial system of
value and meaning while transferring it to several others. The moment at
which the object loses its self-evident transparency within a given system
and temporarily appears like a thing is the moment when these differing
systems come into conflict and expose the object’s potential for being
multiply interpretable and subject to different valuations concurrently.30
It is therefore the familiar object momentarily reconfigured as
estranged, curiously opaque thing that ironically helps render visible for
critical analysis the conflict between two societies, their perceptions of
value, and their conceptualizations of object–subject relations. Precisely
such conflicts, as William Pietz has famously demonstrated, helped
give rise to fetish discourse and related European perceptions of Africa
since the seventeenth century. While anthropologists more attuned to
the politics of value than their Enlightenment predecessors have since the
nineteenth century addressed the possibility of objects – whether a
thread of worsted or a shilling razor – as “adopted elements in culture”
moving between and highlighting the differences between societies,31
recent approaches to object relations in the field of literary and cultural
studies allow us to consider the implications of irregular exchanges for
nineteenth-century literature. Brown’s reading of the Charlie McCarthy
doll in Homebase (1979) as Rainsford Chan’s “ground from which to
express ethnic individuation” highlights instances of conflict and nego-
tiation between a 1950s mass-mediated American culture and the culture
of a recently emigrated Chinese-American family.32 While illuminating
some of the “anxieties and aspirations” associated with the Charlie
McCarthy doll, Brown simultaneously reveals how the doll, because of
its “matter and meaning” in excess of its status as iconic object, could be
appropriated and strategically transformed.33 Brown’s work, when applied to
colonial contexts, yields a form of comparative object relations studies
that allows us to return to the archives of imperial literature with an eye
toward reconfiguring some of the objects and objectifications of colonial
realism. If such artifacts may serve as repositories for history, then they
may also serve as the site of conflict between competing histories and
conceptions of history – acknowledged and denied, comprehended and
misconstrued. As Elaine Freedgood asserts in The Ideas in Things, “critical
cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of
realism” and such archives, I would suggest, may include more than one
“disavowed historical narrative.”34 Accounting for these divergent narra-
tives helps us to read contrapuntally; that is, in the words of Edward Said,
“with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan [and imperial]
history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and
together with which) the dominating discourse acts.”35
The late nineteenth-century novel may seem an unlikely place to
go looking for things, especially given Lukács’s characterization of the
period as “the age of modern capitalism” riddled by the problem of

commodity fetishism.36 During the process of capitalist exchange as Karl
Marx describes it, when commodities enter into personified relations with
other commodities while people enter into objectified relations with other
people, the sensuous and qualitatively unique character of individual
objects as well as their relations to people and the conditions of produc-
tion give way to an abstract exchange value.37 The late nineteenth-century
novel, Lukács argues in his critique of naturalism, structurally embodies
this problem in its emphasis on description, through which “the varied
manifestations of a complex of objects determine the organization of the
novel” while human characters are reduced to mere “appurtenances of
things.”38 Unlike their realist predecessors, these novels so thoroughly
reflect their immersion in market capitalism that they no longer provide
access to an imaginative glimpse of a social totality. Objects, rather than
acquiring meaning through “their function in concrete human experi-
ences,” gain significance through their relation to “some abstract concept
which the author considers essential to his [or her] view of the world”;
in short, “[t]he object is made a symbol.”39 Central to Lukács’s argument
is his distinction between the concrete and the abstract, which coincides
with the dual nature of the commodity form balanced between use value
and exchange value.
Developing a comparable critique that shifts the emphasis from
naturalism to realism, Freedgood explores the problem of symbolic
abstraction in her analysis of the reading practices we have inherited in
part from the Victorian realist novel after mid-century. Objects in the
late nineteenth-century realist novel, argues Freedgood, have largely
been placed in the service either of the novel’s network of metaphors
or of the reality effect – the non-symbolic yet, I would suggest, vaguely
metaphoric use of literary objects that assert “we are the real.”40 “The
things of realism,” she argues, “have been fetishized by an emphasis
on metaphorical reading” that abstracts them from any meanings not
specifically attributed to them within the novel’s symbolic system.41
This process by which novelistic objects are placed in the service of
symbolization or of signifying a generic real she terms “formal com-
modification,” as “they are alienated from so many of their own
qualities in the service of the figural or ‘scenic’ exchanges in which they
participate.”42 The effects of commodity fetishism on novelistic form
that Lukács and Freedgood explore accompanied the development of
market capitalism in Western Europe and England. While this process
did not take place without resistance, and while recent criticism has
attended to the ways in which Victorian novelists struggled to represent
systems of value in tension with those of market capitalism, little debate

exists surrounding the pervasive influence of capitalism on the aesthetic
and social forms that characterized late nineteenth-century England.43
Realism exported overseas, however, encountered an even more radi-
cally heterogeneous social topography marked in part by the unevenness
of capitalist development in the colonies. If market capitalism shaped the
late Victorian novel and the metaphoric reading practices it prescribed,
then how did the presence of multiple economic, aesthetic, and
ontological systems of value in colonial Africa impact the novel’s form
and how might it inform the ways in which we read colonial realism?
Homi Bhabha’s comparison between realism and colonial discourse
offers a point of departure for pursuing this question.44 According to
Bhabha, colonial discourse “resembles a form of narrative whereby the
productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed
and recognizable totality”: “It employs a system of representation,
a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism.”45 Realism in
this analogy, which suggests the potentially negative effects of Lukács’s
theory of totality, draws together a repertoire of signs in an attempt to
produce a sense of wholeness and containment associated with narrative
and ideological closure. This system of representation in both realist
narrative and colonial discourse relies on the reality effect, which Bhabha
associates with “discursive transparency” – “the moment when, ‘under
the false appearance of the present’, the semantic seems to prevail over
the syntactic, the signified over the signifier.”46 “[T]ransparency,” he
suggests, “signifies discursive closure – intention, image, author.”47 While
never wholly transparent, realist narratives, I would suggest, acquire
even greater moments of opacity – of a noticeable disjunction between
signifier and signified – when attempting to represent the complexity and
alterity of colonial life. The moment when we can no longer completely
look through the objects of realist narrative, when they begin to acquire
a thing-like opacity, is the moment when we begin to recognize the
limitations of Victorian realism as a signifying system. The moment
when we begin to question the self-evidence of such objects and expose
alternate, even competing, narratives associated with these objects both
within the literary work and without is the moment when we begin to
experience the uncanniness of colonial realism.
Bhabha’s deconstruction of discursive transparency helps to direct our
attention toward that which eludes realist representation. Elaborating
Sigmund Freud’s analogy between the unconscious and the photographic
negative, in which “every photographic picture has to pass through the
‘negative process’” while not all negatives undergo “the ‘positive process’
ending in the picture,”48 Bhabha highlights how a text relying on the

semblance of transparency possesses a similar unconscious comprised of
that which has been distorted and obscured:
Despite appearances, the text of transparency inscribes a double

vision: the field of the “true” emerges as a visible sign of authority
only after the regulatory and displacing division of the true and the
false. From this point of view, discursive “transparency” is best read
in the photographic sense in which a transparency is also always
a negative, processed into visibility through the technologies of
reversal, enlargement, lighting, editing, projection, not a source but
a re-source of light.49
Recognizing the “double vision” of colonial representation allows us

to consider how realism, like the photograph, depends on the efficient
management of material less palatable to its construction of “the true”
or “the real.” Bhabha’s allusion to the technology involved in produc-
ing the photographic image exposes the apparent positivity and what
Roland Barthes terms the “certificate of presence” afforded by the analog
photograph as the product of the doubling, distortion, and displace-
ment of its negative.50 This “certificate of presence” – the photograph’s
apparent ability to testify to the empirical existence of its subject in a
particular time and place, as well as its ability to preserve this presence –
becomes, in Bhabha’s analogy, merely a “false appearance.” While
Bhabha’s photographic metaphor specifically refers to the inherently
split and ambivalent “presence of authority” in colonial discourse, it has
implications for the troubled authority of colonial realism as well.51 The
ambivalence of English imperial literature, rather than being “of England’s
own making,” instead registers “the disturbance of its authoritative
representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence,
cultural and even climatic differences which emerge in the colonial
discourse as the mixed and split texts of hybridity.”52 Reading colonial
realism with an eye toward interpreting some of its less transparent
objects, I would suggest, requires reading with double vision by attend-
ing to counter narratives associated with these objects that have been
edited out of, or at best represented obscurely and distortedly in, the
realist text.
To extend Bhabha’s analogy a little further, the seemingly transpar-
ent photographic image is moreover produced through the negative’s
varying degrees of opacity. The “densest” sites of the negative – those
that have been overexposed – produce the lightest, in some ways least
transparent areas of the positive image: areas that lack both detail and
depth and that require additional post-processing in order to be made
distinguishable. In the words of Brown, instances of opacity register
“a kind of excess signification, undermotived by manifest theme or
plot”; they include moments when “an impression … unpredictably
recorded … seem[s] to require explanation.”53 At such moments the
ostensibly causal or seemingly natural connection between signified and
signifier reveals itself as contingency, construct, or even incoherency;
we can no longer fully look through the signifier or, by extension, the
literary object as representation. As Brown observes when formulating
his theory of a material unconscious, “moments of obliquity and opac-
ity” rather than transparency bring to light “questions about conflicting
cultural pressures.”54 Making sense of opacities in British colonial realism
involves illuminating instances of conflict not only within a given
society, but also and more especially between radically heterogeneous
social groups that had only recently come to share a history. Whereas
Elleke Boehmer has identified moments of illegibility in colonialist lit-
erature as a recurring pro-imperial motif, I propose returning to similar
moments as part of the ongoing effort to come to terms with the legacy
of colonialism and its literatures.55
Realism transported to the colonies turned its lens toward objects
stationed at the borders of interpretive communities as well as national
and regional affiliations, and the histories, stories, and economies
surrounding these objects reflect this comparative diversity. Brown’s
method involves “developing a chain of associations that seem,
retrospectively, to have converged already in the literary work” in order
to help reveal “the unconscious as material history and history as the
unconscious, as the necessarily repressed that can be rendered visible
in sites of contradiction or incomplete elision.”56 The associations
we might pursue in illuminating the kind of unconscious that Bhabha’s
analogy suggests take the form of disfigurations as well as displace-
ments. The suppressed content of this unconscious not only returns;
it returns with a startling difference that places the authority of the
dominant narrative in question. Like modernity’s repression of its
dependency on the history of colonialism, or “the West’s” denial of its
need to distinguish itself from “the East,”57 realism arguably depended
on suppressing the signs of alternate narratives that would challenge its
fictional constructions of plausible realities. These conflicting historical
narratives usually appear in the colonial realist work, when they appear
at all, as the distorted projections of a colonial lens. The narratives of
colonial realist authors confronting the competing realities that shaped
daily experience moreover generally prove more openly ambivalent and

thus more frequently dependent on strategies of disavowal than repres-
sion. While the present study frequently attends to objects in order to
explore “the pressure that … materiality … exerts on literary texts” as
well as “the formalizing pressure those texts exert on the heterogeneity
of lived life,”58 it does so in order to address colonial realism’s uncanny
counter narratives found largely outside of the text in ways that often
subvert those associations “already in the literary work.”
We encounter moments of opacity when the realist text’s linguis-
tic and rhetorical dimensions cannot fully account for the enigmatic
object in question, often compelling us to turn beyond the pages of
the text for further reference and referents. Such an endeavor may
involve probing what Brown terms the text’s “material unconscious” by
“granting dimensionality to a passing reference or impression” in order
to “confront an image of the past that otherwise inexplicably renders
the text as a whole, and its moment in history, newly legible.”59 We
may alternately perform what Freedgood calls a “strong, literalizing, or
materializing metonymic reading,” in which we interpret fictional
objects literally as well as figuratively while reading the social history
of the object back into the novel and against its “dominant narrative”
in ways that work against “formal commodification.”60 Excavating
the multiple histories of these objects introduces the possibility of
uncovering conflicting narratives that impinge on the realist text,
exposing its photographic negative and opening its ideological fissures.
While frequently attending to the disruptive forces of metonymy and
extra-textual narratives, the present study moreover asks how the trans-
parency and opacity of objects impact colonial realist texts and their
histories of interpretation. Why and to what effect have some objects
appeared enigmatic and not others? Why does Conrad’s Marlow puzzle
over a thread of white worsted and not “miserable rags” of calico?61
How does Kingsley similarly take pains to illuminate the role of charms
in West Africa while relegating other collected objects to an ostensibly
self-evident ethnographic category? How does the relative economic and
semiotic inalienability of southern African rock art in the nineteenth
century impact Schreiner’s realism? Alternate conceptions of object-
hood contrary to the purposes of colonial realism begin to emerge
when we ask how an object’s inalienability may correspond more with
metonymy than metaphor, often revealing the tenacity of the object’s
imbeddedness in alternate social, aesthetic, or economic contexts.
The particular method I adopt in this book places postcolonial theory
in dialogue with theories of object relations, informed predominately
by anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology,

in order to foreground the diverse material relations characterizing
colonial life that exceed realism’s schema. I devote particular attention
to enigmatic objects that lack the kind of self-evident transparency
associated with realism’s reality effect and that instead manifest
degrees of opacity. Following curiously obscure objects as they move
between different systems of value both within the colonial realist
novel and without allows us to highlight conflicts between colonizer
and colonized that emerge over the objects themselves: over their
perception, their possession, and their valuation. Narratives of objects
as facts or specimens, for example, collide with narratives of souvenirs,
charms, or curses, revealing how objects serve as the site of negotiation
and exchange as well as struggle and resistance. While some novels
explicitly stage such cross-cultural encounters mediated by objects, as
in Howarth’s Jan, an Afrikander, they more frequently require additional
historical context in order to facilitate analysis. Placing pressure on
moments where the representational strategies of colonial realism
seem to have faltered by researching the extra-textual narratives
of its more enigmatic objects enables us better to understand the
multiple resonances and silences of narrative form as well as of history,
particularly the histories we bring to bear on literature in the act of
interpretation. The recent work of social geographers, anthropologists,
archaeologists, and historians on colonial Africa therefore plays a central
role in my material and textual analyses. Historical instances of conflict
over objects and resultant contradictions within colonial society, I will
argue, register as semantic, generic, or rhetorical tensions within the
realist text, which does not always manage to provide an “imaginary
resolution” to these contradictions.62 At stake in emphasizing these
conflicts is the understanding that late nineteenth-century realism did
not and could not impose a totalizing form on colonial life, and that
some of the less pliant objects of its narratives may direct our attention
toward alternate stories and histories yet to be told.
This is therefore a book as much about nineteenth-century British
realism as about colonial Africa. The primary works featured in this
study are realist novels of travel and settlement, with the inclusion of
Mary Kingsley’s non-fictional narratives. Kingsley’s tendency toward
storytelling and anecdote in her writing blurs the boundaries between
the conventions of fiction and non-fiction in ways that mirror and
help to foreground similar representational strategies at play in colonial
realist novels written by her contemporaries. The novels I explore, like
Kingsley’s narratives, repeatedly invoke an adherence to facts, even if
only to question the conditions and processes of their production; they

emphasize techniques of observation, implicitly and explicitly engaging
in dialogue with ethnographic and related natural historical paradigms;
they draw on the conventions of multiple literary genres in the context
of predominately realist narratives, often resulting in structural tensions
that threaten to dismantle their fictional worlds; they struggle with
the limits of realist representation profoundly influenced by capitalist
commodity culture; and they exhibit especial interest in construing
the material objects that mediate interpersonal and intercultural
encounters. In attempting to authenticate their narratives, moreover,
colonial realist novelists draw on a variety of media and representa-
tional systems central to the production of knowledge in the colonies.
Conrad’s 1899 novella, for example, gestures toward travel narratives
as well as contemporary ethnographic writing, whereas a number of
Victorian South African novels borrow strategies from ethnographies,
natural histories, and museum collections. Colonial novels often mar-
shaled this repertoire of texts when imaginatively engaging anxieties
similar to those haunting Joest’s own narrative, including the desire to
classify objects and preserve a sense of authenticity, to maintain forms
of authority, and, at times, to contain resistance.
With its primary literary works spanning the period 1883–1899
arranged largely in reverse chronological order, the series of chapters
comprising this book pursue a line of inquiry at once genealogical in
its retrospective exploration of the representational crises that colo-
nial realism confronted by the turn of the twentieth century and
archaeological in its analysis of historically specific tensions that helped
precipitate these crises at particular junctures. Tracking these series of
crises back in time enables us to highlight more effectively the history
of an emerging skepticism regarding the ability to know and to con-
trol others through their objects by beginning with an arguably more
overtly self-conscious, anti-colonial narrative like Heart of Darkness that
helps to foreground the increasingly complex and subtle ways this
issue figures in the earlier works. The novels and narratives I examine
are themselves perhaps more emblematic than paradigmatic, as they
have each come to stand in for the diversity of colonial realist narratives
concerned with their respective territories: Conrad and the Congo,
Kingsley and West Africa, Schreiner and southern Africa. The inclusion
of several non-canonical colonial realist novels in this inquiry begins
to provide a literary historical context for understanding such emblems
more relationally. In order to highlight the historical tensions shap-
ing these novels, I read a selection of African works that help to
foreground some of colonial realism’s counter narratives. Speeches,

essays, paintings, sculptures, etchings, oral testimonies, and folktales
represent the range of works considered, including the writing of
Anglophone Africans as well as oral tales transcribed and translated
into English. While any serious study of African literatures requires
reading these works in their original languages, not to mention in their
performative contexts, my consideration of translations published in
nineteenth-century journals and anthologies enables me to examine
the range of texts that constituted an Anglophone African literary cul-
ture, read by Africans and Victorians alike. By returning to this archive,
I do not expect to present a complete picture of a particular literary
historical period, nor do I intend to provide an extensive overview of
colonial realism in Africa. Rather, I hope to infuse our understanding
of nineteenth-century British realism with a greater sense of the social
heterogeneity that comprised its literatures and engaged its readers who
felt themselves, at least imaginatively, to be members of an expanding
and increasingly global community under Britain’s empire.
Chapter 1, entitled “Taking Objects for Origins: Victorian Ethnography
and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” considers how the ostensible transpar-
ency of facts underwriting nineteenth-century ethnographic authority
as articulated in several leading guides to observation emerges as artifice
in a late nineteenth-century colonial context where the comparable
structures of colonial discourse and realism have begun to wear.63
Building on Bhabha’s discussion of fetishism in colonial discourse,
I consider how ethnographic facts, shaped by the concept of authen-
ticity in part produced through field guides, served as fetishes in the
maintenance of disciplinary and imperial authority to the extent that
they were used to determine cultural and racial differences.64 While
“facts” ranged from carefully selected objects to written accounts
of informed observations to photographs to statistical data, I focus
particularly on the ethnographic object because of its capacity to
serve as a site of inscription for multiple narratives and histories.
Whether considering ethnographic objects as art, which according to
Walter Benjamin offers “testimony to the history which it has experi-
enced,”65 or from an anthropological perspective, in which, according
to Kopytoff, objects acquire individual biographies as they make their
way through changing material conditions and social relations, such
artifacts are suffused with multiple meanings. Each ethnographic object
possesses its own biography that exceeds its apparent value as European
fact or specimen and threatens the classificatory systems that attempt
to contain it. Attempts at narrating the object or translating it into the
written word – basically, attempts at rendering it more transparent while

alienating it from its previous contexts – often encountered its staunch
opacity. Conrad’s novella famously and infamously foregrounds the
problem of opacity in ways that suggest the need for the kind of counter
narratives this project examines.
Laying the conceptual groundwork for subsequent chapters by out-
lining the connections between realism, ethnography, and colonial
discourse, Chapter 1 opens by reflecting on a late nineteenth-century
Yoruban carving of a European ethnographer as a hybrid object; one
whose apparently compromised authenticity disrupts categories and
serves as a reminder of the tenuous grounds on which ethnographic
and imperial authority rested. Keeping this sculpture and its estranged
view of a European writing in mind, I briefly outline the central place
that ethnographic objects held in the foundation of an emerging
discipline and the professionalization of its practitioners. Considered
as forms of preliterate texts, the construction and interpretation of
these objects reflected anthropology’s privileging of the written word
in its perception of cultural forms and its constitution of a method
for observing and recording them. Focusing at greater length on the
guides to observation and collection that practitioners of anthropol-
ogy authored in order better to shape their object, I consider the role
of these texts in attempts at determining objects and their significance.
While anthropologists asserted their authority through authoring these
guides, ethnographers enacted their own authority by following its
directives and authoring written reports; colonial realist authors often
invoked ethnographic models of authority in shaping their narratives
and their objects.
Writing Europeans populate Conrad’s 1899 novella, which famously
places their authority and the transparency of colonial representation
in question through Marlow’s disdain for the “readable report” (Heart
of Darkness, 61). The anxiety of signification in the novella, however,
centers most prominently around objects. Returning to Bhabha’s object-
based reading in “Signs Taken for Wonders” of the enigmatic thread of
white worsted, I consider why other imports that circulate throughout
the novel and are incorporated in forms of African ornamentation –
such as brass wire, glass beads, and cotton textiles – do not present
Marlow with a comparable mystery. These items of trade, I suggest, have
possessed for Marlow as well as for critics of the novel the fetishistic
transparency of the commodity, the ethnographic fact, and the realist
sign. Such interpretive fetishism arguably obscures troubling moments
of conflict surrounding these hybridized objects that work to disrupt
the novella’s dominant narrative. Meaning in the novella as in Marlow’s

tale is no longer readily accessible metaphorically, as “within the shell
of a cracked nut”; rather, it emerges contiguously through metonymic
dispersal in the way “a glow brings out a haze” (Heart of Darkness, 9). As
Conrad himself observed of the novella, “the value is in the detail.”66
Reading Heart of Darkness entails reading the dispersed details that
Marlow shows but does not see, to borrow Benita Parry’s distinction,67
such as the objects circulating throughout the novella that attest to the
mutually constitutive and combative relationship between civility and
savagery.
The second chapter, “The Uncanny Object Lessons of Mary Kingsley
and Edward Blyden,” returns to some of the works familiar to Conrad
while exploring further parallels between ethnography and colonial
realism. In particular, I read the travel and anthropological writings
of Mary Henrietta Kingsley as an imaginative form of documentary
realism against the essays and speeches of Edward Wilmot Blyden. As
friends, correspondents, and fellow activists concerned with British
colonial policy and trade in West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and
Liberia, Kingsley and Blyden both attend to the ways in which repre-
sentations of West African objects and their subjects entered into the
British imaginary and influenced international policies. Kingsley was an
exceptionally well-informed Victorian travel writer, given her extensive
reading in contemporary British and German anthropology and ethnol-
ogy; her writing therefore serves as an important site for exploring the
intersection of ethnography and realist narrative. Referencing England’s
Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone as an important “object lesson,” Kingsley
attempts to promote a more informed understanding of African
object and property relations than that which initially inspired the
Afro-European construction of the concept of fetishism (Studies, 332).
Notions of exchangeability and alienability, as witnessed in her anec-
dote about the payment of a fine, may differ between societies. Focusing
on the question of the fetish, in particular, she moreover invites readers
to view African fetish practices through her example of the old mari-
ner, who treats the parts of his steamship’s engine as “living things.”68
This perspective informs her inquiry more broadly, as she focuses in
her more imaginative passages on the social lives of objects in order to
reveal the relations between people that the object facilitates and that
its commoditization has helped to obscure. Kingsley repeatedly spins
uncanny yarns from the perspective of the object that disrupt narrative
and disciplinary authority while placing forms of European fetish-
ism founded on disavowal in question. Although Kingsley questions
and revises many of the categories of ethnographic inquiry she has

inherited, she continues to uphold the disciplinary values of observa-
tion, visual description, and cultural authenticity while privileging
European economic values in her vision of West Africa’s future. While
her richly visual writing, presented as a kind of colorless photograph
(Studies, xi), records imported objects among its scenes, it is precisely
these objects that repeatedly trouble narrative authority in the present
while revealing the author’s residual anxieties toward signs of cultural
intermingling and of divergent histories shaping West Africa’s future.
Blyden responded to Kingsley and their anthropological predecessors
as an Anglophone African colonist in Liberia, a type of African cultural
middleman that Kingsley often scorned in her writing as a threateningly
hybrid figure. From this perspective, his writings represent a profoundly
reflective consideration of what he and his contemporaries called
“the black man’s burden” as well as the conflict of identification
and (post)colonial subject formation later explored by Frantz Fanon.
Returning indirectly to the problem of commodity fetishism, and its
attendant problems of psychological and economic alienation under
capitalist forms of production, Blyden was all too aware of how Africans
like himself could be subject to ontological forms of alienation and
made into racially discriminated objects. Attending throughout his
writing to the ways in which African subjects have become above all
the object of European anthropological inquiry, Blyden responds to the
works of his predecessors through his attempt in the series of essays
comprising African Life and Customs (1908) to construct an African-
centered comparative ethnography. Drawing on some of the methods
employed in Kingsley’s own writing, Blyden revalues key terms of
her discussion while substituting her emphasis on visual observation
with forms of oral knowledge. For Kingsley and Blyden, ethnographic
facts are far from transparent. Reading their work together ultimately
highlights the politics of signification that inform late nineteenth-
century ethnographic writing and the interpretation of its objects;
whereas Kingsley’s “object lesson” promotes capitalism through the
restoration of British trade rule, Blyden’s favors a resistant communism
in the form of African cooperative industries.69
Chapter 3 turns to the colonial theater that increasingly engaged
the interests of Kingsley and Blyden for the parallels it afforded
their studies of West Africa, especially its parallel historical narrative
of dispossession and displacement. Entitled “Realism and Realia in
Colonial Southern Africa,” this chapter focuses on how a selection of
nineteenth-century realist novels attempt to give form to the objects
and subjects of colonial life at a time when the country’s emergence in

a global capitalist market placed colonists and native Africans in par-
ticularly violent conflict. Written during a turbulent period of colonial
expansion, indigenous resistance, and cross-cultural exchange that laid
the foundations for Apartheid in the following century, these novels
highlight the ways in which the material world bears witness to such
conflicts and negotiations while indexing historical perspectives in
tension with the narratives of colonial realism. Drawing on the con-
ventions of ethnographic and natural historical writing, as well as the
semiology of museum displays, long-term southern African residents
attempted in these novels to authorize their imaginative renderings of
facts once observed. The novels I consider, written by Olive Schreiner’s
Victorian contemporaries Mary Ann Carey-Hobson and Anna Howarth,
expose the limitations of colonial realism through occasional eruptions
of alternate stories, histories, and systems of value that reconfigure
narrative form. These novels, including Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in
the Karoo (1883) as well as Howarth’s Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo (1898)
and Jan, an Afrikander, moreover represent variations of the farm novel
tradition, serving as fictional analogs to colonialism’s development
of agrarian capitalism and providing a much-needed literary context
for reconsidering Schreiner’s famous work.70 Whereas Carey-Hobson
attempts to contain colonial life through a voraciously inclusive,
thoroughly documented, museological narrative that presses against
the seams of the genre, Howarth subtly deploys moments of silence,
generic intermingling, and overdetermined causality that make her
novels fold back on themselves and threaten collapse from within. As
a new chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century realist novel in
English, “Realism and Realia in Colonial Southern Africa” explores how
notions of the real and a form suitable for its containment emerge as
part of a cross-cultural exchange between England and colonial Africa.
As a twenty-five year resident of Cape Colony with a vested interest
in contributing to imperial England’s production of natural historical,
botanical, and ethnographic knowledge about southern Africa, Carey-
Hobson approaches her novel in much the same way she did her
contributions to the Victoria and Albert Museum and to London’s 1862
International Exhibition. Concerned with the observation, description,
and classification of objects for the purposes of colonial development,
The Farm in the Karoo places the material world of southern Africa at its
center. Objects emerge in the novel largely as specimens of scientific and
economic interest, which, like the literary sign, acquire value through
their differential relation to other members of the whole or series.
Curiosities in the novel resist assimilation to this whole and repeatedly

trouble its system of value, since they possess comparatively little worth
as items of typological or mercantile interest. Like the hybrid objects
of Kingsley’s travel and ethnographic narratives, they frequently serve
as repositories for historical anxieties. Curiosities encourage us to read
the novel curiously, or rather metonymically, and take us beyond the
pages of the text while threatening to rupture its metaphoric world.
Metonymic reading moreover serves to illuminate the object relations
of native Africans that border and challenge this world, as revealed in
related folklore and historical testimony. At a time when borders and
the colonial imposition of values in enclosed territories attempted to
dictate social relations by assigning meaning to objects and spaces
through substitutive strategies resembling those of metaphor, the “end-
lessly vagrant” powers of metonymy that curiosities invoke reveal values
in conflict with those of colonial realism under imperial capitalism.71
Through structural resistance to narrative and systemic closure,
Howarth’s novels prove less supportive of capitalist narratives of colonial
development that attempt to render a colonial world visible and whole.
Making strategic use of silences, limited omniscience, and the juxtapo-
sition of perspectives and novelistic sub-genres, Howarth reminds us
that neither the realist novel nor colonial discourse could fully contain
the radical heterogeneity that constituted nineteenth-century southern
African life. Howarth directly employs the aesthetics of the uncanny
in her works, which force estranged narratives and impressions to the
surface of what have previously been considered novels of settlement
and race relations.72 Whether introducing distinctly gothic conventions
in the midst of an otherwise realist narrative that suggest alternate
causalities, or whether turning the already uncanny medium of pho-
tography back on itself and on those who wish to employ it as the
tool of forensics and surveillance, Howarth’s novels subtly challenge
foundational myths underpinning imperial authority. In both Jan, an
Afrikander and Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo, Howarth positions objects at
the center of this challenge to reveal how the material world, through
its “excess matter and meaning” that allows for contrary interpretations
and uses, does not belong exclusively to those who annex it. In each
of these novels, objects serve to represent the limits of both colonial
knowledge and nineteenth-century South African realism.
The final chapter, “Artful Tales and Indigenous Arts in Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm,” focuses on how the struggle over the
interpretation of southern African rock images during the nineteenth
century corresponds with the struggle over land and resources. Whether
considered geological evidence of the San’s claims to the land,

archaeological remains of human prehistory and its arts, or windows
onto the world of spirits, these images represented to their nineteenth-
century interpreters a site for the inscription of conflictual values.
Noticeable in most European interpretations of rock images, whether
ethnographic or aesthetic, is the emphasis on the observation of material
phenomena in the production of meaning. San interpretations of the rock
images they produced and inherited, however, elude the observer’s eye,
as they represent windows onto an invisible world rather than paintings
reproducing the visible; they are arguably for looking through, onto
scenes glimpsed by shamans, rather than looking at.73 Strictly positivist
attempts at rendering the images more transparent – that is, comprehen-
sible – ironically contributed further to their opacity. While these images
grew more opaque, the San entered further into the realm of the invisible.
In many nineteenth-century ethnographic and aesthetic constructions
of rock images, as in Schreiner’s novel, the European viewer emerges as
authoritative interpreter of the images while silencing contemporary San
by removing to the past the authenticity of their creative arts, historical
narratives, and legal claims. The same logic that underwrites the novel’s
imaginative displacement of the San in narrative and historical time,
I argue, serves to enable without necessarily condoning their demographic
displacement throughout the nineteenth century.
Rock images in Schreiner’s novel assist in the management of anxi-
eties surrounding colonial South African claims to the land during a
period of intense border struggles and forced removals. These images,
representing the most indigenous ties to the land dating back tens of
thousands of years, were classed by their colonial interpreters among
things of a previous geological era, which thereby removed such ties to
a remote period while clearing the way for a novel nineteenth-century
figure: the colonial indigene seeking Cape Colony’s independence from
England. As a colonial indigene, the novel’s modern South African
artist, Waldo Farber, manifests ties to both the images and the land
they mark. Producing artworks as “grotesque” as the rock images, while
serving as the sole interpreter of this sign of a southern African past,
Waldo symbolically takes the San’s place now that they have ostensibly
disappeared. The seemingly uncanny return of a displaced, acculturated,
and consequently inauthentic San laborer near the end of the novel,
I argue, troubles the contradictory position of the colonial indigene and
the disavowals necessary for maintaining the wish of authentic belong-
ing before the reality of colonial violence and the San’s resilient presence
on lands they themselves deem inalienable. The Story of an African Farm
(1883) embodies these contradictions through its grotesque aesthetics

of fragmentation, generic heterogeneity, and non-anthropomorphic
perspectives. Whereas the grotesque serves as Schreiner’s symbol and
aesthetic of South African indigeneity, it emerges over the course of the
novel as the sign of colonial fetishism.
Alienability and its contrary forms are essentially Enlightenment
terms, which arose in the context of an emerging concern for modern
contract law and an increased skepticism toward the ostensibly divinely
sanctioned right of inherited executive powers, titles, and estates. The
earliest uses of the words “alienable” and “inalienable” recorded in
the Oxford English Dictionary date back to the early to mid seventeenth
century. Initially meaning “vendible,” “sellable,” or “transfer[able] to
the ownership of another,” the term “alienable” appeared simultane-
ously in contexts implying its opposite.74 The “nerves and sinewes”
of the human body are not, or at least should not be, alienable;
later, “Crown-Lands are only alienable under a Faculty of perpetual
Redemption.”75 By the late eighteenth century, the term “inalienability”
referred to the inability to be “transferred to another by law.”76 While
certainly no substitute for a vastly more detailed study of the changing
notions of property and contract law in England since immediately
before the Restoration, this cursory glimpse at the word’s changing
usage highlights a larger, already familiar history. The inalienable rights
of the Enlightenment subject, who, according to John Locke, “has a
Property in his own Person,”77 increasingly displaced – yet to this day
did not fully dissolve – inherited forms of authority and their attendant
inalienable objects that experienced an afterlife largely via metonymy:
whether as palace or crown, scepter or signet. This shift from inalienable
objects to inalienable rights in one’s person may theoretically parallel
the development of European modernity and the forms of liberty it
promised to promote, yet such modernizing tendencies did not always
liberate colonized subjects in practice.
As modern anthropology has helped to reveal, “the world of things”
and the world of persons mutually constitute each other.78 Under
capitalism, not only objects but also subjects prove alienable. Workers
are alienated from their own labor, whereby a human attribute is
abstracted and commoditized, as well as from the products of their
labor. The post-Enlightenment’s expressed aversion toward slavery
nevertheless creates the need for more insidious ways of alienating
subjects. The practice of primitive accumulation in British colonial
Africa, realized perhaps most prominently in Cape Colony, involved
the annexation, privatization, and taxation of land and necessary
resources as well as forced removals and the institution of pass laws

that compelled colonized subjects to sell or exchange their labor under
conditions little better than those of slavery. At stake in the following
chapters is the excavation of a literary and material record that testifies
to the ways in which the Victorian imperial project deployed the alien-
ability of objects to produce the alienable, yet autochthonous, African
subject. Resistance to alienability in this context, enacted by Africans
and Victorians alike, challenges imperial authority and ripples, at times
even ruptures, the surface of colonial realism.
Notes
1. Thomas Digges and Dudley Digges, Foure Paradoxes or Politique Discourses
(London: H. Lownes for Clement Knight, 1604), 4.
2. Wilhelm Joest, “Verzeichniss der in Afrika im Jahre 1884 gesammelten
und dem Museum für Völkerkunde als Geschenk überwiesenen ethnog-
raphischen Objecte von Wilhelm Joest.” Original-Mittheilungen aus der
Ethnologischen Abtheilung der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin 2/3 (Berlin: Verlag
Spemann, 1886), 146. All translations by author unless otherwise indicated.
The Cologne-born ethnologist and natural scientist is perhaps best known
for the ethnological museum in his city of birth that bears his name – the
Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. Joest’s extensive ethnographic collection was
donated to the city in 1899, two years after his death, and the museum was
founded in 1901. Berlin’s Ethnological Museum opened to the public as an
individual institution in 1883.
3. “Verzeichniss,” 147.
5. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 74.
6. While this particular instance may differ from the more overtly political
forms of resistance represented in colonial war novels and memoirs of the
period, its implications are no less significant.
10. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as
Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun
Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 88. My more
inclusive use of the phrase “object relations” draws on Brown’s proposition
that we attend to non-human things as potential objects of desire. Brown
cites Harold Searles’ unconventional approach to psychoanalysis in The
Nonhuman Environment as critical precedent. Bill Brown, “Object Relations in
an Expanded Field,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17, no.
3 (2006): 88–107; Harold F. Searles, The Nonhuman Environment: in Normal
Development and in Schizophrenia (New York: International Universities, 1960).
11. Mary H. Kingsley, West African Studies, 3rd edn (1899; New York: Barnes and
Noble, Inc., 1964), 377. Hereafter cited in text as Studies.
12. “Cultural Biography,” 73.

13. J. B. (Jeffrey Brian) Peires, House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the
Days of their Independence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 100.
14. House of Phalo, 107–8.
15. Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham-Stewart, “Both Curious and Valuable”:
African Art from Late 19th-Century South East Africa (Cape Town: Hansa
Reproprint, 2005).
16. Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial
South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 109.
17. Literary and cultural critics like Sanjay Krishnan are beginning to make
comparable claims about uses of British realism distinct from metropolitan
forms in former colonial territories like the Malayan Peninsula. See Sanjay
Krishnan, “History and the Work of Literature in the Periphery,” Novel:
A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 482–9.
18. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 195.
19. Even in its very aversion toward inherited literary conventions, and in
its characteristic self-consciousness toward the limitations of its medium,
nineteenth-century realism, in retrospect, pursued recognizable aesthetic
conventions. George Levine remains one of the most important readers of the
range of patterns and disruptions that characterize the self-contradictoriness
of nineteenth-century British realism. See especially Realism, Ethics and
Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008) and The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from
Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
20. Meditating on the nature of value, generally, Saussure identifies a compara-
ble “paradoxical principle”: “Values always involve: (1) something dissimilar
which can be exchanged for the item whose value is under consideration,
and (2) similar things which can be compared with the item whose value
is under consideration.” Following his example of the five-franc coin
exchangeable for “a certain quantity of … bread,” and, by extension, for
other commodities, he turns to the paradoxical relation between signs and
referents: “Similarly, a word can be substituted for something dissimilar:
an idea. At the same time, it can be compared to something of like nature:
another word.” See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans.
Roy Harris (1916; La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1986), 113–14. This
analogy admittedly grows increasingly tenuous, however, when we attempt
to elaborate the dual nature of the linguistic sign in relation to that of the
commodity form. The relation between the “more abstract” signified and
the comparatively more “physical” signifier does not directly parallel that of
“use-value,” the “physical body of the commodity,” and “exchange-value,”
the more abstract “form of appearance” of value at the moment of exchange,
since it is the signifier that enters into circulation with other signifiers. For
Marx, “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by
its abstraction from their use-values” and, consequently, from their physical
properties. See Saussure, 66, and Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben
Fowkes (1861–7; New York: Penguin, 1990), 126, 127. In poststructuralist
linguistics, moreover, this very distinction between signifier and signified
breaks down, as signifieds in the absence of a stable point of reference

(namely, a transcendental signified) constantly turn into other signifiers.
21. General Linguistics, 114.
22. Postmodernism, 195. Jameson is quoting from Walter Benn Michaels, The
Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 95.
23. Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37, 33.
24. Inalienable Possessions, 6.
25. Inalienable Possessions, 33, 6.
27. Bill Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry
24, no. 4 (1998): 936.
28. “How to Do Things,” 954.
29. “How to Do Things,” 954. Throughout the present study, I reserve my use
of the word “thing” largely for these particular contexts: those in which
an object loses its self-evident transparency and momentarily becomes
unfamiliar and illegible.
30. This characterization of objects as transparencies draws further on Brown’s work:
“We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive
attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity
that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a
window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working
for us.” See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4.
31. William Halse Rivers Rivers, “Adopted Elements in Culture: Importation,
Imitation, Teaching,” Anthropological Institute and British Association for
the Advancement of Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 4th edn,
eds Barbara Freire-Marreco and John Linton Myres (London: Harrison and
Sons, 1912), 263–6. For an earlier version of this section, see Thomas Gore
Browne, “Contact with Civilized Races,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology,
2nd edn, eds John George Garson and Charles Hercules Read (London:
Anthropological Institute, 1892), 229–31.
34. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1, 13. Yet as Freedgood sug-
gests, “[f]ictional things have become fetishes, and the fetish gives us back
nothing as it was: it ‘demystifies and falsifies at the same time’” by revealing
its own artifice while simultaneously evading any readerly desire for a fixed
referent (Ideas in Things, 28). Embedded quotation and paraphrase from
Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in
Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 14. Stable
referents prove all the more elusive in realist novels attempting to represent
the things of colonial life: things that may possess alternate social lives at
odds with the meanings colonial authors attribute to them.
35. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage Books,
1994), 51. While the recent work of Jim Buzard has convincingly revealed
ways in which the autoethnographic strategies of metropolitan Victorian
novelists have completed as well as complicated “some of the tendencies
of decentering approaches” after Said, I would maintain that accounting

for European as well as African perspectives in the colonial contexts
I consider is nevertheless central to understanding the formal and historical
complexities of realist narrative beyond the metropole. See James Buzard,
Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British
Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 18.
36. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(1923; Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 84.
37. Capital I, 166, 128.
38. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” 1936, Writer and Critic: and Other Essays,
trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 134, 145.
39. “Narrate or Describe?” 131. Andrew Miller makes an analogous point about
the impact of increasingly abstract commodity relations on the mid-century
realist novel when discussing Vanity Fair. “Thackeray’s book,” he maintains,
“imagines the fetishistic reduction of the material environment to com-
modities, to a world simultaneously brilliant and tedious, in which value is
produced without reference either to the needs or to the hopelessly utopian
desires of characters.” The formal result, he concludes, is “an oddly depth-
less space; the physical contiguity of objects within relations of perspectival
realism is rendered insignificant by the insistence with which those objects
refer to unattainable levels of abstract meaning.” See Andrew H. Miller,
Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9–10.
40. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148.
41. Ideas in Things, 28.
43. As John Plotz has recently argued, even Victorians’ heightened personal
investment in the sentimental or auratic value of objects as represented in
realist novels was in fact “a predictable, even a necessary, development in
a world of increasingly successful commodity flow.” John Plotz, Portable
Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 17. See also Novels Behind Glass and Jeff Nunokawa’s The Afterlife
of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
44. According to Bhabha, colonial discourse is “an apparatus that turns on the
recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences… . The
objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of
degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to
establish systems of administration and instruction” (Location of Culture, 70).
45. Location of Culture, 71.
46. Location of Culture, 109. Embedded quotation from Jacques Derrida,
Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 175.
48. Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis,” 1912,
trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud 12, eds James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1966–74), 264. Brown also references
this passage when elaborating his theory of a material unconscious. See Bill
Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the
Economics of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 248.
50. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (1980; New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 87.
53. Material Unconscious, 4.
55. See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94.
56. Material Unconscious, 4, 5.
57. See, for example, Location of Culture, 171–97.
60. Ideas in Things, 12, 154.
61. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1988), 61. Hereafter cited in text as Heart of
Darkness.
62. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 77.
63. Focusing on these guides in particular enables us to explore how individual
ethnographers both adopted and challenged the formal directives issued to
them without attempting to make general claims about all Victorian ethno-
graphic work generally.
64. As Peter Logan has persuasively suggested, however, “the critic becomes the
fetishist in the act of evaluating the fetish as such, and in this manner, the
critique of fetishism produces a secondary fetishization of the critic’s val-
ues”; needless to say, I do not wholly manage to escape such fetishism. Peter
Melville Logan, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2009), 9.
65. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
1938, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 221.
66. Joseph Conrad, Letter to William Blackwood, 6 January 1899, The Collected
Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2, eds Fredrick R. Karl and Laurence Davies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–2007), 147.
67. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary
Frontiers (London: Macmillan, 1983), 28.
68. Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corsico and Cameroons, 5th
edn (1897; Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 441. Hereafter cited in text as Travels.
69. Edward Wilmot Blyden, African Life and Customs (1908; London: African
Publication Society, 1969), 39.
70. Like many colonial novels of the nineteenth century, they were published in
England and for a largely metropolitan Victorian audience.
72. Freud’s focus on the uncanny as an aesthetic category pervading nineteenth-
century literature and particularly effective in realist narrative corresponds
quite well with Howarth’s fiction. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919,
trans. Alix Strachey, Standard Edition 17, 250–1.
73. David Lewis-Williams and Geoffrey Blundell, Fragile Heritage: A Rock Art
Fieldguide ( Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1998), 29.
74. “alienable, a.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989, OED Online
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1 January 2010, http://dictionary.oed.
com/cgi/entry/50005648.
75. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences,
volume I, 1st edn (London, 1728), 61.
76. “inalienable, a.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 1 January 2011, http://
dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50113761.
77. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1967), II, § 27, 305.
78. See, for example, “Cultural Biography,” 90.
1
Taking Objects for Origins:
Victorian Ethnography and
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory

act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It
looked startling in this black neck of the woods, this
bit of white writing from beyond the seas.
The Location of Culture, 113
Falling under the curious, wooden gaze of the turn-of-the-century

Yoruban sculpture strategically displayed in the front lobby of Berlin’s
Ethnological Museum several years ago produces a rather uncanny
sensation for the museum’s visitors. After all, museums are generally
thought of as places for people to look at objects rather than for objects
to look at, and appear to take notes on, people. Peering curiously from
its glass display cabinet at the slightly self-conscious passerby, the sculp-
ture, labeled Writing European (Figure 1), represents a moment at which
the European observer has been observed; the ethnographer rendered
ethnographically interesting. While mirroring the inquisitive looking
enacted by the typical museum-goer – a kind of ethnographic observer,
twice removed – this effigy of the ethnographer simultaneously encour-
ages us to reflect on the practices of observing, writing, and collecting
that shaped the nineteenth-century ethnological museum, the objects
that entered its walls, and the discipline they helped to authorize. As
you approach the cabinet, in order to gain a closer view, it occurs to
you that you look not into a mirror but rather into a “split screen of
the self and its doubling”: your reflection in the glass and the sculpture
that returns your gaze.1 Whereas Homi Bhabha describes the act of
recognition in the constitution of colonial subjects as an identifica-
tion with a “split screen” that openly troubles distinctions between self
and other, Writing European, by confronting European observers with
29
Figure 1 Writing European, Yoruban, Nigeria, by 1900. bpk, Berlin / Ethnologisches

Museum, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY
their own estranged image, implicates its viewers in an analogously

troubling conflict of identification.2 The double, according to Sigmund
Freud, is born of a “primary narcissism” through which the ego cre-
ates projections of itself in order to ensure its survival and manage its
confrontation with difference; however, the double’s estranged return
at a later stage disrupts any sense of self-complacency.3 Writing European
triggers such returns. Doubling both ethnographer and observer, the
sculpture reminds us to check our narcissism at the door while placing
in question a constellation of originating myths that initially inspired
ethnography in the age of colonialism: the primacy of writing, the
transparency of representation, and the unobtrusiveness of ourselves.
So central a role did the appearance of writing play in distinguishing
civility from primitiveness in the nineteenth century that the museum’s
Taking Objects for Origins 31
founder, Adolf Bastian, conceived of ethnological museums as

“libraries … of the only accessible texts” produced by “tribes without
writing.”4 Like today’s cultural critics, ethnographers of the nineteenth
century recognized the potential for objects to function as meaning-
ful forms of record; however, partly because of philology’s influence
as one of the more established sciences after which ethnography
modeled itself, ethnography as “culture writing” tended to privilege
the written word. Writing, in fact, served as a primary symbol of the
ethnographer’s cultural authority, suggestive of his ability to author
written documents and his self-authorization for writing about other
societies, as well as an array of elevating attributes like a predisposition
toward empiricism, order, and historical record-keeping. Precisely such
attributes fall into question in Conrad’s famous novella, most noticea-
bly in Marlow’s skepticism toward the writing Europeans he encounters.
Writing European similarly troubles such visions of authority by estrang-
ing us from the act of writing itself. Awkwardly grasping his pen – with
clenched fist, the way a child holds a crayon – while looking directly
ahead, this observer appears attentive yet somewhat negligent of what
he is writing. This augmented disjunction between the coordinated
actions of eyes and hands subverts a discredited yet tenacious European
myth perpetuated through an act of disavowal: that writing can record
transparently what the eye sees while representing, and speaking for,
others. Comparable myths informed the realism of colonial writers,
who frequently drew on the conventions of ethnographic writing in
attempts at authoring fact-based fictions. Writing European, providing us
with an estranged view of writing Europeanly, instead directs our atten-
tion toward the appearance of writing as a sign rather than a symbol:
as an unstable image that can be appropriated and even doubled, or
reproduced with an unsettling difference.
Bhabha’s mimicry of Marlow’s anxious query in Heart of Darkness
offers a series of potential “native questions” analogous to those
suggested by Writing European: “Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm –
a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it?”5
What makes these questions so unsettling is precisely how aptly they
describe the badge, the charm, the propitiatory act of writing in the
production of ethnographic and imperial authority. Bhabha’s rewrit-
ing of Marlow’s voice repeats and combines two opposing moments
in the novella in an attempt to “represent … a colonial difference,”6
and each of these moments narrates an encounter with an object.
Beginning with Marlow’s struggle to make sense of the thread of
white worsted tied around the dying African laborer’s neck, in which
“Marlow interrogates the odd, inappropriate, ‘colonial’ transformation

of a textile into an uncertain textual sign, possibly a fetish,”7 Bhabha
turns this textile, this thread, this correlative of the seaman’s yarn, into
the text of the English book that Marlow later encounters. Unlike the
white thread, the presence of Towson’s (or Towser’s) Manual reassures
Marlow’s sense of cultural and moral order by immediately suggesting
to him “the ethic of work” that “provides a sense of right conduct and
honour achievable only through the acceptance of those ‘customary’
norms which are the signs of culturally cohesive ‘civil’ communities.”8
By making the English text – “this bit of white writing from beyond
the seas” – rather than the white textile the enigmatic object of curi-
ous questioning, Bhabha displaces this symbol of “English ‘cultural’
authority” and exposes its ambivalence within a colonial context
and under the imagined eyes of a non-European observer.9 From this
vantage, the English book in Africa – “as a production of colonial
hybridity,” an act of “colonial doubling”10 – transforms from “the
symbol of national authority” into “the sign of colonial difference”
and its seeming transparency – its discursive closure, its immediate rec-
ognition as something authoritative – is exposed as artifice, as technē.11
Such moments, according to Bhabha, disrupt the “narcissistic demands
of colonial power” – the demand that its authority be self-evident and
immediately recognized at the expense of alternate knowledges and
identifications – and “turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon
the eye of power.”12
Hybridity, as Bhabha articulates it, is thus an effect and a condition
of the production of colonial power. In a colonial context in which
a ruling minority attempts to represent a subjected collectivity from
which it differentiates itself and to justify its right to representation
through this very difference, only an act of disavowal can resolve
such paradoxes of representation.13 This disavowal, Bhabha explains,
complicates any notion of a dialectic between self and other, as the self
perceived in this subject-constituting moment of recognition appears
split rather than whole: “Produced through the strategy of disavowal,
the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the
condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture
and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is
disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different – a
mutation, a hybrid.”14 Hybridity, in turn, refers to the “reversal of the
process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of
discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of
authority).”15 Through the estranged repetition of the very signs used to
produce such identities, whether the trappings of racist stereotypes or

images of cultural dominance like the English book, the hybrid exposes
a seemingly transparent reality as an act of signification and places
representations of authority in question.16
As the self-appointed “helpmate of empire,” which frequently benefited
from the advancing borders of imperial expansion, early anthropology
with its ethnographic fieldwork produced its own assortment of hybrids,
like Writing European. Considering the largely positivist methods of
nineteenth-century ethnography, such reminders of the ethnographer’s
or even the anthropologist’s unstable position of authority prove espe-
cially disruptive to the discipline’s objectives: “What is irremediably
estranging in the presence of the hybrid … is that the difference of
cultures can no longer be identified or evaluated as objects of episte-
mological or moral contemplation: cultural differences are not simply
there to be seen or appropriated.”17 The very production of facts, which
ethnographers were charged with observing and collecting as objects of
contemplation used to differentiate groups of peoples and their goods,
thus resulted in the simultaneous formation of hybridity. Hybrid objects
like Writing European testify to the interrelationship of societies, and
of self and other, which trouble some of the dichotomies upon which
anthropology rested.
Nineteenth-century practitioners of anthropology, however, did not
entirely overlook the epistemological problem of understanding and
producing knowledge about other peoples and their cultural goods. As
Adolf Bastian, one of the leading salvage ethnologists of the nineteenth
century, self-consciously asserted about the societies he studied, “As soon
as they become known to us, the angel of death seizes them.”18 This
awareness, nevertheless, did not deter Bastian and his British contem-
poraries from seeking the “unclouded originality” of specimens “as pure
and genuine as possible” for their collections and compilations.19 Similar
to how colonizers deployed discriminatory knowledges to produce and
render visible their own authority, nineteenth-century anthropologists
and ethnographers used facts in an attempt to represent authorita-
tively, while distinguishing themselves qualitatively from, a collectivity.
As Bhabha’s theory of hybridity helps to reveal, the cultural differ-
ences ethnographers studied are produced, not apprehended, through
acts of discrimination that always intertwine the observer with the
observed, subjects with objects, and hinge on the strategy of disavowal.
Nineteenth-century anthropology’s demand issued in the leading guides
to observation for more objective field reports thus appears particularly
paradoxical, while Writing European directly embodies one of the most
artful of denials: that the ethnographer’s desire to observe societies

untouched by European civilization is not compromised at the moment
of contact; that the observer may elude being observed and influenc-
ing the people under observation. The concept of authenticity that
emerged over the course of the nineteenth century helped to regulate
the paradoxical production of anthropological knowledge by instructing
observers in how to discern cultural and racial differences and to deter-
mine what constituted a fact.20
Anthropological facts, to the extent that they worked to preserve the
ideal of coherent boundaries, frequently came to serve as fetishes that
arrested the play of cultural and racial differences while enabling the
observer to disavow alternative knowledges and systems of representa-
tion that would threaten his or her authority. In this regard, the fact as
fetish stands in opposition to the hybrid by precluding the encounter
with difference and a sense of the uncanny that accompanies it. As
Freud famously suggested, “[T]he last impression before the traumatic
and uncanny one is retained as fetish”; the fetish consequently serves
as both memorial to and defense against an uncanny impression and
the originating confrontation with difference that this impression
reinvokes.21 Whereas fetishism depends on the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy in registering this ambivalence, Bhabha distinguishes the
fetish and the hybrid further through their uses of these tropes. Whereas
the fetish “fix[es] on an object prior to the perception of difference, an object
that can metaphorically substitute for its presence while registering the
difference[,] … [t]he hybrid object,” according to Bhabha, “retains the
actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues its presence
[that is, the presence of the authoritative symbol] by resisting it as the
signifier of Entstellung – after the intervention of difference.”22 While facts
as fetishes stood in for, by way of metaphoric substitution, the presence
of difference that helped to preserve the authority of the observer, the
hybrid, by way of metonymy, more openly suggests alternative contexts
and systems of meaning that distort and displace images of authority
and other discriminatory knowledges while exposing them as unstable
signifiers.
Through the metaphoric substitution of authenticated facts for cul-
turally entangled acts, Victorian ethnographers following the directives
of contemporary anthropological guides to observation and record
ultimately worked to erase the traces of their presence while frequently
overlooking or inadvertently distorting contemporary indigenous
perspectives in order to validate their own authority. Hybrid objects like
Writing European manifest, by way of metonymy, alternate systems
of value and meaning that place the mutually constituted authority

of imperialism, ethnography, and colonial realism in question. This
tension between the metaphoric and the metonymic, between forms
of fetishistic defense and unsettling returns of disavowed differences,
between the stable assurance of symbols and the unsettling confronta-
tion with a world of signs, underwrites the project of nineteenth-century
ethnography and the “culture writing” of colonial realism. This tension,
as the second half of this chapter will explore, informs the figurative
world of Conrad’s 1899 novella, in which metaphor increasingly gives
way to metonymy while objects within the narrative serve as the site for
the production of multiple, often contradictory, values and reveal the
limits of colonial realism.
1 Ethnographic Doubling
Like the “colonialists and nationalists who have sought authority in the
authenticity of ‘origins’” in an attempt to manage the disturbing effects
of “colonial doubling,”23 nineteenth-century practitioners of anthro-
pology sought to establish their own authority through the authenticity
of objects around which they erected a discipline. As a discipline initially
concerned with positing cultural origins, both regional and universal,
and with reconstructing the material history of human civilization,
nineteenth-century anthropology required objects that its practitioners
believed would lead them closest to these origins. Given the relative scar-
city of actual prehistoric record when the term “prehistory” entered into
popular currency, British and German practitioners of anthropology,
hoping to discover the “sequence of things” in what they already
believed to be the “order of times,”24 recognized the material goods of
small-scale societies (then called “primitive peoples” or “Naturvölker”)
as an acceptable substitute for this missing record.25 This imaginative
substitution, as Augustus Henry Lane Fox (later Lieutenant General Pitt
Rivers) referred to it, proved less than metaphoric in the social evo-
lutionary theories that emerged in the last quarter of the century, yet
it informed the anthropological methods adopted by leading British
and German practitioners regardless of their position on evolution.
Influential collectors like Bastian and Pitt Rivers consequently viewed
these objects as substitutes for preliterate texts; as such, ethnographic
objects would only yield meaning within a collection or series and
this view, in part, fueled the rapacity of nineteenth-century collecting.
Perceiving objects as preliterate texts ultimately privileged the written
word as the sign of authority as well as presence: as the medium through
which anthropological practitioners exhibited mastery over their object

of study, authored texts that promoted their professionalization within a
discipline, and distinguished themselves from a past ostensibly shrouded
in illiteracy.
Analogies with philology enabled leading anthropological practition-
ers and collectors to approach the study of material objects as the study
of texts while implicitly authorizing their own graphocentric interpre-
tive practices. The material goods of a society, according to both Bastian
and Pitt Rivers, embodied the thoughts and ideas of a people in much
the same way as written documents; a sequence of objects within a
collection represented a sequence of ideas.26 The ethnological museum,
for Bastian, thus served as a library for these texts, which he further char-
acterized as the symbolic predecessors to writing: “In order to ascertain
the originality of an ethnic character perceptibly, unclouded originality
is needed as the first prerequisite for that impression of the ideas
expressed in ethnic thoughts. These are preserved as the only witnesses
of the ideas of races without writing in ethnological museums, which
here simultaneously represent libraries, as guardians of the only acces-
sible texts – symbolic pre-stages of writing.”27 The study of ethnographic
objects in collected series, suggested Pitt Rivers, could ultimately lead to
a systematic understanding similar to that which a grammar provides
a language: “[B]y studying their grammar, we may be able to conjugate
their forms.”28 Directly responding to the work of the famous philologist
Friedrich Max Müller, Pitt Rivers argues for the primacy of ethnographic
objects over language itself to help illuminate the origins of culture:
It has been said that the use of speech is the distinctive quality of
man. But how can we know that? We are literally surrounded by
brute language. We can imitate their calls, and we find that animals
will respond to our imitations of them. But who has ever seen any of
the lower animals construct a tool and use it.
The conception of man, not as a tool-using but as a tool-making
animal, is clear, defined, and unassailable; probably if we could trace
language to its sources, we should be able to draw the same line
between natural sounds employed as a medium of communication,
and the created word. Thus the arts which we can study may perhaps
be taken to illustrate the origin of language, which we cannot study
in this phase.29
Drawing on functionalist theories of the origin of language, in opposi-

tion to the expressive models posited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Johann Gottfried Herder, Pitt Rivers proposes a connection between

natural sounds and natural forms, both of which borrow predominately
from nature and, according to Pitt Rivers, represent the earliest stage of
cultural production. Based on the assumption that material forms of
production reflect the cognitive structure of the mind, the development
of language and the arts would theoretically reflect the same cognitive
development.30
Developing the analogy between language and artifacts further, Pitt
Rivers compares the accompanying rule-bound systems that place
restrictions on their usage. While the practice of taboo serves as one
such law, the “grammar” of each would presumably provide others:
We know that in certain phases of savage life the use of particular words
may be tabooed in the same manner that the use of particular imple-
ments or weapons may be tabooed; but it would be quite as hopeless
for any individual to attempt to change the entire course of the con-
structive arts as to change the form of a language; the action of the
individual man is limited in both cases to the production of particular
words or particular implements, which take their place like bricks in
a building.
Man is not the designer in the sense of an architect, but he is the
constructor in the sense of a brickmaker or a bricklayer.31
In his juxtaposition of the architect and the bricklayer, Pitt Rivers posi-
tions humans as bricklayers or makers who may produce and arrange
words and objects but may not diverge from the system that prescribes
the rules of their usage and variation. An architect, similar to the engineer
of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s later discussion of bricolage in The Savage Mind,
would represent a designer of this system. This architect, if one in fact
existed for Pitt Rivers, would presumably be the law of necessity; one that
stems strictly from environmental conditions and socio-evolutionary
laws governing the origin and descent of species, to which Pitt Rivers
frequently pays homage in his writing. As Jacques Derrida suggests in
his discussion of Lévi-Strauss, however, the engineer very well may be
“a myth produced by the bricoleur.”32 Pitt Rivers’s brickmaker or layer, in
turn, may be the mirror image of the ethnographer himself, compelled
by a seemingly independent utilitarian natural order. Like the ostensible
brickmaker of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the nineteenth-century
ethnographer attempted to construct his authority by rendering the
illegible legible in structured, written reports while operating within
a prescribed system governed by the taboo of disorder.
Guides to anthropological observation and record written in an

attempt to subdue such disorder emerged in greater number throughout
the nineteenth century in response to the expanding field of author-
ship in the production of knowledge. Even two of the most popular
and commercially successful of writers about Africa, Mary Kingsley and
H. Rider Haggard, came to be recognized as authorities on the Fang and
the Zulu, respectively. The nineteenth-century ethnographer, as George
W. Stocking and others have noted, generally performed the field research
and wrote the reports that emerging anthropological professionals
would later synthesize in their writing.33 In an attempt to foster less sub-
jective ethnographic reports, professional societies issued guides to the
travelers, residents, missionaries, seamen, and colonial administrators
of Europe’s rapidly expanding colonial territories. The primary British
guides appeared under the British Association for the Advancement
of Science (BAAS), the Admiralty, the Geographical Society, and the
Anthropological Institute. Such guides instructed the European observer
in how to look, collect, and write, usually providing a basic introduction
to the discipline and its objectives, an overview of its analytic catego-
ries, and lists of questions. As Johannes Fabian has argued through the
comparison of selected ethnographers’ field notes and official reports
detailing research in Central Africa, these guides usually influenced the
format of the final write up more than initial observations and notes34;
guides to observation thus proved central to the production of the
ethnographer’s authorship. While attempting to control the authority
of knowledge produced in the field, practitioners of anthropology, in
turn, discursively produced their own disciplinary authority. Positioned
as the hunter-gatherers of nineteenth-century anthropology, ethnog-
raphers were thus charged with the collection of “facts” unmediated
by individual thought or caprice or by even the influence of European
intrusion. Given nineteenth-century anthropology’s positivist methods
of identifying and recording knowledge through largely visual means,
Victorian ethnography collaborated with colonial discourse to the
extent that it constructed visually verifiable “facts” that came to serve
as fetishes: as objects of both knowledge and disavowal deployed in an
attempt to determine cultural and racial differences.
Whereas James Clifford’s discussion of ethnographic authority focuses
on anthropological methods of the twentieth century, after participant-
observation has emerged as the dominant practice, my concern lies
with the methods of the previous century when “modes of authority
[were] based on natural-scientific epistemologies” and the roles of
ethnographic observation and anthropological analysis were usually
not performed by the same person.35 The methodology prescribed to

nineteenth-century ethnographers, however, did not wholly differ from
those Clifford attributes to the twentieth-century anthropologist as
“fieldworker-theorist,” a role that emerged in the 1920s.36 Nineteenth-
century ethnographers, for example, were encouraged to make use of
native languages even without mastery; observation, and the belief that
a culture could be “record[ed] and explain[ed] by a trained onlooker,”
played a central role; and the ethnographer frequently focused his or her
inquiry “thematically on particular institutions.”37 Some nineteenth-
century ethnographic writers, such as Mary Kingsley, also believed that
studying a particular institution offered insight into an entire culture;
that a part could synecdochically provide access to a perceived whole.38
Given the continuities in method, in addition to the distinctions
that Clifford identifies, the idea of “ethnographic authority” in the
nineteenth century is not as much of an oxymoron as one might think,
despite the usual division of labor between anthropologists and ethnog-
raphers. Rather, nineteenth-century ethnographic method represents
a significant chapter in the history of the discipline’s struggle to assert
its own authority through objects and the narratives they inspired.39
Although European questionnaires soliciting information about unfa-
miliar peoples and their cultural practices had been available to
travelers and explorers since at least the sixteenth century, the nineteenth
century, with the professionalization of anthropology and the spread of
colonialism, witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of
more informative guides. Among the most popular, and the most central
to the promotion of ethnography, was Notes and Queries on Anthropology,
first published jointly in 1874 by the Anthropological Institute and the
BAAS.40 According to Fabian, “Much of ethnographic writing … has
been presented, though rarely directly, as responses to research ques-
tions set down in such authoritative works as the famous Notes and
Queries.”41 Divided into two main sections, which roughly correspond to
the present-day division between biological and cultural anthropology,
the guide structurally affirms Robert J. C. Young’s assertion: “Race has
always been culturally constructed. Culture has always been racially
constructed.”42 The section devoted to the study of ethnography, in
particular, consists of fifty-some sub-sections in an attempt to break
down the social organism called culture into its component parts. As
Pitt Rivers, who was then president of the Institute as well as editor of
the guide’s first edition, claimed in his report to the BAAS, “[T]he social
anatomy of every tribe and race has to be considered in all its parts.”43
His reference to anatomy accords with the Institute’s definition of
anthropology at this time as “the natural history of man.”44 The authors

of Notes and Queries ultimately presented such concepts as “culture” and
“race” as rigorously classifiable, empirically verifiable objects of anthro-
pological knowledge.
Recognized specialists in their respective areas of inquiry authored and
“authenticated,” by name or initials, each of the guide’s sub-sections
and collectively constructed an authoritative and objectifying voice of
the Anthropological Institute with which to address ethnographers.45
Contributors to Notes and Queries included some of the most venerated
names in the Victorian sciences, including Charles Darwin, Francis
Galton, Edward Burnett Tylor, John Lubbock, William Flinders Petrie,
and James Frazer.46 Providing a brief methodological overview and a list
of questions addressed to the reader and written in the present tense,
each author prescribed a way of seeing as well as a sense of temporal-
ity. The questionnaire format, as well as the adoption of the second
person perspective, implies a dialogue between anthropologist and
ethnographer that mirrors the dialogic exchange Fabian identifies in
ethnographic writing: “An I addresses (reports to) a you. But only the
first and second persons are distinguished along the axis of personness.
The grammarian’s ‘third person’ is opposed to the first and second
person as a nonparticipant in the dialogue. The ‘“third person” is not
a “person”; it is really the verbal form whose function is to express the
non-person.’”47 The society under inquiry enters into this dialogue in the
third person, already distinguished linguistically as the “non-person”
who both precedes and succeeds the time of the present dialogue; only
the “I” and the “you,” the anthropologist and the ethnographer, or vice
versa, engage with each other in the present. The present tense, suggests
Fabian, signals an “observer’s language” that “presupposes the given-
ness of the object of anthropology as something to be observed” and
“provides glosses on the world as seen.”48 Ultimately, “the present tense
‘freezes’ a society at the time of observation” and may reinforce familiar
stereotypes about the “repetitiveness, predictability and conservatism”
of small-scale societies.49 This process of objectification, which char-
acterized most guides to observation, accompanied the production of
anthropological and ethnographic authority in the nineteenth century.
Whereas the present tense allowed anthropologists to construct their
authority through a series of directives, it granted ethnographers the
authority of an apparent immediacy; of being able to re-present what
they believed they directly observed as fact.
The concept of authenticity governed the production of facts through
which ethnographers constructed their authority. Anthropological
facts ranged from detailed written records of informed observation, to

choreographed and candid photographs, to carefully selected objects,
precise measurements, and, more disturbingly, body parts. Guidelines
for determining the authenticity of anthropological data usually
warned against European influence, whether resulting from the observ-
er’s individual bias or presence or from a small-scale society’s previous
contact with Europeans. Given the disciplinary significance of objects,
the authenticity of cultural goods received particular attention and
was generally defined as things produced within a small-scale society,
in the local style and materials, and for an indigenous social function.
The representation of Europeans, the use of European materials, and the
production for a perceived European market all contributed to a cultural
object’s inauthenticity. Pitt Rivers therefore emphasized the impor-
tance of a small-scale society’s isolation from Europe in the pursuit of
authenticity: “The more remote and unknown the race or tribe, the
more valuable the evidence afforded of the study of its institutions,
from the probability of their being less mixed with those of European
origin.”50 Accordingly, ethnographers were encouraged to determine
whether materials employed by a society were “native or imported.”51
Adolf Bastian similarly solicited “genuine” objects of “indigenous”
manufacture and “unclouded originality” for the museum collection
under his direction.52 Tylor, moreover, urged ethnographers gathering
mythic stories to “separate all matter which might have been borrowed
from … other traditions … , so as to leave the native mythology as pure
and genuine as possible.”53 A concern for origins recurs throughout
these instructions, which encourage fieldworkers to trace an object or
practice back to its original context as well as its reason for or method
of production. This emphasis on “unclouded originality,” however,
placed particular value on a society’s past rather than its present while
reaffirming the ethnographer’s presence – spatial, temporal, and onto-
logical – of authority over the observed.
Guides to observation like Notes and Queries introduced their read-
ers to visual reading practices for attempting to identify authentic,
indigenous cultural forms. Pitt Rivers, drawing on contemporary func-
tionalist histories of art and ornamentation like the work of Gottfried
Semper,54 proposed the idea of natural forms for determining an object’s
authenticity: “In the infancy of the arts mankind must have availed
themselves of the natural forms of the objects met with; and as the
process of adapting and modifying them to their wants has been slow
and continuous, traces of the forms of nature have been preserved in
those arts which are indigenous and have remained isolated.”55 The
identification of natural forms, determined by the immediately available

flora and fauna, assisted in determining whether forms were indigenous
or borrowed from other societies. A series of related questions to the
observer inquire whether the curve of an object follows the curve of
the wood or its grain, whether gourds are used as drinking vessels and
whether their form is then mimicked in pottery, and whether natural
objects like shells or bones are used in ornamentation. Pitt Rivers’s dis-
cussion of ornamentation, considered in evolutionary histories as one
of the earliest forms of artistic expression, adopted similar criteria for
determining cultural authenticity, as “forms originally serving a useful
purpose have survived in ornamentation … such as, the binding of
a spear or arrow-head represented by painted spirals.”56 Each society,
moreover, was believed to have created at least one original pattern
used repeatedly in ornamentation.57 This section of Notes and Queries
included a list depicting thirty “principal forms” of ornament, thus
offering the observer a visual vocabulary to assist in the identification
of possible variations, to track the development and diffusion of forms,
and to trace cultural forms back to their presumed origins.
Although Victorian scientists acknowledged that both inductive and
deductive methods contributed to the making of facts,58 especially since
only informed observation and collection could produce acceptable
data, facts were frequently spoken of as things to be found and collected
as if they preexisted their identification, selection, and explication.59 As
the respected traveler and Africanist Harry H. Johnston urged readers
of Hints to Travellers, “It is the duty of every civilised traveller in coun-
tries newly opened up to research, to collect facts, plain unvarnished
facts.”60 The history of anthropology, as Johannes Fabian has famously
argued, coincided with a history of favoring “the visual as a mode of
knowing” in Western culture.61 Douglas W. Freshfield, for example,
advised potential ethnographers: “Remember that the first and best
instruments are the traveller’s own eyes. Use them constantly, and
record your observations on the spot.”62 Sources of knowledge, explains
Fabian, were perceived in the visual world; this knowledge, in turn, was
represented visually, often in the form of maps, charts, and schemes of
classification that, especially in the nineteenth century, were used to
produce typologies enabling the “order of times” to be perceived in the
“sequence of things” “at a glance.”63 While empowering the anthro-
pological observer, such methods of constructing facts often ended up
silencing and temporally alienating the observed.
A fact recorded through the medium of photography, in particular,
garnered the greatest “trust in its authenticity” among “scientific men.”64
The photograph before the age of digital and computer generated

imaging, suggests Roland Barthes, “is authentication itself … [;] every
photograph is a certificate of presence,”65 in that it testifies to the exist-
ence of an object, or subject, in a particular time and place. Accordingly,
H. H. Johnston advised ethnographers to adopt a style of writing mod-
eled after the immediacy and ontological realism of photography:
“Endeavour to make your notes like your pictures and photographs. Write
down things of interest as you hear them or see them.”66 Photography thus
served as a model for the observer’s writing and attempts at recording
the presence of phenomena located in a particular time and place at a
time when the “thickening” of language, according to Michel Foucault,
announced its “ceasing to be transparent to its representations.”67
Responding to the difficulties involved in gathering accurate, detailed
information from indigenous informants during a brief encounter,
Charles Hercules Read of the British Museum promoted the use of
photography over writing to record “facts about which there can be no
question.”68 A quick glance at Alfred Cort Haddon’s recommendations to
the ethnographic photographer in the 1899 edition of Notes and Queries,
however, reveals the degree of manipulation that went into preparing
a “factual” shot. “With a little care,” Haddon advises, “one can usually
so place the camera or arrange the foreground or people as to make
an artistic picture.”69 Objects were manipulated, landscapes cleared,
and people choreographed in order to obtain the desired, “objective”
image. Haddon notes how “many photographs are spoiled by the
subject looking at the photographer, or being in an obviously erroneous
position or location.”70 In the hope of containing the pure subject (or
rather, the object of observation) to the space of the image, the indexical
quality of the photograph, and thus the spatial presence of the observer,
is suppressed.
The dangers of fixing the subject in the photographic image tempo-
rally extended beyond the production of a continuous “ethnographic
present”; selective compositions could relegate the subject to an ostensi-
bly more authentic, idealized past. In a later edition of Notes and Queries
published in 1912, William Halse Rivers Rivers, credited with having
introduced modern methods of participant-observation, cautioned
fieldworkers against more egregious fixations:
Some observers are only interested in such customs and ideas as seem
to them “purely native.” When they find anything suggestive of
European influence, they reject it as unimportant and do not record
it; just as they clear the imported furniture out of native houses
before photographing them. Innocent and almost unconscious as

this process seems, it is a serious falsification of the evidence. For
the picture of native life which they reconstruct by leaving out the
foreign elements is artificial … . Indians and Africans of to-day are
not the Indians and Africans of the past with certain foreign additions
which can be stripped off, so as to exhibit them as they used to be;
their experience has become a part of them, and their outlook even
on ‘purely native’ subjects can never be the same as before.71
Ironically, such fieldworkers were practicing precisely the kind of

informed selectivity that previous field guides had recommended
to them. Rivers’s concern for the “artificial” – one might even say
facticius – production of facts that the discipline’s earlier pursuit of
authenticity inspired calls attention to some of the fetishistic tenden-
cies of Victorian ethnography, which continued to inform museum
display practices well into the twentieth century.72 Both words stem-
ming etymologically from the Latin verb facere (meaning to make or
to do), facts and fetishes serve as analogous, although not necessarily
equal, kinds of human productions contingent upon acts of selection,
valuation, and repetition.
The pursuit of ethnographic authority in the nineteenth century thus
shares structural similarities with the management of authority through
colonial discourse. The ethnographic fact as constructed in guides to
observation functions in ways similar to the stereotype, as it, too, tends to
arrest cultural or racial differences in time and place while rendering them
portable and enabling such images of otherness to be reproduced and cir-
culated in museums, journals, and imaginations. According to Bhabha,
the stereotype protects imperial subjects from the threat of difference
by enabling its disavowal and efficient management within a fixed and
repeatable image. The stereotype serves as “the major discursive strategy”
of “fixity,” which is, in turn, a concept “in the ideological construction of
otherness” upon which colonial discourse depends.73 The production of
facts, as a strategy for creating knowledge dependent upon European sys-
tems of classification, protected the nineteenth-century anthropologist
from the threat of difference, such as different ways of perceiving human
variation or different conceptions of cultural value or objecthood. The
concept of authenticity, like the concept of fixity, underwrote the very
object of anthropological discourse through the implication that differ-
ent peoples and cultures could be clearly distinguished and definitively
classified. Nineteenth-century anthropological discourse, like colonial
discourse, ultimately functions as “an apparatus of power … that turns
on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences”

while rendering the colonized “at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely know-
able and visible.”74
Colonial realist authors, in turn, frequently deployed similar ethno-
graphic methods in attempts at validating their purportedly factual
fictions. Building on Bhabha’s comparison between realism and colonial
discourse, I would go so far as to suggest that authority in colonial realism
is mutually constituted through ethnographic and imperial authority;
challenges to narrative authority, in turn, may resonate in these multiple
registers. An ethnographically inflected form of documentary realism
emerges in works like Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa and Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, in which objects prove as resonant as words and play
a central role in the management of narrative authority. Attending to
the enigmatic objects populating these narratives ultimately opens up
a world in which the value is indeed in the detail, and detailed references
to reappropriated European imports trouble the cultural and ontological
authenticity on which colonial realism often depends.
2 Of Trifles and Trade: Conrad’s Ethnography

of Colonialism
Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitia-

tory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it. It
looked startling round his black neck this bit of white
thread from beyond the seas.
Heart of Darkness, 21
The textual enigma captivating Marlow as well as Bhabha introduces

a troublesome knot to the spinning of this seaman’s yarn, especially
when we consider this bit of worsted in relation to other import items
that circulate throughout the narrative. The fireman of Marlow’s steamer
wears “an impromptu charm made of rags”; the ill-fated helmsman
dons “a pair of brass earrings” and “a blue cloth wrapper”; and glass
beads, brass wire, and cotton textiles contribute to the collection of the
African woman presiding over Kurtz’s Inner Station (Heart of Darkness,
39, 45, 60). Why do such objects not each present us with a comparable
mystery? These items of trade apparently elude Marlow’s as well as his
critics’ interpretive grasp through the fetishistic transparency of the
commodity, the ethnographic fact, and the realist sign, each of which
works in its own way to obscure social relations between people. These
objects have merely formed part of the scenic backdrop to this “merry
dance of death and trade,” which critics since Chinua Achebe have
come to expect of the novella’s African characters and their attendant
properties,75 and yet they are absolutely central to this trade and to the
underlying sense of the uncanny that pervades the novella “like a whiff
from some corpse” (Heart of Darkness, 17, 26). Unraveling this history
of interpretive fetishism in order to address these more unsettling
moments involves reading metonymically, at times literally, while
undoing the metaphoric substitutions by which the material world and
its significance dissolve into one of several symbolic systems attempting
to contain it. What uncannily returns in Conrad’s novella are imperial-
ism’s exploitative social relations stripped of “sentimental pretence” and
forms of local resistance narcissistically construed as signs of savagery or
inefficiency (Heart of Darkness, 10). Heart of Darkness reveals how those
objects that appear most transparent in colonial realism may ironically
prove the most opaque.
Bhabha’s mimicry of Conrad’s passage undermines this fetishism by
turning not only the thread of worsted worn by the African laborer
into the text of the English book but also “his black neck” into “this
black neck of the woods.” This moment of repetition with a difference
dramatizes how metonyms can slide into metaphors by way of syn-
ecdoche. Bhabha overtly transforms the contiguous relation between
Africans and forests posited repeatedly throughout the narrative into
a grotesquely metaphoric combination that emerges through the
difference between the two passages: a human neck abstracted through
synecdoche is imaginatively placed as “neck” amidst a metaphoric neck
of the woods comprised of necks of trees.76 Focusing on the ambivalence of
this image, we simultaneously glimpse the residual humanity of the
“neck” – to the extent that the part still points to the whole – as well
as its dehumanized abstraction – as the “neck” is emptied of its human
significance and attached metaphorically to the forest. One cannot
help but think when reading Bhabha’s lines of the equally grotesque
moment later in the novella that combines both necks literally, when
Marlow glimpses Kurtz’s collection of shrunken human heads placed
atop two lines of wooden stakes. What Bhabha’s mimicry serves to
highlight is the potential violence underlying the tension between
metonymy and metaphor in the novella, as well as in British colonial
realism generally. This very tension arguably underwrites one of
Achebe’s central objections to Conrad’s portrayal of African characters
as a dehumanizing assemblage of fragments – like the face, eyes, bones,
fingers, neck of the dying African laborer with the thread of worsted –
which in turn mingles – as the arms, legs, eyes, voices witnessed further
up the river – with the woods to the extent that Africans are not merely
associated with the woods. They become the woods. This tendency
toward metaphor, moreover, is what enables Marianna Torgovnick
to read the African woman even less contingently as “the symbol of
Africa” and the naturalized embodiment of its landscape.77
This slippage between metonymy and metaphor nevertheless
works both ways in the novella, as metaphors threaten to disperse into
less manageable metonyms. The novella’s profusion of fragments, as
forms of emptied synecdoche that each fail to evoke the whole of which
it forms a part, works against the comparative fullness and stability of
metaphor. Ivan Kreilkamp identifies these fragments – like the “limbs or
rolling eyes” Achebe critiques78 – as a “skeptical” form of synecdoche: as
“the part [that] does not allow us to conjure up the whole, but leaves it
shrouded in mystery or points to its inaccessibility.”79 Skeptical synecdo-
che, Kreilkamp argues, dominates Conrad’s portrayal of European as well
as African characters in the novella, revealing a larger representational
strategy at play beyond the novelist’s perception of racial differences:
Conrad pushes the trope of synecdoche to a limit-point where it

begins to undermine Victorian realism. Conrad evidently discovered
that synecdoche would lose its capacity to conjure a referent as
a part does a whole if the details observed were forced to bear more
narrative weight than they could stand. Thus in Heart of Darkness,
we find a disconcertingly synecdochal narrative working against the
aims of realist storytelling. Conrad repeatedly depicts the human
body as a collection of parts.80
If synecdoche, as Paul de Man has suggested, represents as a kind of

“ambivalent zone” the point at which the distinction between meton-
ymy and metaphor breaks down, then skeptical synecdoche troubles the
very efficacy of these two rhetorical strategies.81 Details, as in Lukács’s
critique of naturalism, begin to acquire significance in themselves and
work against the totalizing effect of realism so much so that they threaten
to diffuse the processes of mimesis.
The unnamed narrator of Heart of Darkness acknowledges this repre-
sentational difficulty in a much quoted passage wherein he distinguishes
Marlow’s narrative style from that of the typical seaman’s yarn, “the
whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut” (Heart
of Darkness, 9). Moving from the comparative stability of metaphor
to describe the stability and containment of these yarns to the more
tenuous form of simile, the narrator explains that for Marlow “the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, envel-
oping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze”;
meaning, in Marlow’s narrative, emerges metonymically, centrifugally,
through a dispersed constellation of refracted narrative effects (Heart of
Darkness, 9). This production of meaning through language corresponds
with Marlow’s sense of his position in an expanded geological time
frame dominant by the end of the nineteenth century, one exacerbated
in colonial literature by a growing sense of imperial distension. “[L]ike
a flash of lightning in the clouds,” human life amidst the enduring
natural world, “civilization” amidst times immemorial, individual life
amidst death, meaning amidst disorder produced in part by the limited
medium of language; “[w]e live in the flicker” (Heart of Darkness, 9).
While I do not intend to suggest that this flicker of meaning associ-
ated today with the play of language and narrative indeterminacy
makes Conrad a twentieth-century deconstructionist, I do agree
with critics like Kreilkamp and Ian Watt that Conrad’s linguistic self-
consciousness makes him a nineteenth-century skeptic comparable to
Friedrich Nietzsche.82 For Conrad, whose affirmation was one of avowed
necessity, if the flicker is all we have, then it is worth pursuing in all its
contingencies. Emerging under this unsteady illumination is not only
the structuring network of motifs and symbols traditionally associated
with the novella, but also the seemingly insignificant, dispersive details
stationed at its margins.
Marginal details, when drawn to the center of critical attention,
narrate a different story than one following “the breakup of one petty
European mind” set against a dehumanized Africa as “setting and back-
drop.”83 Part of the challenge of reading Marlow read Africa, in fact,
involves piecing together the fragments of unprocessed information
strewn about the narrative to acquire a critical perspective beyond
Marlow’s at times limited views. The flow of import and export items
that Marlow shows without seeing provides us with such information.
These objects in Heart of Darkness travel as much as Marlow does,
and their own journeys highlight the relationships between the people
who use and exchange them. At the Company Station on the coast,
for example, Marlow observes the traveling objects that come and go
on the caravans: “a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons,
beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness and in return
came a precious trickle of ivory” (Heart of Darkness, 21). These trade
items imported into the interior by the Europeans on African caravans,
items that Marlow alternately refers to as “rubbish” or “trash,” served
as the “trifles” for which traders would obtain ostensibly more valuable
shipments of ivory (Heart of Darkness, 21). Conrad’s choice of terms,

while echoing that of contemporaries like Mary Kingsley who lamented
just two years previously the material traces of “rubbishy white cul-
ture” in West Africa (Travels, 20), is far from unmotivated. References
to rubbish, trash, and trifles as the objects of exchange valued by
indigenous traders recur throughout European writing on Africa rooted
within fetish discourse, from Charles de Brosses to Immanuel Kant to
E. B. Tylor, and they testify to the function of the fetish as “a critical
discourse about the false objective values of a culture from which the
speaker is personally distanced.”84 To this extent, Marlow’s seemingly
casual diction connects his narrative with a history of economic and
aesthetic value judgments that contributed to the production of Africa
as an un-Enlightened “place of darkness” (Heart of Darkness, 12). The
modern concept of fetishism arises, according to William Pietz, when
two mutually incompatible systems for endowing objects with value
come into contact with each other and fail, if only initially, to com-
municate. Traders, as anthropologists frequently observe, occupy an
important position as intermediaries between different societies and
their systems of value. Heart of Darkness, as a narrative about the ivory
trade in the Belgian Congo, highlights transactions between people
at the borders of different systems of value and exchange. Tracing the
journey of an object from one society to another in Heart of Darkness
while accounting for its various uses and values allows us to identify
and to look past the incomprehensibility of boundaries that the word
“fetish” demarcates and that nineteenth-century ethnography, as well
as Marlow’s narrative, worked to reinforce.
That Marlow, as a relatively critical outsider, repeatedly takes note of
this “rubbish” throughout his narrative implies that its presence is far
from trifling. While Marlow’s reference to “a stream of manufactured
goods” may well have included such functional domestic items as
European crockery, candles, and mirrors,85 he specifically singles out
those objects that served as items of exchange as well as standards
of value: that is, objects that functioned as indigenous currency.86
Marlow moreover focuses on forms of currency imported from Europe
rather than from other parts of Africa, such as the cowrie shells
that continued to circulate throughout the Congo River basin, and
his observations therefore signal without explaining the impact of
European imports on local economies. While these imports served to
supplement local currencies, their introduction also spurred forms of
competition with local institutions while their great abundance con-
tributed to inflation.87 Although brass had been imported from Europe
since the fifteenth century, “[b]rass rods,” according to historian Robert

Harms, “were unknown above the equator prior to the arrival of Stanley
in 1877.”88 Given the large number of brass rods brought by European
traders to the Congo in the 1880s, it quickly replaced copper as the
most broadly accepted currency and, in some regions, weakened the
local copper industry.89 The recognition of brass rods was so widespread
that they reportedly served as a form of payment tossed into the river in
order to appease local water spirits.90 Likewise, as Harms notes, “[b]y the
1880s, [locally produced] raffia cloth was being driven off the market
by the cheaper and finer European calicoes along the sections of the
river [then] controlled by the Bobangi” traders south of the equator.91
So valued were imported brass and textiles that they simultaneously
served as prestige items through which members of the elite could
express their status.92 Glass beads, previously coming in large numbers
from the Venetian island of Murano since about the sixteenth century,
traveled to African markets in even greater numbers from the present-
day Czech Republic in the nineteenth century. As ethnographers and
other travelers noticed, European glass beads increasingly replaced
those made locally of shell, bone, or stone. By contrast, ivory, used to
make small local goods like bracelets and hairpins upriver, attracted
comparatively little attention until its growing exchange value on the
coast became more widely known.93
Each of these imports, according to the historian Herbert S. Klein, had
moreover once been used by Europeans to purchase slaves on the coast of
West Africa,94 and they continued to function as currency for purchasing
slaves sold up and down the river throughout the nineteenth century.95
George Washington Williams, a historian who visited the Congo at the
same time as Conrad, announced in his “Open Letter” to Leopold II that
slaves currently sold for as little as three hundred brass rods.96 These
import items, therefore, establish a link between the commoditization
of two perceived indigenous resources: ivory and labor. As Kopytoff has
suggested, the practice of slavery represents a troubling exception to the
conceptual distinction between people and things that has character-
ized Western culture since the onset of modernity. This distinction, he
maintains, corresponds with the tendency to see “people as the natural
preserve for individuation (that is singularization) and things as the natu-
ral preserve for commoditization.”97 While the “work” so valued among
European supporters of trade and colonization in Africa may provide
Marlow with “the chance to find [himself],” that is, to become conscious
of his own singularity, the commoditization of the Africans and their
labor reduces them to inhuman, and ironically “inefficient,” “shadows”
(Heart of Darkness, 31, 20). The lingering institution of slavery, directly

condemned in Marlow’s observation of the dehumanizing effects of time
contract labor in the so-called Congo Free State and metonymically sug-
gested by the presence of “rubbishy” import items, reminds us of the
value of these seemingly valueless objects of trade.
These imports travel by caravan to the novella’s Central Station as well,
and their changing value registers the increasing disjunction between
Marlow’s sense of value and those of local economies. Here these objects
confound Marlow, desperately in need of rivets to repair his steamship,
and he catalogues their apparent worthlessness with palpable disgust:
“And several times a week a coast caravan came in with trade goods –
ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder only to look at it, glass
beads value about a penny a quart, confounded spotted cotton handker-
chiefs” (Heart of Darkness, 30). Handkerchiefs were particularly popular
imports, given their ease of portability and smaller denominations of
value than bolts of cloth.98 Directly proportional to their perceived lack
of immediate use value and European exchange value, however, is
Marlow’s increasingly visceral response to their gross materiality, a
kind of material remainder that finds no place in Marlow’s mercantile
estimate. Objects, in all their residually obstructive thingliness, shape
Marlow’s general sense of disorder, as “there wasn’t one rivet to be found
where it was wanted.” “[H]eads, things, buildings,” he muses metonym-
ically, “the Station was in a muddle” (Heart of Darkness, 21). Rather than
the product of colonial inefficiency that Marlow repeatedly decries,
however, the absence of rivets at the Central Station signals the gradually
changing systems of value that Marlow navigates. Rivets, lying dormant
in piles of cases at the coast, noticeably do not form part of the colonial
or indigenous economy and are entirely absent at the Inner Station. In
short, they are not to be found where largely not wanted. Brass wire, by
contrast, reappears upriver as the form of currency with which Marlow’s
crewmembers are paid each week, “with a regularity worthy of a large
and honourable trading company,” and with which they are to purchase
provisions (Heart of Darkness, 42). Even this object begins to lose its
value, however, in the absence of suitable trading posts along the shore,
not to mention the general manager’s hesitancy to provide opportunities
for trade. Kurtz, as we learn, has begun to acquire ivory by raids, rather
than trade, and has thereby confounded the order of both colonial and
indigenous economies.99 Marlow’s ironic observation that perhaps the
crew was expected to eat the wire or to make fishhooks from it reveals a
necessary return to the object’s useful material qualities in the absence
of a market recognizing their exchangeability. Yet even these items’
reconfigured use values – malleable precisely because of their “excess

matter and meaning” that exceeds any one system of value – grow
increasingly mysterious under Marlow’s eye. Unable to grasp their indig-
enous value, Marlow relegates these imports appearing upriver to the
general and ostensibly transparent ethnographic categories of “charm”
or “ornament.”
In keeping with Victorian ethnography’s emphasis on authenticity,
Marlow perceives these adopted imports as things out of place that serve
to mark people out of place. His African crewmembers most trained in the
arts of seamanship and therefore considered most European appear repeat-
edly in association with these objects. The fireman of Marlow’s steamer,
whose skillful tending of the boiler Marlow compares to the appeasement
of a savage god, converts “miserable rags” into charms and earns Marlow’s
derogatory comparison with “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather
hat” (Heart of Darkness, 38). The helmsman, who Marlow similarly dubs
“the most unstable kind of fool,” adorns himself with brass wire and blue
cloth (Heart of Darkness, 45). Even the Russian devotee of Kurtz wears
clothes “covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red,
and yellow,” and his trousers are trimmed in scarlet (Heart of Darkness,
53). Cast as a kind of “harlequin,” Kurtz’s associate represents the car-
nivalesque that characterizes these figures living at the borders (Heart of
Darkness, 53). By contrast, Marlow considers the African crewmembers
“enlisted … on the way” “[f]ine fellows – cannibals – in their place” (Heart
of Darkness, 36). Watching a group of Africans navigate their boat along
the surf upon his arrival at the coast, while observing that “[t]hey wanted
no excuse for being there,” moreover returns him to the Victorian eth-
nographer’s ideal, transparent world of “straightforward facts” possessing
meaning in themselves (Heart of Darkness, 17). They represent for Marlow
“an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf
along their coast,” which was “something natural, that had its reason,
that had a meaning” (Heart of Darkness, 17). For Marlow, “[t]ragedy
begins,” says Achebe, “when things leave their accustomed place.”100
Yet things “out of place,” a kind of cultural promiscuity addressed by
Clifford,101 ultimately unsettle the dichotomy between Africa and Europe
that Marlow’s narrative invokes.
The paradox of seeking pure facts and authentic objects of indigenous
value while hastening their demise, manifest in anthropological writing
from the period, characterized the fetishistic quest for authenticity
among late nineteenth-century ethnographers and collectors. While
lamenting the variety of inauthentic objects he encountered on his 1884
expedition, Wilhelm Joest stressed the value of natural objects like shells,
fruit pits, talons, and animal teeth used in ornamentation “before Africa
was inundated with European glass beads.”102 In an early twentieth-
century guide to collecting, museum director Felix von Luschan
particularly solicited “amulets, fetishes, and cult objects of all sorts.”103
These objects, presumably created for an indigenous social or religious
purpose, rather than for a European market, represented the ideal eth-
nographic object. Such an authentic object, immersed in indigenous
tradition and often resistant to commoditization – or, “a sense of the
universal equality of things,” resembles and in part informs Walter
Benjamin’s later description of authentic, auratic art rooted within “the
service of a ritual.”104 If these items were produced for European buyers,
their qualitative value as authentic ethnographic objects of indigenous
significance were believed to give way to their quantitative, monetary
value as commodities within an international capitalist market. Thus the
most desired ethnographic objects, as we saw in Joest’s narrative, were
precisely those whose owners refused to sell them.
This kind of irreducible or “untranscended materiality” of the ideal
ethnographic object is one of the defining characteristics of the fetish,
which Pietz has discussed at length in his essays on the history of the
term.105 According to Pietz, the very idea of the fetish arose at the site
of exchange between Europe and West Africa after the fifteenth century
and “remains specific to … the problematic of the social value of mate-
rial objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically
heterogeneous social systems.”106 He traces the genealogy of the term
“fetish” from its Latin root facticius (meaning “artificial” or “manufac-
tured”) to the late-medieval Portuguese feitiço (a term meaning “magical
practice” and associated with witchcraft) to the sixteenth-century pidgin
fetisso. The idea later entered into English by way of the preexisting
word “fetish” (or “fetys”), which meant “well made.”107 According to
Pietz, when Portuguese traders first encountered difficulty in convincing
members of “highly organized non-Islamicized black societies … in
Benin and the Congo” to trade certain items of personal, social, and
religious significance – often small gold objects worn about the body –
the Catholic Europeans labeled these items feitiço, considering them a
non-Christian equivalent of sacramental objects.108 The development
of the term fetisso in the sixteenth century marked the beginning of
the concept of the fetish in its modern sense, as it emerged with the
“articulation of the ideology of the commodity form” in negotiations
between African middlemen and Protestant European merchants.109
Faced with the mystery that different societies might honor different
spheres and rules of exchange, the Protestant traders from Holland
and later France and England determined that their reluctant African
merchants endowed these gold ornaments with magical powers that
precluded the objects’ status as potential commodities. While medieval
Christian traders may have accepted “the ability of material objects to
embody social value and human-oriented powers,” such value found
no place in the Protestant mercantile estimate of objects “in terms
of technological and commodifiable use-value.”110 In addition to its
materiality, explains Pietz, the fetish therefore exposes the social value
of things as non-universal and constructed. Pietz also includes among
the characteristics of the fetish the “subjection of the human body …
to the influence of certain significant material objects,” a quality
attributed to both African charms and European commodities, and the
“power to repeat its originating act of forging an identity of articulated
relations between certain otherwise heterogeneous things.”111 The
relation between heterogeneous things, such as European and African
systems of value, is thus preserved within the concept of the fetish. The
authentic ethnographic object similarly attempted to preserve – and to
enable its late nineteenth-century devotees to experience repeatedly – an
originating moment of intercultural contact, as well as the desire for pre-
contact, that the object paradoxically embodied. Precisely such desire
echoes in Marlow’s longing for “straightforward facts” and for the order
they promise.
Yet Conrad repeatedly parodies the desire for order, most overtly
through the writing Europeans populating the novella who at times
elicit even Marlow’s skepticism. The chief accountant of the Company
Station struggles to keep his books in “apple pie order” by making
“correct entries of perfectly correct transactions,” despite the “tumult
in the station-yard,” the “objectless blasting” on the nearby cliffs, and
the proximity of the “grove of death” where African laborers lie dying
(Heart of Darkness, 21, 22, 19, 22). For the brickmaker of the Central
Station, who possesses neither power nor authority over the people
he observes, writing and collecting offer the semblance of imposing
order and gaining control over the lives of others. Possessing his own
ethnographic collection of “[n]ative mats … spears, assegais, shields,
[and] knives,” the brickmaker has arranged these items on the walls
of his room like “trophies” of his former mercantile and intercultural
conquests (Heart of Darkness, 27). Most importantly, this “papier-mâché
Mephistopheles” represents the one figure Marlow will later deem capa-
ble of writing a tidy, yet reductive, account of the events leading up to
Kurtz’s fate (Heart of Darkness, 29). This “readable report” would stand
in contrast to both Marlow’s narrative and Conrad’s novella, while no
doubt giving an account of the “facts” that the Company manager

and his associates would most value (Heart of Darkness, 61). Even the
harlequin of Kurtz’s Inner Station lovingly annotates with his own
marginalia an old seaman’s manual filled with orderly charts and tables,
which represents to Marlow in a haze of disorder “something unmistak-
ably real” (Heart of Darkness, 39).
The desire for order among the Europeans Marlow encounters tends
to go hand in hand with the desire for ivory, revealing “fact-hunting
materialists”112 and ivory hunters as comparable fetishists. In their pur-
suit of ivory in exchange for trifles, Europeans, rather than Africans,
emerge as the most blatant fetishists in the novella and thereby
challenge post-Enlightenment perceptions of Africa.113 At the Central
Station, Marlow observes the apparently magical allure that ivory held
for the “bewitched” – one might say “charmed” – European Company
employees: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed.
You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity
blew through it all like a whiff from some corpse” (Heart of Darkness,
26). A sense of the uncanny similar to that which Freud identifies in
nineteenth-century literature pervades the station, as the lingering
sensation of death in life characterizes the pilgrims’ daily rituals. Ivory,
while reflected in the deathly images of the imperial city as “whited
sepulcher,” Kurtz’s death-filled countenance, and the bones of Marlow’s
predecessor Fresleven, paradoxically serves as the pilgrims’ primary
source of animation and the object of their pilgrimage from Europe
(Heart of Darkness, 13).114 Ivory as fetish offers protection against as
well as memorialization to the traumatic and the uncanny, a sensation
often associated with the dissolution of boundaries between subject
and object, the living and the nonliving. While Marlow considers the
scene “unreal” and asks himself “what it all meant,” Conrad’s allusions
to fetishism implicitly criticize the acquisitive and exploitative Central
Station residents by identifying ivory as both their object of desire and
irrepressible emblem of death (Heart of Darkness, 26).
This description of the pilgrims’ homage to ivory most closely resem-
bles Victorian theories of the fetish prominently detailed in E. B. Tylor’s
Primitive Culture. Tylor defined the fetish as an “object [that] is treated as
having personal consciousness and power, is talked with, worshipped,
prayed to, sacrificed to, petted or ill-treated with reference to its past or
future behavior to its votaries.”115 In contrast to broader applications of
the word “fetish,” such as John Hollingshead’s tongue-in-cheek survey
of Victorian “household gods” in his 1858 contribution to Household
Words “Fetishes at Home,”116 Tylor cautions against using the term too
generally. Evoking the parallel between “a museum of monstrous and

most potent fetishes” from the Ivory Coast with an Englishman’s collec-
tion of stamps or walking sticks, Tylor urges that the love of curiosities
or of the marvelous noticeable in many societies should not be con-
fused with fetishism.117 Excepting his revealing examples of “primitive”
“survivals” among spiritualists, peasants, Catholics, and the Irish, Tylor
attempts to keep the concept of fetishism outside of contemporary
Europe.118 Contemporary West Africa, on the contrary, continued to
represent for Tylor “a world of fetishes.”119 Whereas the European in
Europe may remain but an avid collector of objects, “the European
in Africa,” asserts Tylor, “is apt to catch it” from his African associ-
ates, to begin wearing charms to ward off spirits, and, consequently,
to “become black.”120 Whereas Tylor’s theory may try to contain the
apparent contagion of fetishism to African and marginalized European
peoples, Conrad’s fetishists import their malady, if not their object,
from Europe.
The pilgrims’ adoration of ivory moreover reenacts with a difference
a famous anecdote that Tylor recounts while explaining the animation
and empowerment of objects. The “quaint story” taking place around
the time of Columbus’s voyages details the encounter between Spanish
and Cuban systems of value: “The cacique Hatuey … called his people
together, and talked to them of the Spaniards – how they persecuted
the natives of the islands, and how they did such things for the sake
of a great lord whom they much desired and loved.”121 After holding
a ceremony in homage to a basket of gold, they proceeded to toss the
basket containing the Spaniards’ lord into the sea in order to discour-
age further invasion. While Tylor presents this account to exemplify
“authentic savage ideas” among the Cubans, the anecdote simultane-
ously reveals a pre-Columbian society’s perception of the European
fetishization of gold – especially prominent in its Anglo-European guise
as the universal equivalent of exchange before the introduction of
paper currency. Karl Marx, as Pietz has discussed, recorded this same
anecdote in an 1842 notebook while sketching out his early thoughts
on commodity fetishism. For Marx, the encounter represented an
external critique of European systems of value – the mysterious value of
an emerging European standard of currency, to be precise.122 Conrad’s
indictment of the ivory-seeking pilgrims operates in much the same
manner as Marx’s strategic deployment of fetishism in his writing: it
offers a materialist critique of the ivory trade from a momentary and
imaginative “viewpoint outside capitalism,” a viewpoint accessible at its
borders and made visible by the objects that travel between them.123
Conrad’s association between the ivory trade, death, and bewitchment,

moreover, mirrors nineteenth-century African perceptions of this inter-
national trade that European demands promoted. Unlike regional forms
of trade transacted at short distances, explains Robert Harms, the long
distance trade that developed in order to ship canoes full of slaves and
later of ivory downriver represented larger scale economic ventures that
generally only chiefs or members of the elite could afford to undertake.
Given the exponentially increasing exchange value of ivory traveling
downriver, these ventures yielded unprecedentedly large profits and
produced an even greater divide between the wealthy and the poor.124
Excessive wealth such as that gained through the slave and ivory trades
was associated with death throughout the Congo basin: “material
wealth, physical health, and social tranquility were interrelated in
such a way that a person who wanted more than his perceived right-
ful share of wealth had to accept less of the other two.”125 According
to this “zero-sum” logic of economic activity, an increase in wealth
led to a decrease in health and a higher risk of death.126 The charms
that traders purchased in order to promote economic success reinforced
this logic, since payment to the witch doctor could in some regions
involve the death of one or more individuals.127 Witchcraft also served
more generally as “the idiom” for explaining such “trade-offs necessary
to get rich” as well as the social inequalities that resulted.128 As Harms
explains, witchcraft provided a way of understanding the disparities
between changing modes of exchange and forms of value effected by
long distance international trade: “Professional traders made a stock
of capital goods increase as if by magic through constant turnover,
while fishermen merely sold their surplus fish for items they could not
produce themselves. It was the difference between capitalistic activity
and subsistence activity, between exchange values and use values.”129
Europeans, when they arrived and began to dominate the river trade,
were suspected of precisely such magic.130 In Conrad’s novella, it is
ironically the Europeans who have become most bewitched.131
African witchcraft otherwise figures rather opaquely in Heart of
Darkness, appearing briefly in the form of charms and “gifts of witch-
men” (Heart of Darkness, 60). Given the dangers of long distance trade,
from navigating whirlpools to combating piracy to overcoming the
blockades of rival traders, “[c]harms and trade were inseparable.”132 The
“impromptu charm made of rags” Marlow observes in the possession
of his fireman resembles charms made from knotted cloth filled with
medicine that were worn about the body to protect their owners: one
of many varieties of charms purchased and employed by traders.133
Circulating with these locally produced goods were the magical stories
that contributed to their value by recounting the deployment of charms
to produce rainstorms, darkness, or fog when their owners sought to
evade pursuit while traveling through less welcoming territories.134
Charms and offerings from witch doctors also adorn the African woman
Marlow encounters at the Inner Station, and their number appears
commensurate with her status and power. While Mary Kingsley devoted
great care to the study of charms in neighboring regions, and to the
forms of object relations charms manifested, Marlow seems to observe
charms as a matter of course, as “bizarre things” and as forms of super-
stition arguably separate from trade (Heart of Darkness, 60). Charms
nevertheless functioned similarly to forms of insurance investment
and were extremely desirable items of trade throughout the Congo
basin, produced and consumed locally.135 As such, they form part of
the local economies that Marlow glimpses only obliquely in the form
of enigmatic objects.
Another such enigmatic object evincing signs of a regional economy
takes the form of the staple food Marlow’s African crewmen have
brought along for the journey as a supplement to their ill-fated supply
of hippo meat. Marlow, from his characteristically limited perspective,
sketches the contours of this item: “[T]he only thing to eat – though
it didn’t look eatable in the least – I saw in their possession was a few
lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough of a dirty lavender colour,
they kept wrapped in leaves and now and then swallowed a piece of”
(Heart of Darkness, 42). Despite the range of possible symbolic meanings
woven into this scene, Marlow’s crewmembers are likely attempting to
stave off hunger by intermittently consuming small portions of prepared
or partially prepared cassava. The most common way of eating this very
starchy yet not fully nourishing root vegetable was in the form known
most widely as chickwange: small steamed loaves made of peeled and
kneaded cassava wrapped in leaves that could last for at least a week.136
Traders could purchase chickwange as well as cassava throughout the
river basin; harvested, preserved cassava in its unprepared form could
last as long as four months, which made it an ideal food for longer
journeys.137 Originally brought to the area from Brazil, cassava became
a staple crop among local farmers and, “in terms of tons traded, it was
the major trade item in the entire central basin” during the nineteenth
century.138 In a sense, therefore, cassava and trade were also insepara-
ble. Although the slave and ivory trades undoubtedly proved severely
destructive to the area in a variety of ways, these novel forms of long
distance trade according to Harms also helped to develop regional trade.
Whereas the ivory trade contributed to the wealth of the few, regional
trade benefited the broader population and distributed returns more
diffusely.139 Unpacking the novella’s glimpses of regional trade reveals
how Africans were not merely victims of international trade and how
an awareness of this fact, no matter how oblique, informs Conrad’s
portrayal of the African woman at Kurtz’s Inner Station.
Marlow’s encounter with the African woman, in which the European
imports circulating throughout the novella make their final enigmatic
appearance, offers a culmination of European fetishisms dependent
on the ostensible transparency of literary symbols, realist signs, ethno-
graphic facts, and capitalist commodities. Torgovnick’s characterization
of the African woman as “the symbol of Africa” clearly speaks to the
overt connection Marlow establishes between the woman and her
natural surroundings. “And in the hush that had fallen suddenly over
the whole sorrowful land,” he remarks, “the immense wilderness, the
colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her,
pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous
and passionate soul” (Heart of Darkness, 60). Drawing on Marlow’s ref-
erences to the body and fecundity, Torgovnick juxtaposes the African
woman with Kurtz’s European Intended: “[U]nlike the Intended, she is
not ‘high-minded’: she is presented as all body and inchoate emotion.”140
This nexus of primitivist imagery connecting women, Africa, and bodily
knowledge certainly recurs throughout modernist prose and establishes
Marlow, whom the narrator appropriately calls a “wanderer,” as a rep-
resentative modern figure (Heart of Darkness, 9). Although Torgovnick’s
conclusions closely mirror Marlow’s own in this scene, they help to
obscure the fact that the African woman’s body is precisely what we do
not see. Marlow’s visual description of the African woman instead focuses
on her “barbarous ornaments,” on their status as dispersive metonyms
rather than her status as embodied symbol. These ostensibly “barbarous”
ornaments, moreover, are composed of import items similar to the ones
circulating throughout the narrative, suggesting that the African woman
may be no more fully “in her place” than the fireman or the helms-
man.141 Marlow lists several of these items comprising the woman’s attire,
in addition to the “striped and fringed cloths” (possibly raffia) that she
wears: “[S]he had brass leggings to the knees, brass wire gauntlets to the
elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of
glass beads on her neck, bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that
hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step” (Heart of Darkness,
60). Brass wire and glass beads thus assume a prominent position among
her collection of “barbarous ornaments.” This collection consequently
exposes the notion of “barbarity” as a product of both European and

non-European manufacture, thereby disrupting the dichotomy between
Africa and Europe that Marlow’s narrative constructs.
Although these imports command Marlow’s attention as objects rather
than symbols, they nevertheless acquire a transparency no less obfuscat-
ing. In contributing to the novella’s reality effect, they merely appear on
the scene as transparencies forming part of the novella’s characteristically
detailed setting that contributes to Marlow’s authority as a narrator. As
objects increasingly noted in contemporary ethnographic reports like
that of Joest, these imports lend themselves to the factual accounts
with which fieldworkers struggled to preserve forms of cultural authen-
ticity and disciplinary authority. As objects possessing a recognizable
market value, moreover, they lead Marlow to dematerialize the “bar-
barous ornaments” before him by immediately calculating their worth
as potential commodities as well as forms of currency. “She must have
had the value of several elephant tusks upon her,” he estimates (Heart
of Darkness, 60). While Marlow nevertheless commends the woman for
appearing “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent,” the narra-
tive subverts this singular observation through the double entendre of
the woman’s “deliberate progress” along the shore (Heart of Darkness,
60). Throughout Marlow’s narrative, the word “progress” resonates with
intense irony while revealing the negative effects of European colonial
settlement and trade in Africa. Marlow, earlier in the narrative, observes
how “the cause of progress” could wipe out entire villages, including
their people and their apparently more highly regarded livestock (Heart
of Darkness, 13). That the woman’s progress is “deliberate,” however,
suggests that she may not represent simply a passive victim of European
colonialism.
While the African woman may serve as a kind of high priestess to
a skeletal Kurtz, she commands the accumulated imports that European
traders have offered up both in exchange for and in homage to ivory.
She oversees the storehouse of brightly colored textiles from which the
Russian takes remnants to mend his clothes, and these “miserable rags,”
as he calls them, resemble the “rubbishy cottons” Marlow frequently
observes (Heart of Darkness, 61). She moreover collects import items
like cotton textiles, brass wire, and glass beads while controlling their
market status and use.142 Much of the woman’s collection, while viewed
by Marlow as potential commodities and even as currency, have been
taken out of circulation to join the realm of culture in the form of
prestige items. While imported cloth served a variety of useful purposes,
especially as clothing, it also functioned like brass as a form of currency
and as a luxury or prestige item.143 The latter two functions, of course,

mutually reinforced each other, as such prestige items served as vis-
ible displays of wealth partly because they could readily be converted
into currency. The storehouse of cloth nevertheless appears especially
precious, given the woman’s extreme reaction to the Russian’s seemingly
small theft. “Wealthy people,” Harms notes, “not only wore imported
cloth but also saved large quantities of it to be buried with them as
a way of gaining honor in the afterlife.”144 Wealthy traders, in particu-
lar, attempted to accumulate huge stores of cloth for their burial, as
witnessed by H. H. Johnston in the 1880s.145 Given the status of Kurtz’s
health, inversely proportionate to his social status and accumulation of
wealth, I might add, the storehouse of cloth is most likely intended for
him. Unlike the writing Europeans in the novella, the African woman
does not write “readable reports.” She doesn’t need them. She, after
all, understands and controls the value of objects in the world around
her. Her presumed execution under the fire of the departing European’s
rifles, in addition to serving as “a jolly lark” for the pilgrims, arguably
constitutes an act of retaliation against regional forms of authority and
indigenous resistance (Heart of Darkness, 66).
Brass wire, glass beads, and cotton textiles: these metonyms of
European economic imperialism in the novella register the centripetal
effects of European trade as well as of the imperial “order” King Leopold
II of Belgium proposed to bring to his African “Free State” in the 1880s
and 1890s. These goods not only impacted local currencies, industries,
and consumer tastes, but they also made manifest changes in social
organization and hierarchies. Wealthy traders rivaled the power and
authority of local chiefs, as “political office and ritual position became
marketplace items to be purchased by the highest bidders” – often
through payment with these very imports.146 On the other hand, indig-
enous uses of these imports point to the workings of developing local
economies that persisted even after opportunities for long distance
trade dissipated with the intrusion of European trading monopolies and
Belgium’s privatization of local resources. These objects as commodities
flowing toward the interior in reluctant exchange for a “trickle of ivory”
are appropriated and placed amidst an alternate economy obscurely
perceived in the novella as one of ornaments, charms, and “bizarre
things.” Rather than representing the wholly pliant abstractions
required of capitalist exchange, they possess the vulgar materiality of
things that can be worn, that can be hoarded, that can be burned, and
that can nevertheless wield forms of material and transcendent power
in defiance of European systems of value.
3 Authenticity on the Market, an Afterword
By the turn of the next century, several major European museums had
begun to revise the organizing principles underwriting their collections.
In one of the remodeled African exhibition halls in Berlin’s Ethnological
Museum, a mannequin clothed in traditional dress holds a cowbell
bearing the inscription “PREMIER. Made in England.” This English
import, finding its way into an African display in a German museum,
represents one of several strategies employed in complicating the con-
cept of authenticity that the museum reproduces for its international,
even global, audience. Similarly, the Sainsbury African Galleries of the
British Museum that opened in 2000 display both traditional and inno-
vative African arts signaling African artists’ participation in a global
cultural market. The hanging sculpture entitled Man’s Cloth (Figures 2
and 3), which resembles a draping tapestry when viewed at a distance,
reveals upon closer inspection a colorful and glittering warp and woof
of European metal bottle neck wrappers “stitched” together with local
copper wire. In this work, El Anatsui, the world-renowned Ghana-
born artist and professor at the University of Nigeria, weds Ghana’s
traditional art of textiles with European imports; an originality of style
emerges from scrap metal saved from empty liquor bottles. The unrecy-
cled packaging of consumed commodities, essentially “rubbish,” enters
a new stage in its social biography as it takes the form of a stunning,
inherently mutable sculpture that comments on the changing traditions
of a contemporary African nation.147 Gesturing equally toward the past,
these bottle neck wrappers point to the history associated with yet
another commodity that came to serve as currency in West Africa: to
the imported liquor once used to purchase slaves and local goods.148
An appreciation for African authorship informs such museum
displays and their criteria for authenticity, in which a former empha-
sis on the anonymity of tradition increasingly admits the singularity
of individual creativities. As Sally Price recounts in Primitive Art in
Civilized Places, non-Western artists, whose works found their way
more frequently into European ethnographic collections rather than
art museums, were consistently aligned with the “unnamed figure
who represents his community and whose craftsmanship respects the
dictates of its age-old traditions.”149 This “anonymization” of non-
European art identified as primitive,150 according to Price, continued to
pervade the art market well after related methods had been discredited
in the field of anthropology. In attempting to attribute names to works
of the past, anthropologists like Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor
Figure 2 Man’s Cloth (1998–2001) by El Anatsui. Courtesy of the artist and the
Trustees of the British Museum. Photograph by Hanchen
affirm the presence of “individual hands”151 within African arts as well

as the recognition of individual artists at the local level.152 Even when
the individual names of artists may no longer be accessible, epithets
characterizing a unique style may serve as a kind of author-function.
The reproduction of names, supplementing the geographic or tribal
identification often documented in ethnographic displays, reflects
a greater appreciation for the individualized histories to which con-
temporary African artists in part respond. The idea of authenticity
constructed in such exhibits, therefore, increasingly reflects the history
of the term’s link to individual authorship as a source of authority.153
While Heart of Darkness explores the heterogeneity and “impuri-
ties” generated by intercultural contact, Conrad himself would soon
grow aware of the value of authenticity through the marketing of his
manuscripts. Writing in the age of mechanical reproduction, in which
Figure 3 Detail of Man’s Cloth. Courtesy of the artist and the Trustees of the
British Museum. Photograph by author
many of his surviving manuscripts existed solely as typescripts, Conrad

repeatedly documents in his letters to potential buyers like John Quinn
or T. J. Wise the history of the text’s production, any handwritten
corrections and additions, and particular pages bearing the author’s
autograph.154 The material history of the work and the traces of the
author’s “individual hand” therefore take the place of what Benjamin
considered the aura of authentic ritualistic art, an aura not unlike that
attributed to the fetishized ethnographic object. Conrad’s investment
in the authenticity of his literary works, like an individual’s inter-
est in controlling the estimate and exchange of his or her own labor
value, presents at least one good reason for preserving some notions
of authenticity and the authorship to which it testifies. Whether

representing one’s œuvre, or even one’s contemporary culture, authen-
ticity – with all of its paradoxes, impurities, and forays into commodity
spheres – served, as we will see in the next chapter, as a recurring
strategy for pursuing greater autonomy through one’s relation to objects
in the age of an emerging global capitalism.
Notes
2. Bhabha’s reference to a “split screen” troubles the image of an ideal whole-
ness that Jacques Lacan associates with the mirror stage, the level of psychic
development at which one begins to form a sense of coherent identity.
For Lacan, all egos are fundamentally divided and thereby register the
disjunction between one’s bodily sense of self and the ideal image (Ideal-I)
with which one attempts to identify. For Bhabha, even this ideal image
appears fractured in colonial contexts that discriminate between colonial
and idealized imperial subjects during the process of ego formation. See
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 1949, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 71–81.
3. “The Uncanny,” 235. According to Freud, the subject’s relation to its double
is often “marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone
else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extrane-
ous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and inter-
changing of the self” (“Uncanny,” 234). He therefore compares the double
to those equally uncanny “forms of ego-disturbance … harking-back to par-
ticular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to
a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external
world and from other people” (“Uncanny,” 236).
4. Adolf Bastian, “Nachwort,” Original-Mittheilungen aus der Ethnologischen
Abtheilung der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin 2/3 (Berlin: Verlag von W. Spemann,
1886), 166. Considered the “father” of German cultural anthropology, Bastian
also authored one of Tylor’s primary sources for Primitive Culture. See Adolf
Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte: zur Begründung einer psychologischen
Weltanschauung (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1860).
8. Location of Culture, 106. One might nevertheless argue that the authority of
the English book is to an extent already uncertain, given the doubleness of
“Towson’s or Towser’s” manual.
9. Location of Culture, 113, 105.

18. Adolf Bastian, Die Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 63.
I have decided to translate this famous line literally, rather than figuratively,
in order to accent the distinctive flavor of Bastian’s prose.
19. See Bastian, “Nachwort,” 166 and Edward Burnett Tylor, “Mythology” in
Anthropological Institute and British Association for the Advancement of
Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents
in Uncivilized Lands, ed. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers) (London:
Edward Stanford, 1874), 62.
20. When I employ somewhat anachronistically the phrase “cultural differ-
ences,” I wish to allude to the concept of culture both in the singular form,
as a socio-evolutionary scale of development, as well as in the plural, as
traditions or lore specific to a group of people (for example, the Kunde in
Völkerkunde). Bastian articulated this distinction at the level of psychology as
one between Grundgedanken or Elementargedanken (basic or elementary forms
of thought that all humans share) and Völkergedanken (forms of thought
unique to a people differentiated by environment).
21. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” 1927, trans. Joan Riviere, Standard Edition 21, 155,
154. For Freud, this originating confrontation specifically arose in response to
female sexual difference. As he succinctly explains, the (for Freud, male) fetish-
ist disavows the idea (that the mother does not have a penis) while repressing
the affect (castration anxiety). When fetishes fail, the repressed returns. (See
“Fetishism,” 153.)
24. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 4. Fabian, in turn, borrows
these phrases from Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle
(Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1845), 2.
25. According to Pitt Rivers, “All the implements of primaeval man that were of
decomposable materials have disappeared, and can be replaced only in imagina-
tion by studying those of his nearest congener, the modern savage.” Augustus
Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays, ed. John
Linton Myres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 4. Bastian adopts a similar posi-
tion in several contemporary texts, basing this method on the common “level
of development” of both prehistoric and contemporary societies that supposedly
preceded historical consideration: “Knowledge of the oldest conditions of human-
ity or of individual peoples cannot be obtained by the usual historical ways, since
the history of a people first begins after they have reached a certain degree of
organization. … If we ever obtain reliable knowledge of the primitive ancestral
homes, ... it can only be gained with the help of comparative ethnography.” See
Adolf Bastian, Ethnologische Forschungen und Sammlung von Material für dieselben
( Jena: Hermann Costenoble, 1871), xlviii. Bastian’s “comparative method,”
influential for Tylor, involved gathering cultural forms from different small-scale
societies in order to determine their common and presumably elementary or
base forms. See, for example, Adolf Bastian, “Allgemeine Begriffe der Ethnologie,”
Anleitung zu wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen, ed. Georg Balthasar von

Neumayer (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1875), 526. Given comparative ethnogra-
phy’s emphasis on development, these earlier approaches as realized in practice
generally did not result in the kind of relativity that Christopher Herbert associ-
ates with works like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. See Christopher Herbert,
Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
26. Bastian describes the ethnographic object as “the sensually-perceivable
manifestation of creations of the spirit, the embodiment of the idea in
the products of art and industry.” See Adolf Bastian, ed., Museum Führer,
Königliche Museen: Ethnographische Sammlung (Berlin, 1872). When describ-
ing the selection of objects in his collection, Pitt Rivers adopts a similar
view: “[O]rdinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been
selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the
succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition
of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous” (Evolution of Culture, 2).
27. “Nachwort,” 166.
28. Evolution of Culture, 10.
29. Evolution of Culture, 31–2.
30. According to Pitt Rivers: “[E]ach particular word bears the impress of human
design as clearly as a weapon or a coin. A word may be said to be a tool for
the communication of thought, just as a weapon is an implement of war. …
Words … are the outward signs of ideas in the mind, and this is also the case
with tools or weapons” (Evolution of Culture, 25). According to this functional-
ist scheme, the unadorned implement represented an originary stage of the
arts. Bastian also stressed the collection of tools and implements, among
other everyday objects that ethnology studied: “What could not be said in
distinct words due to lack of writing and that lay symbolically expressed in
tools and instruments and perhaps – if the evidence someday joins together
in series requisite for statistical views – in the collections of ethnological muse-
ums, may divulge many a psychological secret.” See Adolf Bastian, “Ueber
Ethnologische Sammlungen,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 17 (Berlin: 1885), 41.
31. Evolution of Culture, 25.
32. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences,” Critical Theory Since 1965, eds Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle
(Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 88.
33. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press,
1987).
34. Johannes Fabian, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of
Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 206.
35. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 22.
36. Predicament of Culture, 29.
38. Predicament of Culture, 31. It is precisely this type of traditional “allegorical
thinking” that Schreiner and Conrad both question.
39. I am certainly not the first to make this more general claim about anthro-
pology’s methodological legacy. See, for example, George W. Stocking, Victorian
Anthropology and “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology

from Tylor to Malinowski,” Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic
Fieldwork, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983), 70–120; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other; and James Urry, “Notes
and Queries on Anthropology and the development of field methods in British
Anthropology, 1870–1920,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland (London: Trübner and Co., 1973), 45–57.
40. Copies of Notes and Queries on Anthropology were distributed widely during the
guide’s first few years in print: to the governors of Cape Colony, Barbados,
Antigua, and Ceylon; to travelers to the Transvaal and to Central Africa; and
to the secretaries of “The International Association for African Exploration”
in Brussels as well as the “Societé des Colonies Explorateur” in Paris. See
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, “Council Minutes,”
8 June 1875, 13 March 1877, 12 June 1877, and 12 February 1878. Anthropology
Library, British Museum, A10:1: 204, 269, 278, 296. So popular was this guide
that the Royal Geographical Society, famous for their series Hints to Travellers,
requested permission to republish Notes and Queries several years after its first
appearance. See “Council Minutes,” 14 December 1880, A10:1: 381.
41. Out of Our Minds, 10. For example, papers with titles like “Painting and
Drawing taught by Natural Forms” were submitted to the Institute within
the next few years. “Council Minutes,” 25 January 1876, A10:1: 224. Notes
and Queries, moreover, influenced later guides to observation and collec-
tion published by Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (now known as the
Ethnologisches Museum). Similarly, the British Admiralty’s Manual for
Scientific Enquiry (1849) was used in both England and Germany before the
appearance of Georg Balthasar von Neumayer’s comparable Anleitung zu
Wissenschaftlichen Beobachtung auf Reisen in 1875. See Lords Commissioners
of the Admiralty, A Manual of Scientific Enquiry: Prepared for the Use of Her
Majesty’s Navy; and Adapted for Travellers in General, ed. John F. W. Herschel
(London: John Murray, 1849).
42. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(London: Routledge, 1995), 54. The first edition of Notes and Queries in 1874
was comprised of two main sections that roughly coincide with present-day
divisions between biological and cultural anthropology: “The Constitution
of Man,” renamed in the 1892 edition as “Anthropography,” and “Culture,”
renamed in 1892 as “Ethnography.” Distinct from current uses of the term,
which refer mainly to the participant-observer methods developed in the
early twentieth century, ethnography was defined in the 1892 and 1899
guides as a branch of anthropology dealing with the social and intellectual
aspects of human beings rather than the structural and functional ones.
The desire to study human differentiation as an interrelated biological and
cultural phenomenon also characterized foundational works like James
Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (London:
W. Phillips, 1813) and Edward Burnett Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to
the Study of Man and Civilization (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1881).
43. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Report on the Anthropological
Notes and Queries for the Use of Travellers Published by the Committee,”
Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
(London: J. Murray, 1875), 217.
44. Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1892, 1.
45. The 1912 fourth edition, which omitted such signatures, referred back to this
practice as one of authentication. See Charles Hercules Read, “Preface,” Notes
and Queries on Anthropology 1912, v.
46. It is nevertheless important to draw a distinction between the diversity of
these scientists’ works and the comparatively more standardized guide to
which they contributed.
47. Time and the Other, 85. Embedded quotation from Emile Benveniste, Problems of
General Linguistics (1956; Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 198.
48. Time and the Other, 86, 87.
49. Time and the Other, 81.
50. Augustus Henry Land Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Preface,” Notes and Queries on
Anthropology 1874, iv.
51. Augustus Wollaston Franks, “Clothing,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology
1874, 100.
52. See Adolf Bastian, “Allgemeine Begriffe,” 530 and “Nachwort,” 166.
53. “Mythology,” 62.
54. Semper’s London Lectures of the 1850s generated wide interest in his
theories of ornamentation. Similar functionalist theories of the arts would
continue to inform the thought of historians and aestheticians into the
twentieth century.
55. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Natural Forms,” Notes and Queries on
Anthropology 1874, 136.
56. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Ornamentation,” Notes and Queries
on Anthropology 1874, 136.
57. “Ornamentation,” 120.
58. See, for example, the introduction to Herschel’s Manual of Scientific Enquiry.
59. As Christopher Herbert observes, “Culture per se is not empirically observ-
able, … but fieldwork anchored in the hypothesis of culture [“as a complex
whole”] can amass large enough quantities of detailed ethnographic data
and can deploy about this data enough rhetoric of strict scientific proce-
dure to screen its underlying conceptual problems from view.” Christopher
Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 150.
60. Harry H. Johnston, “Hints on Anthropology,” Hints to Travellers, 6th edn,
eds Douglas W. Freshfield and Captain W. J. L. Wharton (London: Royal
Geographical Society, 1889), 398.
62. Douglas W. Freshfield, “Preliminary Hints,” Hints to Travellers, 5.
64. “Hints on Anthropology,” 399.
65. Camera Lucida, 87.
66. “Hints on Anthropology,” 399.
67. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(1966; New York: Random House, 1994), 282.
68. Charles Hercules Read, “Prefatory Note,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology
1892, 87.
69. Alfred Cort Haddon, “Taking Pictures,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology,
3rd edn, eds John George Garson and Charles Hercules Read (London:
Anthropological Institute, 1899), 238.
70. “Taking Pictures,” 240.
71. “Adopted Elements in Culture,” 266.

72. See especially James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture and Routes: Travel and
Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
75. As Achebe famously argues, Conrad’s Africa is “devoid of all recognizable
humanity” and “reduc[ed] … to the role of props.” See Chinua Achebe, “An
image of Africa,” Research in African Literatures 9, no. 1 (1978): 9.
76. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham has argued, the grotesque emerges precisely at
the moment when metonyms transform into metaphors. See Geoffrey Galt
Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 71.
77. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 155.
78. “Image of Africa,” 5.
79. Ivan Kreilkamp, “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart
of Darkness,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 2 (1997): 227–8.
80. “Voice Without a Body,” 228. One might nevertheless argue that Conrad
deploys this strategy more frequently in his portrayal of Africans.
81. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 63, fn. 8. As
de Man suggests, “Tropes are transformational systems rather than grids”
(Allegories of Reading, 63).
82. Indeed, Conrad’s contemporary reviewer H. L. Mencken famously identi-
fied him as skeptic. See Henry Louis Mencken, “Joseph Conrad,” A Book of
Prefaces (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1917), 20.
84. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and
Aesthetics 9 (1985): 14.
85. These are some of the goods mentioned by Robert W. Harms in River of
Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory
Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 40.
86. This coincides with Harms’s definition of currency (River of Wealth, 88).
87. River of Wealth, 45.
89. River of Wealth, 45, 46. As Harms observes, “Beads and shells supplemented
the local nzimbu and nsi shells; brass rods supplemented copper rods; and
European cloth supplemented raffia cloth currency” (River of Wealth, 46).
91. River of Wealth, 46. Lancashire, where mechanized copper rollers were first
introduced in the production of printed calico in the late eighteenth century,
served as a major producer of “ghastly glazed calico” in the nineteenth
century.
92. River of Wealth, 191–2.
94. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
96. George Washington Williams, “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty
Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of
Congo,” 1890, reprinted in Heart of Darkness, 111.
99. While Kurtz’s raids resemble common ways of obtaining slaves among
earlier river traders, they also reflect some of the more violent forms of
imposition and reprisal European traders enacted in the 1880s and 1890s
in seeking to consolidate their authority in the Congo. See River of Wealth,
36 and 219–32. European trading posts, in turn, were sometimes burned
and their supplies destroyed (River of Wealth, 221), which may shed some
additional light on the ostensibly accidental fire at the Central Station in
Heart of Darkness.
103. Felix von Luschan, Instruktion für ethnographische Beobachtungen und
Sammlungen in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1896), 21.
104. “Work of Art,” 223.
105. “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 7.
107. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, vol. 2, 1871, 2nd
American edn (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1877), 143.
108. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,”
Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 37.
110. “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 35, 36.
111. “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 10, 7–8.
112. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich,
1831), 454.
113. The entry of the term “fetish” into medical and psychological discourses in
the 1880s arguably posed a comparable challenge.
114. David Simpson comments extensively on the connection between ivory,
bones, and death in the novella. See David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination:
Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1982).
115. Primitive Culture, 145.
116. John Hollingshead, “Fetishes at Home,” Household Words 17, no. 422
(1858): 445–7.
118. See Primitive Culture, 145, 149, 151,153, 167. Tylor also cites scientific con-
cepts prevalent during his “schoolboy days,” such as “heat and electricity
as invisible fluids passing in and out of solid bodies,” as species of fetishism
(Primitive Culture, 60). Ether, by this time, had become the recognized
“fetish” of choice.
122. William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,”
eds Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–51.
123. “Fetishism and Materialism,” 143.
131. Given his references to charms, witch doctors, and “propitiatory acts,” it is
not at all unlikely that Conrad knew at least a little about these widespread
beliefs.
139. As Harms explains: “Despite the inequities in the international economy
and the destructiveness of the slave and ivory trades, the people of the cen-
tral Zaire basin found a way to benefit indirectly from international trade
by using it to promote regional trade. The slave and ivory traders of the
upper Zaire filled any unused space in their canoes with locally made prod-
ucts which they bought and sold along the route. The cost of transporting
these local goods was almost nil because profits from slave and ivory sales
more than covered the cost of the trip. Regional trade thus grew along with
international trade. By the late nineteenth century the merchants of the
central Zaire basin had developed a regional economy complete with its
own currencies and lingua franca” (River of Wealth, 5).
140. Gone Primitive, 147. Numerous critics have also argued for either dis-
mantling or inverting this qualitative dichotomy.
142. As Kopytoff has argued, “commodities are singularized [and thereby con-
verted into culture] by being pulled out of their usual commodity sphere”
(“Cultural Biography,” 74).
143. As Harms has noted, however, cloth did not hold the same widely acknowl-
edged status as brass, as traders in regions north of the equator frequently
refused cloth as payment.
147. At a moment of historical irony, in light of Mary Kingsley’s 1897 prediction
that a “Devos patent paraffin oil tin” would sell for a high price in West
Africa 200 years hence (Travels, 679), one of El Anatsui’s hanging sculptures
sold for over half a million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2008.
148. El Anatsui emphasizes this connection in his recent interview with Professor
Chika Okeke-Agulu. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Golden Lamb
Productions. 1 April 2011.
149. Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), 56.
150. Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 66.
151. Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos
(Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1984), 24.
152. Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 65.
153. “Authenticity, n.” OED Online, 8 September 2010, http://dictionary.oed.
com/cgi/entry/50015045
154. See, for example, Conrad’s Letter to John Quinn, 6 October 1918, Collected
Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 6, 276–8. Conrad, in fact, was acutely aware
of the construction of his own authorship, as an earlier letter on the sale
of his “Youth” manuscript reveals. See Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad,
vol. 5, 215. I am indebted to Dr Christopher Fletcher of the British Library
for bringing to my attention Conrad’s concern for and marketing of the
authenticity of his manuscripts.
2
The Uncanny Object Lessons of
Mary Kingsley and Edward Blyden
While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary

Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more
memorable experiences in Victorian England:
During a visit to Blackpool many years ago, I went with some hos-
pitable friends to the Winter Garden where there were several wild
animals on exhibition. I noticed that a nurse having two children
with her, could not keep her eyes from the spot where I stood, look-
ing at first with a sort of suspicious, if not terrified curiosity. After a
while she heard me speak to one of the gentlemen who were with
me. Apparently surprised and reassured by this evidence of a genuine
humanity, she called to the children who were interested in exam-
ining a leopard, “Look, look, there is a black man and he speaks
English.”1
Blyden, a West Indian-born citizen of Liberia and resident of Sierra

Leone, assures his audience that such scenes were not unique for the
African abroad, even at the turn of the twentieth century; seen as
“an unapproachable mystery,” an African traveler like himself was “at
once ‘spotted’ as a peculiar being – sui generis” who, as if by nature,
“produce[d] the peculiar feelings of the foreigner at the first sight of
him.”2 Keenly aware of how non-Europeans were displayed at metro-
politan zoos, fairs, and exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century,
Blyden puns on the leopard’s spots in order to highlight his experience
of being marked as an object of curiosity. Indeed, the nurse’s anxious
wavering between curiosity and terror dissipates not because Blyden
ceases to appear marked, or “spotted,” but because the taxonomic crisis
he arouses by not standing on the other side of the fence has been
74
Object Lessons of Mary Kingsley and Edward Blyden 75
temporarily contained: she distances the threat of Blyden’s difference

as “a black man” while evading the equally threatening possibility of
recognizing his sameness as one who “speaks English.” The nurse, to
borrow the words of Homi Bhabha in describing the fetishism of such
“scenes of subjectification,”3 constructs the man before her as “at once
an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” in a way that attempts
to “fix” Blyden’s identity and the Victorian categories his appearance
unsettles,4 while making the relation between differences and their
appended significance appear natural.5
If, by expressing himself in his characteristically impeccable English
in order to vindicate his “genuine humanity,”6 Blyden appears to be
“putting on the white world” at the expense of his autonomy,7 he simul-
taneously wages battle in this world at the level of signification in ways
that anticipate the work of the later African nationalist and West Indian
emigrant Frantz Fanon. An extensive reader and ordained minister who
recognized the politics of exegesis as well as semiosis, Blyden implicitly
asks his audience, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard
his spots?”8 Posing a rhetorical question that argues rather than asks,
that brandishes the very texts often used against him, Blyden subtly
deploys this passage typically associated with the intransience of
human character in order to defy attempts at determining him entirely
from without. Serving as a kind of object lesson demonstrating the
need for less objectifying knowledge about Africans and their cultures,
Blyden’s anecdote challenged his contemporaries to further the lessons
he and Mary Kingsley offered through their writing.
The rhetorical skirmish that unfolds in this anecdote exemplifies
some of the more dialogic strategies of Blyden’s and Kingsley’s writ-
ing when considered in relation to methods constructed in Victorian
guides to anthropological observation. These methods, as examined in
the previous chapter, emphasized the collection of visually verifiable
facts governed by the concept of authenticity that frequently resem-
bled fetishes deployed in an attempt to determine cultural and racial
differences while presenting socially constructed relations as objects
of common knowledge. Such methods threatened to fix the subjects
of a culture not only in an ethnographic present, but also, as Fabian
has argued, in a typologically distinguished, ontologically alienated
past that precluded the possibility for intercultural communication.
Returning to familiar objects of nineteenth-century anthropological
inquiry, from fetishes to physiognomies, Kingsley and Blyden approach
facts as signs in order to highlight the importance of signification
as a process that takes place between cultures and thereby restore an
element of temporality to their ethnographic writing that often eluded

the “fact-hunting materialists” of the nineteenth century. Attempting
to reconnect these objects with the contexts from which they have been
abstracted, Kingsley and Blyden address the connections between alien-
able objects and alienated subjects. Kingsley, to this end, frequently
presents her narrative from an unconventional object-position that
troubles ethnographic authority, whereas Blyden, all too familiar with
being placed in the position of the object, adopts other methods of
challenging ethnography’s temporal imperative. The future each writer
envisions for West Africa, however, ultimately informs the system of
value within which objects are construed, and Blyden, if he wishes to
resist Kingsley’s tinny, typed image of the African trader in “a remote
future” – “still with his tom-tom in his dug-out canoe – just as willing to
sell as ‘big curios’ the débris of [Europe’s] importations” – must skirmish
with his revered friend as well (Travels, 679). Although both authors
devoted themselves to combating what was called “race prejudice” by
educating their audiences about African beliefs and customary laws in
ways that complicated established anthropological methods, Blyden,
more than Kingsley, worked to expose the circular relation between the
social organization of labor and race prejudice – between economic and
ontological forms of alienation – that underwrote imperial capitalism’s
most destructive means.
1 If Objects Could Speak, “many a wild story the handles

of your table knives could tell”9
While trading with the Fang in the relatively remote West African
village of Efoua, Mary Kingsley first encountered a scene to which she
would return in her narrative. Once the flow of goods had reached
a lull, one Fang chief hurried back to his dwelling to search for a par-
ticularly “precious article” to offer in trade (Travels, 272). After a flurry
of activity and anxious questioning, after rummaging through one box
after another under torchlight, the chief at last returned with the article
in question that Kingsley’s narrative gradually unveils almost in the
manner of a striptease:
It was a bundle of bark cloth tied round something most carefully

with tie tie. This being removed, disclosed a layer of rag, which was
unwound from round a central article. Whatever can this be? thinks I;
some rare and valuable object doubtless, let’s hope connected with
Fetish worship, and I anxiously watched its unpacking; in the end,
however, it disclosed, to my disgust and rage, an old shilling razor.

(Travels, 272)
In this unveiling, the familiar rather than the exotic reveals itself with
the lifting of the final rag; nevertheless, the estranged return of the
familiar in this scene proves equally as unsettling. Kingsley recollects
this moment later in her journey when she observes, “[I]t’s Africa all
over; presenting one with familiar objects when one least requires
them” and the unfamiliar when one least expects it (Travels, 399).
“One’s view of life gets quite distorted,” she concludes: “I don’t believe
I should be in the least surprised to see a herd of hippo stroll on to
the line out of one of the railway tunnels of Notting Hill Gate station”
(Travels, 399). Expecting to find facts related to fetish worship “in the
heart of Gorilla-land,” Kingsley, ironically, encounters a conflict of value
between different systems of exchange and constructions of objecthood
like those that initially gave rise to the idea of the fetish (Travels, 399).
Rather than finding the African chief unwilling to enter into trade,
however, it is the European collector of facts, as fetishist, who refuses to
accept the familiar item as an acceptably authentic ethnographic object.
Still troubled by the memory of objects out of place while attempting
to organize into a coherent narrative the notes she returned with to
London, the “disgust” and “rage” she experiences belong to both the
collector and the writer. Mavungu, the blood-smeared N’kisi or “power
figure” depicted in Figure 4 that adorned the entrance hall of Kingsley’s
London home, may well have served not only as a memento to her
travels but also, because of its association with traditional West African
ritual, as a defense against the threat of such disorder.
Having read the works of leading ethnologists, anthropologists, and
naturalists like Edward Burnett Tylor, Adolf Bastian, Theodore Waitz,
Charles Darwin, and John Lubbock, as well as guides like Hints to
Travellers, Mary Kingsley was well outfitted with contemporary theories
of ethnography among her “instruments of observation” before sailing
for West Africa (Travels, 436). Accordingly, Kingsley follows Freshfield’s
advice that “the best instruments are the traveller’s own eyes” and
places the careful observation and detailed recording of facts among her
highest priorities. She moreover upholds her contemporaries’ emphasis
on authenticity by seeking facts among “the real African … away from
the coast towns,”10 living in an “original state” in regions that “had not
been in contact with white culture” and remaining “uninfluenced by
European ideas” (Travels, 429, 282, 429); she attempted to record as
unobtrusively as possible the practices, beliefs, and objects that were
Figure 4 Mavungu, Nganzi, Democratic Republic of Congo, by 1900.

PRM.1900.39.70. Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford,
England
“original” or “purely native” (Travels, 66, 486). Conceiving of her

ethnographic writing as “collections of facts,” properly labeled and
contextualized like objects in museum displays, she proposes that these
facts will speak for themselves (Travels, 430).
Her work nevertheless proves less neutral than these comments
suggest. Throughout her narrative, she acknowledges objects that ini-
tially appear out of place and time and concludes that “West Africa
is undoubtedly bad for one’s mind”; she might well have said that
her experiences in Africa were bad for one’s method (Travels, 399).
Such troubling moments of hybridity, which according to Bhabha
“reverse[s] … the process of domination through disavowal” and

thereby the fetishism of colonial discourse,11 produce some of the most
intriguing passages in Kingsley’s narrative that defy the temporal logic
of authenticity. Rather than overlooking such moments or omitting
them from her narrative, rather than “clear[ing] the imported furniture
out of native houses before photographing them,” Kingsley engages
such apparent enigmas and attempts to view facts as multiply interpre-
table as well as culturally and historically contingent.12 As we will see in
her encounters with several more cosmopolitan African residents, how-
ever, a residual anxiety surrounding this realization localizes around
precisely these imports. Through her pursuit of facts, and especially
those pertaining to fetishism, Kingsley begins to question and to revise
the categories of knowledge prescribed to the anthropological observer;
facts, for Kingsley, serve as a discursive battleground for representing
and, indeed, speaking for Africans during a period of unprecedented
colonial expansion. Like the photograph that captures more than the
photographer sees, while not always bringing all of its negative’s details
to light, the documentary realism of Kingsley’s narrative lays bare some
of the nuances of this struggle.
While Kingsley playfully alludes to the devoted positivism of her
anthropological predecessors when narrating her experience “[s]talking
the wild West African idea,” her dedication to observing and recording
details while tracking African objects and concepts back to their origi-
nal cultural contexts without bias proves no less earnest (Travels, 430).
Patience and flexibility of mind, according to Kingsley, enable one to
“bag [one’s] game,” as the observer’s European biases are equally as
threatening to the production of authenticity as an African society’s
contact with European culture (Travels, 434). Photography, moreover,
provides Kingsley with a model for recording in her writing “facts
about which there can be no question.” Describing her method as
“confin[ing] [herself] to facts and arrang[ing] those facts on as thin
a line of connecting opinion as possible,” she refers to herself as “a mere
photographic plate” (Studies, ix), and, in the words of Johnston, strives
to “make [her] notes like [her] pictures and photographs.” Accepting
the role ascribed to the ethnographer as collector rather than theorist,
Kingsley proposes through her writing to provide a photograph for
others to decode: “I have to show you a series of pictures of things, and
hope you will get from those pictures the impression which is the truth.
I dare not set myself up to tell you the truth. I only say, look at it: and
to the best of my ability faithfully give you, not an artist’s picture, but
a photograph, an overladen with detail, colourless version” (Studies, xi).
While “colourless” may hardly seem an adequate description of

Kingsley’s often wry and discursive prose, her claim to a black and white
photographic realism manifests itself in the wealth of visual details
her narrative offers. Kingsley nevertheless acknowledges that even
a collection of photographs requires a certain amount of ordering and
labeling to render its facts significant: “The state of confusion the mind
of a collector like myself gets into on the West Coast is something
simply awful, and my notes for a day will contain facts relating to the
kraw-kraw, price of onions, size and number of fish caught, cooking
recipes, genealogies, oaths (native form of ), law cases, and market
prices” (Travels, 73). The fieldworker’s memory, she continues, resem-
bles a “rag-bag” through which one rummages in search of a “particular
fact rag” (Travels, 73). Writing, Kingsley suggests, enables the fieldworker
to convert “the varied tangled rag-bag of facts” into the more ordered
“results of [a] collection” to lay before “some great thinker” like one of
her most favored confidants E. B. Tylor (Travels, 436). To this extent,
her adherence to anthropology’s visual-spatial methods aligns her with
the more Eurocentric approach to the construction of knowledge that
Fabian critiques.
That facts, as rags, as worn fragments of textile, possess little value
until woven into the text of the fieldworker’s narrative, however,
suggests that Kingsley is simultaneously aware of the materiality of
facts and their status as signs whose meanings unfold in time. The field-
worker – as Tylor warned her after her first journey to West Africa – is
not only in danger of collecting facts bereft of contextual narratives and
thus of value while “empty[ing] [a heap of] them over any distinguished
ethnologist’s head” and bewildering him, but the fieldworker may also
misread or fail to read facts (Travels, 439). Until one learns to “see things
worth seeing” (Travels, 103), the forests and the minds of its inhabitants
remain – in keeping with Bastian’s analogy – “a library whose books you
cannot read” (Travels, 102). Only a careful understanding of African
values and belief systems, Kingsley argues, will help render the cultural
texts of this library legible. Time and repetition enable the observer to
understand these texts, as well as the processes by which their meaning
is made, construed, and misconstrued. Kingsley laments while discuss-
ing the challenges of performing geographic research how Hints to
Travellers should verse its readers in “every separate native word, or set
of words, signifying ‘I don’t know,’” given how frequently European
travelers and surveyors had mistakenly recorded this response as the
indigenous name for local villages and rivers (Travels, 237). Such self-
consciousness guides her as a reader as well as writer of texts. Crafting
a highly visual ethnographic narrative while relying largely on trade

English and translators to communicate with her African hosts, she at
least recognizes the limitations of the sign systems she employs.
Kingsley especially argued for a more contextual understanding of
the facts about fetishism, and her critical observations placed her at
odds with several of her influential contemporaries. Expressing reserva-
tions toward Tylor’s definition of fetishism as a branch of animism in
which “spirits [are] embodied in, or attached to or conveying influence
through certain material objects,” Kingsley warns against potentially
misleading corollaries drawn about African notions of objecthood
(Studies, 97). The concept of the fetish, she argues, represents a larger
system of religious belief comprised of both embodied and unembodied
spirits and thus is in no way reducible to the “worship of a material
object” (Studies, 100). Kingsley’s understanding of African fetishism
offers a corresponding theory of African object relations: “What strikes
a European when studying [West African Fetishism] is the lack of gaps
between things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the
conception of spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair
of grade – not of essential difference in essence” (Studies, 109).13 Thus,
the spirit of a shapely pitcher may haunt a spring and beguile women
into leaving their own earthenware in exchange; the spirit of a spear
may revisit a particularly treacherous path and injure those who pass
(Travels, 522); the spirit residing in a human may wander off during the
night and stumble into the net and possession of a local witch doctor;
the spirit in a charm may help one to “keep foot in path” or to “see
Bush” (Travels, 239, 102); or the spirit housed in a charm may die or be
lured away, leaving the object perfectly useless and “only fit to sell to
a white man as ‘a big curio’” (Travels, 449). Such a company of spirits,
populating the spaces within and between humans and things, renders
the animate and the inanimate, the seen and unseen, the corporeal and
the spiritual continuous rather than distinct.
What may initially appear to be a quibble over terminology thus
emerges in Kingsley’s discussion as an attempt to think outside
of European dichotomies between spirituality and materiality, and
between subjects and objects, which had underwritten representations
of Africa and the very history of the term “fetish” since at least the
Enlightenment. As William Pietz suggests about the term’s dominant
usage from seventeenth-century Dutch travel narratives to nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, the concept
of the fetish consistently “involve[d] the object’s untranscended materi-
ality.”14 This quality, in turn, was projected onto European constructions
of African character as one incapable of elevation beyond the material

world. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, declared in The
Philosophy of History (1837) that the African fetish possesses neither
“independence as an object of religious worship” nor “æsthetic inde-
pendence as a work of art,”15 as it remains in the power of the individual
who initially endowed it with significance. The fetish, as an arbitrarily
selected embodiment of the supernatural powers the individual wishes
to wield against the threat of natural elements, serves to illustrate
Hegel’s claim that Africans possess no sense of a general, human con-
nection to a higher power of “God, or Law.”16 In short, Hegel attributes
to African societies a level of consciousness that recognizes no “category
of Universality” with which individuals identify themselves or others.
This acknowledgment of “Universality,” of the world of ideas in which
one “realizes [one’s] own being,” for Hegel, forms the basis of human
civilization and the beginning of “History”: “What we properly under-
stand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in
the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only
as on the threshold of the World’s History.”17 The “Undeveloped Spirit”
or lack of self-consciousness that Hegel associates with African societies
ostensibly derives from being subject to the conditions of nature, which
a sufficient level of civilization and human order has not yet subdued.
“The African,” according to Hegel, represents “the natural man in his
completely wild and untamed state.”18 This association of Africa with
the “Unhistorical” translated, by way of universalist and developmen-
tal theories of human history, into nineteenth-century anthropology’s
interest in African culture as the residual site of what became known by
the 1830s as human prehistory.
While Kingsley’s reading of African fetishism held by those living in
“a thoroughly wild part of West Africa” as a “perfectly natural view of
Nature” may share several of Hegel’s assumptions about “natural man,”19
the conclusions she draws reveal markedly different criteria of judg-
ment. Fetishism for Kingsley represents an immanently spiritual, rather
than untranscended, materialism that is nevertheless neither godless
nor arbitrary. The best preparation for adopting what she considered
a “perfectly natural,” less human-privileged “view of Nature” in order to
understand fetishism entails rethinking our relation to objects: “[T]he
wisest way is to get into the state of mind of an old marine engineer who
oils and sees that every screw and bolt of his engines is clean and well
watched, and who loves them as living things, caressing and scolding
them himself, defending them, with stormy language, against the asper-
sions of the silly, uninformed outside world, which persists in regarding
them as mere machines, a thing his superior intelligence and experience

knows they are not” (Travels, 441–2). Representing a less objectifying
encounter with the object world without, in turn, anthropomorphizing
it, the mariner’s relation to his steam engine provides an example of
the more fluid boundaries between humans and things that fetishism,
for Kingsley, implies. More than resembling Marlow’s ability to “find
[himself]” by working on his steamship in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Kingsley’s mariner constructs a “world” for himself, and arguably his
subjectivity therein, through his relationship with the steam engine.
Marlow, anthropomorphizing the steamship, values it as the embodi-
ment of his own seemingly unalienated labor: “I had expended enough
hard work on her to make me love her. … She had given me a chance
to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. … I don’t like work. …
but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own
reality” (Heart of Darkness, 31). As Marlow repairs the steamboat for his
own use, we do not get the immediate sense of his labor, by way of the
steamship, entering into exchange and thereby becoming fully alien-
ated from him. Although granting Marlow the chance “to come out”
and realize himself as a being in the world through his embodiment
within a built environment, the steamship nevertheless serves more as
a catalyst for Marlow’s transformation through work. Finding his “own
reality” by defining and distinguishing himself from his surroundings
through his work differs from the mariner’s perception of the steam
engine as a sentient, yet not necessarily human, being – as a “living
thing” – that collaboratively brings a world into existence.20
The steam engine, in Kingsley’s example, approaches what Bill Brown
would call a “hybrid object,” in that it “figure[s] as a participant in
the intersubjective constitution of reality.”21 As Brown suggests, “we
may ‘share’ a perspective with things no less than with persons” and
such an engagement may play a role in the formation of subjects.22
Kingsley’s mariner, identifying with the durabilities and frailties of
his steam engine in all its component parts, while acknowledging the
object’s differing material limitations and resistances, defines himself
against other humans who do not adopt his “shared perspective” with
the object and “re-produces himself as subject, triangulated between the
object and himself.”23 The mariner, in effect, produces himself as a mem-
ber of a subculture with which Kingsley, herself, identified: the [G]old
Coasters. The child of Brown’s example who enters into a triangulated
relationship with a doll in the process of constituting a sense of subject-
hood within a family or a culture, however, does so through engaging
with a thing that bears resemblance to a person.24 Kingsley’s mariner,
by animating and identifying with an object that neither resembles nor

directly conforms to the measure of humans, offers a more appropriate
parallel for fetishism, in which, unlike idolatry, identification with an
object does not depend on the quality of human resemblance.25 The
choice of example moreover proves significant, as European maritime
technologies figure prominently in the discourses about fetishism that
Pietz recounts. Serving as an example of hypostatization,26 specifically
as the “propensity to personify European technological objects” result-
ing in “a false perception of causality,”27 Africans’ ostensible perception
of European ships and machinery as “living things” represented to
Enlightenment theorists of fetishism a false – that is, without natural-
scientific basis – understanding of nature and its mechanics. In contrast,
Kingsley employs the natural-scientific methods of nineteenth-century
anthropology to reassess the facts about African fetishism available to
her while exposing and, to a certain extent, undermining European
perspectives that disavow African differences. If, as Brown suggests,
“accepting the otherness of things is the condition for accepting
otherness as such,”28 then Kingsley’s account of African fetishism and
object relations offers her European readers a model for attempting to
respect difference that simultaneously places nineteenth-century ethno-
graphic and imperial authority in question.
Kingsley’s recurring attentiveness to moments when “the object
appears to assume a life of its own” highlights for her European read-
ers “the uncanniness of everyday life” rather than its stabilizing and
reassuring familiarity.29 The object world of Kingsley’s narrative fre-
quently resonates with sentience and significance to the extent that
the stability, as well as safety, of the narrator’s present position falls
into question. The multi-page saga of how mangrove swamps develop,
while distinctly anthropomorphized, offers an estranging point of con-
trast to the human historical narratives that it implicitly references. As
Kingsley narrates, “these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to have
laid down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for colonisation, for the
time gradually comes when other mangroves can and do colonise on it,
and flourish, extending their territory steadily; and the mud-bank joins
up with, and becomes a part of, Africa” (Travels, 91). This narrative of
colonization, juxtaposing the deep geological time of natural develop-
ment with the relatively brief development of European imperialism,
ultimately serves more to de-anthropomorphize the reader’s sense of
time than to anthropomorphize the process of geological transforma-
tion. Entering a more overtly uncanny register, Kingsley estranges her
readers further by directly placing them within this expanded time
frame to expose the transience of the present: “[Y]ou see … miles and
miles sometimes of gaunt white mangrove skeletons standing on gray
stuff that is not yet earth and is no longer slime, and through the crust
of which you can sink into rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are
dead, buried, and forgotten, this will become a forest of … trees” (Travels,
91). This perspective from the vantage of the non-anthropomorphic
world indirectly points to the ephemerality of imperial presence, and
the reader’s position therein, at the height of the scramble for Africa.
Kingsley’s use of object-centered perspectives, like her much discussed
deployment of irony, distinguishes her writing from that of many pre-
decessors.30 In this regard, Mary Louise Pratt’s assessment of Kingsley
in relation to previous travel writers would equally apply to ethnogra-
phers: “Kingsley creates value by decisively and rather fiercely rejecting
the textual mechanisms that created value in the discourse of her male
predecessors: fantasies of dominance and possession, painting that is
simultaneously a material inventory.”31
Such a counter-imperial perspective enters into Kingsley’s self-conscious
representation of her own empirical project. While cautioning the
reader against the treachery of mangrove swamps, Kingsley casts her
position as scientific collector in an uncanny light by envisioning the
collector of objects as a potential museum object of the future:
[T]he mud is of too unstable a nature and too deep, and sinking into
it means staying in it, at any rate until some geologist of the remote
future may come across you, in a fossilised state, when that man-
grove swamp shall have become dry land. Of course if you … really
care about Posterity, and Posterity’s Science, you will jump over into
the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
(Travels, 89)
Not only does this passage allude to the observer being observed, but also
to the collector being collected by the animate mangrove swamp. Again
the allusion to geological time serves to estrange the reader from the
present, only this time with the suggestion that the distinction between
subjects and objects, between the animate and the inanimate, is merely
a matter of time – or, more precisely, the transformation of matter over
time. Obviously not quite so devoted to scientific posterity, Kingsley’s
light-hearted irony enables her readers to contemplate such disturbingly
alternative perspectives while maintaining a sufficiently comfortable
distance.32 While irony characterizes the prevailing tone of Kingsley’s

larger narrative, such particularly self-conscious (because self-effacing)
moments help to prepare the European reader for the ensuing discus-
sion of African fetishism as an alternate and seemingly uncanny form
of subject–object relations. Kingsley’s usual humor, as her biographer
Katherine Frank frequently notes, was modestly self-deprecating or self-
effacing.33 I would like to suggest that this self-effacement corresponds
with a broader natural historical perspective that, if not quite developed
into the effacement of selfhood, at least encourages us to reevaluate our
self-gratifyingly privileged position. Indeed, Kingsley’s humor echoes
that of a famous 1830 lithograph by the English geologist Henry de la
Beche, reproduced in the frontispiece to Francis T. Buckland’s Curiosities of
Natural History (1857) and shown in Figure 5. As Kingsley would say, such
a perspective disabuses us of our own conceits (Travels, 102).
Warning against the physical dangers European travelers may
encounter in Africa, Kingsley prepares the way for engaging with a more
Figure 5 Henry de la Beche, Awful Changes, 1830

subtle epistemological peril. She suggests that the “mind requires

protection” when weaving its way “through the tangled forests, the
dark caves, the swamps and the fogs of” African thought (Travels, 440).
Summing up the experience of beginning to understand fetishism and
“African metaphysics,” she likens the lingering effects of engaging this
perspective to those of a fever (Travels, 441):
The fascination of the African point of view is as sure to linger in

your mind as the malaria in your body. Never then will you be able
to attain to the gay, happy cock-sureness regarding the Deity and the
Universe of those people who stay at home, and whom the Saturday
so aptly called “the suburban agnostics” … . The truth is, the study
of natural phenomena knocks the bottom out of any man’s conceit
if it is done honestly and not by selecting only those facts that fit in
with his pre-conceived or ingrafted notions.
Kingsley, alluding to the Saturday Review’s coinage “suburban agnostic,”

refers to those who question their religious doctrine only to the extent
that they “remove … from it all the inconvenient portions,” such
as the threat of hell and divine retribution, while keeping the more
tolerable portions, like the promise of eternal salvation (Travels, 661).
A true agnostic, perhaps one on par with Thomas Henry Huxley who
coined the term in 1869, would, somewhat like the fact-hunting mate-
rialist, question the possibility of knowing anything beyond empirical,
non-transcendent phenomena. If, as Kingsley suggests, a more objective
examination of facts would lead one to question the presumptions
underlying one’s beliefs, then such an inquiry could eventually lead
one to question the underlying beliefs that frame and give rise to the
construction of facts. In other words, scientific facts emerge as much
a product of cultural value as other forms of knowledge.
The particularly unsettling effects of studying African fetishism,
as Kingsley articulates them, resemble some of the challenges that
Marlow faces in Heart of Darkness. Marlow does “not know whether [he]
stood on the ground or floated in the air” when he confronts Kurtz,
who has “kicked the very earth to pieces” and confounded European
metaphysics (Heart of Darkness, 65). Not only does Kurtz undermine the
truths by which Europe lives, by answering to nothing sacred or secular
“above or below him” (Heart of Darkness, 65), but also, as Edward Said
has famously argued, he places “reality itself” in question by revealing
how “all human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable
reality to which words approximate only by will or convention.”34
After witnessing Kurtz’s last judgment and surviving his own near-death
struggle with fever, through which life emerges as “that mysterious
arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose,” Marlow returns to
Europe with anything but a sense of “happy cock-sureness” and finds
himself “totter[ing]” about the streets and resentfully viewing the faces
of its inhabitants “so full of stupid importance”: “They trespassed upon
my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me
an irritating pretence because I felt so sure they could not possibly
know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of
commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance
of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings
of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend” (Heart of
Darkness, 69, 70). Conrad’s Marlow, like Kingsley, does not linger over
the physical dangers he experienced; he instead wanders unsteadily
through a world of fallen metaphors that give way to the more dis-
persed poetics of metonymy.
While Conrad and Kingsley both frequently make use of the sec-
ond person “you” in order to immerse and implicate their readers in
their respective narratives, and thereby to deepen the impact of their
skepticism, Kingsley’s approach seems less conventional given the
expectations of her genre. Conrad’s use of the second person builds on
an oral tradition of storytelling, albeit with a tale that conveys its
meaning through dispersal and concentric narrative voices; Kingsley’s
adoption of the second-person pronoun, which, at times, enters into
an extended second-person narrative, disrupts the familiar perspective
of nineteenth-century ethnographic narratives. Whether luring her
readers into a mangrove swamp or placing them in the position of need-
ing to return a defunct protecting charm to the local medicine man,
Kingsley locates her reader immediately within the culture she observes:
“Finding, we will say, that you have been upset and half-drowned, and
your canoe-load of goods lost three times in a week, that your paddles
are always breaking, and the amount of snags in the river and so on is
abnormal, you judge that your canoe-charm has stopped. Then you go
to the medicine man who supplied you with it and complain” (Travels,
449). Although many of her readers have likely never stepped foot in
a canoe, much less invested in a fetish charm, the trip to the medicine
man begins to sound vaguely familiar: like a visit to a shifty merchant
or any sort of confidence man. While irony, once again, underwrites
the subtle comparison, the placement of the reader directly into the
ethnographic narrative disrupts what Fabian describes as the usual
dialogue in ethnographic writing between the “I” of the ethnographer
and the “you” of the listener who discuss the third person – or rather
the “non-person.” Positioning the reader as both listener and object
of ethnographic inquiry – the “non-person” – not only troubles the
reader’s ability to maintain adequate distance from the object but also
uncannily threatens to convert the reader into the ethnographic object
him- or herself.35
Kingsley further destabilizes the position of the subject in her
narrative by occasionally providing access to more explicitly object-
centered perspectives. When providing her readers with information
on the West African ivory trade, she envisions such a perspective in
a telling aside: “[M]any a wild story the handles of your table knives
could tell you, if their ivory has passed through Fan hands. For ivory
is everywhere an evil thing before which the quest for gold sinks
into a parlour game” (Travels, 325). Reducing the pursuit of gold to
a parlor game says quite a lot, considering the long history of its role
in West African trade and its increasingly bloody pursuit in southern
Africa since its 1886 discovery in Johannesburg. Kingsley proceeds to
reveal the sources and violent methods of ivory’s acquisition, and the
condition of “ivory fever” that she recounts finds fuller elaboration
in Conrad’s novella just two years later. Kingsley, once again, directly
implicates her readers by striking close to home – the dining room, to be
precise – and by doing so through the use of second-person pronouns.
Providing her readers with the history of their own utensils, while
sparing no delicate sensibilities by mingling the suggestion of murder
with family meals, helps to demystify the everyday domestic object
by revealing the social conditions of its production. By animating the
object and attributing a “story” or narrative to it, Kingsley continues to
envision the object world from the perspective of African fetishism as
she understands it; in short, she attributes to the object a kind of “social
life” that highlights, rather than obscures, the relations between people
that the object facilitates.36 This method of reading, in part informed by
her study of African fetishism, approaches what Arjun Appadurai would
call “methodological fetishism.”37 The result is an uncanny perspec-
tive from the position of the object that works against the fetishism of
capitalist commodity production, in which, according to Marx, the true
source of a commodity’s value – the alienated labor that produced it – is
obscured.38 Kingsley’s table knife “story” thus takes its place in a long
history of demystifying narratives, from the anti-slave trade narratives
that encouraged the English lady to take her tea without sugar to more
recent reflections on engagement rings and the “blood diamond” traffic
in contemporary West and South Africa.
Kingsley’s study of fetishism informed and was motivated by her

larger project of attempting to respect contemporary indigenous
institutions and systems of value in West Africa, rather than merely
“salvaging” them for posterity. When recounting transactions at a mis-
sionary store in the French Congo, for example, she explains how each
item in the store belongs to a particular class of value recognized by
local customers; traders need to understand these different classes and
their respective worth in order to faciliate exchange (Travels, 203):
The payment of that fine consisted of a hundred balls of indiarub-

ber, six teeth (elephant tusks), four bundles of pissava fibre, three
Odeaka cheeses, a canoe, a collection of iron swords, two English
china basins, ten billets of ebony, a canoe load of cam wood mixed
with billets of bar wood as an adulteration, and five ladies in rather
bad repair. My friend the official, who was new to West Africa, said:
“Would you come, Miss Kingsley, and look at the museum that has
just arrived?” On observing it I remarked: “My dear sir, this is the
payment of the fine; it’s good value and quite correct.” “That’s what
they say,” he replied, “and, my dear madam, I can understand it up to
a certain point, but –” “Well, what point?” I inquired. “Those ladies,”
he replied. “They are quite correct,” I said. “Correct?” he ejaculated.
I hastily added, “From a scientific point of view.” (Studies, 377)
What makes this scene particularly humorous, yet illuminating, are the
points of impasse in the exchange. The official’s hesitancy in accepting
the five women reveals residual spheres of exchange within European
culture: humans should not be directly exchangeable for objects. Were
humans, regardless of their portability, to enter into exchange as com-
modities, this would constitute a kind of slave trade, which England
banned on ostensibly moral grounds in 1806.39 When, ironically, the
official attempts to calculate the worth of the women in order to request
ivory in place of them, he encounters yet another conflict of value.
As Kingsley explains, “I was called in later on, however, because this
official, doubtless from the natural gallantry of his nation, put a far
higher equivalent value on the ladies than the local view, which was
their true worth” (Studies, 378). That Kingsley refers to the indigenous
value of the women as “their true worth” suggests the degree to which
traders and colonial officials needed to adjust their value systems to
local markets; that the official refuses the women as acceptable pay-
ment, however, reveals the extent to which this adjustment formed part
of a larger negotiation. Perhaps most troubling to the missionary store
clerk, which this scene tends to obscure, is the fact that the payment
serves as compensation for members of the chief’s district consuming
three African Roman Catholics.
Kingsley connects this intentionally shocking yet light-hearted example
with more immediate concerns. The Hut Tax War of 1898 that erupted in
Sierra Leone in response to colonial injustices generally and the English
Crown’s taxation on African dwellings to help fund the railroad in
particular represented to Kingsley an “object lesson” illustrating the need
for consulting indigenous systems of value when introducing new legisla-
tion directly involving land and property rights (Studies, 332). Kingsley’s
reinvestigation of West African religions, family structures, and judicial
practices as rational and internally coherent systems contributes to this
project of revaluation. Even her bold defense of plural marriage, influenced
by John Mensah Sarbah,40 relates to her support of indigenous social orga-
nization and communal access to land. Traders rather than Crown Colony
administrators emerge in this project as the understanding, comparatively
benevolent imperialists of the future, and Kingsley lobbies for expanding
relations with Africa through trade instead of direct colonization and “the
introduction of European culture – governmental, religious, or mercantile”
(Travels, 675). Helping to mediate different systems of value between
Europe and Africa, traders moreover benefited economically from better
understanding the cultural construction of value. Each item in the mis-
sionary store was exchangeable for a certain amount of items of another
class. Only when traveling among a remote tribe of the Fang did Kingsley
encounter different spheres of exchange, generally associated with a less
advanced form of exchange technology in which certain spheres of goods
are not directly exchangeable for those of another sphere.41 In the case of
the Fang tribe that Kingsley studied, wives occupied a higher sphere
than lesser commodities like ivory or rubber and therefore could only
be purchased through the medium of bikei: “little iron imitation axe-
heads which are tied up in bundles called ntet, ten going to one bundle”
(Travels, 320). Bikei served as significant items for mediating value
relations between different spheres of exchange within Fang society. In
many of the societies Kingsley visited, however, any item was potentially
exchangeable for any other, thereby better accommodating trade with
European capitalist markets. If objects could speak to European traders,
they would ultimately explain how better to exchange them.
Kingsley, herself a trader sensitive to a range of African values she
observes in the present, nevertheless tends to privilege European values
when envisioning object lessons of the future. If, as Fabian suggests,
visualism or “[t]he hegemony of the visual as a mode of knowing
may … directly be linked to the political hegemony of an age group,

a class, or one society over another,”42 then Kingsley’s “pictures of things”
prove less disinterested than one might expect. According to Fabian, the
visual and spatial activity of anthropological fieldwork that emerged with
the professionalization of the discipline promoted the “organization of
a segment of bourgeois society for the purpose of serving that society’s
inner continuity.”43 Not surprisingly, Kingsley’s visual-spatial methods
coincide with a bourgeois interest in furthering economic imperialism
in West Africa. Traders, she suggests, will assist in educating Africans in
the market value of certain commodities, such as coffee, and in remedy-
ing the “wasteful” techniques employed by African rubber collectors
(Travels, 642, 677). When she proposes enhancing “the little trickle
of native trade” by transporting goods from the interior on European
steamships rather than the caravans of African middlemen (Travels,
637), the value of efficiency emerges in her argument as the product of
future ideological conditioning: “What Africa wants at present, and will
want for the next 200 years at least, are workers, planters, plantation
hands, miners, and seamen; and there are no schools in Africa to teach
these things or the doctrine of the nobility of labour save the techni-
cal mission-schools” (Travels, 671). It becomes evident in the valuation
of mining and planting over bookmaking and printing that her ideal
educated African is being prepared for entering the working classes of
an emerging global capitalist market. Prolific West African intellectuals
like Blyden, who contributed regularly to local newspapers, would likely
have taken issue with this limited role. Despite his mutual support of
agrarian development in the interior,44 Blyden also looked toward other
areas of development: “The great African works of the future … whether
in literature, religion, or science, will proceed from sources least affected
by the conventional ideas of Europe, though influenced probably by the
European system and employing European methods.”45 The “doctrine of
the nobility of labour,” moreover, arguably serves as the ideological coun-
terpart to the alienation of labor under capitalist forms of production,
while Kingsley’s emphasis on efficiency and “teaching [Africans] how to
work” supplies the familiar moral pretense (Travels, 680).
2 Out of England: Objects and Others
Kingsley’s object-centered perspectives and respect for African val-

ues assume different aspects when she considers the social lives of
commodities that travel to Africa instead of England. While the
entry of African commodities into England may potentially taint the
morality of the bourgeois dining room, the migration of English com-

modities in the opposite direction serves as an argument for economic
imperialism:
[ J]ust as the surplus population created by a strong race must find

other lands to live in, so must the surplus manufactures of a strong
race find other markets; both forms of surplus are to a strong race
wealth.
The main difference between these things is that the surplus
manufactured article is in no need of considering climate in the
matter of its expansion. It stands in a relation to the man who goes
out into the world with it akin to that of the wife and family to
the colonist; the trader will no more meekly stand having its trade
damaged than the colonist will stand having his family damaged;
but at the same time, the mere fact that the climate destroys trade-
stuff is, well, all the better for trade, and trade, moreover, leads the
trader to view the native population from a different standpoint to
that of the colonist. To that family man the native is a nuisance,
sometimes a dangerous one, at the best an indifferent servant, who
does not do his work half so well as in a decent climate he can
do it himself. To the trader the native is quite a different thing, a
customer. (Studies, 250)
In building her case for the production of markets over the develop-
ment of colonies, Kingsley replaces the colonist’s wife with the trader’s
commodities. The insalubrious tropical climate, from the perspective
of the commodity, appears comparatively benign or even ideal, given
Kingsley’s logic of obsolescence. The environment’s ability to rust steel
rather efficiently, she explains, is ultimately good for English industry
(Studies, 254). While Marx may have taught us to be suspicious of
humans entering into objectified relations with other humans and of
commodities, through their circulation, entering into social relation-
ships with other commodities, Kingsley evokes these very conditions to
argue for the benefits of domestic commodity production and overseas
circulation while ostensibly keeping the welfare of the English “manu-
facturing classes” in mind. This allusion to the “manufacturing classes,”
however, sounds strategically vague. While the development of overseas
markets would likely help to enhance England’s balance of trade, as
well as the manufacturer’s accumulation and reinvestment of capital, it
would not necessarily improve the working conditions or wages of the
typical English factory worker.
From the perspective of a commodity-centered intercultural encounter,

Kingsley suggests, Africans appear as customers to appease rather than
rivals or foes to suppress. While likening the economic to the biological
development of a “strong race” offers a social Darwinist argument for
the promotion of overseas markets, Kingsley envisions the “strong race”
thriving on the mutual benefit, rather than the detriment, of what
would, by unfortunate default, be considered the less strong race(s). Thus
the familiar turn-of-the-century survival of the fittest – conveniently also
laissez-faire – imperial rhetoric is put in the service, however tenuous, of
a symbiotic relationship between Europe and Africa, between Manchester
by way of Liverpool and present-day Nigeria. How well this logic worked
in West Africa we see, once again, in Conrad’s 1899 novella, in which
the uses of indigenous labor make the life of the Manchester factory
worker seem like polite dinner conversation. The idea that a strong race
needs to expand its markets and sell its more refined commodities to
others, moreover, lays the ideological foundations for the economic and
cultural imperialisms of the subsequent centuries. According to her logic
of mutual benefit, expanding relations with Africa through trade rather
than direct colonization would moreover help to preserve the indigenous
institutions she so devotedly studied: “Speaking at large, the introduc-
tion of European culture – governmental, religious, or mercantile – has
a destructive action on all the lower races; many of them the govern-
mental and religious sections have stamped right out; but trade has never
stamped a race out when disassociated from the other two, and it cer-
tainly has had no bad effect on tropical Africa” (Travels, 675). Throughout
her extensive consideration of West African trade and culture, Kingsley
does not connect economic with cultural imperialism.
Kingsley’s repeated observation of European imports, however, ulti-
mately reveals ways in which trade did impact African culture and
suggests that the importation of commodities and cultures could not
be so easily disentangled. In response to Kingsley, John Flint argues
that “[c]ommerce with Europe was just as much a force which was
changing society, creating new wants, new methods of production,
and new ideas[,]” as was missionary work or colonial rule through their
respective methods.46 In other words, even European objects, despite
their transformation into commodities and their circulation within
overseas markets, cannot be fully alienated from their previous social
contexts. Kingsley frequently makes note of European import items
that have found their way into African cultures, even though they do
not prove especially desirable as the kinds of “facts” she seeks. In the
shops and markets of Sierra Leone, she finds “bundles of gay-coloured
Manchester cottons and shawls, Swiss clocks, and rough but vividly
coloured china” as well as “brass, copper, and iron cooking-pots,” cheap
beads, and “vivid coloured Berlin wools” (Travels, 16, 22). European
imports have thus found their way into the practice of everyday life,
from the preparation of food to the construction and presentation
of self through the body and its adornment. Accordingly, European
imports could denote the status or refinement of their owner. The Egaja
chief, whom Kingsley specifically mentions admiring for his power and
intelligence, rather than his dress, nevertheless distinguishes himself
as a person of rank through his “remarkable” attire that “consisted
of a gentleman’s black frock-coat such as is given in the ivory bundle,
a bright blue felt sombrero hat, [and] an ample cloth of Boma check”
(Travels, 282). The chief’s material affluence, while denoting his political
status, also suggests a certain level of involvement with the ivory trade
in the Congo, for which Boma served as a key port. While among the
Igalwa, Kingsley notes the profusion of European goods adopted in
the home: “On going into an Igalwa house you will see a four-legged
table, often covered with a bright-coloured tablecloth, on which stands
a water bottle, with two clean glasses, and round about you will see
chairs – Windsor chairs”; in the kitchen, one finds European saucepans
and a skillet (Travels, 220). Wealthy men could be seen in European
coats and hats, while women accent their printed cotton wraps with
European shawls and silk parasols. While such items apparently tes-
tified to the Igalwa’s “somewhat refined culture,” which Kingsley
accredits to the foundation of a mission station at Kangwe by her friend
Dr. Nassau, they also contribute to Kingsley’s estimate of the Igalwas as
“one of the dying out coast tribes” (Travels, 228, 226). This link between
the adoption of European material “refinements” and the degeneration
of African societies recurs throughout Kingsley’s writing, yet she man-
ages, in this instance as in others, to place full blame on missionary
influence rather than the effects of European trade.
Nowhere does the implied link between a “refined” taste for European
culture and an ostensibly degenerate state of African society enter into
Kingsley’s narrative more prominently, however, than in her discussion
of African coastal “middlemen,” particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone,
and Fernando Po. While contemplating Xenia, a Liberian émigré who
accompanies Kingsley on her hike through German occupied Cameroon,
she indirectly links the importation of American culture with Liberia’s
reputation for corrupt political institutions: “I am sure Xenia has had a
chequered past; he is from the Republic of Liberia. I wonder whether he
is a fugitive president or a defaulting bank manager? They have copies
of all the high points of American culture, I am told” (Travels, 606).

What initially appears to be an ironic juxtaposition takes on in the
larger context of Kingsley’s narrative the logic of an implied relation
between cultural and political corruption. Her emphasis on “copies”
identifies the newly independent republic as a culture of imitation
rather than invention, a familiar charge that inspired Blyden’s “The
Liberian Scholar.” Given the focus of Kingsley’s own education and
interests that were directed mainly toward Greek and Roman classics as
well as contemporary works by British, German, and French authors,
moreover, these “high points” were not likely considered particularly
high or numerous. At best, Liberian culture may have appeared to the
Victorian reader as merely the copy of a copy. Toward the end of her
narrative, we realize where the primary root of her scorn toward Liberia
lies: taxation. Not only does she implicate Liberia in the coastal African
“monopoly” on the rubber trade, but she also denounces Liberia for
levying taxes on the shipment of labor required by European merchants
(Travels, 649–50). Kingsley’s characterization of African “middleman”
traders as monopolists, John Flint suggests, dramatically overlooks the
Niger Oil Company’s amalgamation of local British trading firms and
its attempts in the early 1890s to form an even larger monopoly by
merging with the oil traders of Liverpool.47 “Westernized” Africans, par-
ticularly those working independently of or even in competition with
European traders, repeatedly emerge in Kingsley’s narrative as impedi-
ments to “free” trade and a threat to “the true African.” While Kingsley
may defend the possibility of separating imported consumer goods
from imported cultures, what initially conjures her suspicion of Xenia
as Liberian is his propensity for wearing pants and his assertion that he
once wore “better boots than [hers]” (Travels, 606).
After surveying a market full of European commodities in “The
Liverpool of West Africa,” Free Town, Sierra Leone, Kingsley also
attacks one of the primary consumers of these goods: “the Sierra Leone
dandy” (Travels, 15, 20). Few Africans receive her scorn like those she
perceives as “that perfect flower of Sierra Leone culture, who yells your
bald name across the street at you, condescendingly informs you that
you can go and get letters that are waiting for you, while he smokes his
cigar and lolls in the shade, or in some similar way displays his second-
hand rubbishy white culture” (Travels, 20). As in her discussion of
Liberians, the idea of acquiring culture “second hand” – as an import –
and a “rubbishy white” culture at that serves as leverage for Kingsley’s
attack. While she interprets this adoption of European culture as a per-
formance that defies Europeans like herself as figures of authority, she
presumes that the actor, rather than his audience, is made to feel inse-
cure. Were Kingsley completely at ease, however, she might not have
devoted such attention to the “dandy” or declared a “wish to punch
his head, and split his coat up his back” – a desire, once again, that
fixates on an article of European clothing (Travels, 19–20). As Laura
Ciolkowski suggests, “Englishness” becomes in Kingsley’s narrative
“a highly ritualized performance that all subjects must learn to master”;
such performances, in turn, reveal “the emptiness lurking beneath the
familiar signs of European power and English subjectivity.”48 When
comparing Sierra Leonians with the middleman traders at Fernando
Po, she attributes to both a “‘Black gennellum, Sar’ style”; an adopted
“style” identified as insolent yet unintended mimicry (Travels, 72).
According to John Flint, “She liked the old African as he was, and hated
the new pushful and ambitious educated men, who in fact were the
men of the future.”49
Only later, when meeting the smooth-speaking Prince Makaga along
the river Rembwé, does Kingsley admit her discomfort at encountering
African adoptions of European cultural goods. Ciolkowski suggestively
reads this encounter as an “ontological drama,” which stages “the fabu-
lous confrontation between an African man impersonating a European
gentleman and a provincial woman with a cockney accent imperson-
ating a cultured European lady.”50 Makaga nevertheless represents for
Kingsley the difference between a “gentleman” and a “gennellum,”
which roughly coincides with the distinction between apparent assimi-
lation and overt insubordination:
I turned round and saw standing on the bank against which our
canoe was moored, what appeared to me to be an English gentleman
who had from some misfortune gone black all over and lost his trou-
sers and been compelled to replace them with a highly ornamental
table-cloth. The rest of his wardrobe was in exquisite condition,
with the usual white jean coat, white shirt and collar, very neat tie,
and felt hat affected by white gentlemen out here. Taking a large
and powerful cigar from his lips with one hand, he raised his hat
gracefully with the other and said:
“Pray excuse me, madam.” (Travels, 340)
Not only does Makaga don his attire, minus the pants, like “an English
gentleman” and address Kingsley as a gentlewoman, but he also speaks
impeccable English and apologizes for not having his card case at hand;
“One little expects in such a remote region to require one,” he explains
(Travels, 341). While Salome Nnoromele focuses her reading of this

scene on Kingsley’s “attempt to normalize [the] disturbing presence”
of “the African Other,”51 I wish to emphasize Makaga’s disturbing simi-
larity. Exchanging thoughts on London, Paris, and Liverpool, as well
as the quality of their art galleries, this “black gentleman” of European
culture unnerves Kingsley and initiates a kind of rivalry in which she
feels the need to display a comparable level of cultured sensibility:
“I felt I had got to rise to this man whoever he was, somehow, and
having regained my nerve, I was coming up hand over hand to the
level of his culture when Obanjo and the crew arrived, carrying goats”
(Travels, 340).
Unlike Blyden’s encounter with the nurse, this scene stages Kingsley’s
lingering anxiety about recognizing Makaga as all too human – that is,
white. She introduces Makaga as “an English gentleman … gone black”
rather than as “a black man” who “speaks English.” In the absence
of detectable insolence, Makaga’s virtuoso performance of European
“refinement,” in which European objects do not appear as properties
(mis)used to challenge imperial authority, takes him a long way in
acquiring Kingsley’s reserved admiration. Whereas her captain, Obanjo,
considers Makaga “too much of a lavender-kid-glove gentleman to deal
with bush trade” and “spoilt by going to Europe,” Kingsley defends
Makaga’s “fine polish” exhibited “without the obvious conceit usually
found in men who have been home” (Travels, 341). It is not entirely
clear in this statement, however, whether the “home” of Europe sig-
nifies home for her readers, herself, or Makaga. Makaga, we learn,
once worked for a large European trading company in Gaboon, before
“[t]hinking that he could make more money on his own account” and
turning an independent trader (Travels, 341). One wonders whether
his portrait would have been different, had his venture been more suc-
cessful; since “a lot of his trust had recently gone bad,” he served as an
object lesson to Anglicized African traders competing with European
firms (Travels, 341).
Contrary to Kingsley’s claims, therefore, new objects create new
desires and ideas travel with objects between Europe and its colonies.
The English book that represents to Conrad’s Marlow “something
unmistakably real” in the turbulent world of the so-called Congo
Free State (Heart of Darkness, 39), for example, conjured for the young
V. S. Naipaul the thought of Conrad’s book in English as “a kind of
truth and half a consolation” about his own troubled sense of identity
after the “fixed world” of colonial Trinidad gave way to a “new world”
of postcolonial independence.52 Part of this “fixed world” included the
“fantasy” of going “to England as to some purely literary region, where,

untrammelled by the accidents of history or background, [he] could
make a romantic career for [him]self as a writer”; while belief in such
a region faded for the mature author, the English novel continued to
provide him with a kind of reality. Part of the English book’s authority
for the young West Indian author, suggests Bhabha, is the role it fulfills
in representing, as a sign, and modeling, as a literary text making use
of a particular sign system, “the metaphoric writing of the west”53:
its ability to convey, as if without mediation or “the discourse that
accompanied it,”54 “a kind of truth”; “something unmistakably real.”
As Bhabha asserts, “The discovery of the English book establishes both a
measure of mimesis and a mode of civil authority and order.”55 Indeed,
Naipaul repeatedly refers to the Polish-English author’s tendency “to
stick as close as possible to the facts of every situation,” being “too
particular and concrete a writer” to indulge frequently in symbolism,
while offering “a meditation on our world.”56 It is precisely this act
of meditation that Naipaul finds lacking in the novel sixty years after
Conrad: “[T]he world we inhabit, which is always new, goes by unex-
amined, made ordinary by the camera, unmeditated on; and there is
no one to awaken the sense of true wonder.”57 The best of Conrad’s
writing, suggests Naipaul, possessed the authoritative presence of con-
veying as truthfully as possible, with a “singleness of intention,” the
facts as Conrad observed and thought of them.58 Similarly, the book
that Marlow encounters, with its factual presentation of orderly charts
and graphs indicative of the visual-spatial practices employed by the
English for encoding knowledge,59 with its “honest concern for the
right way of going to work,” and with the writing that he mistakes for
cipher, lead him to declare of its owner, “He must be English” (Heart of
Darkness, 39, 40). So strong is the authoritative presence of the English
book for Marlow that it conjures, metonymically, the image of an
English owner.
Yet English books do not necessarily have English owners, nor does
the English book’s enunciation of its authority so completely deter-
mine the identities of its readers. Marlow, of course, was mistaken,
as the careworn English book belonged to the impassioned Russian
devotee of the apparently lawless Kurtz; what appeared to be cipher,
moreover, was in fact Cyrillic. That this reader’s written response to
the English book should slip under the radar of English imperial intel-
ligibility as effectively as a secret code suggests that apparent emblems
of authority do not preclude the possibility for other authorities and
authors. Conrad exposes Marlow repeatedly as a fallible reader, as one
adrift within a world of signs that he mistakes for wonders and “extrava-
gant myster[ies]” (Heart of Darkness, 40). That Marlow responds to one
language of empire in the imperial language of another, however, may
suggest that for Conrad, as a Polish-English author, there was no accept-
able language wholly outside of empire from which to speak. Like the
generations of Anglophone authors who succeeded him, writing back to
him and the canonicity that he had come to represent, Conrad chose to
write in the language of empire; in the language of an empire that iden-
tified in him “a vague touch of the Asiatic”60; albeit, in the language of
an empire that had never directly colonized Poland.61
Reading for a comparable level of irony in “Conrad’s Darkness,” Sara
Suleri moreover observes how Naipaul’s essay, below the radar of overt
expression, doubles Conrad’s text and figures Naipaul as its unspoken
Russian harlequin: “Naipaul invites his readers to conceive of him as the
Harlequin. He chooses to become that comic figure of incessant arrival,
and in so doing inscribes himself as strongly on Heart of Darkness as in
that tale the Harlequin makes An Inquiry serve as the occasion for his
own ciphered marginalia.”62 Naipaul’s vision of his “romantic career” is
thus reflected in the harlequin’s “glamour”; “[g]lamour urged him on,
glamour kept him unscathed” in a world of his own fantastic design.63
Naipaul, Suleri continues, “dismantle[s] the trope of arrival, exhibiting
its haphazard uneasiness as opposed to its possible romance” to expose
arrival and disappointment as “synonymous terms.”64 The harlequin,
who disappears into the forest before the novella reaches its climax,
notably never does “arrive,” but rather skirts off into the margins of
the text. For Marlow, the harlequin appears “fabulous,” “improbable,”
“inexplicable,” and “bewildering”; “[h]e was an insoluble problem”
that Marlow’s English yarn simply cannot contain or resolve (Heart of
Darkness, 54). The harlequin, whose parti-colored patchwork costume,
Christopher GoGwilt observes, echoes the multicolored map of colo-
nial Africa, stands in for the carnivalesque hybridity of a country and
a condition that defies the representational strategies of both realism
and colonial discourse.65
Upon entering the well-furnished “European-fashion house”
belonging to the family member of an associate, Eveke, in Nassau Bay,
Mary Kingsley experiences a mysterious encounter with a displaced
English object that reminds us of Marlow’s discovery of the English
book (Travels, 412). Rather than claiming that its owner “must be
English,” however, Kingsley rather startlingly attributes her cultural
artifact to “some white man who is dead now” (Travels, 412). Instead
of the English object conjuring the presence, no matter how troubled,
of imperial authority, Kingsley’s relic immediately suggests its very

absence; or rather, its obsolescence:
On the table, scattered anyhow together, are glass scent-bottles,

a hanging-lamp, framed oleographs of English farmyard scenes; and
amongst them an old album full of faded photographs, evidently
once the valued treasure of some white man who is dead now; for
were he living he would never have parted with it, after pasting in
against the pictures those little English wild roses and bits of heather
and bluebells. (Travels, 412)
This collection is peculiarly Victorian, in both its eclecticism and its

incorporated bits of realia – the dried flowers – intended to supplement
the ontological realism of the faded photographs that can only ever
re-represent their absent subjects. Emptied of the nostalgia this album
of gray pictures may have possessed to their English owner, its pages
remain blank to the reader and lie anonymously among the other
objects in the collection. Unlike the photographs that Kingsley took
during her journey, they have lost their status as emblems of authenticity.
The oleographs, meanwhile, serve as late Victorian metonyms for a
“dying out” way of English rural life: an agrarian lifestyle that many
English colonists sought to reproduce on lands annexed abroad. In their
present context, these English objects thus uncannily resemble an eth-
nographic collection preserving for posterity the now absent presence of
an English settler without an English heir. Considered in combination
with Kingsley’s preference for economic imperialism, this collection
situates the English Crown colonist as a curiosity of the past.
Yet these objects, as well as the chests of drawers, the dining table,
the chairs, and other curiosities in the house, all appear under Kingsley’s
gaze to be “for dandy”; that is, they evince no signs of use or of any
more subjective value, seemingly functioning merely for show or
ornamentation, and they do not suggest to their owners the world
from which they have come. In relation to the comparatively modest
neighboring huts, the entire house and the majority of its contents
could be considered merely a display of wealth and status. Throughout
her writing, however, Kingsley frequently refers to items deployed “for
dandy” without, as in this case, offering further analysis. In fact, this
phrase, seemingly transparent in its allusion to a common ethnographic
category of inquiry, denotes a kind of opacity in Kingsley’s analysis;
a point at which the semantic potential of a particular object has been
foreclosed by the very category of ornamentation that abstracts or
alienates the object from its previous contexts.66 Whereas Kingsley

rigorously pursued the meaning of indigenous objects and practices, she
devoted much less attention to considering the significance of imported,
hybrid items. Taking these objects seriously, meditating, for example,
on the resonance of a shilling razor in the middle of the French Congo,
would perhaps have invested these items with more value than Kingsley
was comfortable admitting. Acknowledging the potential for European
objects to impact African subjects – for the possibility of Bill Brown’s
“hybrid object” to play a role in the constitution of colonial subjects,
while the troubling uncanniness of these culturally hybrid objects,
as Bhabha suggests, serves to undermine imperial authority – would
further reveal ways in which trade was changing African societies.
What Kingsley does not fully acknowledge is the degree to which
these objects, so familiar and seemingly transparent while nevertheless
desemanticized through their current classification as ornaments, have
become oddly opaque to her. These objects that continue to bear the
trace of their European contexts could well resonate with new mean-
ings that exceed the limited role of functioning “for dandy.” Are these
objects curios, trophies, mementos, heirlooms, or objects of desire?
Why do they lie in a cluttered heap on the dining table and how did
they come there? What value do the scenes of English farm life hold for
their African owner? Could its current owner, perhaps like the young
V. S. Naipaul poring over a scene in an English novel, look at the framed
images of England and envision this exotic space as a place of romance;
as the destination of future travel; as the source of an English education,
or as the promise for social advancement? Would future generations
find the collection of English items and assume that the objects, val-
ued because preserved, were intended as part of their legacy? Had
the current owner already traveled to England and returned with the
photograph album him- or herself? Why must the owner of an English
object be English? What Kingsley neglects, or perhaps cares not, to read
is the role that these objects play in the construction of an emerging
Anglophone African subjectivity. Her emphasis on anthropological
constructions of knowledge and of cultural authenticity ultimately cir-
cumscribes her attempts at understanding African object relations and
representing them in her writing.
Kingsley’s vision of the future African trader therefore fades before
the threateningly refined figure of Makaga, while the imported objects
populating this scene once again reveal broader historical interests. The
future trader, she imagines when arguing for the resilience of African
societies amidst commerce with Europe, will be “just as willing to sell
as ‘big curios’ the débris of [European] importations to his ancestors at

a high price,” and “a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton’s tin”
may become as valuable as “Phœnician ‘Aggry’ beads” (Travels, 679).67
Like the old shilling razor that Kingsley encounters while trading with
the Fang, she envisions the empty packaging of exhausted commodi-
ties emerging as the overvalued object of African consumer desire. This
scene implicitly associates such empty articles of tin with the articles
labeled “rubbish,” “trash,” or “trifles” that African traders of the interior
accepted in exchange for items of European value like gold. Kingsley’s
light-hearted anecdote corresponds with a long history of denigrating
West African systems of value, a history that fueled fetish discourse and
attempted to impose European values on Africa – whether economic,
aesthetic, moral, or political. The Devos paraffin oil and Morton’s salt
tins simultaneously reveal the ways in which commerce was indeed
changing African society. Palm oil, from West Africa, and salt, from
North Africa, had been two of the main commodities in African trade
for millennia. The vital resource of salt figured prominently in trans-
Saharan trade, for which West Africans offered Northern traders gold in
exchange. Palm oil served as a versatile commodity significant not only
in West Africa, but also in England after the Industrial Revolution and
before the distillation of kerosene (paraffin oil) and oil from petroleum
when it was used in making palm wax candles and lubricating machin-
ery.68 That Europe, not to mention America, would be shipping the
refined resources of oil and salt in all its modern packaging to Africa is
more than an unacknowledged irony by a writer noted for her irony;
it highlights the imbalance of trade that accompanies the development
of economic imperialism, which Kingsley advocated for West Africa’s
immediate future. The memory of Makaga, man of the future, troubles
Kingsley’s present as a disturbing anachronism and disrupts her future
as an uncanny double with an alternate narrative of development.
Considering the work of Kingsley and Blyden together highlights
how the production of knowledge about Africa placed Victorians and
Anglophone Africans in dialogue and often debate with each other. In
her open letter to Liberia published in The New Africa shortly after her
death, Kingsley urges Euro-American educated Liberians, like “[her]
friend, Dr. Blyden,”69 to study indigenous African customs and to
mediate relations between Europe and West Africa. “Mutual misunder-
standing” would continue to impede political relations, she argues from
a familiar liberal position, until “you who know European culture, who
are educated in our culture, and who also know African culture, will
take your place as true ambassadors and peacemakers between the
two races and place before the English statesmen the true African.”70
Writing to Kingsley just one month before her death, Blyden responds
to her still unpublished address: “Your exhortations are lost upon the
majority of Anglicised Africans.”71 Those who would best understand
her arguments, Blyden explains, would not likely be able to read them
in English. Those with missionary instruction in English, he continues,
have been taught that native languages and customs are, at best, not
worth knowing or, at the worst, pernicious.72 Blyden, subsequently
remembering Kingsley as “a spirit sent to the world to serve Africa and
the African race,”73 nevertheless took seriously her suggestions and her
final warning: “Unless you preserve your institutions, above all your land
law, you cannot, no race can, preserve your liberty.”74 In his Emersonian
address as president of Liberia College in 1900, Blyden echoes Kingsley’s
parting words to his country while identifying “The Liberian Scholar” as
one who would “understand the African in his native state, and know
how to give the world a correct knowledge of him” through a study of
“native law, tribal organization, native languages, native religion, [and]
native politics.”75 Blyden’s 1908 African Life and Customs represents his
most direct attempt at promoting such scholarship of the future while
intervening in colonial policies of the present. Rather than trusting
wholly to the powers of “mutual understanding” and offering his read-
ers a picture of West African life and customs, however, Blyden employs
the methods of nineteenth-century comparative ethnography to con-
struct a more explicit argument against the imposition of European
values on African societies.76 Juxtaposing African with European institu-
tions, often to the detriment of the latter, he encourages his readers “to
leave by imaginative effort the limits of their surroundings in Europe;
their constant habit to refer all propositions to the standard of what
English institutions, social and religious, will admit.”77 Even the most
imaginative of writers like Kingsley struggled with such limits.
3 Not “an object in the midst of other objects”78
Blyden – a highly educated, missionary-trained, meticulously postured,

extensive traveler, who valued his European suits and gold watch chain –
met Kingsley in her native habitat. Unlike Kingsley’s encounter with
Makaga, or Blyden’s with the nurse, their meeting fostered a productive
friendship cultivated through conversations, letters, and the exchange of
books. Kingsley’s writings on West Africa undoubtedly impressed Blyden,
who cites them frequently in his later works. Her careful pursuit of facts
as well as her attentiveness to the signifying systems and cross-cultural
conversations from which they emerge provided Blyden with a model for
anthropological inquiry. Her pursuit of authenticity in order to dispel the
“purely imaginary African” that England exported with its representatives
overseas,79 moreover, spoke to his own investment in promoting a more
African-centered identity among indigenous and diasporic communi-
ties in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Blyden’s experience of race prejudice
throughout his life, however, motivated his pursuit of ontological as well
as cultural authenticity through the attainment of greater autonomy
than Kingsley’s vision of the future would allow.
Like Kingsley, Blyden recognized “facts – or what seemed to be
facts” as socially constructed relations and concerned himself with
writing about Africa for the present.80 “[T]he theories of the noisy
and blustering anthropologists of forty or fifty years ago,” he explains
in African Life and Customs, proposed “all sorts of arguments based
upon estimates of physical phenomena as conceived by phrenology
or physiognomy, using signs and symbols taken from every part of
the man – from the heel to the skull – to prove the mental and moral
inferiority of” Africans.81 Rather than serving as self-evident facts, phys-
ical attributes appear to Blyden as signs possessing arbitrary, socially
conventional meanings dependent upon interpretive systems that were
subject to manipulation.82 As early as his 1857 essay “A Vindication of
the African Race,” Blyden comments on the misuse of such signs in the
construction of racial types. “Caucasian naturalists and ethnologists,”
he argues, juxtaposed in geographies and ethnographies select pictures
of ideal Europeans with images of the most “degraded” Africans for
the purpose of representing the races as a whole.83 By laying bare the
processes by which discriminatory significances were attached to visual
differences, Blyden attempts to intervene in the production of ethno-
logical and anthropological knowledge that continued to shape his
everyday experience even in an independent Liberia.
The anthropological methods resulting in racial typecasting that
Blyden cautiously locates in the past had not completely disappeared
by the turn of the twentieth century. The developing field methods of
physical anthropology were in fact well represented in guides to anthro-
pological observation like Notes and Queries. Given the limitations of
black and white photography for Victorian racial theory, late Victorian
field guides attempted to indoctrinate the observer in how to perceive
variations in bodily appearances that anthropologists and ethnolo-
gists would later decode. All editions of Notes and Queries from 1874 to
1899 consequently included hair, eye, and skin pigmentation charts,
furnished by the comparative pathologist Pierre Paul Broca, which
revealed anthropologists’ anxious awareness that even the perception

of presumably objective attributes such as color varied with the indi-
vidual observer. The swatches of disembodied colors ranged in rows and
columns bring to mind Bhabha’s claim that “[s]kin, as the key signifier
of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible
of fetishes, recognized as ‘common knowledge’ in a range of cultural,
political and historical discourses.”84 Skin pigmentation, as a fetish, is
presented in Notes and Queries as a transparent medium for determining
racial difference, rather than as a signifier arbitrarily aligned with
a signified.85 What may have passed as “common knowledge,” however,
could not be entirely regulated in the eye of the ethnographic beholder
or even in print. These charts, designed to determine and to fix
subjective impressions, faded and discolored beyond recognition in the
first edition: a problem – or, perhaps, an appropriate irony – lamented
by subsequent editors.
In much of his writing, Blyden attempts to unhinge such fixations by
employing methods similar to those of Kingsley; that is, by attending to
the function of time and repetition in the semiotics of racial and cultural
differences. As early as 1862, he considers the pervasive appearance of
Africans and African-Americans performing the lower status jobs avail-
able to them as one of the most visible yet insidious ways in which an
image of inferiority could be produced, fixed, and repeated. Such images,
he suggests, promote the misleading conflation of class with race, of
oppression with aptitude: “He is almost universally the servant of the
white man; so that, as soon as a Negro is seen, the presumption at once
is that he is menial. His colour at once associates him with that class of
persons, and the general feeling is to treat him as such.”86 Whereas this
image of inferiority results from economic and political oppression, its
seemingly autonomous repetition and reinforcement within a broader
system of signification helps to obscure its conditions of production.
Africans trained in European systems of education, Blyden explains in
1881, “often receive direct teachings which are not only incompatible
with, but destructive of, their self-respect.”87 Popular print culture rein-
forces and extends these teachings: “After leaving school [the African]
finds the same things in newspapers, in reviews, in novels, in quasi
scientific works; and after a while … they begin to seem to him the
proper things to say and to feel about his race, and he accepts what, at
first, his fresh and unbiased feelings naturally and indignantly repelled.
Such is the effect of repetition.”88 Repetition, as seen in Kingsley’s
writing, may help to unravel misrepresentations as well as to construct
alternate representations inductively. Also associated with the colonizer’s
anxiously fetishistic need to reassert discriminatory knowledges,89

repetition here serves as the vehicle by which constructed beliefs gradu-
ally displace “unbiased feelings” in both metropolitan and colonial
subjects. Moreover, suggests Blyden in 1881, the ideal self-image with
which Africans are conditioned to identify is white: “The standard of all
physical and intellectual excellencies in the present civilization being the
white complexion, whatever deviates from that favoured colour is pro-
portionally depreciated, until the black, which is the opposite, becomes
not only the most unpopular but the most unprofitable colour.”90 By
1896, Blyden, like his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, describes this sense
of conflicted identification and damaged self-respect as feeling “alienated
from himself.”91 His analysis thus traces the circular relation between
economic and psychological alienation: from unpopular employment
to unpopular color to unprofitable color to unprofitable and unpopu-
lar employment. As Fanon will later argue, “If there is an inferiority
complex, it is the outcome of a double process: – primarily, economic; –
subsequently, the internalization – or, better, the epidermalization – of
this inferiority.”92 Throughout his writings, and especially in African Life
and Customs, Blyden attempts to interrupt this circular process of produc-
ing value – economic and psychic, scientific and aesthetic.
Originally written for the Sierra Leone Weekly News and reprinted in
London, African Life and Customs addressed Africans as well as Europeans
in a way that challenged the temporality of nineteenth-century ethnogra-
phy. Fabian characterizes standard ethnographic writing as an “observer’s
language” that freezes its subject while establishing a dialogue between the
“I” of the ethnographer and the “you” of the listener that distances those
discussed in the third person temporally and ontologically. Although
Blyden begins his study proposing to discuss “the African pure and
simple – … the man untouched either by European or Asiatic influence,”93
he increasingly adopts the first-person plural when discussing “our Native
System.”94 As Blyden’s ethnography consistently reevaluates African
customs at the expense of their European comparators, this “we” proposes
a solidarity that attempts to reconcile Anglophone West Africans of the
coast to the interests of their countrymen in the interior. Blyden may well
have appreciated Kingsley’s strategic adoption of the second person in her
writings, which heightens narrative irony while drawing subtle compari-
sons between Africa and England. By disrupting the “observer’s language,”
and by inserting Europe more directly into his comparative ethnography,
Blyden further works toward narrating Africa in the present.
Although Blyden’s categories of inquiry frequently resemble those of
Kingsley, he subtly revalues key terms in her discussion while emphasizing
African oral narratives over visual description. Indeed, the political

implications of anthropology’s visual-spatial practices were not lost on
him. Whereas Kingsley represents the Hut Tax War as an “object lesson”
promoting English trade rule in West Africa, Blyden proves all too wary
of the argument that British capitalists have the best interests of their
African customers at heart. Blyden draws a counter “object lesson” from
his immediate environment95: in particular, from the cooperative prac-
tices of animals and insects that inform African proverbs.96 Comparing
African institutions with contemporary British socialism, Blyden suggests
that Europeans may learn something from a system that “is cooperative
not egotistic or individualistic”; such a system, he suggests, produces
neither capitalists nor proletariat classes,97 nor waste nor poverty.98 From
the perspective of African cooperative industries, part of a larger “com-
munistic order,”99 Blyden attacks a common stereotype held against
Africans who resist entering a global capitalist workforce:
It is charged against the African that he is lazy, … and yet a hundred

steamers constantly dog the coast to take away his produce – created
not by the help or supervision of the white man. He is lazy, yet steamers
frequently lie in West African ports for days landing cargo. All this stuff
must be presents to a lazy and worthless set of men, who give nothing
in return. How benevolent our kind friends in Europe must be!100
Resistance to “exploiters” and to alienation, rather than laziness

(one might add inefficiency), he explains, accounts for the practices
of African laborers101; contrary to Kingsley’s argument, they do not
need instruction in “how to work” or “the nobility of labour.” “‘The
dignity of labour,’” Blyden counters, “is glorified … only among
those who have various means … of alleviating or brightening it. …
To the millionaire there is ‘dignity in labour’; to the hod-carrier there
is only drudgery.”102 Herein lies the significance of the indigenous
land laws that Kingsley presciently defended: communal access to
land and water resources, contrary to the designs of capitalism and its
dependence upon disenfranchised labour produced through primitive
accumulation, ultimately stands in the way of colonial expansion.
For Blyden, however, defending West Africa’s land laws also entailed
defending them from the unregulated, potentially exploitative prac-
tices of traders and the economic system they imported.
Although Blyden dedicated African Life and Customs to the influential
Liverpool trader William John Davey, its argument relies much more on
the work of socialist Sydney Olivier whom Blyden commends in his
introduction. Olivier, long before Bhabha theorized the stereotype of

colonial discourse after Freud’s model of fetishism, exposed imperial race
prejudice as a form of fetishism. Speaking especially of the Belgian Congo
in 1906, Olivier writes: “The old familiar cant is gravely repeated that the
indolence of the natives needs to be extirpated and the understanding of
the dignity of labour instilled, that the native must be civilised by being
taught to work, and moreover that he ought to pay taxes for the benefits
conferred on him by the administration in setting up the machinery for
this educative process.”103 A “hierarchy of extortion” is consequently
set in place,104 and colonial capitalist machinery institutes “the policy
of forcing the native to work, by direct taxation, or restricting the area
of land which he may occupy.”105 The capitalist’s need for economic
alienation, moreover, motivates the social and psychic forms of alien-
ation that Blyden analyzes. “[R]ace-prejudice is the fetish of the man of
short views,”106 Olivier argues, in that “trained hatreds” are presented as
natural antipathies and used to promote economic exploitation.107 While
acknowledging the impossibility of returning completely to tribal com-
munal institutions in a country whose citizens “have accumulated money
under the individualistic system of Europe,” Blyden cautions against
adopting European values and systems of production wholesale: “All their
wealth, sooner or later, goes back to the European, in spite of the most
stringent provisions of Wills and Codicils. … It is not a rule but a law – the
law of disintegration under the European competitive order.”108 Blyden’s
resistant vision of the future, even more than that of Kingsley, resonated
with later African nationalists.
Blyden’s encounter with the British nurse and children, in fact, strik-
ingly resembles the familiar, traumatic scene of identity formation
conjured by the disruptive refrain “Look, a Negro!” in Fanon’s “The
Fact of Blackness” (L’expérience vécue du Noir). Focusing on “the lived
experience of the black,”109 this chapter furthers one of the larger argu-
ments made in Black Skin, White Masks that racial discrimination cannot
properly be understood through objectification; that is, without at least
“feel[ing] [one]self into the despair of the man of color confronting
the white man.”110 This formative scene reveals how the “corporeal
schema” – the implicit “slow composition of [the] self as a body in the
middle of a spatial and temporal world” that forms a “dialectic between
[one’s] body and the world” – could be underwritten by the social con-
struction of race111:
Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial

schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by
“residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular,

kinesthetic, and visual character,” but by the other, the white man,
who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.
I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological
self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on
for more.
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me
as I passed by.112
In a series of formative scenes, Fanon illustrates how his bodily self-

consciousness takes shape from the colonial knowledge produced about
him by others that forms a culturally constructed “collective uncon-
scious.”113 Within this unconscious, the discriminatory use of objects
has already been mobilized against him. His body and its appearance
have been (mis)measured, construed, imagined, and represented in
a variety of media; the racial category to which he has been ascribed
reflects over a century of classificatory schema providing a particularly
restrictive cognitive representation of the world; and “[his] ancestors,”
based on colonial typologies, have been rigorously assigned to him.
Even classic Hollywood films managed to cross the Atlantic with their
stereotypes intact, assigning to their characters of color the pidgin
English of “Sho’ good eatin’” that had become associated with them in
popular culture.114
This scene of misrecognition functions as a formative moment for
both the white child, who identifies with the white parent, and the
black man, whose identification with the passersby has been denied
him upon being recognized, in the words of Blyden, as “a peculiar
being sui generis.” As Fanon explains, “I feel, I see in those white faces
that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man,
a new genus.”115 Alienated both from others and from his own bodily
consciousness by the “white eyes” that “dissect” and “fix” him as the
overdetermined product of “a thousand details, anecdotes, stories,”
Fanon highlights the tension between a lost sense of originality – of
imagining himself and his engagement with the world as the origin of
his own present identity, as in Blyden’s “unbiased feelings” – and “a gal-
axy of erosive stereotypes: the Negro’s sui generis odor … the Negro’s sui
generis good nature … the Negro’s sui generis gullibility… .”116
The dialectical sense of self and world that Fanon associates with the
corporeal schema, as Bhabha suggests in the essay inspired by this scene,
corresponds with that of the imaginary order first entered during the
mirror stage.117 At this stage in the process of colonial subject formation,
the ideal image with which the colonial subject attempts to identify –
Lacan’s “ideal-I,” or “orthopedic” frame118 – is not only whole but also
white and thereby introduces particular difficulties for black colonial
subjects continuing to identify with this image while attempting to
enter a society whose institutions privilege whiteness discriminatively.119
Fanon writes: “And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white
man’s eyes. … The real world challenged my claims [of recognition].”120
Denied acknowledgment as a subject, even as a human, he is cast into
a “neurotic situation”: being forced to “turn white” – an impossibility
for those not recognized as such – “or disappear” – only a possibility for
those who accept being denied ontological status as subjects and agree to
“keep [their] place” by corresponding with the stereotypes that objectify
them.121 Accepting the position of object, whether of anxiety or desire,
within a white imaginary, however, represents a form of castration that
figures his “Negro consciousness” as “lack”(-ing whiteness)122: “I took
myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an
object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision,
a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?”123
The stereotype, like the fetish, supplements this lack, making the
black subject’s difference “palatable” to fetishists in the white world,124
and serves as a memorial to and defense against this difference.125 For
Fanon, however, this substitution of “pseudopodia” for the human feet on
which he “wanted to rise” proves unacceptable.126 Fanon, like Blyden,
resists the ontological imperative to “turn white” – to “change his skin,”
like the leopard its spots – “or disappear.”
Blyden, as émigré educated on both sides of the Atlantic, described
this imperative spatially as a form of exile that he experienced,
“consciously and unconsciously,”127 in colonial societies as well as
postcolonial Liberia. “In the depth of their being,” suggests Blyden,
black residents “always feel themselves strangers in the land of their
exile, and the only escape from this feeling is to escape from them-
selves.”128 As Fanon observes, “In the man of color there is a constant
effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own
presence.”129 Identifying such exile in the moral and aesthetic privi-
leging, if not deification, of whiteness in European Christian art that
“exhibited only the physical characteristics of a foreign race,” Blyden
argues that such “models for imitation” and “the canons of taste” they
promote disrupt Africans’ “normal development.”130 One African-
American at a prayer meeting in New York, he recounts, unthinkingly
invited parishioners to turn white: “Brethren, imagine a beautiful
white man with blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and flaxen hair, and we shall
be like him.”131 Better not to represent one’s supreme deity visually, as

in Islam, Blyden suggested, than to depict this figure only as white.
This unconscious whitening resembles that of the Antillean children
writing in French like “real little Parisians” with their “rosy cheeks,”132
and Blyden, like Fanon, emphasized throughout his career the impor-
tance of introducing Africans at an early age to a symbolic world that
does not estrange them from themselves.133 While Blyden’s biogra-
pher Thomas W. Livingston tends to diagnose him as one of Fanon’s
neurotic, postcolonial subjects of conflicted identification,134 I would
argue that Blyden, as émigré of “incessant arrival,” theorizes and takes
issue with this position.
Rather than emphasizing an individual, inner sense of conflict,
moreover, I would highlight the societal tensions that contributed to
the turbulent, collective unconscious, to borrow again from Fanon,
that Blyden navigated. Born to parents of Igbo descent in the Danish
colony of Saint Thomas, the Virgin Islands in 1832, Blyden witnessed
the alienating effects of slavery at first hand.135 His family moved to
recently independent Venezuela when he was ten, before immigrating
to the Republic of Liberia by way of the United States eight years later.
As a citizen of postcolonial Liberia consciously adopting the role of
colonizer among indigenous West Africans and as a resident of the
British colony of Sierra Leone during the majority of his final decade,
as Liberian ambassador to France and the United Kingdom as well
as to the West African interior, Blyden continuously moved between
the positions of colonizer and colonized. Not surprisingly, allusions
to an authority and authenticity rooted within racial and cultural
purity recur in tributes paid to Blyden by his contemporaries as well
as in Anglophone West African nationalist discourse of the period.
Sierra Leonian barrister Samuel Lewis prefaced his 1887 introductory
comments on Blyden by identifying himself as “a Negro … of unadul-
terated African blood.”136 Mary Kingsley similarly praised Blyden as a
“perfectly typical true Negro,”137 a category she usually reserved for
the Fang whom she considered the least influenced by European cul-
ture. These rather defensive, fetishistic claims to the purity of a black
African origin, which in nineteenth-century Liberian parlance served to
distinguish “the Negro” from citizens of mixed race, reveal the extent
to which Blyden’s authority to speak on behalf of all Liberians was
troubled by his Euro-American upbringing. In this instance, “the myth
of historical origination” serves the purpose of another empowered
minority population attempting to represent a majority: the diasporic
African colonists in Africa. Blyden, perhaps to his credit, viewed the
Liberian project as one of colonization rather than repatriation; while

emphasizing the need for recently emigrated Liberians to learn about
existing native African cultures, he approached this enterprise initially
as one of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural encounter rather
than the unmediated reclamation of a heritage. Blyden, moreover,
recognized the significance of acknowledging a variety of differences
in such encounters: he taught himself Hebrew in order to read the
Torah and the Talmud; he became fluent in Arabic in order to study
the Koran and to communicate better with local African chiefs as well
as his Muslim colleagues; and he advocated equal educational oppor-
tunities for African women.
Returning to the dialogue, both explicit and implicit, between
Kingsley and Blyden ultimately helps to recast both writers’ current
critical legacies. Kingsley, while frequently celebrated for her strategies
of “irony and subversion,”138 as well as her relative comfort in “not
knowing” and “not seeing,”139 is also criticized for her Eurocentric
humor,140 her imperialism,141 her suspicion toward Westernized
Africans, and her tendency “to fossilise the [economic and political]
conditions of the 1880’s” in West Africa.142 As if aware of such poten-
tial objections, Kingsley attempts in her letter to Liberia to make
peace with the Euro-American educated Africans she often criticized:
“I know I have been a nuisance. I know I have spoken words in wrath
about the educated missionary-made African, and I am glad to hear
you will tolerate me.”143 Blyden, a contemporary “man of the future,”
did more than tolerate Kingsley, as he read, embraced, and criticized
her ideas. As an early African nationalist, influential pan-Africanist,
and precursor of Négritude,144 Blyden leaves behind a legacy analo-
gous to that of Kingsley and simultaneously reaffirms her influence on
West African authors.145 Blyden’s reception, in turn, has been the most
positive in West Africa and the Caribbean,146 and it is no coincidence
that he knew these regions best and cared for them most. Criticized
both for his support of African-American emigration to Liberia, which
placed him partly at odds with Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois,
and even his former colleague Alexander Crummell,147 while in dubi-
ous alliance with southern white oligarchs like J. C. Hemphill,148 and
for his at times almost fetishistic advocacy of cultural nationalism,149
Blyden has, by even some of his most sympathetic American critics,
been accused of “‘putting Whitey on’ to effect Negro advancement”
and in the process becoming “a black apologist for the very structures
that … denied his manhood.”150 Reading Blyden in relation to his
imperial contexts may not lessen the strength of the criticism launched
against him, but it does shift the perspective from which to evaluate
his critical contributions: contributions that focus more on his rhetori-
cal engagement with colonial and postcolonial relations between West
Africa and England.
“There will be an authentic disalienation,” argued Fanon, “only to
the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the
word, will have been restored to their proper places.”151 Blyden, even
more than Fanon, preserved the concept of authenticity in promoting
an autonomous African subjectivity located in an African-centered
culture, and he unfortunately expressed these views frequently at
the expense of his influential colleagues of mixed race in ways that
reinforced the reactionary and dualistic thinking of his contem-
poraries.152 Authenticity, ontological as well as cultural, nevertheless
remained an indispensable concept underwriting both Blyden’s work
and West African nationalist movements. Kingsley, working in the
spirit of Victorian liberalism, preserved the concept of cultural authen-
ticity to the extent that it enabled her, like Blyden, to question some
of the fixed and fixating ideas of her contemporaries. Her defense
of indigenous groups like the Fang as “true Africans” with a distinct
character also influenced West African nationalism; however, it did
not account for the challenges of negotiating relations between indig-
enous groups of the interior with a postcolonial coastal elite, nor did it
suggest an option outside of the dichotomy between authenticity and
inauthenticity.153 The visualism of Kingsley’s writings may moreover
have served as the formal correlative to political views in conflict with
the very cultures she studied, and Blyden may well have found himself
in her vision of a remote future merely “an object in the midst of other
objects.” While rejecting the objectified position of curiosity, Blyden
capitalized on the metonymically inclined curiosity of readers open
to considering perspectives in conflict with Europe’s fixed images
of Africa; to borrow the words of Kingsley, Blyden’s writing “knocks
the bottom out of [Europe’s] conceit[s].” The relationship between
observation, description, and objectification in nineteenth-century
ethnographic writing moreover informs the representational strategies
of colonial realist novels, as explored in the chapters that follow, and
attending to realist objects as sites of conflict as well as anxiety enables
us to reassess their value comparatively. Blyden’s and Kingsley’s
comparative ethnographies – as broader textual and political practices –
ultimately worked toward promoting that which they did not fully
possess themselves: freedom from “[t]he slavery of the mind.”154 In
this regard, their writings remain timely.
Notes
1. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “West Africa Before Europe,” Journal of the African
Society 2, no. 8 (1903): 363.
2. “West Africa Before Europe,” 362, 363.
4. Location of Culture, 70–1, 78.
6. Ironically, Blyden also knew Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and several
European languages.
7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952;
New York: Grove Press, 1967), 36. As Fanon explains of the postcolonial
Antillean, he “will be proportionally whiter – that is, he will come closer
to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French
language” (Black Skin, White Masks, 18).
8. Jeremiah 13: 23. The Bible, King James Version. Project Gutenberg, 13 January
2011, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8024
9. Travels, 325.
10. Quoted in George Augustus Macmillan, “Introductory Notice to Second
Edition,” Studies, xxii.
12. For a discussion of Kingsley’s Travels in relation to ethnography and gen-
der, see Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and
West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), primarily 78–80; Julie English
Early, “Unescorted in Africa: Victorian Women Ethnographers Toiling in
the Fields of Sensational Science,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4
(1995): 67–75; and Ulrike Brisson, “Fish and Fetish: Mary Kingsley’s Studies
of Fetish in West Africa,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 3 (2005):
326–40.
13. On Tylor’s departure from Auguste Comte’s theory of fetishism, neither of
which Kingsley fully embraces, see Victorian Fetishism, especially 95–8.
15. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 1837, trans.
J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 94.
16. Philosophy of History, 93.
17. Philosophy of History, 93, 99.
18. Philosophy of History, 93.
19. Quoted in “Introductory Notice to Second Edition,” xxii–xiii; Studies, 104.
20. My discussion of things is indebted more directly to Bill Brown than to Martin
Heidegger. According to Brown, “thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet
formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically
or metaphysically irreducible to objects).” See his essay “Thing Theory,” 5.
The present reading, focusing on an adult’s relation to a man-made object, is
concerned more with an excess than a latency. See “How to Do Things,” 954.
Rather than this excess being exposed through misuse, however, it emerges in
this scene through negotiation.
24. One could argue that all forms of human design, to the extent that they
accommodate the human body in function, scale, perspective, and so
forth, are implicitly anthropomorphic. What concerns me more, and what
concerned those attempting to distinguish fetishism from idolatry, is the
extent to which one can identify with an object that does not represent,
at least metaphorically, the human form. Perhaps Brown’s discussion of
a child’s reaction to Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser would provide a
complementary example for further understanding the mariner and his
steam engine. In this example, we see how the child’s triangulated relation
with both the sculpture and the accompanying parent produces a sense of
temporality and, by extension, of subjectivity as a spatially and temporally
determined formation. See “Thing Theory,” 15–16.
25. This distinction between fetishism and idolatry is drawn from Pietz’s
“Problem of the Fetish, I,” especially 6 and 7.
27. “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 41, 42.
28. “Thing Theory,” 12. Brown is openly paraphrasing Theodor Adorno in this
formulation.
30. Ako and Fondo provide a valuable reminder of how much Kingsley’s irony
targeted a predominately European audience. See Edward O. Ako and
Blossom N. Fondo, “Alterity and the Imperial Agenda: Mary Kingsley’s Travels
in West Africa and Gerald Durrell’s The Bafut Beagles,” Jouvert 7, no. 2 (2003).
1 April 2008, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7i2/ako.htm
31. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 214.
32. Critics like Blunt observe how Kingsley’s landscape descriptions frequently
occasion the questioning of individual and imperial authority. See Alison Blunt,
“Mapping Authorship and Authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape
Descriptions,” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies,
eds Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 51–72.
33. Katherine Frank, A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1986).
34. Culture and Imperialism, 29.
35. For an alternate discussion of how the colonial sublime, rather than the
uncanny, “bewilders colonial identities,” see Christopher Lane, “Fantasies
of ‘Lady Pioneers,’ between Narrative and Theory,” Imperial Desire: Dissident
Sexualities and Colonial Literature, eds Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 90–114.
36. “Cultural Biography,” 64–91.
37. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,”
The Social Life of Things, 5.
38. Capital, 128.
39. For a detailed discussion of the economic bases for the abolition of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the
Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).
40. John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws: A Brief Introduction to the
Principles of the Native Laws and Customs of the Fanti and Akan Districts of the
Gold Coast with a Report of Some Cases thereon Decided in the Law Courts, 1897,
3rd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1968).
41. See, for example, “Cultural Biography,” 72–7.

44. African Life and Customs, 9.
45. Edward Wilmot Blyden, The African Society and Miss Mary Kingsley (London:
John Scott and Co., 1901), 28.
46. John E. Flint, “Introduction to Third Edition,” Studies, lxiv.
47. “Introduction to Third Edition,” xlviii–xlix. George Goldie, writes Flint, amal-
gamated the British trading firms along the Niger in 1879, bought out the
local French competitors in 1884, and obtained a Royal Charter two years later
to form the Royal Niger Company, which placed the territory under company
rule and allowed it to collect taxes. Goldie, along with the Miller Brothers of
Glasgow who owned a significant amount of stock in the Niger Company,
sought to form an even larger monopoly with the Oil River traders of
Liverpool (since 1889 known collectively as the African Association Ltd). The
1892 Parliamentary decision to establish the Niger Coast Protectorate under
British Colonial rule ended the possibility for such an amalgamation, but the
Liverpool traders did reach an agreement with the Niger Company whereby
the former would give up trade in the Niger in exchange for some of the
Company’s profits and representation on its board of directors (“Introduction
to Third Edition,” xlviii–xlix). Flint further notes that Kingsley studiously
avoids mentioning how the Niger Company’s own local monopoly and taxa-
tion of African middlemen led to smuggling and to the 1895 attack on the
Company’s headquarters in Akassa that resulted in severe Parliamentary criti-
cism of the Niger Company (“Introduction to Third Edition,” l).
48. Laura E. Ciolkowski, “Traveler’s Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the
Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa,”
Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 344–5.
49. “Introduction to Third Edition,” lxiv.
50. “Traveler’s Tales,” 344.
51. Salome C. Nnoromele, “Gender, Race, and Colonial Discourse in the Travel
Writings of Mary Kingsley,” The Victorian Newsletter 90 (Fall 1996): 5.
52. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” New York Review of
Books 21, no. 16 (1974). Online.
53. Dissemination, 189. Cited in Location of Culture, 105.
56. “Conrad’s Darkness.” Volumes of Conrad criticism would of course take issue
with this point about symbolism.
57. “Conrad’s Darkness.”
58. “Conrad’s Darkness.”
59. Time and the Other, 114–18.
60. Mencken, “Joseph Conrad,” 20.
61. On Conrad’s relation to English and to colonialism as a Polish-born imperial
subject, see Alex S. Kurczaba, ed. and introd., Conrad and Poland (Boulder,
Colorado: East European Monographs, 1996) and Wieslaw Krajka, ed., A
Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland and East-Central Europe (Boulder, Colorado:
East European Monographs, 2004).
62. Sara Suleri, “Naipaul’s Arrival,” The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), 152.
63. Heart of Darkness, 54, cited in “Conrad’s Darkness.”

64. “Naipaul’s Arrival,” 152–3.
65. Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-
Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
66. Pitt Rivers urged aspiring ethnographic observers to distinguish carefully
instances of writing, which Tylor deemed “made for the purpose of com-
munication or record” (“Writing,” 118), from drawing, which Pitt Rivers
considered largely representational, and from ornamentation, which he
considered conventional and serving no particular function outside of itself
(“Drawing,” 119).
67. The value of Phoenician “Aggry” beads, as opposed to their cheap European
imitations, was nothing to scoff at, since they fetched their weight in gold
during Kingsley’s day. See John Edward Price, “On Aggri Beads,” The Journal
of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 12 (1883): 64–8.
68. Petroleum was not discovered in the Niger Oil River region of present-day
Nigeria until 1956. On the production and uses of palm oil, see K. G. Berger
and S. M. Martin, “Palm Oil,” The Cambridge World History of Food, eds
Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 397–410.
69. Mary Kingsley, Letter in The New Africa, reprinted in “Introductory Notice to
Second Edition,” xix.
70. Letter in New Africa, xvi, xvii. Blyden also cites this latter passage in African
Society and Miss Mary Kingsley, 7. Whether or not Kingsley truly believed
that England’s imperial aggression was fully rooted within “ignorance not
intention” is a matter for debate (Letter in New Africa, xviii); her adopted
stance nevertheless amounts to an indirect call to England to live up to the
letter of its ostensibly moral mission.
71. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Letter to Mary Kingsley, 7 May 1900, Selected Letters
of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. Hollis Ralph Lynch (Milwood, New York: KTO
Press, 1978), 460.
72. Letters of Blyden, 460. Blyden, in the process, offers a more sympathetic view of
the African cultural middleman: “The Christianized Negro looks away from his
Native heath. … He is under the curse of an insatiable ambition for imitation
of foreign ideas and foreign customs. … He finds neither delight nor solace
in sympathetic study of Native institutions, and is, therefore, in no position
to instruct foreigners with regard either to Native law or religion. This [is] the
black man’s Burden – the Christianized black man” (Letters of Blyden, 461).
73. Quoted in “Introduction to Third Edition,” lxvii.
74. Letter in New Africa, xviii.
75. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Black Spokesman: Selected Published Writings of
Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. Hollis Ralph Lynch (New York: Humanities Press,
1971), 266.
76. Nineteenth-century comparative ethnography promoted the collection
and collation of information concerning diverse small-scale societies in the
hope of discerning common, primary forms of cultural production, which
were subsequently read as analogous, “primitive” forms found in European
societies at an earlier stage of development. Blyden, and to a certain extent
Kingsley, revise this temporal relation by comparing African and European
societies as contemporaries.
77. African Society and Miss Mary Kingsley, 14.

78. Black Skin, White Masks, 109.
79. Mary Kingsley in a letter to Blyden, quoted in African Society and Miss Mary
Kingsley, 14.
80. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887;
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), iii.
82. Symbols, in the contemporary semeiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce,
were considered a subset of signs founded on social convention.
83. Black Spokesman, 131.
85. Even the extensively revised 1912 edition of Notes and Queries omitted the
section then titled physical anthropology only because the growth and spe-
cialization of this field necessitated a separate volume, to which sufficiently
qualified readers were referred.
92. Black Skin, White Masks, 10–11.
98. African Life and Customs, 37–8.
100. African Life and Customs, 51–2.
103. Sydney Haldane Olivier, White Capital and Coloured Labour (London:
Independent Labour Party, 1906), 116.
104. White Capital, 116.
107. White Capital, 170. Olivier’s discussion of fetishism, unlike that of Bhabha,
nevertheless does not emphasize the strategy of ambivalence.
109. Fanon draws on Edmund Husserl’s concept of Erlebnis.
110. Black Skin, White Masks, 86. Despite his emphasis on physical and affec-
tive experience, Fanon is careful not to restrict access to critical discussion:
“I sincerely believe that a subjective experience can be understood by others;
and it would give me no pleasure to announce that the black problem is my
problem and mine alone and that it is up to me to study it. But it does seem
to me that M. [Dominique O.] Mannoni has not tried to feel himself into
the despair of the man of color confronting the white man. In this work
I have made it a point to convey the misery of the black man. Physically
and affectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would

be dishonest: It is not possible for me to be objective” (Black Skin, White
Masks, 86).
111. Black Skin, White Masks, 110. Fanon draws further on the phenomenology
of Merleau-Ponty: “We grasp external space through our bodily situation.
A ‘corporeal or postural schema’ gives us at every moment a global, prac-
tical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on
Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5. The notion of a trau-
matic, primal “scene” alludes to the onset of Freud’s Oedipus complex,
in which a subject first encounters societal institutions and prohibitions
related to sexual differences. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, this scene marks
the subject’s transition from the “specular I” to the “social I.”
112. Black Skin, White Masks, 111. Embedded quotation from Jean Lhermitte,
L’Image de notre corps (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), 17.
113. Black Skin, White Masks, 188. Fanon clearly distinguishes his use of this
phrase from that of Karl Jung, who attributes this unconscious to inherited
psychic structures.
114. Black Skin, White Masks, 112. Fanon discusses the potential for language
to construct a fixed, stereotypical image in “The Negro and Language”: “To
make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to
imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which
he is not responsible” (Black Skin, White Masks, 35).
117. According to Lacan, the subject at this level of development identifies with
and feels alienated from a misrecognized, mirror image of the self – one
that, contrary to the subject’s experience of bodily fragmentation, appears
inaccessibly perfect, whole, and therefore other – and thus experiences the
dual reaction of narcissism and aggressivity, recognition and alienation,
that will characterize all subsequent encounters with others in society. On
Fanon’s divergence from Lacan, see, for example, Abdul R. JanMohamed,
“The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in
Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 59–87; Henry Louis
Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 3 (1991): 457–70;
David Macey, “The Recall of the Real: Frantz Fanon and Psychoanalysis,”
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 6,
no. 1 (1999): 98–107.
118. “Mirror Stage,” 71.
119. As Fanon explains, “I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the
degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a col-
onized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me that I am a
parasite on the world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into
step with the white world. … Then I will simply try to make myself white:
that is, I will compel the white man to acknowledge that I am human”
(Black Skin, White Masks, 98).
121. Black Skin, White Masks, 100, 34.

125. “Fetishism,” 154.
126. Black Skin, White Masks, 33, 140.
128. Black Spokesman, 235–6.
130. Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 14, 15.
131. Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 15. This comparative analysis of race
relations in the United States and Liberia, while founded to a certain extent
in Liberia’s status as a former US colony, also served obvious political inter-
ests for Blyden, who acted as a spokesman for the American Colonization
Society.
133. Black Skin, White Masks, 148. Fanon locates moments of formative trauma in
early childhood when the Antillean is forced “to choose between his family
and European society.” For white Europeans, according to Fanon, the struc-
ture of the family models that of the nation and “[t]he [white] family struc-
ture is internalized in the superego”; the black colonial who goes to Europe,
however, often chooses white society over the colonial family, in which case
“the family structure is cast back into the id” (Black Skin, White Masks, 149).
According to Fanon, the neurosis that may develop in black colonial subjects
results from this augmented tension between the superego and the id.
134. See especially 206–23 for Livingston’s biographically detailed and nuanced
assessment.
135. The Virgin Islands did not emancipate slaves until 1848, one year after
Liberia was declared an independent republic.
136. Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, vii.
137. Kingsley cited in Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (London:
Macmillan, 1932), 254.
138. Imperial Eyes, 213. See also “Mapping Authorship and Authority”; “Fish
and Fetish”; and Catherine B. Stevenson, “Mary Kingsley’s Travel Writings:
Humor and the Politics of Style,” Exploration 8 (1980): 1–13. For a critique
of the political efficacy of irony and the significance of unconscious desire
in Kingsley’s narrative, see “Fantasies of ‘Lady Pioneers.’”
139. Imperial Eyes, 215.
140. “Alterity and the Imperial Agenda.”
141. See especially “Introduction to Third Edition” and “Gender, Race, and
Colonial Discourse.”
142. “Introduction to Third Edition,” lxiv.
143. Letter in New Africa, xix.
144. See, for example, Hollis Ralph Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro
Patriot 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) and Thomas
W. Livingston, Education and Race: A Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden
(San Francisco: Glendessary Press, 1975).
145. Flint acknowledges her influence on African nationalisms through the 1960s.
146. See, for example, Richard J. Douglass-Chin, “Revisiting Edward Wilmot
Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887): Islam and the Eastern
Caribbean in the 21st Century,” La Torre 11, no. 41–42 (2006): 345–54;
Pan-Negro Patriot; Apollos O. Nwauwa, “Empire, Race and Ideology: Edward
Wilmot Blyden’s Initiatives for an African University and African-Centered
Knowledge, 1872–1890,” The International Journal of African Studies 2, no. 2
(2001): 1–22; Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Edward Wilmot Blyden, Précurseur
de la Négritude” (Foreword), trans. David L. Schalk, Selected Letters of
Edward Wilmot Blyden, xv–xxii; Boikai S. Twe, “Edward W. Blyden’s Lessons
in African Psychology,” Liberian Studies Journal 21, no. 2 (1996): 169–202;
Ngũgı̃ Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature (London: J. Curry, 1986).
147. Curiously, no critic to my knowledge has examined the mounting tensions
precipitating the break between these two Reverends, Blyden and Crummell,
in the light of Blyden’s sympathetic turn toward Islam by the 1870s.
148. On Blyden’s controversial position in African-American history, see
Education and Race (especially 184–223); on the similarities between Blyden
and Du Bois, see Michael J. C. Echeruo, “Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois,
and the ‘Color Complex,’” Journal of Modern African Studies 30, no. 4 (1992):
669–84.
149. For this issue as well as Blyden’s affinity with Washington, see Ross Posnock,
“How it Feels to be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the ‘Impossible Life’ of
the Black Intellectual,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 323–49.
150. Education and Race, 204, 205. Livingston also discusses Blyden’s eventual
disillusionment with Liberia and his proposal by the turn of the century for
an interim imperial government.
151. Black Skin, White Masks, 11–12.
152. See Education and Race.
153. Fanon’s parallel between racism and anti-Semitism, in which he quotes the
following passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, further illu-
minates the potential limitations of Kingsley’s liberalism: “It is our words
and our gestures – all our words and all our gestures – our anti-Semitism,
but equally our condescending liberalism – that have poisoned him. It is we
who constrain him to choose to be a Jew whether through flight from himself
or through self-assertion; it is we who force him into the dilemma of Jewish
authenticity or inauthenticity” (quoted with emphasis in Black Skin, White
Masks, 182). See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of
the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (1946; New York: Schocken Books
Inc., 1995), 135.
3
Realism and Realia in Colonial
Southern Africa
The natural and social landscape that Wilhelm Joest traversed while
traveling through British southern Africa in the mid-1880s evinced
decades of conflict between African and European residents that
rivaled the atrocities Conrad, Kingsley, and Blyden observed in Central
and Western Africa. Southern Africa underwent an exceptionally
rapid and excessively violent development in the second half of the
nineteenth century, following its emergence within a predominately
capitalist market as the world’s primary supplier of diamonds, after their
1867 discovery in Kimberley, and of gold, which led to the 1886 foun-
dation of Johannesburg. Behind these well-known events lies a lengthy
history of struggle over the land, its resources, and its objects that char-
acterized colonial relations in southern Africa throughout the century.
What perhaps distinguished Cape Colony from other British occupied
territories in Africa at this time was the level of systematization achieved
in “setting up the machinery” for “a hierarchy of extortion.”1 While this
machinery existed most visibly at the administrative and legislative
level, its effects reverberated in other discursive forms as well – from the
representational strategies of museum displays to those of ethnographic
and imaginative writing.
In contrast to metropolitan authors like Henry Rider Haggard and
Ernest Glanville, who offered Victorian readers narratives of southern
African adventures filled with discoveries of exotic objects and others
to supplement the growing archive of travel writing, memoirs, and war
novels, a number of long-term southern African residents proposed to
stake their authority and base their expressly realist novels on careful
observation and “the facts” that “lie … before [them].”2 The South African
novels considered in this chapter, including Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s
The Farm in the Karoo as well as Anna Howarth’s Jan, an Afrikander and
123
Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo, represent attempts at transplanting the realist

novel to the African karoo. They are, to a certain extent, “farm novels”:
Anglophone versions of the plaasroman that drew on a broader tradition
of “the English novel of rural life” to provide an imaginative site for
envisioning successful, productive settlement.3 Novels of extreme sty-
listic and generic heterogeneity, reflecting the multiple genres available
to colonial authors for depicting and authenticating “the real,” emerge
in these attempts at capturing southern African life in the forms of
nineteenth-century realism. Ethnographic and natural historical texts, in
particular, provided South African novelists with both a lens and a lan-
guage for representing the colonial world of people and things around
them. Far from offering the sense of transparency or photographic objec-
tivity such genres expressly pursued, however, these forms of writing,
as we have seen in the work of Kingsley and Blyden, possess imbedded,
often politically charged, interests.
Meaning in the colonial novel, as in ethnographic and natural historical
narratives and museums, is nevertheless not so easily contained, since
other ways of seeing, inscribing, and making sense of the world serve to
rupture the “metaphoric writing” upon which colonial realism depends.
The novels I explore in this chapter focus on the material world and
its multiple resonances while highlighting not only colonial anxieties
over the decentering of imperial authority, but also conflicting systems
of value and notions of objecthood that often underwrote colonial
encounters. Alternate economies and forms of social organization
structuring southern African life present sites of resistance to the realism
of Carey-Hobson and Howarth while entering into their narratives, when
they appear at all, in the form of unsettling returns or menacing doubles.
Whereas Howarth’s novels structurally anticipate such returns in proto-
modernist narratives that subtly resist closure, Carey-Hobson’s novels
attempt to overcome them and thereby expose by way of exaggeration
the borders of literary realism. Considered together, the works of Carey-
Hobson and Howarth demonstrate how the material world represented
in and exerting pressure on colonial realist narratives testifies to some
of the struggles and negotiations that characterized colonial exchanges
while registering values in conflict with the novels’ dominant narratives
of imperial order, conservation, and reproduction.
1 Collecting Cape Colony Life
Toward the end of Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in the Karoo,
a novel characterized by ardent collecting, “a remarkably fine specimen
Realism and Realia in Colonial Southern Africa 125
of the horned viper” or “horensmaan” is brought home, “preserved …

in spirit, and … ultimately placed in the Natural History Museum at
Grahamstown.”4 Had contemporary readers visited this collection of
natural and cultural objects in Grahamstown’s Albany Museum, they
might have encountered such a specimen donated by the author’s
family and listed in its 1883 catalogue as “‘Hornsman’ … , adult,
in spirit.”5 Silently taking its place in the collection’s classificatory
schema, this “Viperidœ cornuta” behind glass appears significantly
less lively than the venomous snake that characters Teddy and Jack
Carlton encounter in the karoo on which their family’s farm rests. Yet
this dead specimen arguably enlivens the novel, while simultaneously
distending the narrative’s already strained form. The indexicality of
this object’s strongly metonymic gesture toward the referential world
outside of the novel represents one of several ways in which Carey-
Hobson attempts to validate the novel’s realism, and yet The Farm in
the Karoo is practically overflowing with fictional fragments that help
produce its reality effect. So many objects press against the pages of this
novel it seems little wonder that one of them appears to have escaped
the borders of fiction and entered the world of referents. Specimens,
curiosities, souvenirs, and trophies jostle one another and compete
for significance in a narrative that attempts to hold them together
while advancing its straightforward, linear plot. The natural historical
museum arguably serves as the dominant structural metaphor of the
novel, in which the atemporality of the collection strains against the
temporality of narrative while the scientific and economic interest in
specimens collides with the curiosity for more singular objects, and yet
the drive to classify and to press nineteenth-century southern African
life between the novel’s pages increasingly gives way to the contingen-
cies and idiosyncrasies of metonymy.
On the surface, The Farm in the Karoo is an edifying adventure tale
advocating travel and settlement in southern Africa among its young
male audience: especially “the boys of England and of the ‘Cape’”
(Karoo, vii). The novel opens as Fred Dalrymple, the excessively studious
son of a minister, receives a rather ominous “sentence of transportation”
from his doctor, who recommends he suspend his studies at Oxford for
a comparatively salubrious year of travel in Cape Colony (Karoo, 4).
The young man, we are told, has endangered his health through too
much reading (Karoo, 13). Thousands of miles from Devonshire, amidst
the grassy flatlands of central southern Africa known as the Great
Karoo, Fred will find a mirror image of himself in the inquisitive Frank
Harding, a friend of the Carlton family, who laments his relative lack
of books and his unfulfilled desire to attend university in England. The

two quickly become brothers in botany, as well as affiliates of empire.
Presented as a kind of late Victorian Grand Tour, beneficial to any
“young men who are likely to enter Parliament,” the proposed journey
through “the outlying portions of [England’s] great empire” also lures
Fred’s companions Charley Vyvyan, a recent Oxford graduate, and
Sinclair Marston, “the son of an officer who had served and died in
India” (Karoo, 9, 13). Unlike Fred, Marston, as he is called, does not like
books, and his uncle the Colonel believes his ward “would learn more
from observation while travelling about” (Karoo, 14). This remark, in
essence, forms the underlying principle of the novel, which employs
Victorian realism’s descriptive apparatus in order to train its young read-
ers how to observe, collect, and classify during the characters’ journey
from England to the Great Karoo via Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The
novel’s subtitle emphasizes “what Charley Vyvyan and his friends saw,”
and its narrative indoctrinates readers in a particular way of seeing. In
this regard, the novel closely mirrors the strategies of contemporary
ethnography as well as the educative role of contemporary southern
African natural and cultural history museums. It is no coincidence that
the colony’s oldest and most extensive museums frame the travelers’
stay in southern Africa, as they visit the South African Museum in Cape
Town shortly after their arrival and leave one of their specimens with
the Albany Museum at their journey’s end.
From its earliest inception, the South African Museum (SAM) in the
nineteenth century was conceived of as a public institution devoted to
educating colonists on the value of local resources. The announcement
of its 1825 foundation in the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser
defined the museum as “an Establishment … for the reception and clas-
sification of the various objects of the Animal, Vegetable and Mineral
Kingdoms which are found in South Africa, whereby an opportunity
will be opened to the colonists of becoming acquainted with the general
and local resources of the Colony.”6 Given “the endless diversity and
novelty of the natural products of this Colony,” local inhabitants were
urged to donate to the museum “whatever it [was] in their power to
collect” in order “to promote an Institution so interesting and useful.”7
Similarly, an 1855 announcement made by the “Economic Section”
of the museum in The Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette solicited
samples of local wool to be displayed alongside European comparators.
With the help of local support, the museum’s Trustees hoped “to renew
annually the specimens of colonial growth exhibited in the Museum …
and … to render the museum complete in this branch, as well as in the
other staple commodities of South Africa.”8 Some of the best-preserved

natural history specimens during the early years of the museum were,
quite literally, potential commodities on loan from local taxidermy
firms like the Cape Town branch of Maison Verreaux that emerged
in response to Europe’s increasing demand for foreign specimens.9
Similarly, natural and ethnographic objects collected during an expedi-
tion by the Cape of Good Hope Association for Exploring Central Africa,
exhibited by the SAM in 1836, were sent to London the following year
for exhibition and sale in the hope of recovering expenses and funding
future ventures.10 The museum’s objects thus resonated with economic
as well as scientific interest, and both forms of investment grew with
the borders of Cape Colony.
The SAM, like the mid-nineteenth-century British Museum after
which it was largely modeled, displayed a wide range of natural and
cultural specimens, although the smaller scale of the newer museum’s
collection and exhibition space necessarily brought these various
objects in closer proximity.11 The museum, as described by director
Edgar Layard in the early 1860s, followed as closely as possible the
nomenclature employed in the catalogues to the various departments of
the British Museum: Cuvier’s system ordered the assembly of mammals
and birds, the mineralogical series followed the system of Berzelius, and
shells were organized according to Lamarckian classification.12 A brief
excerpt from the 1861 museum guide, however, provides a sense of the
typological juxtapositions that characterized this rapidly growing col-
lection before it was moved to its current location in 1897:
At the extreme end of the room … is a collection of manufactured

articles, ancient as well as modern, pottery, glass, and Kafir ornaments,
&c., and on one side of the long case containing the Mammalia is
the Entomological collection; on the other, the Herbarium. Ranged
along the top of the case containing the Birds is a series of the horns
of various animals, most of which are not to be found in the col-
lection. On the Mammalian case are specimens of native vessels in
wood and basket work, and Hindoo and Buddistical Deities, a trophy
of New Zealand weapons and a suit of Sikh mail.13
Gathering together various donations, as well as objects more system-

atically collected by mid-century, this eclectic institution working to
assert itself as more than a curiosity cabinet – both “interesting and
useful” – also included an extensive numismatic collection as well as
a fledgling botanical museum modeled after the plan of Kew Gardens.
It is this collection, housed along with the public library in a stately

1860 neoclassical building at the lower end of the botanic gardens, that
Carey-Hobson’s fictional travelers would have seen in 1872.14 A photo-
graph from about 1880 reproduced in Figure 6 helps us to imagine what
this collection may have looked like to Carey-Hobson’s travelers, minus
the upper balcony completed in 1876.15
As in other nineteenth-century natural historical collections, humans
took their place metaphorically and metonymically within the exhibi-
tion space. Noticeably absent from Layard’s 1861 catalogue, as well as
contemporary photographs of the SAM’s collection, were the life-size
figures of black South Africans acquired by the museum after their
display in Steedman’s 1833 London exhibition.16 These eight figures,
last mentioned in a repair record from 1860, represented “the four
principal tribes Kafir, Basuto, Hottentot and Bushman” and, accord-
ing to Summers, were the precursors to the present museum’s diorama
figures.17 A selection of human skulls, organized by ethnicity, were
Figure 6 Interior of the South African Museum, circa 1880. Image courtesy
South African Museum, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, South Africa
however included among the 1860 mammalia specimens. One of these,

enlivened by an unusually lengthy description offering the Xhosa
man’s name, his occupation, and the conditions surrounding his skull’s
acquisition after his 1851 death in battle at Fort Hare, stands out among
the specimens while encouraging us to ponder how such physical relics
may have signified within a collection largely devoted to educating the
public about potential Cape commodities.
Susan Stewart’s discussion of the collection as “a metaphor for the
social relations of an exchange economy” under capitalism suggests a
preliminary framework for considering the significance of objects in
the museum, and given the SAM’s expressed educative roles this met-
aphor seems particularly apt.18 According to Stewart, the collector, like
the mercantilist, works by “extraction and seriality” and “removes
the object from [its original] context and places it within the play of
signifiers that characterize an exchange economy.”19 The resultant col-
lection – as a self-contained, autonomous world – creates for objects a
new context that “stand[s] in a metaphorical, rather than a contiguous,
relation to the world of everyday life.”20 The museum therefore does
not represent the world; it constitutes a world in itself, and in this
substitute world “[t]he spatial whole of the collection supersedes the
individual narratives that ‘lie behind it.’”21 Appearing to the viewer as
simply given or inherited, “objects are naturalized into the landscape of
the collection”: natural objects “are made cultural by classification” and
cultural objects “are naturalized by the erasure of labor and the erasure
of context of production.”22 As in the construction of the commodity
fetish, the qualitative diversity of the objects assembled – such as the
uniqueness of their sensuous physical qualities, their use values, and
their histories as animate, inanimate, or manufactured creations – is
subordinated to the homogenizing system that defines the collection.
The public collection ultimately constitutes the museum object through
a certain degree of forgetting that assures the object’s position in the
memory of future generations.
The dominance of the classificatory system over individual narratives
thus contributes to what Stewart considers the “ahistoricism” of the
collection23; however, this process of temporal and physical extraction
is never wholly complete. The natural history museum in particular,
Stewart suggests, “allows nature to exist ‘all at once’” by collapsing the
space and time that separates its objects outside of the collection,24
while seemingly defying the ravages of time and history. Within the
walls of the SAM, for example, the extinct quagga roams with the giraffe
and elephant, while weapons from eighteenth-century Polynesia hang
alongside arrows and assegais from nineteenth-century southern Africa

or opposite fossils from England and Cape Colony. Thus the extended
“social lives” of individual objects, while at times indicated by a wall
label or catalogue description, subject themselves to the collection’s
spatial and temporal presence. Yet, as Stewart explains, “there are two
movements to the collection’s gesture of standing for the world: first,
the metonymic displacement of part for whole, item for context; and
second, the invention of a classification scheme which will define space
and time in such a way that the world is [metaphorically] accounted
for by the elements of the collection.”25 It is the first movement of
metonymic displacement by which a unique object becomes a represen-
tative specimen that, when remembered, most effectively troubles the
ahistorical, metaphoric wholeness of the museum collection on which
Carey-Hobson’s novel models itself.
The SAM’s nineteenth-century display of the Xhosa man’s skull high-
lights such tensions between representative part and contextual whole,
particular narrative and general system, metonymy and metaphor that
characterize the collection generally. As a scientific specimen, positioned
within a system that distinguishes Homo sapiens by perceived ethnicities,
the physical remains of one man stand in for the diversity of the group:
the individual is identified as a “Gaika Kafir.” As a specimen within
a collection that represents economic exchange as literally as it does
figuratively, this physical relic also enters into circulation with other
objects qua latent commodities. Displaying together southern African
manufactures and physical remains may thus represent the potential
resources of indigenous labor, figured as both objectified labor value
and bodily potential. The especially brutal war of 1851–3 during which
this man fell, in fact, resulted in an unprecedented number of displaced
and impoverished Xhosa forced to enter the British colonial labor force.
According to Clifton Crais, “By June 1855 the number of Africans from
the ‘Gaika’ district who were searching for employment on the public
works [such as building roads and irrigation canals] temporarily out-
stripped the number that could be employed.”26 Xhosa prisoners, in
fact, supplied some of the unpaid “convict labour” used to build the new
museum.27 Alternately, the material remains of an Irish murderer, English
convict, and Xhosa military adversary, in particular, could represent the
ostensibly non-reproductive agents against which imperial capitalist
development struggled. Yet it is the lengthy catalogue description that,
by authenticating the object through detailing the skull’s origins, intro-
duces a thread of the individual man’s story and sets into play a more
metonymic curiosity. Was the man a brave warrior? What were the exact
conditions of his death? Did he leave behind a family who grieved for
him? The more questions asked the more this personal physical relic
appears out of place in a public museum; however, contemporary Cape
colonists admitted to the museum would likely not have asked all of
these questions. What, for example, may the object have signified to a
museum visitor who witnessed or fought in the same war?
Displayed in the same space where mounted game paraded down
the central aisle while horns lined the lower balcony as in a hunting
lodge, the abbreviated war story contained in the description simulta-
neously points to a narrative of conquest that positions the object as
trophy.28 Sadly, the conditions of the 1851–3 Xhosa War as it progressed
rendered the hunting trophy analogy particularly appropriate. As one
soldier observed when many Xhosa began dying of starvation, the war
came to resemble “a mere hunt.”29 According to Stewart, the hunting
trophy, like the physical relic, troubles the distinction between the
souvenir and the collection, remembering and forgetting, metonymy
and metaphor: “Because they are souvenirs of death, … [they] are at the
same time the most intensely potential souvenirs and the most potent
antisouvenirs. … If the function of the souvenir proper is to create a
continuous and personal narrative of the past, the function of such
souvenirs of death is to disrupt and disclaim that continuity.”30 By dis-
claiming continuity with the past, from which these objects have been
severed, the collector of physical relics and trophies struggles to ensure
his or her existence in the present by displaying a kind of victory over
time and death as well as over the former life represented in the object
displayed. The physical relic appears as a powerful (potential) triumph
over death that ultimately returns (potently) as death’s uncanny harbin-
ger reminding the collector of his or her own transience.31 Perhaps the
human physical relic, as a special kind of museum object not so easily
objectified because hauntingly familiar, acts as a limit case that exposes
the collector’s fragile and paradoxical investment in the collection.32
Collections as attempts at preserving objects and subjects, specimens
and collectors, exhibit particular urgency in a colonial context, since
the museum’s implied narrative of colonial production simultaneously
serves as a narrative of imperial reproduction: the objects assembled
represent the colony’s potential for future agrarian and industrial devel-
opment. These tensions between metaphor and metonymy, forgetting
and remembering, objects and subjects, underwrite the figurative world
of Carey-Hobson’s novel as well.
Within the world of the novel, as within the world of the collection,
metaphor and metonymy coexist in necessary if imbalanced tension,
and Carey-Hobson’s novel proves no exception in this regard. Metaphor,

according to de Man, works by analogy to establish relationships of neces-
sity and a sense of totality, whereas metonymy, working by contiguity,
establishes chance relationships more susceptible to fragmentation.33
This comparative stability of metaphor, Freedgood further argues,
grants prose fiction “the important armature of the symbolic structure”
that helps produce literary meaning; in contrast, metonymy, through
its heightened indexicality, “often conjures up the real so successfully
that its status as a trope seems to disappear.”34 Metonymy performs the
prosaic work of annotating, predicating, and describing – of drawing
a relation between two things, such as object and subject, because of
their adjacency within a given context – all of which Carey-Hobson
performs in excess of symbolic meaning making. The stability of meta-
phor enters into Carey-Hobson’s novel largely through its attempts to
identify, classify, and order a heterogeneous reality by pressing it into
the homogenizing service of a novelistic world modeling its armature
after the natural history collection. In this regard, the “necessity” of
metaphor derives its authority largely from the “necessity” of deductive,
natural historical methods of classification: the order imposed derives
from the order already believed to exist in nature. To adapt Jim Buzard’s
recent formulation of the relation between metaphor and the autoeth-
nographic novel, my reading of The Farm in the Karoo depends on the
interrelation between three primary tropes: “first, the ‘metaphorization’
of life … into [natural history] … ; second, the metaphorization of”
natural history into the space of the museum collection; “and third, the
metaphorization of a spatialized [natural historical museum] into the
textual space of [the] novel.”35 My subsequent analysis of the novel will
focus primarily on the third trope.
While the realist novel may generally favor metonymy over metaphor,
as Roman Jakobson famously suggested, Carey-Hobson’s novel exhibits
an excessive indexicality and receptivity to what Freedgood has termed a
“strong” metonymic reading that interprets fictional objects both figu-
ratively and literally, taking readers beyond the pages of the novel.36 In
promoting the novel’s realism in the Preface, Carey-Hobson invites her
readers to read literally. Like her friend and fellow South African Olive
Schreiner, Carey-Hobson emphasizes the need for direct observation and
“long acquaintance with the scenes described” in the construction of a
South African realism (Karoo, x).37 The novel’s realism thus borders on
the strategies of naturalism, as detailed by Émile Zola, in its emphasis on
observation, experience, and documentation. Through these methods,
he suggests, “the novel will write itself” and, as if ordering objects in
a museum display, “[t]he novelist must only arrange the facts logically.”38
The Farm in the Karoo devotes so much attention to observation and
documentation when citing specific people, things, and places that,
although no dates are offered, the reader can locate the novel in time to
the exact year and month. The characters moreover appear to leave their
mark on the referential world by leaving a horned viper in the Albany
Museum’s natural history collection, leading the reader to wonder
whether the San stone implements that George claims to have presented
to Atherstone stand in for those also donated to the museum by William
Carey-Hobson.39 The sensuous immediacy of the museum object seem-
ingly traveling between collections enlivens the object world of the
novel, while Carey-Hobson continuously blurs the distinction between
fiction and reality by inviting her reader to look for the fictional world
in the world of referents.
The novel further directs the attention of its readers beyond its
margins through the extensive paratextual apparatus it deploys in
support of its realism. From its dedication and preface, to its engravings,
footnotes, and extensive quotations from authoritative predecessors, this
extra-textual material attempts to render more palpable the connection
between the fictional and referential world. As if conscious of the novel’s
incompletion as a collection, for example, she recommends in her Preface
the work of George Thompson,40 among others, for “more descriptions
of natural objects and of the fauna and flora of the country” (Karoo, x).
Footnotes repeatedly interrupt the narrative to supply additional
information and even engage argumentatively with literary and natural
historical predecessors (Karoo, 138). One of the most extensive in-text
interruptions occurs once the travelers finally reach the karoo. Rather
than providing a detailed description of this much awaited setting,
Carey-Hobson defers her own illustrative powers and quotes Thompson’s
description instead; she then immediately revises it through a lengthy
rebuttal in defense of the arability of the karoo, in which she marshals
recent publications by Crumbie Brown on forestation and irrigation.
While supplementing the novel’s use of observation and description,
paratextual material disrupts narrative development while introducing
accessory, at times even competing, narratives.
The public collection provided Carey-Hobson with a model for order-
ing the complexity of her colonial surroundings and representing them to
an English metropolitan audience while, as we will see in the section that
follows, divorcing objects as specimens from the turbulence of colonial
history as it continued to unfold. In this regard, Carey-Hobson’s involve-
ment in arranging the South African Court at the 1862 International
Exhibition in London could be viewed as a non-literary precursor to her

first novel published twenty years later. This small exhibition display
representing Natal Colony, in particular, shared Carey-Hobson’s focus on
local resources and their potential for development. The Popular Guide to
the exhibition opens its description with a list of the wool, cotton, grain,
fruit, tobacco, sugar, and “buffalo” horns on display, drawing attention
to the “specimens of sugar” that demonstrate “how rapidly a branch
of industry may be established in a country” given “a little encourage-
ment” among colonists.41 The display also included photographs and
drawings of the colony’s Zulu residents, depicted in a variety of dances
and domestic activities, as well as illustrations of animals and insects.
Objects in this display, as in many nineteenth-century museum displays,
arguably possessed a greater degree of immediacy than subjects in that
they stand in for themselves rather than appearing as copies in black and
white photographs, drawings, or wax models. The subject as translated
museum object lacks a comparable sense of immediacy and generally
troubles the collection’s sense of wholeness. The relative immediacy of
the museum object, placed in the service of the collection, ultimately
corresponds with the sense of immediacy or discursive transparency
upon which colonial authors professing to offer a factual account relied.
Kingsley could therefore describe her West African travel writing as
“collections of facts,” and Carey-Hobson could profess to offer her read-
ers realism founded in direct observation and fact. Some of the “facts”
Carey-Hobson cites in attempting to authenticate her novel’s realism,
however, are precisely those that lead to the unraveling of its metaphoric
colonial world.
2 Specimens and Curiosities in Carey-Hobson’s

The Farm in the Karoo
Given the novel’s affinity with the colonial museum, a peculiarly

Victorian avidity for collecting shapes The Farm in the Karoo from
beginning to end. From ferns to the catalogue of curiosities and speci-
mens amassed by the young travelers on their journey through southern
Africa, the novel carefully documents them all. The travelers collect
leaves, ferns, flowers, shells, seaweed, corallines, the head of a ham-
merhead shark, an octopus tentacle, a leopard’s skull, feathers, snakes,
San stone implements, a lorry, a golden cockatoo, and animal skins for
stuffing. Throughout the novel these things are preserved in vessels,
spirit, and prose, and what cannot be collected, packed, and shipped
back to England is meticulously described and sketched. Description,
rather than narration, thus serves as the dominant method in the novel,
in which readers, like the characters, assume the position of an observer
wandering through Cape Colony as a grandiose natural history museum.
Human life observed takes its place among the animal, vegetable, and
mineral kingdoms of this display, while events in the novel, placed in
the service of observation and description, appear as tableaux – at times,
even as early museum dioramas of late nineteenth-century vintage – fore-
stalling narrative development; specimens of scientific and economic
value meanwhile assume a privileged place in this collection, yet one
that curiosities repeatedly trouble.
Collecting, we learn at the opening of the novel, is a hobby everyone
can practice, even those whom the novel will leave behind in England.
We come to know Charley’s sister Florence, in particular, as a devotee
of “the Victorian Fern Craze,” and her native Devonshire was noted
in contemporary classificatory guides for its luxuriance of ferns.42
Given the growing demand for ferns in households and gardens across
England, fern nurseries dealing in a great diversity of species emerged
in order to appease consumer desire.43 Before her brother departs for
southern Africa, Florence makes him a fern book for gathering and
pressing the specimens he finds on his journey. Fern books, fashionable
among young Victorian ladies by mid-century, allowed the enthusiast
to classify and preserve her specimens, thus serving as a kind of portable
herbarium. One folio edition featured pages of colored illustrations
opposite blank pages for “affix[ing] the dried specimen[s], forming
when filled an elegant and complete collection of this interesting family
of plants.”44 The fern book allowed the collector to capture the natural
world between its pages, transforming nature’s infinite variety – as no
two ferns are identical – into a finite selection of representative speci-
mens. While ferns often attracted Victorians’ especial passion for their
aesthetic qualities,45 the structure of the fern book systematized the
enthusiast’s acquisitiveness by emphasizing the need to complete the
collection rather than to indulge the fancy too much in the singularity
of its parts. Fred, before visiting Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew Gardens
prior to his departure, receives similar botanical advice from the
Colonel: “[T]here are plenty of dabblers in botany; people who collect
all the ‘pretty flowers’ and ‘lovely ferns’ that come within their reach. …
but one who loves the science will, while not neglecting the beau-
ties, do his best to develop the botanical resources of a comparatively
unknown region scientifically” (Karoo, 17). Sounding more like specifi-
cations from a museum’s or professional society’s guide to observation
and collection rather than novelistic dialogue, the Colonel’s emphasis
on collecting scientifically and systematically characterizes the novel’s

larger representational schema and the status of fictional objects
therein. Specimens and curiosities, rather than souvenirs and trophies,
dominate the world of this novel.46
Objects and events in Carey-Hobson’s novel, whether described by
the narrator or by characters, are represented from the perspective of
an immediate, scientifically inclined observer, which, in turn, encour-
ages the reader to become a fellow observer. In this regard, observant
Fred rather than active Marston represents the model figure: “Fred was
not one of those who … go about with their eyes in their pockets.
Nothing seemed to escape his notice. He looked at everything that
came in his way with a critical eye, and for a youth of his age he had
a very fair amount of scientific knowledge” (Karoo, 60). Encouraging
scientific observation, even the dialogues between the novel’s central
characters often take the form of a question and answer session that
matches visual descriptions of flora and fauna to classificatory names.
This drive to rename the world of southern African objects, in fact, per-
meates the language of the novel as characters cognitively remap their
surroundings.47 “Master likes Gocums?” asks their Malay attendant,
Dollie; “Hottentot figs very good” (Karoo, 42). Edward Trevelyan, the
travelers’ English guide in Cape Town, explains: “It is the fruit of the
figbearing Mysembryanthemum [sic], and many people are very fond of
it” (Karoo, 42). Encountering the diversity of the natural world and ways
of naming it, characters and readers alike learn to observe, describe, and
classify the world as specimen. Throughout the course of the novel,
water lilies become Crinum aquaticum, pig lilies become Arum ethiopica,
and even Schreiner’s delicately suggestive ice-plant is identified as a
species of Mesembryanthemum (Karoo, 103, 107, 195). An early reviewer
of The Farm in the Karoo, in fact, commended the novel for its detailed
descriptions of flowers, which perhaps served as the literary counterpart
to Carey-Hobson’s drawings of Cape flora then exhibited in the South
African section of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
It is no coincidence, then, that this highly descriptive, episodic
novel often resembles a collection of pictures rather than a series of
closely interrelated events. Lukács considers how description produces
a particular kind of presence in the late nineteenth century: “Description
contemporizes everything. … One describes what one sees, and the
spatial ‘present’ confers a temporal ‘present’ on men and objects. But
it is an illusory present, not the present of immediate action of the
drama. … Static situations are described, states or attitudes of mind
of human beings or conditions of things – still lives.”48 Implicitly
distinguishing the spatial presence of description from the temporal

presence of narration, Lukács suggests that description places an event
in our view yet does not allow us, even imaginatively, to participate
in this event. Description, he argues, positions the reader as observer
and “the events themselves become only a tableau for the reader,
or, at best, a series of tableaux” that does not play a central role in
developing the plot of the novel or the inner lives of its characters49;
this series, moreover, presents images “as isolated and unrelated to
each other as pictures in a museum.”50 Narration, by contrast, produces
characters and readers as participants in events that prove central to this
development: “We are the audience to events in which the characters
take active part. We ourselves experience these events.”51 In Carey-
Hobson’s novel, however, the characters participate in observation
as an educative event, and as the young travelers learn how to see so
does the reader. In fact, the practice of observation supersedes all other
events in the novel to the extent that, much to Lukács’s distaste, no one
scene proves integral to the development of the plot and, in most cases,
any scene could just as well have been substituted with another. The
sense of totality derived from the necessary interrelatedness of events,
characters, and objects that Lukács praised in the realism of Walter
Scott and Leo Tolstoy simply does not exist in Carey-Hobson’s novel;
rather, the novel models its sense of totality after the fragile metaphoric
wholeness of the collection.
The scenes of human life collected in this descriptive novel tend to
annotate objects, as would the arrangement of figures in a diorama, or,
at best, to offer an ethnographic view of colonial life. The novel’s empha-
sis on exhibiting Cape resources places flowers, fruits, salt, diamonds,
soap, leather, and ostrich feathers at the center of its descriptions of
human activity. Rather than offering a narrative account of interrelated
human actions and reactions, in which one scene leads causally to the
next, the novel weaves together a collection of scenes passing before the
eyes of the travelers that focus on various forms of colonial production.
According to Lukács, the danger of description resides in the fact that
“details becom[e] important in themselves” and achieve a significance
autonomous from the lives of characters that ultimately impacts the
novel’s organization52: “The writer using the descriptive method starts
out with things … . The characters’ lives, the careers of the protagonists,
merely constitute a loose thread for attaching and grouping a series of
pictures of objects, pictures which are ends in themselves.”53 “When
men are portrayed through the descriptive method,” he continues,
“they become mere still lives”54; this objectification of the human
subject, which he associates with “the domination of capitalist prose

over the inner poetry of human experience” following the consolida-
tion of bourgeois power in Europe after the mid nineteenth century,55
results in “a schematic narrowness in characterization.”56 Without
coincidence, Carey-Hobson pays minimal attention to character devel-
opment in the novel; in an early chapter, entitled simply “Who’s who,”
characters are ticketed and labeled like items prepared for display. The
chapters devoted to Mr. Carlton’s titular farm in the karoo, moreover,
provide detailed accounts of cattle tending, leather tanning, and ostrich
farming rather than focusing on the thoughts, emotions, or relation-
ships of its residents. Having finally reached the destination anticipated
since the novel’s opening, no particular event produces a memorable
or climactic moment that humanizes the passage of time and events;
at best, the journey results in a climax of productivity embodied in the
well-irrigated karoo farm. This is, perhaps, the point, as Carey-Hobson’s
novel openly endorses colonial development of the karoo through
English capital.57
The majority of objects in this narrative appear as either curiosities or
specimens, which differ noticeably from one another.58 The specimen,
because of the distinct place accorded to it in the collection, possesses
value – scientific as well as economic – in relation to the whole and yet
can also exist in redundancy. When Fred begins to worry that he will
not fill up Florence’s fern book while lingering on the grassy karoo,
a local farmer offers him a selection of already pressed ferns from his
own collection “as he had many duplicates, including specimens of
varieties that would have taken them perhaps days to find” (Karoo, 279).
In contrast, those items labeled curiosities – gifts purchased in Madeira,
ivory goods sold at the Port Elizabeth market, a hammerhead shark,
and San rock paintings and implements – possess a sense of the new
and unusual, dependent on the perspective of the uninitiated observer,
without possessing significant exchange value. When Fred eagerly
begins stuffing his pockets with arrowheads found on the floor of a cave
where the travelers have been viewing several rock paintings – before
pausing to ask, “May I have them?” – George responds:
Take as many as you like … for these things are not accounted
treasures in this country. I took some down to Dr. Atherstone, of
Grahamstown, who is a very excellent amateur of such things, and
is also an excellent geologist, to whose opinion we always defer. … It
was he who pronounced a stone from the Transvaal to be a diamond,
and thus opened up the diamond fields. (Karoo, 174–5)
Diamonds rather than San stone implements, already contained in

the natural historical collection at Grahamstown, possess immediate
exchange value in the novel, as even an avid part-time geologist and
co-founder of the Albany Museum like Atherstone allegedly expresses
limited interest in these ethnographic objects that play comparatively
little role in colonial account keeping. The paintings, samples of which
the South African Museum first began to acquire in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, are described as in standard ethnographic
accounts of the period with an emphasis on materials, technique, and
iconography; their exchange value was no doubt limited to their degree
of portability. Whereas Marston, a skilled draughtsman, recognizes in
the paintings “a wonderful talent for drawing” (Karoo, 173), the narrator
undercuts this estimate by taking leave of the “rude sketches” and sub-
ordinating them to more useful and exchangeable objects (Karoo, 176).
Like in the South African Museum, objects as specimens in the novel’s
collection resonate with economic as well as scientific value while read-
ers and characters alike learn about the value of Cape Colony resources.
Not only does the novel introduce readers to the abundance of fruit
at the Cape, the promise of Port Elizabeth suburbs, the productivity of
saltpans outside Uitenhage, and the exchange value of karoo farmed
ostriches and their feathers, but it also repeatedly emphasizes the value
of natural resources under an “improving” colonial hand (Karoo, 55,
102, 103–6, 255–6). While the travelers visit a brandy farm on their way
to Graaff-Reinet, the novel once again discourses on the near Edenic
productivity of a well-irrigated karoo:
[T]here was much to please the visitors in showing what could be

done in the Karoo, with capital well applied and industrious working
out of well-planned improvements. … The whole country around
consisted of vast barren-looking “flats”; but the rows of shady wil-
lows, the lofty almond and eucalyptus, forests of peach, apricot,
and fig, and groves of orange and citron trees, irresistibly impressed
the beholder with what could be effected by the industry of man.
(Karoo, 268)
The narrator’s simple description of the farm, while not entirely incom-
patible with the aesthetics of the picturesque, serves as a catalogue of
Cape commodities. Moreover, English capital, in particular, represented
for Carey-Hobson the promise of improvement. At the end of her 1884
Anglo-Boer War novel, At Home in the Transvaal, an English farmer
comforts himself following the British retrocession of the Transvaal
with the thought that, after the Boer Republic’s presumably inevitable
bankruptcy, “English capital will be so welcome, and by that time
invited, that matters will right themselves.”59
The chapter “Curiosities Old and New” exhibits some of the novel’s
most extensive ethnographic descriptions of figures lying outside this
narrative of productivity and development. Featured as curiosities, rather
than specimens, these objects of interest do not hold quite as valued a
place in the novel’s metaphoric museum. The “old” curiosities of this
chapter are easily identified, when Hendrick proposes going to “see the
pictures on the rocks that the old Bushmen left” (Karoo, 170). Hendrick’s
emphasis on “old Bushmen” distinguishes the famed indigenous artists
located in an ostensibly pre-colonial past from the Carltons’ contem-
porary San servant Yonge, who specializes in collecting honey rather
than etching and painting stone. On this trip, Fred collects arrowheads
and Charley admires a grinding apparatus in a well-stocked workshop
eerily devoid of human life; indeed, it evokes the memory of a museum
once visited: “I have seen round stones like it in collections of stone
implements at home” (Karoo, 176). This scene might just as well have
taken place in a museum, if only its objects were valued as more than
curiosities to colonists like George, since its setting inspires an object-
centered discussion of the San and their industry. Metonymically, the
“old curiosities” of this chapter emerge as the absent “old” San them-
selves. The “new” curiosities of this chapter are not so easy to discern.
At the end of the chapter, the sight of their Khoekhoe servant Kaatje
purchasing fresh bread at the side of a river piques Marston’s “curiosity”
(Karoo, 177). Learning that a Mozambique woman has baked them in a
clay oven along the riverbank, the travelers solve the curious mystery
while drawing a connection with curiosities of old. The San grinding
apparatus, George explains, resembles those still used by Kaatje for
grinding coffee and, presumably, by the Mozambique baker for grind-
ing grain. The implied connection between these curiosities suggests
a narrative of conservatism rather than development, which, in the
words of Roy Wagner, turns “the whole world of ‘custom’ into a gigantic
living museum”: “It was not simply the museum, but man’s life itself,
that constantly recreated the past.”60 This new curiosity represents a
variation of the old.
The other new curiosity in this chapter, however, appears in a Cape
Dutch farmer’s wattle and daub hut that the travelers visit before seeing
the rock paintings. While spanning out their oxen on Van Royen’s
property, they feel obliged to accept his invitation to coffee. Upon
entering the fly infested home, illustrating, according to Fred, “one of
the Plagues of Egypt,” their attention falls on a “curious black object”

looming in the corner of the room (Karoo, 172). When they discover
this object of curiosity to be a fly covered sheep slaughtered that
morning for dinner, they extricate themselves from their social obliga-
tion as quickly as politely possible. George explains how “[t]he better
class of Dutch are noted for neatness and cleanliness”; however, “Van
Royen was a squatter” (Karoo, 172–3, 170). An implied lack of industry
underwrites this familiar portrait of colonial vagrancy, and, according
to J. M. Coetzee, “the true scandal of the [British colonial] nineteenth
century was not the idleness of the Hottentots … but the idleness of
the [Calvinist] Boers.”61 Rather than attributing this idleness to an
ostensible habituation to African slave labor, to which Fred’s indirect
reference to ancient Egypt’s enslavement of the Jews arguably alludes,
Carey-Hobson reveals the institutional source of Van Royen’s relative
lack of industriousness. As George elaborates, “the land belongs to [the
British colonial] Government, and though he may have a long lease of
it, he would think it a pity to build on land not his own” (Karoo, 170).
Identifying this family of Cape Dutch farmers (or rather, cattle and
sheep herders), who evidently haven’t trekked far enough north, as
“nomads,” the novel implicitly aligns them with other groups of land-
less South Africans alluded to in this chapter whom the Cape Dutch
themselves helped to disenfranchise (Karoo, 173). The image of plague
and poor hygiene in association with squatting moreover recurred
throughout the 1870s and 1880s in Cape sanitation discourse, which
colonists wielded in order to reorganize or repossess lands inhabited,
lawfully and unlawfully, by native Africans.62 As curiosities old and new,
these archaeological and ethnographic scenes of southern African life
represent by way of metonymy produced within the text some of the
displaced byproducts of Cape Colony’s “well-planned improvements.”
The term “curiosity,” as it functions in the novel, serves to objectify
ostensibly non-productive subjects, positioning them among the col-
lection of curiosities populating the narrative. A strong metonymic
reading, however, might take us beyond the pages of the novel in order
to contextualize further Cape Colony’s familiar curiosity of the squatter,
revealing an even more complicated historical narrative elided between
“curiosities old and new.”
The highly charged term “squatter” served as a popular nineteenth-
century object of public discourse and evokes a turbulent history of
British colonial legislature and indigenous resistance that concerned
African more than Dutch descended residents. The colonial history of
this term as it resonates albeit opaquely in the novel centers largely
around the Eastern Cape’s attempts at mobilizing an agrarian capitalist

labor force after the abolition of the slave trade in 1806 and the
emancipation of Khoekhoe workers through Ordinance 50 of 1828.
The demand for low-wage labor intensified in the Eastern Cape after
the 1820 arrival of nearly 4,000 English settlers, including a young
William Carey-Hobson, to whom the British government had promised
large tracts of farmland that the colonists could not themselves tend.
Ordinance 50 granted the Khoekhoe rights intended to enable them to
sell their labor more freely on the colonial market, including the right
to move about the colony without a pass,63 thus revoking the Caledon
Code of 1809,64 and the right – pending citizenship and successful
application, both difficult to obtain – to acquire government land. This
ordinance, as Clifton Crais notes, resulted instead in a large number of
desertions from colonial farms, as most Africans preferred tending land
and livestock for themselves rather than their former masters. As colo-
nists had by this time privatized much of the land suitable for farming,
grazing, or hunting, the majority of the newly emancipated sought ref-
uge for their families and livestock on missionary lands, on uninhabited
government land, at the periphery of towns and farms, in the Kat River
Settlement (ca. 1829–54),65 and, later, in the few peasant communities
that sprang up on the lands purchased by chiefs and other members of
the pre-colonial elite.66
Colonists immediately expressed their discomfort over the heightened
visibility of displaced and alienated Africans “having no visible means of
subsistence” by issuing new local regulations and lobbying intensely for
vagrancy legislation.67 Within three months of Ordinance 50, landown-
ers in Somerset, the district where the Carey-Hobsons lived, announced
a new set of regulations: “To prevent idlers and other improper persons
lurking about the village, no person whatever is to be allowed to take
up his residence upon the Government Ground, anywhere within
the limits of the Township, and all Huts or other erections … shall be
destroyed by the Police.”68 Ordinance 2 of 1837 officially “prohibited
unauthorized rural and urban locations,” which the newly empowered
Town Commissioners of Grahamstown enforced by destroying any such
communities found in the vicinity on government land.69 Even the 1856
Masters and Servants Act, Crais argues, resembled a preliminary vagrancy
act70; it enforced five-year contracts and punished workers for various
forms of indiscipline, including desertion, drunkenness, laziness, dis-
obedience, and abusive language.71 Xhosa, in particular, were subject in
1857 to the more rigorous Act 23, which forbade them from entering the
colony unless for work, and Act 27, which allowed them two weeks in
the colony to find new employment after the expiration of a contract.72

As Crais observes, these laws “helped establish South Africa’s modern
migrant labour system.”73 While Cape Colony did not establish the
Vagrancy Act until 1879, various additional pass laws, employment acts,
taxes, and communal surveys and regulations served in the interim.
The imminent threat of a vagrancy act, proposed and tabled numer-
ous times over the course of the century, inspired African resistance
throughout the colony and especially in the volatile East. While
mid-century land and labor legislation often employed “color-blind”
language, it specifically and quite transparently targeted Africans who
were being increasingly disenfranchised from their means of subsis-
tence. Attempting to generate Khoekhoe and Griqua support at the
onset of the war in 1851, resistance leader Willem Uithaalder presciently
observed of the proposed act, “not a single person of colour, wherever
he may be, will escape this law.”74 As early as 1834, when the Vagrancy
Ordinance was first proposed, one African resident of the Theopolis
London Missionary Society station declared, “The vagrant law is for
black men,” while another maintained that the law would reintroduce
them to slavery.75 Speaking before a younger crowd gathered in protest
of the Vagrancy Ordinance, Platje Jonker reflected not only on rejecting
the proposed legislation but also on the need for more laws preserving
the rights of Africans: “You children do not know why we stand here
and talk, but we do. Every nation has its screen, the white men have
a screen, the color of their skin is their screen, the 50th Ordinance is our
screen and this law we approve but not the vagrant law.”76 While the
word “screen” in 1830s parlance referred to any object used to protect
oneself from wind or heat, it figuratively denoted “means of securing
[oneself] from attack, punishment, or censure.”77 White skin, as screen,
helped to secure colonists from charges like vagrancy to the extent that
they were much less frequently stopped for questioning and identifi-
cation. In contrast, racial profiling grew so prevalent that even black
South Africans not classed among the “Native Foreigners” required to
carry passes, like the Khoekhoe and Mfengu, expressly asked for and
began carrying passes “to shew that they [were] not vagrants, and that
they [were] upon some lawful business.”78 Only with the extended
depression of 1862 did some colonists make a place for Africans who
continued to resist their ascribed role in agrarian capitalism, when
poorer farmers who could not afford to pay for labor instead illegally
encouraged sharecropping and tenancy on their lands.79
Without some understanding of contemporary vagrancy and labor
legislation in the colony, the scene in which Piet thanks his master
Mr. Carlton for not sending him to jail after he has slipped away from
work to visit the canteen would remain largely incomprehensible.
After all, throughout the novel Mr. Carlton represents the ideal master
whose just treatment of his servants ensures their gratitude and hard
work.80 When Charley derogatorily laments of the Khoekhoe, “They
are not pleasant animals to have to deal with,” Mr. Carlton assures him
that they are “valuable” and “efficient servants” (Karoo, 98, 97, 98).
No one mentions the 1856 Masters and Servants Act as insurance
against inefficiency, which punished any breach of contract, damage to
property, or form of indiscipline with fines or imprisonment. The threat
of incarceration that haunts the margins of the text in such scenes
moreover helps to explain why trophies figure as insignificantly as
souvenirs in the novel.81 The only “trophies” procured in this novel are
a couple of leopard skins and an octopus’s tentacle, as decades of war
have produced “efficient servants,” and indigenous resistance enters
the novel as merely a memory and a glance in the direction of Robben
Island (Karoo, 232, 93). When touring Cape Town Fred inquires whether
all convicts reside on the island, as “[o]ne could scarcely imagine that
they could find employment in such an isolated spot for those con-
demned to hard labour” (Karoo, 52). Trevelyan explains that the prison
houses primarily “State prisoners” like “the rebel Kafir [that is, Xhosa]
chiefs,” although “such cases are now few and far between.” “The
natives as they become civilized,” he cheerily elaborates, “find it more
to their own interest to keep up friendly relations with the Europeans,
and become voluntarily amenable to the laws of the colony” (Karoo, 52).
“The laws of the colony” that regulated the workforce, some of which
descended from the 1754 Cape Slave Code, often did prove preferable to
imprisonment, convict labor, and death in battle or attempted escape,
although indigenous resistance continued throughout the century.
Beneath the novel’s positive images of colonial efficiency and grateful
servitude lies the shadowy reality of Cape Colony’s developing legal and
penal system, metonymically suggested yet simultaneously foreclosed
through the rather oblique reference to Robben Island.
Curiosities stationed at the margins of Carey-Hobson’s realist collection
ultimately encourage us to read metonymically and, like the exceptional
specimen that escaped even if only to enter another collection, beyond
the borders of her museological novel. Emerging at the limits of colo-
nial capitalist narratives of production, conservation, and reproduction,
curiosities inspire the readerly curiosity that helps to unlock forgotten
narratives of objects contained in colonial collections. Curiosity, in its
more obscure sense denoting a “careful attention to detail,”82 disrupts
the collection’s emphasis on representative specimens and classifica-

tory types while entertaining an interest in the singular. Carey-Hobson
encourages curiosity and strong metonymic readings in order to help
authenticate her realist collection, and yet metonymy proves a disor-
derly and unpredictable figural strategy for an author attempting to
order southern African colonial life and its resources. Even her most
favored recommendation, Thompson’s Travels and Adventures in Southern
Africa (1827), presents a strikingly different view of the Khoekhoe than
we find in the novel through its “curious” story of Abraham Zwarts,
the “respectable” and “industrious Hottentot” whose successful farm
Thompson visited several years before the establishment of the Kat River
Settlement:
This is, perhaps, the only instance of a Hottentot having obtained a

grant of land in the Colony; and the circumstances are curious and
worthy of being commemorated, to evince what might be antici-
pated from Hottentot industry, if that long oppressed race received
due encouragement to exert themselves. … How can industry or
improvement be expected from a class of people long degraded into
bondsmen, and systematically prevented from emerging from that
condition?83
Curious readers who accept Carey-Hobson’s invitation to read curiously

may discover just how “voluntarily amenable to the laws of the colony”
the majority of its inhabitants had become.
3 Outside the Realist Collection: Reckless Generosity

and Other Notions of Expenditure
When explaining to Charley the status of his farm laborers, Mr. Carlton
reflects on the seemingly constitutional peculiarities of his Khoekhoe
servants:
“The Hottentots I call permanent because most of them have grown

up on the farm, and their parents were servants here before them;
now and then, when they have accumulated a few head of stock and
fancy themselves rich, they go away for a time, but the Hottentot
is very generous, he shares with his poorer brethren as long as he
has anything to share; therefore his little flock is soon eaten up,
and then he comes back to work. The Hottentot has a great many
faults; he is often lazy, thriftless, dirty, and will drink when he has
the opportunity.”
“What a picture!” said Charley. (Karoo, 260)
What a picture, indeed, and one that corresponds with the novel’s
investment in productivity and well-planned improvements.
Mr. Carlton neglects to mention that the Khoekhoe were by this time
one of the few African groups not identified as “Native Foreigner,” and
thus might consider their tenure on his farm a little more permanent.
He also does not reflect on how the Masters and Servants Act gave him
the authority to detain children born on his farm against their parents’
will and indenture them until the age of 18; he chooses instead to focus
on their ostensibly fixed characteristics. Mr. Carlton’s catalogue of his
Khoekhoe servants’ “faults” interestingly includes extreme generosity,
as a form of unconditional expenditure, among the related vices of
wastefulness, laziness, and alcoholism. While the familiar charges of
evading work either by loafing or stealing away to the canteen resemble
forms of indirect resistance to the demands of colonial authority,84
which, in turn, fueled colonists’ justification for imperialism as the
imposition of order and efficiency, the recurring concern over excessive
generosity highlights the degree to which indigenous systems of
value and exchange came into conflict with the demands of colonial
capitalism. The problem of generosity as vice would remain as illegible
to us as Piet’s gratitude if not for the availability of a broader Anglophone
and African literary archive. Whereas Khoekhoe and Xhosa characters
repeatedly enter into colonial South African novels as irrational
practitioners of excessive generosity, Xhosa, Nama, and Damara folklore
collected throughout the nineteenth century warns against the dangers
of excessive acquisition and of unreasonably placing individual and
immediate above communal and delayed interests. While Carey-
Hobson’s novel attempts to provide a complete picture of southern
African life through its deployment of a realism enmeshed in market
capitalism, such narratives and perspectives informed by an alternate
economy less easily find a place.
Mr. Carlton suggests that his servants’ economic dependence on
him results from their own weaknesses rather than from the colonial
legislation that circumscribed them. While the farmer recognizes his
servants’ ability to conserve their wages, despite their ostensible lack
of thrift, and to accumulate cattle, sheep, or goats to take back to their
extended families, he criticizes their perception of value in claiming
that they “fancy themselves rich” enough to discontinue working for
him for a while. Mr. Carlton’s perception of his servants was not unique;
in fact, it literally did exist as “a picture” in the form of a painting by
the Victorian artist and explorer Thomas Baines. Entitled Kaffers having
made their fortunes leaving the colony, 1848, the painting depicts a group
of Xhosa traveling on foot with two cattle, a couple of old rifles, and
whatever the women can carry on their heads. Surely such a “fortune”
could not compare with the thousands of acres and scores of thousands
of livestock individually owned by some of the more successful colonial
farmers. Of the Xhosa, Fingo, and Basuto (or Sotho) laborers living in
kraals on his farm, Mr. Carlton remarks, “none of these are to be reck-
oned upon more than from month to month” (Karoo, 261); as “Native
Foreigners” they were required to leave the colony once their term of
employment expired.85 Khoekhoe, by contrast, could legally remain,
but only on designated and densely populated lands. As the century
progressed, living conditions in these areas steadily declined. As Crais
and others have revealed, Africans living in locations and settlements
often had to pay both a hut and livestock tax, to have their land
surveyed and enclosed, and to limit the number of livestock in their
possession; hindering Africans’ ability to accumulate wealth, these regu-
lations overtly worked to produce a rural proletariat. Displaced “Native
Foreigners” and Khoekhoe alike continued to squat on farmlands and
in settlements, working only when necessary for local white farmers;
approximately half of the residents in the Kat River Settlement, for
example, were identified as squatters.86 The intermittent work habits
that Mr. Carlton observes ultimately represent the “pattern of people
resisting full proletarianization but forced into occasional employment
on white farms” that characterized southern African labor relations
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.87 The distorted
reproduction and fixation of resistance strategies as congenital charac-
ter flaws persisted into the following century as well.
Mr. Carlton’s criticism of his Khoekhoe servants moreover highlights
the degree to which his governing ethics of acquisition, production,
and conservation conflict with the alternative values of giving and
reciprocating. According to Mr. Carlton, they do not appear to conserve
in the sense that they do not accumulate surplus capital for reinvest-
ment and for purchasing the means of future self-subsistence. Georges
Bataille, when critiquing the utilitarianism that underwrites bourgeois
societies founded on capitalist commodity exchange, suggests that
“humanity recognizes the right to acquire, to conserve, and to consume
rationally, but it excludes in principle nonproductive expenditure”: “on
the whole, any general judgment of social activity implies the principle
that all individual effort, in order to be valid, must be reducible to the

fundamental necessities of production and conservation.”88 Among
these “principles of classical utility,” the Khoekhoe’s generosity, like
their poverty, finds no place.89 According to Bataille, “As dreadful as it is,
human poverty has never had a strong enough hold on societies to cause
the concern for conservation – which gives production the appearance
of an end – to dominate the concern for unproductive expenditure.”90
The conservation of goods overshadows the conservation of human life,
placing primary emphasis on production seemingly for its own sake.
Sharing resources until exhausting them, even if this were necessary in
order to preserve individual human lives, would thus appear to consti-
tute an act of irrational, non-productive, “unconditional expenditure”
resembling other forms of loss, such as art, play, luxury, mourning, or
debauchery.91 The image of thriftless consumption, in that the servant’s
“little flock is soon eaten up,” does not account for the fact that large
numbers of Khoekhoe were on the verge of starvation; rather than
watching his relatives perish, Mr. Carlton’s servant instead “shares with
his poorer brethren as long as he has anything to share.” Colonial offi-
cials issued similar reports about residents of the Kat River Settlement
that was established largely for liberated Khoekhoe, where, despite
government regulations enforcing individual land ownership through
the construction of rectilinear plots surrounded by fences, “much of
the land … remained communal”: “They tended to be ‘most kind and
generous to each other’ and were willing to ‘share to the last with their
compatriots.’”92 Mr. Carlton’s ethics correspond more with those of a
British novel-reading middle class, rather than those of impoverished
and alienated pastoralists committed to ties of kinship and a sense of
reciprocal obligation. His perception of accumulation and conservation
moreover does not account for a system founded on communal owner-
ship: could his servants “fancy themselves rich” while their extended
families remained poor?
Gift exchange, practiced by Khoisan and Xhosa communities through-
out the nineteenth century, accompanies an alternative system of value
that British colonists like Mr. Carlton, and, moreover, The Farm in the
Karoo, fails to recognize. As historian J. B. Peires observes, the ethics of
generosity governed Xhosa practices of exchange within an economy
distinguished by alternate periods of abundance and scarcity; assuring
for the redistribution of resources during times of need necessitated
establishing “a network of reciprocal social relations” through giving
and through the exchange of gifts.93 Such practices, explains Peires,
typically baffled neighboring colonists: “White observers admired the
willingness of the Xhosa to ‘divide what they get amongst each other,
be it ever so trifling’ while they condemned an apparent inclination
to waste and squander in time of plenty. However, the two tendencies
were perfectly complementary. A man gave as much as he could on one
day in case he was hungry on another.”94 Crais moreover summarizes
the conflict of value that such systems presented to British colonists:
“The British came from a capitalist and industrializing society centred
on the individual and an economic system oriented around the pro-
duction of commodities for exchange. In Xhosa society, in contrast,
the overwhelming majority of goods remained within the community
and circulated according to principles of reciprocity and redistribu-
tion.”95 Unlike terminal exchanges emphasizing an immediate return
between individuals within a commodity-centered market economy,
gift exchange results in often delayed returns and establishes a “more
general and enduring contract” between groups of people entering into
a relationship of reciprocity that generally renders the gift less alienable
than the commodity.96
The Damara tale of “The Unreasonable Child to Whom the Dog
Gave its Deserts,” translated and published in an 1864 collection of
“Hottentot Fables and Tales” by the famous Cape linguist Wilhelm
Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, presents a non-capitalist view of “reasonable”
exchange practices.97 Whereas British colonists considered extreme
generosity as a form of unconditional expenditure irrational, the epony-
mous “unreasonable child” of this tale defies Damara reason by giving
selfishly rather than generously and with the effect of redistributing
property more equitably. The tale begins when a little girl, who had
picked a piece of fruit from her family’s tree, offers it to her mother:
“Mother, why is it that you do not say, ‘My first-born, give me the
eïngi?’ Do I refuse it?”98 After the mother asks for the eïngi, the little girl
gives it to her and walks away. The mother proceeds to eat the fruit,
whereupon the girl returns and asks her mother to give it back to her:
“Mother, how is it that you have eaten my eïngi, which I plucked from
our tree?”99 In order “to appease her” daughter, the mother gives her a
needle in exchange for the eïngi. Taking the needle, the girl leaves her
mother, sees her father attempting to sew his thongs with a thorn, and
addresses him in the familiar pattern: “Father, how is it that you sew
with thorns? Why do you not say, ‘My first-born, give me your needle?’
Do I refuse?”100 The father asks his daughter for the needle, the daugh-
ter again goes away after giving it to him, and the needle soon breaks.
When she returns to ask her father for the needle, she again complains:
“Father, how is it that you break my needle, which I got from Mother,
who ate my eïngi, which I had plucked from our tree?”101 In return, her
father gives her an axe. The girl wanders through her village, entering
into similar exchanges with every human and animal she meets. After
giving food to a group of pheasants, who of course eat the food, she
poses the same question in a by now expanded form: “How is it that
you eat my food, which I had received from a little old woman who
had eaten up my honey, that I had got from the lads of our cattle who
had broken my axe, which had been given me by my Father who had
broken my needle, which was a present from my Mother who had eaten
my eïngi, which I had plucked from our tree?”102 The story, along with
this chain of exchanges, ends when the little girl demands that their dog
return the milk that she had given him and that he has drunk. Instead
of offering her something in exchange, the dog flees, leads the girl up
a tree she cannot descend, and refuses to assist her because she chased
him. The little girl, as the title suggests, has received her deserts.
The child’s unreasonableness arguably emerges within the context
of an exchange system informed more by notions of the gift than the
commodity. In commodity exchanges under capitalism, one thing is
acquired for an equal value of another in the form of their universal
equivalent – that is, the money form – through discreet, or terminal,
exchanges. Those entering into a terminal exchange possess no further
obligation toward one another after completing the transaction. While
each exchange in “The Unreasonable Child” involves one object offered
in place of another, none of the goods appear wholly alienable and
therefore no single transaction is entirely discreet. Characters in this
story recognize in each object the trace of the humans and animals
offering these objects in exchange, as each item preserves the symbolic
value of all preceding transactions.103 The little girl, in fact, repeatedly
invokes a kind of genealogy of exchange that endows each object in the
chain of exchanges with increasing value in order to convince others
to restore the objects she offers. Whereas requesting the return of food
already consumed may seem particularly unreasonable, since, as Weiner
remarks, food and other expendable commodities make for the least
viable forms of inalienable possessions,104 the story does not wholly
distinguish between terminal and non-terminal goods.
By demanding a more immediate rather than delayed return of
each object offered, the little girl nevertheless violates the temporal-
ity of gift giving. Most commodity exchanges take place within what
James Woodburn calls an “immediate-return” system, in that one
thing is offered in place of another at the moment of exchange.105 In
“delayed-return” gift exchange systems,106 making or soliciting the
more immediate return of a gift constitutes an act of impropriety.

When the “unreasonable child” asks for and persists in seeking the
return of an object she has freely given, she exhibits such unseemly
behavior. The girl’s untimely request for the return of goods freely
given violates the very premise of gift exchange, which allows for the
redistribution of goods and services within the community to establish
greater equity. Demanding a nearly immediate return hardly allows for
goods to circulate or for interest to accumulate sufficiently; instead, the
child’s offerings resemble very short-term loans. In this regard, even
her reference to the needle her mother has given her as a “present”
appears inappropriate or disingenuous. The mother offers her daughter
the needle in order “to appease her” and her immediate demands, not
because she wishes to return the child’s anti-gift of the eïngi.
A Xhosa version of this tale appears in the cycle of episodes centered
on a popular trickster figure also common to Zulu folklore and published
in translation by George McCall Theal as “The Story of Hlakanyana.”107
Hlakanyana as both trickster and shape-shifter beguiles every human
and animal he meets while defying Xhosa exchange practices of reci-
procity and redistribution. In nearly every episode he manages to gorge
himself on meat he has contrived to obtain for himself while often
casting blame on another; his capacity for private acquisition proves as
superhuman as his powers. One of the episodes included in this cycle
begins as he tricks a young companion by eating all the birds they have
caught, accusing his companion of this same offense, and demanding
that he “pay for [his] birds with [a] digging-stick.”108 Hlakanyana sub-
sequently passes through a series of exchanges resembling those of the
unreasonable child, and these transactions culminate in a comparable
genealogy of exchange:
You have killed my calf, the calf that I received from the keepers
of calves, the keepers of calves that killed my goat, the goat that
I received from the boys that were tending goats, the boys that broke
my pot, the pot that I received from the people who make pots, the
people who broke my digging-stick, the digging-stick that I received
from my companion, my companion who ate my birds and left me
with the heads.109
More unreasonably than the unreasonable child, who misleadingly

claims that her series of exchanges began with a present from her
mother, Hlakanyana initiates his series with a self-serving lie. The other-
wise close similarities between these two tales serve to highlight the
inappropriateness of the little girl’s initial claim upon her mother and
the way in which she presents it to others; while her impropriety may
not equal Hlakanyana’s deception in its severity, it nevertheless exhibits
a comparable degree of questionable self-interest. Hlakanyana, unlike
the child, continuously manages to trade up for items of increasing eco-
nomic value, working his way from a stick to a pot to a goat and finally
to a calf. While trading up may mirror the practices of early Xhosa trade
with European colonists – which, according to Peires, resembled “a form
of financial speculation” rather than “the exchange of one use-value
for another”110 – Hlakanyana’s artful series of uneven exchanges as yet
another manifestation of his gluttony also resembles the increasingly
more exploitative relations that the Xhosa experienced throughout the
nineteenth century in trade with the colonists. Hlakanyana in this cycle
of adventures ultimately meets his end when he captures and intends
to eat a vindictive tortoise.
Warnings against selfish and excessive acquisition recur throughout
Khoekhoe and Xhosa folktales collected and published in the nine-
teenth century. The Nama folktales included in Bleek’s anthology
repeatedly punish animals for eating more than their fair share of game,
for attempting to monopolize communal resources, or for gluttonously
swallowing another animal whole. The elephant of “The Elephant and
the Tortoise” commits two of these offenses, when he swallows the
tortoise for failing to guard a waterhole he has selfishly claimed as his
own. The elephant, like the giraffe of “The Giraffe and the Tortoise”
as well as Hlakanyana, dies in his attempt to ingest the tortoise.111
Theal’s selection of Xhosa folklore includes numerous stories of unusu-
ally ravenous animals and cannibals, in which the human characters
must find their way among such grotesque figures attempting to imbibe
them merely to appease their appetites. In “The Story of the Cannibal
Mother and Her Children” this excessive form of acquisition perverts
the very relation between parent and progeny, as the cannibal mother,
rather than feeding her children, swallows them whole before engulf-
ing an entire village and its cattle.112 At the end of this tale, a little bird
kills the mother by tearing her open and freeing her victims. A fabulous
monster known as an igongqongqo, or glutton, meets a similar fate at
the end of “The Story of the Glutton,” when his human conquerors
free the members of the village he ingested.113 The threat of excessive
acquisition – of taking into the self – rather than expenditure, haunts
the worlds of these tales.
Whereas warnings against excessive acquisition were not unique to
southern African folklore, as we will see in the novels of Anna Howarth
and Olive Schreiner, they do recur with striking regularity and in

marked contrast to colonialists’ denunciation of excessive expenditure.
Carey-Hobson’s novel represents an extreme form of realism under
capitalism, bordering on naturalism, that encodes an ethics of produc-
tion, completeness, and stability dependent on the substitutability
and alienability of its objects, rendering them exchangeable within
a largely metaphoric, atemporal system paralleling that of capitalist
commodity exchange. Objects and objectified subjects falling outside
of this economic and cognitive grid include those that are inalienable,
contiguously connected to social contexts and participants, and
therefore temporally constituted to resemble the more metonymic prac-
tices of gift exchange. The tension between commodity- and gift-based
economies thus appears as a tension between two rhetorical strategies
in the novel, as the stability of Carey-Hobson’s realist narrative as meta-
phoric museum begins to crumble under the pressure of an “endlessly
vagrant” metonymy that opens the text up to other systems of value
and meaning.
4 Curses and Gifts in Anna Howarth’s Karoo Novels
Anna Howarth brings European and African systems of value into

conflict in her novels of settlement featuring the southern African karoo,
while subtly highlighting the ways in which not all people and things
can easily become the objects of realist narrative. In her 1897 novel, Jan,
an Afrikander, excessive acts of generosity conflict with the demands of
English law and practices of reasonable exchange, resulting in a cycle of
reciprocity and gratitude that extends beyond the grave. This conflict
figures formally as well as conceptually in the novel, as seemingly
unreasonable and excessive practices contrary to the utilitarian needs
of colonial capitalism erupt within a predominately realist narrative
through gothic moments of a distinctly colonial uncanny. The central
narrative ultimately proves double, and reading Jan, an Afrikander
requires reading its narrative and its objects with double vision.
Howarth’s 1898 novel Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo interrupts its realism
with similar uncanny moments that escape the novel’s descriptive
and narrative grasp; at these moments, readers are invited to entertain
a perspective “that turn[s] the gaze of the discriminated back upon the
eye of power.”114 The moral order of each novel does not condemn such
uncanny perspectives, nor does it attempt to resolve them analytically,
but rather finds a place for them generically even if only at the margins
of the text.
Jan, an Afrikander engages the question of excessive generosity in

ways that trouble English laws of exchange, social order, and justice.
Throughout the novel, protagonist Reginald Carson grapples with
attempting to “place” the title character and his peculiar display of
values.115 While Jan looks English – in fact, better than any Englishman
Reginald has ever seen – he does not seem to exhibit the “systematic
and reasonable habits of thought” that Reginald had grown accustomed
to in England. When Reginald learns that Jan’s father was English and
his mother is African, however, all of Jan’s eccentricities align them-
selves neatly with familiar stereotypes, and Jan’s generosity, like that of
Mr. Carlton’s servant, acquires the appearance of congenital flaw rather
than cultural value:
The discovery that there was something of the original savage in

Jan’s nature was a help to Reginald in understanding his character. It
was comprehensible that to him hospitality was the highest virtue,
while truth was no virtue at all. His sudden and uncontrollable bursts
of passion were also accounted for, as well as a certain vindictiveness
which Reginald thought he had observed in him. He did not seem
to care about money once he had obtained it, though he was sharp
enough in obtaining it; and he was recklessly generous, but without
judgment. ( Jan, 54)
First and foremost, Jan exhibits marked generosity toward his fam-
ily; Jan’s father, in fact, did not will any of his fortune to the younger
children, as, according to Jan, “he knew I should give them everything
they want” ( Jan, 82). Reginald, while staying with Jan and being nursed
by him after suffering an accident near Jan’s farm, also witnesses his
generous hospitality, which, observes Reginald, is to Jan “a sacred duty”
( Jan, 47).116 While “reckless,” Jan’s disarming generosity nevertheless
wins him the admiration and affection of his family; moreover, Jan
does manage to run a successful farm. In Reginald, Jan’s generosity
inspires the appropriate response of gratitude and indebtedness that
leads him to “sacrifice” his own adherence to “absolute justice” when
concealing his growing suspicions that Jan has committed a murder:
“Yet the thought of thus returning Jan’s kindness to him was almost as
horrible as the other thought of continuing to enjoy it” ( Jan, 95, 68).
While Reginald finds himself in the middle of a gothic mystery, replete
with its excessive and irrational horrors, he simultaneously enters into
a realist South African novel of cultural and racial conflict in which he
must navigate diverging systems of value.
The central, uncanny moment that takes place in Jan, an Afrikander,

which brings to light conflicting personal and historical legacies, arises
in response to an enigmatic photograph, or rather two of them. The
novel opens with its British protagonist, Reginald Carson, searching for
his uncle with only an old photograph to guide him. This photograph
contiguously represents Reginald’s dutiful adherence to English law,
embodied in the will of his grandfather, as well as the motive for his
increasingly gothic quest and the novel’s plot. The death of Reginald’s
maternal grandfather, who has left the family estate to his long
estranged eldest son or his heir, leads Reginald to southern Africa in
search of his uncle, Sir John Fairbank Sr., who disappeared in the colony
a quarter century earlier. The laws of primogeniture,117 designed in
part to maintain distinctions of pedigree by restricting the inheritance
of wealth, titles, and estates, encounter unexpected affiliations in this
colonial setting. The scene of mirror recognition that takes place in
Jan’s home, in which Reginald sees his mother in Jan and Jan sees his
father in Reginald, follows the uncanny moment at which both men
realize they possess a copy of the same photograph: an old portrait of
Reginald’s uncle, Jan’s father ( Jan, 76).
An inherently uncanny medium, photography proves doubly
uncanny in this colonial context. As a nineteenth-century tool in the
techniques of forensics and surveillance that Reginald employs in his
search through the colony, the photograph confronts its own double
in Jan’s collection that disrupts the photograph’s status as an emblem
of empirical and imperial authority as well as of patrimony. The same
photograph, of which there exist multiple copies, may have multiple
owners and multiple, even contradictory meanings. Moreover, the pho-
tograph, Barthes lyrically reflected, “produces Death while trying to
preserve life”118; it is the very essence of the double in the form of
the reassuring soul that returns as disturbing ghost, as a “harbinger of
death.”119 Reginald’s photograph of his dead uncle, in consort with his
dead grandfather’s will, already haunts him, urging the nephew and
grandson to pursue justice like a pale, late Victorian shadow of Hamlet
without a father. The truth about Reginald’s uncle, whose disappear-
ance troubled a family nevertheless burying their anxieties and hoping
for the best, reveals itself through this doubled image of a purportedly
original subject.120 As both Reginald’s uncle and Jan’s father, the late
Sir John Fairbank Sr. manifests through this double life his English
family’s greatest fear: interracial marriage and, ultimately, miscegena-
tion. Reginald, like Jan’s neighbors the Robinsons, considers marriage
between Europeans and Africans “horrible,” “wicked,” and calamitous,
and Reginald’s recognition of his mother’s likeness in Jan causes him

“a sick shudder of conviction” in their kinship ( Jan, 26, 90, 79). While
this scene disturbs Jan as much as it does his English cousin, the novel
focuses most intensely on Reginald’s conflict of identification with a
man who both attracts and repulses him. Reginald’s nausea signals his
inability to maintain comfortable boundaries under England’s expand-
ing empire: he realizes that even the family of an English baronet can
“get so mixed up in this country,” and he quickly learns to question
the “superiority of birth or connection” that he once felt endowed him
with authority ( Jan, 26, 118).
Pedigree as the symbol of English authority dependent upon the fixed
distinctions of inherited rank and “blood,” rather than the more volatile
distribution of wealth, thus breaks down in the colony and emerges as
the sign of colonial difference. Without these distinctions Reginald
the English aristocrat sees little difference between himself and the
middle-class colonial Robinsons. Concluding that even gentlemen can
work as shopkeepers in Cape Colony, as “[a] gentleman can be nothing
more than a gentleman,” he learns to question external signifiers like
name or vocation as indicators of an essential gentility ( Jan, 198). In
this regard, the novel adopts a familiar trope of middle-class fiction
since the eighteenth century. Reginald, however, does not accept the
Robinsons’ common gentility (only partly oxymoronic) until after he
discovers his connection to Jan, and it is this relationship across racial
and cultural boundaries that most profoundly troubles hierarchical
distinctions in the novel. Reginald’s particular attraction to Jan seems
to reside neither solely in family resemblance or relation by blood nor
in a wholly fetishized view of Jan’s differences. Reginald finds himself
drawn toward Jan’s striking figure, his strong hands, his gentle nursing,
his horsemanship, his generosity, his thoughtfulness and kindness, his
promise of goodness, and, ultimately, his unconditional love for
his English cousin. No other man in the novel, English or African, solicits
Reginald’s comparable admiration. Reginald’s extraordinary love for Jan
ultimately conflicts with and very nearly trivializes the stereotypical
drawing room talk over the ostensible horrors of miscegenation, and
Reginald decidedly compromises his previously rigid adherence to
justice and honesty in defense of Jan’s honor in life and memory after
death. Reginald, I would go so far to argue, modifies his practice of
justice in order to extend its accountability to marginalized colonial
residents like Jan.
Jan’s own conflicted sense of identification results not from a physi-
ologically based inner conflict of race, as Reginald repeatedly suggests,
but rather from a British and colonial social order that restricts
him. Identifying fully with a “fastidious” Reginald, who watches –
meticulously, compulsively, repetitively – for any sign of “the primeval
savage [in Jan], abandoning himself to his ungoverned emotions,”
tends to obscure Jan’s emphasis on the social construction of race ( Jan,
40, 115). For Jan, the photograph of his father represents an alternate
family legacy and related historical narrative. Jan expresses distinct
hostility toward his English father, who provided Jan with a thorough
education and who “was very particular that [he] should speak and
write English perfectly” ( Jan, 80). As Jan explains:
I used to love my father dearly. I used to think, when I was a boy,

that he was very good to me. But now … I curse him! I curse him for
marrying my mother! I curse him for bringing me into the world!
I curse him that he fitted me for a position which I can never hold!
I curse him that he gave me my rights with one hand, only to take
them away with the other! He knew that I should be hated by the
Kafirs because my father was a white man! He knew that I should
be scorned and loathed by the white men because my mother was a
Kafir woman! I curse him because he knowingly did me this wrong!
( Jan, 115)
Cursing his white father in perfect English, as would any Caliban figure,
Jan distinctly alludes to a popular Xhosa proverb used to refer to
English colonists: Omasiza mbulala (“The people who rescue and kill”;
or, alternately, “the people who rescue with one hand and kill with the
other”).121 According to George McCall Theal, the saying first came into
currency around 1819 when Cape Governor Charles Somerset forced
chief Gaika to cede an unexpectedly large tract of land to the Colony
in exchange for military protection.122 Jan’s malediction resonates both
literally and figuratively, as the white father and English colonist are
one. As Jan’s father strove to dissolve all ties with his English family
and inherited title, he “fitted” Jan through his education and upbring-
ing for the position of a Cape-born English colonist; however, Jan will
never be accepted completely as English – not even colonial English.
Jan, in fact, murders the man who, in avenging a dispute over a tract
of land that Jan purchased, exposes Jan’s parentage and does not allow
him to “turn white” in the eyes of his former English fiancé, although
he “was practically white, and would pass for such in English society”
( Jan, 87). His fiancé’s rejection confirms Jan’s sense of denied recogni-
tion that only Reginald, albeit imperfectly while struggling with the
compulsion to stereotype, manages to redeem.123 While most of the

novel’s characters discourage interracial marriage, particularly Jan’s
ex-fiancé whose tale of deception by an alluring yet mysterious suitor
takes the form of a gothic tale when recounted in England, social
ostracism – not biological determinism – remains the only argument
presented against it.
These conflicting readings of the photograph ultimately coincide
with competing ways of reading the novel. Jan’s final act of generosity
toward Reginald, “his last mistaken and fatal act of sacrifice,” brings
the novel’s conflict of value and circle of exchange to a climax ( Jan,
303). When Jan learns of Reginald’s own “sacrifice,” he resolves to
make his delayed return with interest. Jan wonders over his cousin’s
actions, so entirely at odds with English colonists’ practice of tak-
ing away, rather than restoring, the land and rights of Africans: “You
knew all along that I was half a Kafir, and also that I was a murderer?
You found out that I was your cousin, and heir to your property, and
you told me, and told it to the world, and gave me my rights?” ( Jan,
256). Reginald’s sacrifice, however, derives as much from self-interest as
from interest in and gratitude toward his cousin. Reginald knows that
a legal “proceeding must bring public disgrace upon his whole family,
and break his mother’s heart”; moreover, Jan’s conviction and execu-
tion would likely transfer the property “to his next brother, who was,
by all accounts, a little black boy, and would certainly never be received
in English society, his brother having died a felon’s death” ( Jan, 84).
Jan, nevertheless, values the element of generosity in his cousin’s act
and resolves to atone himself and ultimately his family.124 Returning to
southern Africa, after residing temporarily (nearly disastrously) on the
family estate in England, Jan confesses his crime to the Port Elizabeth
magistrate whose son he murdered and then takes his own life. As the
magistrate subsequently explains to Reginald, who encouraged Jan to
confess, “I believe that he sacrificed himself in that terrible manner for
the very purpose of sparing you and his other relatives the disgrace of
a public trial and execution” ( Jan, 295). Reginald recognizes Jan’s final
offering as a “noble, if perverted, idea of sacrifice” that epitomizes his
ostensibly reckless generosity ( Jan, 304).
Reginald’s Victorian notion of sacrifice as self-denial does not
account for the extremity of Jan’s act as a final offering even beyond
reciprocity: as a gift that cannot be returned and that solicits only
“horror” under British colonial eyes ( Jan, 288, 292). As a form of
unconditional expenditure, at odds with the values of production
and conservation, Jan’s act resembles the way “humanity [(i)n the
practice of life] acts … that allows for the satisfaction of disarmingly

savage needs … and [that] seems able to subsist only at the limits
of horror.”125 Horror, in fact, drives the novel’s Victorian narrative
of murder, seduction, and deception that takes shape around its
fictional English and colonial societies’ inability to account fully for
Jan’s perspective: Reginald and his future English colonial fiancé, May
Robinson, experience chills of horror when they first discover the
body of Jan’s victim; Gertrude Lilse, Jan’s one-time fiancé, shudders
at the thought of almost marrying a man of mixed race – twice; Jan’s
murder of the magistrate’s son and attempted murder of Gertrude
chills Reginald to the quick. In the context of this gothic narrative,
the horror of death mingles with that of miscegenation as a form of
social death.
The novel’s competing South African narrative of racial and cultural
conflict, however, proposes an alternate way of reading Jan’s “noble”
sacrifice. When Jan asks Reginald what he would do if he were forced
to live under a “curse” – the curse of his mixed parentage – Reginald
responds, “I would make every one whom I knew bless me … [b]y trying
to gratify every one’s desires except my own” ( Jan, 229). While Reginald
has specifically in mind the possibility of “leading a noble and useful
life,” Jan pursues an alternative form of ennobling himself beyond the
logic of utility ( Jan, 228). By sacrificing himself and his material desires,
Jan invokes the very etymological meaning of sacrifice: the production
of the sacred.126 The novel, in fact, closes with the sacralization, rather
than the horror, of Jan’s memory:
And though all that was left of Jan was that solitary grave in the
veldt, far away from his fair English home, across six thousand
miles of ocean, yet he lived, a sacred treasure, in the hearts of those
to whom he had been faithful. They never ceased to love him; but
through all the years of their lives, in summer suns and winter frosts,
in the bright noonday of youth and the serene evening of age, in
many an hour of silent thought, or of sweet and intimate commu-
nion, they kept his memory green. ( Jan, 318–19)
While preservation as a “sacred treasure” in the hearts of family

members may seem like meager compensation for the social rejection
Jan experiences while alive, the narrator, like Reginald, acknowledges
Jan’s expiation. Preserving his memory, moreover, serves as the only
option for expressing gratitude that the Carsons can offer Jan beyond
the grave.
Despite Jan’s final expiation, Reginald questions whether Jan possesses

the ability to devote himself to a moral ideal rather than merely
to a particular individual; we might, alternately, question whether
Reginald can recognize an individual distinct from a racialized type.127
When Jan promises to make expiation specifically to his cousin for his
crime, Reginald laments that Jan “had so much of the primeval savage
in his nature, that the very foundations of morality seemed altogether
wanting in him” ( Jan, 258). As he says to Jan, “I hope you will yet
learn to want something better than my forgiveness” ( Jan, 268). Jan’s
final letter to Reginald, however, suggests that he is not incapable of
recognizing moral behavior: “You are the sort of man that makes a
fellow do what is right when he least wants to do it. If I had known
you sooner, you might have done something with me; but it is too late
now” ( Jan, 296). Now that Jan has already committed a crime of pas-
sion inspired by the white colonial world’s refusal to accept him, no
amount of recognition, admiration, or love from Reginald can change
his past actions: “it is too late now.” Since Jan can recognize “what is
right,” however, “his sole motive in giving himself up to justice” does
not entirely reside in his “utter devotion” to his cousin, as Reginald
continues to believe ( Jan, 303). As Jan explains, his confession “shall
thus satisfy public justice in the magistrate, and private justice in the
father” ( Jan, 296). Jan’s seemingly inexplicable sacrifice, as a return
to Reginald and his family as well as the magistrate, thus fulfills the
demands of both reciprocity and justice.128
Reginald’s racial typology, supported throughout the novel by colo-
nial doctors and farmers alike, moreover conflicts with the specific
knowledge provided about Jan’s parents. Whereas Reginald identifies
Jan’s recklessness with his African heritage, it was his uncle, Jan’s father,
whom Reginald’s family remembers as “a reckless and irresponsible
youth” ( Jan, 167). When struggling to comprehend his uncle’s law-
ful, faithful, and responsible marriage to the daughter of an African
chief, Reginald asks, “How could an Englishman, with generations of
noble ancestors … descend so low as to choose for a life companion
an ignorant, uncivilized negro woman?” ( Jan, 90–1). Significantly,
the novel never provides access to and thus never quite discredits
this Englishman’s perspective. Moreover, the stately, “very graceful”
and pleasant woman “speaking very fair English” whom we meet as
Nampetu, Jan’s mother, seems anything but ignorant and uncivilized;
her home, moreover, appears “as neat and clean within as without, and
was furnished like an English cottage of the same class” ( Jan, 105, 106,
104–5).129 Reginald, in fact, almost seems disturbed by the fact that he
cannot find anything to criticize, especially after he asks for Nampetu’s

help in persuading Jan to go to England to claim his estate:
“No,” said Nampetu; “he will be despised by the white people for
his mother’s sake. I will not persuade him to go. If he wants to go,
I will say nothing to him; he shall go.” She did not speak angrily,
only gravely and with decision. Reginald was completely taken
aback, and found no words to reply to her. To his unspeakable relief,
Gesina [Jan’s sister] returned at this moment with coffee on a tray. It
was nicely served, everything was scrupulously clean, and the very
fact that there was nothing to find fault with, added to an unrea-
sonable sense of self-reproach which had suddenly fastened upon
Reginald. Why had he come to see these people, when they knew so
well that he loathed his connection with them? ( Jan, 109)
Surveying Nampetu’s flawlessly tidy home, a familiar Victorian sign of

morality, Reginald appears to be looking for some indication of that
“indelible stain on the family that can never be effaced or forgotten,”
which Mr. Robinson evoked when reflecting on interracial marriage
( Jan, 93). “Why had he come to see these people,” indeed, if he could
not reasonably substantiate his sense of loathing?
Nampetu, moreover, confirms Jan’s distrust of English tolerance while
exhibiting no signs of the passionate, irrational nature Reginald expects
of all Africans, as she meets the demands of her unexpected and fasti-
dious guest with decision and tact. When Reginald explains that Jan’s
visit to England would enable him to claim the family estate, Nampetu
suggests that the estate should go to Reginald since Jan already possesses
more than he needs. “Well, he will have more now,” Reginald mechani-
cally responds to a skeptical Nampetu: “Nampetu shook her head slowly,
and murmured some exclamation in Kafir” ( Jan, 108). The untranslated
in Howarth’s novels, used sparingly yet effectively, gestures beyond the
limits of the Victorian characters’ understanding. More wealth does not
necessarily mean more contentment for Nampetu, who preferred to
maintain her modest home even after her husband earned a fortune at
the diamond mines; excessive acquisitiveness does not find a place in
Nampetu’s tidy home. Despite Reginald’s sense of loathing, Nampetu
represents a model of grace, thrift, and sound judgment. The novel’s
conclusion, in fact, corresponds with her recommendation: Jan leaves
his English estate to Reginald and his family.
The novel’s conclusion not surprisingly does tend to reinforce its
English characters’ arguments against miscegenation, since, as the title
suggests, Jan is an Afrikander.130 By the end of the century, the term

“Afrikander” encompassed everyone born in the colony of Dutch,
German, French, or English descent. While often invoked by colonial
South Africans to denote a sense of white solidarity, the term acts in the
novel to reinforce England’s white borders. Sir John Fairbank Jr. trans-
lated as Jan Vermaak is neither English nor Dutch nor African, much
less an English nobleman, but rather an Afrikander not so easily placed
whose place can only be the comparatively more diverse Cape Colony.
How can he ever fully assimilate in England, even the Carsons ask, if
he may one day father a child less white than himself? While Reginald
and May laugh over the name Sir Mbangwe Fairbank, as Jan’s English
title descends to his younger brother (otherwise known as “little black
boy”), they can only do so because Mbangwe takes no interest in the
title and, because of Jan’s will, holds no claims to the English estate.
The threat of racial, social, and economic miscegenation is thus contai-
ned at the end of the novel and the African characters conveniently
condone this conclusion. Howarth nevertheless draws the problem of
racial intolerance to the fore, and Jan’s sacrifice challenges the values
of the English and colonial upper and middle classes who discriminate
against him. As Bataille observes of bourgeois societies, “[j]ealousy
arises between human beings,” just as it did in pre-capitalist societies,
“and with an equivalent brutality; only generosity and nobility have
disappeared.”131 Jealousy over land in a karoo enclosed and divided by
agrarian capitalism motivates the man who first attacks Jan’s character,
while generosity and nobility – in all senses of the term – die with Jan.
Appropriately, Reginald places Jan’s English name and title as a noble-
man on his southern African gravestone. Through its contrary readings
of a peculiarly enigmatic object associated with conflicting histories,
sub-genres, and systems of value, Howarth’s first novel provides us with
an imaginative material archive for remembering part of South Africa’s
divisive, dismembered past and accounting for its legacy.
Jan’s “recklessly generous” acts differ greatly from a more ignoble
form of unconditional expenditure explored by Howarth in her later
novel Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo. Charlie Stanton, brother of the pro-
tagonist Allan, well embodies Bataille’s image of “a youthful man,
capable of wasting and destroying without reason” who “gives the lie”
to the ethics of production and conservation underwriting classical,
not to mention colonial, utility.132 Embezzling money from family
members only to lose it to debt and gambling, Charlie repeatedly lies
and displaces blame in order to maintain the façade of his virtue
while concealing his steadily diminishing credit. After Charlie tricks
a young, illiterate Dutchwoman named Katrina whom he once promised

to marry into signing away the deed to her farm, he faces charges of
forgery, breach of contract, and insolvency brought against him by the
woman’s usurious uncle, Andries Bester, who has secretly purchased all
of Charlie’s debts.133 Allan, as his “brother’s keeper,”134 generously steps
in to take his younger brother’s place by marrying Katrina and assum-
ing his extensive losses after Charlie disappears and Bester threatens to
disgrace the Stanton family and alarm Allan and Charlie’s aging parents.
Allan’s illogical “sacrifice” baffles Bester’s capitalist sensibilities, and yet
this excessively generous act leads Allan by the end of the novel to a
happy (and productive) marriage, stable finances, and a renewed faith
in his family (Katrina, 155). At first glance, the novel resembles a famil-
iar romance as well as a cautionary tale against the abuses of colonial
capitalism and its attendant emphasis on self-advancement. The two
antagonists, moreover, receive their just deserts through what appear
classic acts of fate tinged with retributive justice: Charlie, guilty of
ignoble and selfishly excessive expenditure, lies paralyzed for life after
being thrown from the horse he once lamed, while the more villain-
ous Bester, the gluttonous figure of excessive acquisition who secretly
revels in the bankruptcy of his debtors, meets an excessively painful
death commensurate with his ophidian designs after being bitten by
the karoo’s most poisonous snake. Directing one’s attention to the
margins of this colonial stage, however, reveals a different account of
Charlie’s fateful conclusion, one that does not so easily find a place in
this otherwise realist narrative.
While this tale of the karoo focuses its drama on the increasingly
interrelated lives of English and Dutch colonists, African characters
occasionally glimpsed are attributed an awareness of events that
exceeds both the knowledge of the colonists and the parameters of the
plot. After Charlie lames his brother’s horse Gipsy, Allan asks his servant
Klaas where Charlie has gone. When Klaas responds that Charlie rode
to Dreikop, the farm where Katrina lives with her mercilessly named
stepfather Johannes Petrus Christian Van Heerden, he speaks “with a
knowing look, which was lost on Allan” who did not suspect his brother
of treachery (Katrina, 78). Depending on precisely what Klaas knows,
this look may be lost on the reader as well since the depth of Charlie’s
courtship comes to light only later in the novel. Similarly, none of the
colonists suspect that Van Heerden’s African (likely Xhosa) resident, also
named Klaas, knows anything about the colonists he closely watches
coming and going from Dreikop. Van Heerden’s Klaas sits by the side of
the road near the gate to the farm and sculpts figures out of clay, since,
as Katrina explains, “he cannot do anything else, because he is lame”

(Katrina, 88). Charlie takes little notice of this Klaas, whose status seems
little more than that of a squatter, and his necessary existence outside
of the colonial labor force likely enhances this invisibility, as no amount
of surveillance will press him into servitude. The narrator notices this
Klaas, however, repeatedly, and each brief glimpse shows him busily at
work sculpting figures familiar to him. Unlike in more traditional forms
of African sculpture, Klaas strives for exact verisimilitude. When admir-
ing a figure in the “real likeness” of Van Heerden, Charlie exclaims,
“the beggar is a regular portrait painter” (Katrina, 88). The aesthetics as
well as the referents of Klaas’s figures exhibit the influence of colonial
life around him, and yet the aesthetics of the realist novel cannot fully
contain these figures.
These likenesses prove all too disturbingly real to Charlie’s father
Richard, who later visits Van Heerden to confirm the account he has
received of his wayward son’s behavior. When leaving the farm, Richard
encounters Klaas sitting by the side of the road. Klaas, who knows
exactly who Richard Stanton is, greets him and offers him three of his
figures. One, presented “with a very sharp glance,” is a figure of Charlie
on horseback (Katrina, 215). Klaas proceeds to provide the figure with a
narrative, attesting to Charlie’s frequent visits, his courtship of Katrina,
and even his proposal that he alone, unseen, witnessed. Realizing that
his son visited Dreikop so frequently as to be immortalized in clay,
Richard can no longer doubt the truth about him. After offering Klaas
a sixpence for the figure of Charlie, presumably to collect this evidence
of his son’s ignominy, Richard rides away and subsequently disposes of
the figure:
Presently he came alongside the dam, which was dry from the long
drought, but there was a hole of water which had been dug at one
end. The water lay far down at the bottom, brackish and stagnant.
Stanton pulled up his horse by the hole. He took the clay figure of
Charlie, and broke it into tiny little pieces, all of which he threw
down into the water at the bottom of the hole. (Katrina, 216)
Frequently interweaving the psychic lives of her characters with the nat-
ural life of the karoo, Howarth overlays the lengthy drought with the
period of Allan’s estrangement from his family after his marriage and
a fresh supply of Charlie’s withering lies. Richard’s disposal of Charlie’s
likeness immediately precedes his reconciliation with Allan and the
end of the drought. The rains, in fact, fill the dam until its waters
overflow and the rivers and streams run high. The thought of Charlie’s
mutilated likeness rising with the water mingles with descriptions of
the redeeming rain in imagery resembling that of Nadine Gordimer’s
later novel The Conservationist: “A resurrection from the dead could
hardly be more stirring, indeed it must be somewhat similar. Life from
the dead – green herbs for withered sticks – flowing rivers for dry sun-
baked watercourses – a cool, fresh atmosphere after the fiery breath of
a furnace” (Katrina, 234). When Charlie himself last resurfaces after his
final disappearance, his uncannily familiar form is found, broken and
paralyzed, reduced to “a living death,” lying awkwardly among the river
boulders near the drift (Katrina, 296). Although the narrative voice and
chapter title suggest that Gipsy, the horse that stumbled and threw him,
has finally “taken her revenge,” Klaas’s broken figure encourages us to
think otherwise (Katrina, 296).
The recurring presence of Klaas and his figures suggests a contrary
force driving Charlie to his fate and thus an alternate sense of causal-
ity in the novel. The series of events in the novel, like those in Jan, an
Afrikander, is ultimately overdetermined; at the very least, it is doubled.
Both Richard and the narrator remain noticeably silent over the signifi-
cance of Klaas’s figures. His encounter with Klaas is the one incident
that Richard omits when recounting his investigation into Charlie’s
misdeeds to his family. Why? Klaas, although serving as a witness to
Charlie’s proposal, does not provide any information that others have
not already supplied. Does Richard recoil from viewing his family
disgrace through the eyes of an African whose status he perceives as
something less than an abject servant? Does the uncanny clay double
of his son, which likely brings to the light of consciousness all of the
former signs of Charlie’s guilt that the Stantons grew accustomed to not
seeing, prove too horrific a thing to share with his family although he
spares them no detail when explaining Charlie’s web of deceit? Perhaps
words in this case are kinder than things. The narrator similarly refrains
from drawing any overt connections between the fates of figure and
character, while nevertheless drawing subtle comparisons at the level
of metaphor. While foreshadowing may serve to explain away as liter-
ary device the haunting similarity between the fates of Charlie and his
likeness, the repeated references to Klaas’s figures throughout the novel
place an otherwise inexplicable weight on objects not even necessary to
the plot. Is the figure a curiosity, a charm, or a curse? What does it mean
for the figure to be a “real likeness”? What type of “reality” does it pos-
sess? Does the figure, like the fetish charms Kingsley bemusedly studied,
possess an intimate relation to the human it serves to embody? Howarth
draws marked attention toward this figure, and then remains silent
about it; like Nampetu’s untranslated mutterings, its significance eludes
the factual world of the realist novel and leaves us to wonder. Although
we do not see Klaas offering his figures for sale, Richard gives Klaas
money for his son’s likeness in order to mitigate the power it seems to
possess over both father and son. By attempting to convert the figure
into a commodity, and thereby into a mere exchange value, Richard
arguably tries to diffuse via abstraction any symbolic or representational
value it may hold. As if aware of the inevitable failure of such a strat-
egy, he attempts to destroy the figure completely. By dismembering the
figure and throwing it away at the dam, however, does Richard unwit-
tingly seal his son’s fate?
While both Carey-Hobson and Howarth devoted themselves to
depicting through carefully observed details a life on the karoo long
familiar to them, they ultimately presented different models for the
nineteenth-century South African realist novel. Unlike Carey-Hobson,
who attempts in her novel to provide a portrait of Cape Colony life
through the use of richly detailed description, Howarth produces mean-
ing by way of omission and imbedded counter narratives. Whereas
Carey-Hobson uses the novel’s extensive descriptive apparatus to
impose an order on her colonial environment that foresees the “well-
planned improvements” of an ideal colonial British state, Howarth
interrupts her predominately realist novels and an implied narrative of
colonial development with alternate narratives and passages drawing
more heavily on the gothic mode and the aesthetics of the uncanny.
Howarth’s fiction reminds us that nineteenth-century realism’s sense of
totality – its promise of offering an internally coherent world complete
in itself – is, after all, a metaphoric wholeness, and one that grows
more fragile in a fractured and fractious colonial society. This sense of
fragmentation, as we will see in the chapter that follows, underwrites
Olive Schreiner’s acclaimed novel The Story of an African Farm and the
grotesque aesthetics that shape its narrative.
Notes
2. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, ed. Joseph Bristow
(1883; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xl. Hereafter cited in text
as African Farm. Olive Schreiner certainly proved the most successful of these
local authors; however, that she has come to represent in Anglo-American
studies of the nineteenth-century realist novel the literary output of an entire
British colony suggests the need for a critical reinvestigation of southern
African literatures prior to the 1910 formation of the Union. One notable
exception includes Gerald Monsman’s discussion of H. Rider Haggard’s novel
Jess. Gerald Monsman, H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political
and Literary Contexts of his African Romances (Greensboro: English Literature
in Transition Press, 2006).
3. J. M. Coeztee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 63. They are also novels written by
women, Mary Ann Carey-Hobson and Anna Howarth, in particular, who
by and large turn their attention more frequently toward the details of
quotidian domestic life in the colonies than did their novel-writing male
contemporaries. While their gendered positions as women writers argu-
ably already rendered their relationship to narrative and imperial authority
off-center, as critics have maintained of Kingsley’s and Schreiner’s writing,
I would suggest that this tenuous relation to authority serves to augment
and to highlight the tensions already existing in colonial society that the
present study explores.
4. Mary Ann Carey-Hobson, The Farm in the Karoo: Or, What Charley Vyvyan
and His Friends Saw in South Africa (London: Juta, Heelis and Co., 1883), 266.
Kessinger Publishing first made this text more widely available in a 2007
reprint edition, which only lacks pages x–xi of the novel’s Preface. Nabhu
Press released another reproduction in 2010. Hereafter cited in text as Karoo.
5. Albany Museum, Catalogue of the Natural History Collections of the Albany
Museum, Graham’s Town, preface by Marion Glanville, curator (Cape Town:
W. A. Richards and Sons, 1883), 55. The donor of this specimen from Graaff-
Reinet, “Carey Hobson, Esq.,” was likely the author’s second husband,
William Carey-Hobson (1805–70) of Graaff-Reinet, otherwise her son-in-law,
also William Carey-Hobson (1838–97).
6. R. Plaskett, “Notice,” Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, 11 June 1825,
1: 1. Reprinted in R. F. H. Summers, A History of the South African Museum,
1825–1975 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975), 5. Plaskett was secretary to
Cape Colony Governor Charles Somerset and wrote on his behalf.
7. “Notice,” 5.
8. The Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, 5 October 1855, 3. Library of the
Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town.
9. History of South African Museum, 2.
10. The Society’s objective, namely “the acquisition of knowledge relative to
the Geography, Natural History, and Commercial Resources of the Interior,
and of the Social Condition of its Inhabitants,” complemented the interests
of colonial expansion. See A Catalogue of the South African Museum, Now
Exhibiting in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (London: Smith, Elder and Co.,
1837), 3–4.
11. London’s Natural History Museum opened to the public in 1881; before
then, it functioned as a department of the British Museum.
12. The Catalogue of the South African Museum, Part I. Compiled by the curator,
Edgar L. Layard (Cape Town: Cape Argus Office, 1861), iii. Library of the
Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town.
13. Catalogue of South African Museum, 6.
14. This building is now the National Library of South Africa. I am dating the
novel, the central narrative of which takes place ten years before its final
chapter, after William Guybon Atherstone identified the first diamonds

from Kimberley in 1867 and, more precisely, after the death of Cape
Town’s first bishop Robert Gray on 1 September 1872 (see Karoo, 53).
Given that Fred is able to collect wildflowers on Table Mountain, he
likely visits Cape Town later that spring sometime during September
to mid-October. While the novel appeared 1883, its Preface dates from
1882.
18. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.
19. On Longing, 153.
26. White Supremacy, 200.
27. Edgar Layard, Interview, cited in Legislative Council, Cape of Good Hope
Report and Proceedings of the Committee of the Legislative Council to take into
consideration the question as to appropriating the museum and library building
for a Parliament House, or the Expediency of constructing a suitable building
for the accommodations of both branches of the legislature (Cape Town: Saul
Solomon and Co., Steam Printing Office, 1859), 35. Library of the Iziko
South African Museum, Cape Town.
28. Given that the only named British skull in the catalogue is that of an Irish
murderer, there seems little ground for arguing that the Xhosa man is at least
honored by being individually identified.
29. Hugh Robinson: Letters written to his family, 1849–53. Cory Library,
Manuscripts Collection, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. MIC 220.
Robinson to mother, n.d. October 1852. Cited in White Supremacy, 197.
31. Freud, in his discussion of the double, draws heavily on the work of Otto
Rank: “[T]he ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of
the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and proba-
bly the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. … Such ideas, how-
ever, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary
narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But
when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From
having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger
of death.” The assurance of the soul, for example, returns as the threat of a
ghost. See “Uncanny,” 235.
32. For those groups who identify more directly, such as the Khoisan who fought
for the restoration and burial of Sartje Bartmaan’s remains, such relics repre-
sent nothing more than desecrations.
33. Allegories of Reading, 14. De Man’s subsequent example proves especially
illuminating: “The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of
metaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact: an element

of truth is involved in taking Achilles for a lion but none in taking Mr. Ford
for a motor car” (Allegories of Reading, 14).
35. Disorienting Fiction, 12.
37. Unlike the famous author, however, she does not propose to offer a color-
less version (African Farm, xl): “The young always delight in travellers’ tales,
especially when full of exciting adventures and hair-breadth escapes, and the
first question always asked is – ‘Is it true?’ To this, as far as the incidents in
the present book are concerned, I can honestly answer, certainly” (Karoo, x).
In fact, Carey-Hobson’s 1882 description of her novel contains much of
what Schreiner dismisses in her own Preface to the second edition of The
Story of an African Farm; among the conventions Schreiner disapprovingly
associates with metropolitan adventures, The Farm in the Karoo only lacks a
scene involving marauding Bushmen.
38. Cited in “Narrate or Describe?” 120. Among the many obvious differences
between Zola and Carey-Hobson, however, are their divergent attitudes
toward capitalism, which Carey-Hobson embraced, not to mention orga-
nized religion, to which she remained quite devoted. These qualities also
generally distinguish her distorted realism from naturalism.
39. Catalogue of Albany Museum, 112–13.
40. George Thompson, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa Comprising a
View of the Present State of the Cape Colony: with Observations on the Progress
and Prospects of British Emigrants (London: Henry Colburn, 1827).
41. Edward McDermott of Camberwell, The Popular Guide to the International
Exhibition of 1862 (London: W. H. Smith and Son, 1862), 124.
42. Sarah Whittingham, The Victorian Fern Craze (Oxford: Shire Books, 2009), 17–18.
43. Fern Craze, 21–33.
44. Phebe Lankester, ed., A plain and easy account of the British ferns; together with
their classification, arrangement of genera, structure and functions; and a glossary
of technical and other terms (London: Robert Hardwick, 1854), xvi, cited in
Fern Craze, 16.
45. See, for example, Fern Craze, 43–51.
46. The word “souvenir,” in fact, only appears once in the novel when used
to refer to the scrapbook Charley assembles for Florence. The scrapbook,
Stewart argues, functions more like the souvenir than the collection in that
“the whole dissolves into parts, each of which refers metonymically to a
context of origin or acquisition” (On Longing, 152). This scene, however,
reveals how the assembled parts of the scrapbook form a whole and how
this process flattens narrative time as recent events are metaphorically and
metonymically pressed between the pages of Carey-Hobson’s, as well as
Florence’s, book.
47. George Carson, son of an English karoo farmer, represents a variation in this
general tendency in the novel. When Charley teases him for continuing to
use Cape Dutch names for local woods and trees, George counters, “[T]hey
do very well. In fact, neither should we nor the people know them by any
other” (Karoo, 144). The names George adopts nevertheless correspond with
an earlier stage of mapping under Cape Dutch colonists.
48. “Narrate or Describe?” 130.

53. “Narrate or Describe?” 133–4.
57. One of the more interesting glimpses of human activity in the novel,
however, features the Carltons’ Khoekhoe driver Hendrick delivering a
sermon to the African laborers who have gathered in the sheep-shearing
house on the Hardings’ farm for Sunday service. While Marston compares
Hendrick to an African-American parson depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the scene serves as Major Harding’s dubious lesson on why he, a veteran of
the mid-century Xhosa Wars, does not favor “amalgamation and treating the
natives as equals and brothers” (Karoo, 163–4).
58. Natural historical studies like Curiosities of Natural History, referenced both
in the novel’s Preface and in its dialogue, nevertheless often capitalized on
curiosity in order to promote their collections and publications among gen-
eral, and often young, audiences. See Francis Trevelyan Buckland, Curiosities
of Natural History (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1857).
59. Mary Ann Carey-Hobson, At Home in the Transvaal (London: Sonnenschein,
1884), 512.
60. Wagner is speaking particularly about Tylor’s theory of survivals in cultural
practices. See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, revised edn (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 28.
61. White Writing, 28.
62. See White Supremacy, 151, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial
Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875–1902
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 46–61, 84, and 102–5.
63. According to Crais, “passes for other Africans remained on the books” and
“[u]nder Ordinance 49 of 1828 officials issued passes to ‘Native Foreigners’
who took up employment in the colony” (White Supremacy, 194); Ordinance
2 of 1837 ordered the arrest of “Native Foreigners” found in the colony
without a pass, which, as Crais notes, “virtually amounted to a vagrancy
law” (White Supremacy, 142).
64. Also known as the “Hottentot Proclamation,” the code required that these
traditional pastoralists possess “certificates of residency and passes, issued by
their master or by the landdrost, when they left their abode” and allowed
local colonial officers “to distribute Khoikhoi labour to anyone they chose”
without the worker’s consent (White Supremacy, 59–60). The code refined
an earlier pass law issued by the Swellendam Board of Landdrost and
Heemraden in 1797. See Johannes Stephanus Marais, The Cape Coloured
People, 1652–1937 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1939).
65. The Kat River Settlement was established mainly for Christianized Khoekhoe
who possessed no criminal record or history of indiscipline. On government
grants of land, previously inhabited by Xhosa chief Maqoma, Khoekhoe and
selected Africans with peasantry experience developed the fertile settlement
into the Eastern Cape’s top supplier of grains and hay by the 1840s. Pressure
from local colonists seeking land and labor, whose farms increasingly
encroached on the settlement’s borders, and decades of colonial legislation
enforced with violence that culminated in the 1851–3 Xhosa War, eventually
led to the demise of the settlement. See White Supremacy, especially 79–82
and 159–85.
68. Cape Archives, Colonial Office 2721 no. 39, Marais to Bell, 8 March 1830,
encl. Constable J. Walker to Marais, 20 February 1830, 229–32. Reprinted in
V. C. Malherbe, “Testing the ‘Burgher Right’ to the Land: Khoesan, Colonist,
and Government in the Eastern Cape after Ordinance 50 of 1828,” South
African Historical Journal 40 (1999): 11.
71. White Supremacy, 194; Harold Jack Simons and Ray E. Simons, Class and Colour
in South Africa 1850–1950 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), 24.
74. British Parliamentary Papers 1428/1852, Uithaalder to Adam Kok and
Hendrik Hendriks, 11 June 1851, enclosed in Smith to Grey, 18 September
1851. Cited in White Supremacy, 186.
76. School of Oriental and African Studies, London Missionary Society, 14(2)B,
Barker to Ellis, 6 October 1834; British Parliamentary Papers 538/1836, evid.
of Stoffel, 27 June 1836. Cited in White Supremacy, 147.
77. “screen, n.1” OED Online, 23 October 2008, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/
entry/50216741
78. Cape Archives Fort Beaufort: 1835–79, 1/FBF 6/1/2/2, Papers Despatched,
Stringfellow, Report, 22 April 1856. Cited in White Supremacy, 196.
80. The Farm in the Karoo, unlike the collection as Stewart conceives it, may
mystify the conditions but rarely the means of production as it notes tasks
performed by Malay servants as well as Khoekhoe, Fingo, Xhosa, and Basuto
laborers on Mr. Carlton’s farm. On the contrary, the purpose is to render
workers visible and classifiable.
81. The mock heroic scene in which Marston, as a less than heroic Perseus,
attempts to rescue a Victorian “Andromeda” caught in the grips of an
octopus while she was precariously “collecting some [corallines] for [her]
aquarium” (Karoo, 89, 91), produces the trophy of the octopus tentacle. This
light-hearted reference to the trophy arguably alludes, partly by way of omis-
sion, to another class of trophies common to southern African narratives:
war trophies. Variously appearing as physical relics, weapons, garments, or
domestic objects, such objects appealed to British troops, especially during
the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, which resulted in “frenzied and compulsive
collecting.” See “Both Curious and Valuable,” 7.
82. “curiosity, n.” OED Online, 28 October 2008, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/
entry/50056021
83. Travels and Adventures, 309, 308, 309.

85. As historian J. B. Peires suggests, Xhosa laborers preferred shorter contracts,
generally a year in length, after which time they would return home. During
the period of their contract, “[t]hey continued to send home the stock they
earned.” See House of Phalo, 105. Their extreme transience, living month to
month, may moreover suggest that Mr. Carlton allows these groups to squat
on his land in exchange for labor. Mr. Carlton, after all, prides himself in his
relative benevolence and good relations with his workers, and some settlers,
cognizant of more subtle forms of resistance, avoided enforcing vagrancy
legislation even after 1879. “[I]t is dangerous to prosecute these people,” one
settler suggested: “If you do it, these men mark you, and where you formerly
had a few men to work for you, you would have none at all” (cited in White
Supremacy, 219).
88. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess, trans. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 117.
89. “Notion of Expenditure,” 116.
90. “Notion of Expenditure,” 120. As Bataille further explains: “In order to main-
tain this preeminence, since power is exercised by the classes that expend,
poverty was excluded from all social activity” (“Notion of Expenditure,”
120–1).
92. White Supremacy, 235; Cape Archives, Lieutenant-Governor: 1829–59, 590:
Formation of the Kat River Settlement in 1828, Rogge, Notes, 1856. Cited in
White Supremacy, 84.
93. House of Phalo, 44.
96. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies,
trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2000), 5. This claim,
of course, does not necessarily rule out the existence of immediate-return
gift economies or of “inalienable commodities.” On the former, see Alan
Barnard, Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa: A Comparative Ethnography of
the Khoisan Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); on the
latter, Elizabeth Emma Ferry, “Inalienable Commodities: The Production
and Circulation of Silver and Patrimony in a Mexican Mining Cooperative,”
Cultural Anthropology 17, no. 3 (2002): 331–58.
97. “The Unreasonable Child to Whom the Dog Gave its Deserts, or, a Receipt
[sic] for Putting Any One to Sleep,” Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or,
Hottentot Fables and Tales, ed. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (London:
Trübner and Co., 1864), 90–4. Bleek’s choice of including a Damara tale in
a collection of “Hottentot” fables reflected his observance of cultural and
linguistic connections between the Damara and the Nama. Present-day
anthropologists like Alan Barnard also consider Nama and Damara cultures
closely affiliated. See Hunters and Herders, 11.
98. “Unreasonable Child,” 90.

103. On the contrary, economic value does not appear to compound with each
transaction.
104. Inalienable Possessions, 38.
105. See James Woodburn, “Hunters and Gatherers Today and Reconstruction
of the Past,” Soviet and Western Anthropology, ed. Ernest Geller (London:
Duckworth, 1980), 95–117 and “Egalitarian Societies,” Man n.s. 17 (1982):
431–51. Cited in Hunters and Herders, 123.
106. While Mauss associated gift exchange with delayed-return economic
systems, anthropologists like Alan Barnard have noted the existence of
immediate-return practices within contemporary societies governed by
gift exchange: “[T]he !Kung and most other Bushmen are regarded as
immediate-return (i.e. obtaining subsistence without work input requiring
a return on investment at a later date). Fisherman, herders, and part-time
hunter-gatherers [such as many Khoekhoe], who do invest in the future,
have delayed-return economies” (Hunters and Herders, 249).
107. “The Story of Hlakanyana,” Kaffir Folk-lore: A Selection from the Traditional
Tales Current among the People Living on the Eastern Border of the Cape Colony,
ed. George McCall Theal (1882; Westport, Connecticut: Negro Universities
Press, 1970), 89–117.
108. “Hlakanyana,” 102.
109. “Hlakanyana,” 104–5.
111. See “The Elephant and the Tortoise” and “The Giraffe and the Tortoise” in
Reynard the Fox in South Africa, 27–31.
112. “The Story of the Cannibal Mother and Her Children,” Kaffir Folk-lore, 137–43.
113. “The Story of the Glutton,” Kaffir Folk-lore, 172–5.
115. Anna Howarth, Jan, an Afrikander (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1897),
47. Hereafter cited in text as Jan.
116. Howarth also reflects on Xhosa adherence to the laws of hospitality in her
post-1820 settler novel, Sword and Assegai (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.,
1899), 188–92.
117. A familiar target of the gothic since Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.
118. Camera Lucida, 92.
119. Otto Rank, cited in “The Uncanny,” 235.
120. I would like to thank Dr Alexandra Neel for suggesting this additional point
about the status of the subject.
121. Kaffir Folk-lore, 199.
122. George McCall Theal, History of South Africa, from 1795–1872, vol. 1, 4th
edn (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1915), 344. As Theal notes,
most Xhosa viewed this cede as theft since, under Xhosa law, Gaika did not
possess such authority.
123. Jan’s determination to marry a white woman suggests that he has internal-
ized European colonial values, despite his love for his African mother and
family ( Jan, 211).
124. Jan’s extreme generosity toward Reginald moreover resembles traditional

Xhosa practices of hospitality as elaborated by Peires: “Duties to fellow-
clansmen were not as clearly defined as duties to members of one’s lineage,
but if a stranger was discovered to be a fellow-clansmen, the obligation
to give him help and hospitality was renewed a hundredfold” (House of
Phalo, 5).
127. Between these two questions, Enlightenment conceptions of fetishism in
the tradition of Hegel collide with those of postcolonial humanists like
Fanon.
128. Even the magistrate’s observation that Jan seemed to feel no remorse for his
crime conflicts with Jan’s emerging feeling of “compassion” for the magis-
trate as father ( Jan, 286).
129. As D. G. N. Cornwell similarly observes, “nowhere here or elsewhere in the
text of the novel do any of the black characters evince one shred of the
‘innate savagery’ which is blamed for the woes of Jan Vermaak.” D. Gareth
N. Cornwell, “Race and Class in a Nineteenth-Century South African
Novel,” Mfecane to Boer War: Versions of South African History (Essen: Verlag
die Blaue Eule, 1990), 137.
130. Jan in many ways also corresponds with the nineteenth-century stereotype
of the “tragic mulatto.”
133. The British and their authoritative pieces of paper that disenfranchise the
Dutch, in fact, are familiar features of Dutch and German colonial southern
African fiction. In this novel, however, the Dutch Bester gains access to the
letter of the English law and uses it against the colonial Englishman; this
tool of imperial domination, as susceptible to dispossession as the money
used to purchase it, further reveals the instability of colonial capitalist rule.
134. Anna Howarth, Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.,
1898), 304. Hereafter cited in text as Katrina.
4
Artful Tales and Indigenous Arts
in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an
African Farm
Southern African rock images captured the imagination of many Victo-

rians, from geologists like George William Stow to the celebrated author
Olive Schreiner. Whether considered residual traces of a Paleolithic human
prehistory, works of art or ornamentation, functional signage, or objects
of anthropological inquiry, these images stirred debates over how
to regard them and, by extension, the land on which they rested.
Painted or chiseled upon the rocks that form an integral part of the
regional landscape, the images, according to Stow, testified to the
intimate connection between the land and the creative productions
of southern Africa’s earliest native inhabitants: the Bushmen, also
known as the San.1 In The Native Races of South Africa, published post-
humously in 1905, Stow observes: “[T]he ancient Bushmen themselves
have recorded [their occupation of the land] upon the rocks, in their
paintings, their sculptures or chippings, and stone implements, which
are as much their unquestionable title-deeds as those more formal
documents so valued among landowners in more civilized portions of
the earth.”2 Although framed within European conceptions of prop-
erty rights, Stow’s reading nevertheless accounts for the San’s distinct
sense of belonging on the lands they inhabited. Unlike portable prop-
erty such as tools and clothing, inherited rights to occupy and use
these lands could neither be sold nor given away; the San deemed the
land and much of its primary resources inalienable.3 The San viewed
their relation to the land as one of stewardship, explains present-day
archaeologist Sven Ouzman, in which the land represented “a vast
network of relations and obligations between people, animals, places,
[and] spirits” that exceeded individual as well as communal owner-
ship: “Rather, the land or network of relations was believed to own
them.”4 What colonists perceived as the San’s itinerate hunter-gatherer
175
Figure 7 San painting near Windvogelberg, copied by George W. Stow. Courtesy

of the South African Museum, Iziko Museums of Cape Town and the Rock Art
Research Institute/SARADA, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
South Africa
practices lacking a sense of ownership were in fact “seasonal moves …

on established, though flexible, annual migration routes” between
camps established near waterholes,5 which in addition to providing
life-sustaining nourishment also served as portals linking the material
with the spiritual worlds above and below.6 The San’s connections to
their ancestors, who are said to have become the wind and rain, ani-
mals and stars and who further mapped the land with their human
histories, moreover contributed to the land’s absolute value defying
exchange.7 As immobile sites stationed throughout this land for com-
municating with the world of spirits, San rock images possessed their
own form of inalienability and arguably did serve as symbolic, yet
non-transferable, “title-deeds.”
Schreiner’s 1883 novel, The Story of an African Farm, engages this
interpretive debate, which correlates with the struggle over land and
resources. The rock paintings represented in the novel, as well as
their interpretation by the novel’s primary artist figure, Waldo Farber,
have long suggested to critics a connection between the novelist,
Indigenous Arts in The Story of an African Farm 177
her male protagonist, and the displaced San.8 Interpretations of the

role these paintings play in the novel have largely corresponded
both with Schreiner’s degree of empathy, no matter how conflicted,
toward the San and with her growing anti-colonial sentiments. In
contrast to her British metropolitan-born South African contempo-
raries Carey-Hobson and Howarth, Schreiner devoted the majority of
her literary endeavors to critiquing imperial England’s economic and
demographic encroachment on southern Africa. As Laura Chrisman
has argued in regard to the author’s 1890s fiction, Schreiner’s critique
of British imperial capitalism exposes the exploitation of land and
labor that impacted resistant Africans and European colonists alike.9
Schreiner’s anti-colonial stance was nevertheless also deeply informed
by her sense of identity as a native-born South African and staunch
advocate of a future postcolonial independence; her novel, in turn,
reflects the ambivalent position of a second-generation colonist hoping
to become postcolonial.10 Viewed from this perspective, Waldo emerges
as a model home-grown artist, whose grotesque woodcarving that he
refuses to sell represents a form of primitive resistance to European
capitalism in what has come to be considered “the founding work
of the South African novel in English.”11 The connection established
between the works of San painters and colonial artists ultimately
displaces one kind of indigenous art with another, once the San have,
ostensibly, disappeared. “Now the Boers have shot them all,” Waldo
eulogizes, while he alone remains to interpret their “grotesque” paint-
ings, to produce aesthetically kindred forms of “grotesque” art, and to
commune with the land in which he has grown (African Farm, 16, 10,
123). Unless the contemporaneous incarceration of many San in Cape
Town’s prisons could be considered a form of premature burial, how-
ever, the novel’s fetishistic eulogy ultimately proves to be premature,
yet imaginatively and politically expedient.12
This novel of origins at once aesthetic, cultural, and historical rests on
an imaginative act of displacement that coincides with a demographic
one. Schreiner’s representation of the Bushmen and their paintings
in the novel, informed by late nineteenth-century anthropological
constructions of cultural authenticity, removes the image of the true
Bushmen to another time, while detracting from the contemporary
experiences of indigenous forced laborers. The Bushmen who live
with and work for the European characters, whether a Grahamstown
wagon leader or a Dutch landowner’s servant, apparently fall outside
the category of authentic Bushman culture and therefore receive less
critical attention. Native Africans maintaining practices and traditions
in opposition to colonial rule do not appear among the characters in

Schreiner’s fictional world, although the date of the novel’s setting
coincides with a historical period of intense border struggles, the
removal of indigenous peoples, and a growing interest in salvaging
traces of the reportedly “disappearing,” traditional small-scale societies
of southern Africa.13 In the absence of these societies, Waldo, a young
South African of European descent, appears as their cultural and
historic successor. Waldo, as a kind of colonial indigene, possesses a
rather paradoxical relationship to his native precursors. The Bushmen
appear absent yet hauntingly present, as authentic artists immortal-
ized in their rock paintings as well as inauthentic workers or prisoners
within European society. The Bushmen, therefore, stand in relation to
Waldo as both his historic predecessors and his political rivals.
Given the novel’s open recognition of a Bushman presence, both past
and present, and its simultaneous erasure of this presence, disavowal
serves as the dominant strategy for negotiating colonial ambivalence
toward southern Africa’s earliest known inhabitants. This ambivalence
extended well beyond the author’s individual opinions or at times
elusive intentions to the extent that it constituted what Raymond
Williams would term a “structure of feeling” pervading colonial South
African society.14 The colonial indigene emerges as the anxious, central
figure of this ambivalence and as such resembles Freud’s construction
of the fetishist, the primary foundations of which lie in medical
research of the 1880s as well as earlier anthropological constructions of
primitive culture.15 In particular, Freud posits fetishism as a strategy
of displacement that negotiates a contradiction emerging in the face
of two incompatible perceptions of reality.16 The fetish, onto which
the fetishist displaces a denial of difference, both memorializes and
protects against the threat to self that the recognition of difference
effects. Through the fetish, therefore, difference may be simultaneously
recognized and disavowed (that is, affirmed yet denied) – a perverse
strategy Freud, in keeping with the fetish’s etymological link to artifice,
deems almost “artful.”17 The colonial indigene’s curious relationship
to his predecessors, in fact, resembles that of Freud’s two patients who
each failed to recognize fully the death of his father without exhibit-
ing signs of a psychosis. Freud explains how one of these patients later
developed a neurosis and oscillated between two contradictory perspec-
tives: “the one, that his father was still alive and was hindering his
activities; the other, opposite one, that he was entitled to regard himself
as his father’s successor.” This case ultimately illuminated for Freud
the two “attitudes” of the fetishist, whose negotiations allow “wish”
and “reality” to exist concurrently.18 This contradictory relationship

to a paternal figure thus enacts a disavowal of the father’s death, of his
actual physical absence.
The fictional case introduced by Waldo, while resembling this case
history of a troubled paternal relationship, involves the denial of the
Bushmen’s contemporary physical existence. To resolve the troubling
paradox that the appearance of contemporary Bushmen with a different
account of southern African history would introduce, these more resis-
tant Bushmen disappear from the novel’s fictional present and enter
into its representation of the historical past. This act of displacement
in narrative time accompanies a displacement of value: the authentic
Bushmen’s lingering presence is both recognized and disavowed in the
“old Bushman-Paintings” (African Farm, 10). The colonial indigene
must confront the alterity of another, more original, indigenous South
African society, whose acknowledgment threatens the colonist’s iden-
tity as primary keeper of the land. The paintings’ attributed antiquity,
documented in the novel by the condition of the surrounding rock and
the non-anthropomorphic and distinctly non-European iconography
of the images, which characterized many published Victorian reproduc-
tions like the lithograph in Figure 8, ultimately protect the colonist
from confronting the Bushmen’s claims to the land in the narrative’s
present, while artfully serving as a memorial to the Bushmen’s osten-
sible absence. While the rock paintings in the novel therefore represent
Figure 8 San painting, copied by Helen Tongue. Courtesy of the South African
Museum, Iziko Museums of Cape Town and the Rock Art Research Institute/
SARADA, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
an inalienable connection to the land, the temporal logic of African

Farm manages to alienate those who would claim this connection as
right. The grotesque, as a representational strategy for embodying con-
tradiction and ambivalence, ultimately serves not only as the novel’s
symbol and aesthetic of indigenous art, but also, I will suggest, as its
sign of colonial fetishism.
1 A Portrait of the Artist as a Colonial South African19
Schreiner’s vision of the colonial indigene emerges with her critique of

European colonial rule in Africa. In accord with its opening epigraph
by Alexis de Tocqueville, proposing that “[t]he entire man is … to be
found in the cradle of the child” (African Farm, xlii), African Farm, as
Ruth First and Ann Scott have noted, criticizes colonialism by exam-
ining the institution’s effects on the lives of three colonial children
who ultimately serve as its “symbol and expression.”20 Em, the English
stepdaughter of the Dutch farm owner Tant’ Sannie, assumes the roles
of lawful heir to the homestead as well as pious Christian matron.
Em’s rebellious orphan cousin Lyndall serves as the dominant female
protagonist, whom Elaine Showalter has famously regarded as “the
first wholly serious feminist heroine in the English novel.”21 Lyndall,
like her companion Waldo, possesses no legal claim to the land she
inhabits and spends her childhood at the mercy of her Dutch benefac-
tress. As Loren Anthony observes, their anomalous status as “landless
whites” parallels Schreiner’s own position at the time of the novel’s
composition.22 Waldo, son of the German overseer Otto, appears an
awkward and “uncouth creature with small learning” throughout
much of the novel; his interpretations of his natural surroundings,
however, provide the dominant fictional perspective within the novel
through which to view and attempt to understand the southern
African landscape (African Farm, 268). Waldo’s right to the land, while
officially denied, emerges through his formation within this land
and his ability to read its natural historical as well as cultural texts.
Lyndall, appropriately, compares Waldo to a thorn-tree, an indigenous
plant whose roots delve into the red soil of the predominately arid
karoo (African Farm, 198).
Although Lyndall has managed to elicit more attention from the
novel’s critics since its first publication,23 the curious figure of Waldo
continues to spark interest as well as debate. Among a generation of
readers drawn to the novel for its engagement with turn-of-the-century
feminism, Doris Lessing considered Waldo both “the heart of the book”
and “the first appearance in women’s writing of the true hero, in a form
appropriate to the novel; here a kind of Caliban who mysteriously
embodies Prospero’s spirit, or Faust’s.”24 Caliban, of course, figures as
British literature’s paradigmatic character of colonization, disinherited
from lands to which he holds claim. As Joseph Bristow argues, “Waldo,
however, need not be pitied”: “His course in life is to come to terms with
‘a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing’ (p. 74), to reach the
limits of his capabilities, succeed in what few things life has been able
to offer him, and not to give up on his dreams.”25 More recently, Mark
Sanders has argued in keeping with the novel’s multilevel masquerade
of gender that African Farm reveals how “the female intellectual has, in
effect, to cease to be a woman”; Waldo’s development therefore speaks
to that of the female intellectual to the extent that “Waldo is Olive
Schreiner.”26 Jed Esty, by contrast, reads Waldo as “a pious ragamuffin,
an ageless, curly-haired cherub of Germanic intellection” who functions
as “a walking figure of nondevelopmental time” in a novel that subverts
“the bildungsroman’s allegory of development” while casting “allegori-
cal thinking” as “a passing phase in the life of her German-romantic
boy hero but also in the history of European ideas.”27 Although Waldo
may feature in “a brief romance of colonial innocence based on a vision
of virgin land and unalienated labor,” Esty argues, the novel ultimately
reveals how “the colonies do not – cannot – come of age under the rule
of empire.”28
While South Africa indeed could not “come of age” as a nation while
under colonial rule, and while Schreiner clearly exposes the challenges
of coming of age at the margins of empire, the novel nevertheless
neither wholly condemns its protagonists for their forestalled youth
nor I would suggest does it reject allegory as a form of underdevel-
oped thinking. Reflecting on the significance of childhood in a letter
to Havelock Ellis the year after the novel’s publication, Schreiner
provides further insight into the novel’s construction of childhood
perception:
Did you ever read the passage in Shelley’s letters when he talks about
genius … : Genius does not invent, it perceives! … It agrees with the true
fact that you noticed the other day, that men of genius are always
childlike. A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it,
without any preconceived idea; most people, after they are about
twelve, quite lose this power, they see everything through a few pre-
conceived ideas which hang like a veil between them and the outer
world.29
Further encouraging Ellis to look at something as familiar as his

own hand while “dissociat[ing] from it every preconceived idea” by
“[l]ook[ing] at it simply as an object which strikes the eye,” she observes how
“new and strange and funny” it will look.30 Viewing nature “as it strikes
the eye” and perceiving connections through formal analogies, in art
as well as evolutionary biology, Waldo translates this knowledge albeit
awkwardly into the formal relations that structure his woodcarvings –
woodcarvings that appear “grotesque”; that is, “strange and funny.”
When an influential stranger advises Waldo to “stay where [he is] …
[as] [t]he time may yet come when [he] will be that which other men
have hoped to be and never will be now” (African Farm, 137),31 he is
apparently referring to Waldo’s potential for a distinctly nineteenth-
century form of genius (African Farm, 133). Waldo’s woodcarving,
which possesses a degree of truth despite its want of beauty, begins to
lift the “veil between [himself] and the outer world”; without coinci-
dence, allegory – the literary form traditionally associated with lifting
the veil of material reality – serves as its verbal correlative in the story
of the hunter that the stranger discloses in explication of the carving.
Schreiner’s realism, as we will see below, embraces rather than rejects
allegorical reading; in her late nineteenth-century variant, however, the
proper reading of surfaces requires not the correct system of belief but
rather the correct form of observation. For Schreiner, as for Conrad, “the
value is in the detail.”
Claims made by the European colonists on the southern African
landscape nevertheless do encounter staunch resistance in Schreiner’s
anti-colonial novel. In his essay “Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South
Africa,” novelist and scholar J. M. Coetzee observes how the colonial
homestead on which the novel’s plot unravels appears strikingly
unhomely: “Whereas in the peasant model the farm is naturalized
by being integrated with the land, and in turn historicizes the land
by making the land a page on which the generations write their story,
Schreiner’s farm is an unnatural and arbitrary imposition on a dog-
gedly ahistorical landscape.”32 Schreiner, he continues, conveys “the
alienness of European culture in Africa” and the “unnaturalness” of life
on the farm represented, thus diverging from the pastoral tradition
in that the colonial farm never appears as a natural extension of the
southern African landscape.33 While the farm and the majority of its
inhabitants seem strange intruders upon an inhospitable land, how-
ever, Waldo manages to make himself at home by communing with
the land in which he has grown. The Teutonic name Waldo, after all,
means “ruler.”
Waldo’s “grotesque” woodcarvings and keen observations of nature,

exemplified in his ability to see the world in the leaves of an ice-plant,
establish him as an artist figure whose innocent auguries grant him
a symbolic rather than legal right to the land (African Farm, 267).34
Among the variety of nineteenth-century thinkers embodied in Waldo’s
character, Ralph Waldo Emerson plays a particularly prominent role; the
name “Waldo,” in fact, forms part of Schreiner’s tribute to the famous
essayist who died the year before the novel’s publication.35 Waldo’s
interpretations of his natural environment throughout the novel reveal
an ability to imagine a harmonious whole from its diverse parts. The eye
that Waldo turns to nature thus makes him an artist, as embodied in
Emerson’s figure of the poet, in which “[t]he eye is the best of artists”:
The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably

made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field,
Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them
owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no
man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the
poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their
warranty-deeds give no title.36
Waldo takes “the cream” from the African farm while leaving its owner
Tant’ Sannie with “skimmed milk” and bultongs, or strips of dried
meat. Waldo, like Emerson’s poet, serves as an interpreter and “lover
of nature,” who “[i]n the presence of nature” frequently experiences
“a wild delight … in spite of real sorrows,” and thus possesses a particu-
lar claim to the surrounding landscape.37 As Emerson does not consider
in his essay the rights of Native Americans to the land that the poet
“integrates” and the farmers have claimed as private property, however,
Waldo’s connection to the landscape appears equally as untroubled
now that the Bushmen seem to have disappeared. Schreiner’s remem-
brance of Emerson, advocate of a kind of postcolonial American cultural
identity separate from that of England and Europe, thus highlights the
double vision maintained by colonists becoming, or hoping to become,
postcolonial.38
Although the landscape in Schreiner’s novel may remain, as Coetzee
suggests, “doggedly ahistorical,” its record of natural history provides
Waldo with the primary text through which the novel authorizes his
position in time and space. While ahistorical in its apparent indiffer-
ence to the rise and fall of ancient and contemporary empires, the
landscape reveals to Waldo an alternative to the secular and religious
historical narratives available to him through the books within his

reach: “‘If they could talk, if they could tell us now!’ he said, moving his
hand out over the surrounding objects – ‘then we would know some-
thing. This “kopje,” if it could tell us how it came here!’” (African Farm,
15). Moving his hand across the rocks as across a page of text, Waldo
takes a particular interest in the origin of the solitary kopje that disrupts
the surface of the plain and that the narrator describes as “a heap of
round iron-stones piled one upon another, as over some giant’s grave”
(African Farm, 1). Waldo echoes this mythic explanation of the kopje
when admitting how as a child he “thought a great giant was buried
under it” (African Farm, 15). Loren Anthony asserts that the buried giant
represents “the repression of the sign of History,”39 and he draws further
support from Stephen Clingman’s observation that “a colonial culture
must needs repress the real history of violent aggrandizement that
underlies its claim to the colonized land as a natural right.”40 I would
argue that Waldo’s recognition and disavowal of this trace of a South
African Titan reflects his troubled relation to the San whose paintings
survive on the iron stones of the kopje.
The more mature Waldo rejects the mythic giant yet continues to
contemplate the creative mystery of the kopje, which forms the focal
point of the chapter “Plans and Bushman-Paintings.” This chapter jux-
taposes Waldo’s readings in his Physical Geography – presumably Mary
Somerville’s predominately uniformitarian work of the same name
published in 1848 – with Em’s Biblical understanding as both children
attempt to formulate a narrative of origin.41 While Waldo remains dis-
satisfied with both narratives and must use his “shuttle of imagination”
to probe further, natural historical narratives similar to those informing
Mary Kingsley’s later writing nevertheless permeate his vision (African
Farm, 131). The only chapter marked by a specific year, 1862, the set-
ting of “Plans and Bushman-Paintings” appropriately coincides with
the publication of sociologist Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, which
famously attempted to reconcile Christian doctrine with evolutionary
natural sciences. As critics have frequently noted, First Principles, which
Waldo reads later in the novel, was crucial to Schreiner’s own thought.
“He [Willie Bertram] lent me Spencer’s First Principles,” she recounted
in her famous 1884 letter to Havelock Ellis, while continuing: “I always
think that when Christianity burst on the dark Roman world it was
what that book was to me. I was in such complete blank atheism.”42
Shattering foundational beliefs that Schreiner garnered from a mission-
ary childhood, Spencer’s work opened up a space in her thought that
she would eventually fill with an interest in evolutionary science and
a natural moral philosophy. Spencer’s book promises to provide Waldo

with “a centre round which to hang [his] ideas” when he finds himself
similarly adrift (African Farm, 137). “Plans and Bushman-Paintings”
highlights an earlier stage of this conflict in Waldo’s thinking, taking
place immediately after his rejection of his father’s God and reflecting
a turn toward an empirical pursuit of knowledge rooted within the visual
observation of natural phenomena rather than the literary exegesis of
authorized texts. Waldo’s interest in the natural sciences, particularly
in the wake of Charles Lyell’s 1830 Principles of Geology that challenged
the timeline of religious histories and informed studies like those of
Somerville, represents a secular approach to constructing history and the
temporal relations between people, things, and events therein.
Waldo’s earliest historical view, in fact, resembles a cross-section of
the surrounding landscape, in which the layers of sedimentation visu-
ally represent the succession of years at a glance. This condensed vision
of a secular, universal history, in which Waldo envisions a “stream of
people” moving “in one direction,” offers such a synchronic glimpse
of the succession of geographically located human eras from “the
old Greeks and Romans” to the contemporary peoples of China and
India (African Farm, 3–4). Waldo’s glance thus corresponds with what
Johannes Fabian terms “the visual reduction of temporal sequence,” or
an emerging “‘synchronic’ understanding” of time employed for the
purpose of constructing universal histories that provided the founda-
tion for early anthropological constructions of primitive culture.43 As
Waldo listens to the incessant ticking of his father’s hunting watch,
which, in the age of popular statistics suggests that “every time it
ticked a man died,” he envisions this forward march of standardized,
periodized time (African Farm, 3).44 As Fabian has noted, the emergence
of modernity and thus of anthropological discourse can be examined
“not in the invention of a linear conception, but in a succession
of attempts to secularize Judeo-Christian Time by generalizing and
universalizing it.”45 In Waldo’s vision, though, the perceived inevita-
bility of time’s progression overlays the supposedly natural decline of
nations; that India and China were supposedly by the mid nineteenth
century “going over” testifies to their status within the contemporary
British imaginary as degenerate cultures. Waldo’s historical vision, by
emerging from the land, thus forges his apparently primitive ties to his
surrounding natural environment while informing his more modern
scientific mastery over it. Waldo therefore does not find himself at
odds with modernity, but rather with forms of corruption that attend
it; Bonaparte, the novel’s satirical embodiment of foreign capitalist
speculation, destroys Waldo’s innovative sheep-shearing machine,

not modernity, development, or progress per se. As Carolyn Burdett
has succinctly observed, Waldo is a “striving modern.”46 His double
historical vision, therefore, counters two forms of alienation: that of
the colonial settler’s “arbitrary imposition” on a foreign landscape
and the South African laborer’s disenfranchisement under imperial
capitalism.
Waldo applies a similar view to his reading of the kopje, its paint-
ings, and their painters, as he constructs a natural history from the
visible traces that remain as part of the geological record. As in the
universal history he envisions, distant moments in time lie side by
side under his panoramic gaze: “Sometimes … I lie under there with
my sheep, and it seems that the stones are really speaking – speaking
of the old things, of the time when the strange fishes and animals lived
that are turned into stone now, and the lakes were here; and then of
the time when the little Bushmen lived here. … It was one of them,
one of these old wild Bushmen, that painted those [pictures]” (African
Farm, 15–16). While the stones seem to speak to him, the ancestors of
the indigenous peoples he mentions do not. The Bushmen painters
Waldo evokes assume a position within this condensed and periodized
chronology sometime after “the time” of “strange fishes and animals”
and before the colonial present and its sheep. Classed among the ranks
of “the old things,” the creators of these paintings undergo a kind of
fossilization and are relegated to a remote past.47 Waldo accredits the
stones of the kopje with narrating their own story, thereby natural-
izing the history of displacement he recounts, while he projects his
own narrative agency onto the scene. Found sitting with her back to
this past at the opening of the chapter, Lyndall’s comparison between
diamonds and the ice-plant’s crystalline leaves moreover foreshadows
southern Africa’s imminent future against which Waldo will struggle.
Disregarding Em’s association between diamonds and marriage, as she
will later in the novel when she accepts a ring without the contract,
Lyndall does not realize how thoroughly the three children’s lives will
soon change; the foreign speculator’s arrival on the farm at the end
of the scene heralds this future. With the 1867 discovery of a massive
diamond on Colesburg Kopje, later Kimberley, the kopjes and their
paintings would moreover yield to miners’ explosives; the San, in turn,
would continue to experience the pressure of increasingly expanding
colonial borders.48
Despite its allusion to the development of capitalism in southern
Africa, this scene tends to naturalize the history leading up to Waldo’s
own settlement that he recounts. Allegedly listening to the story of the

kopje, one which would presumably correspond with a geological sense
of time, Waldo envisions his place in what Coetzee has identified as
“inhuman time,”49 or what Fabian would call naturalized time – time
that endures even without the presence of human consciousness or
agency: “Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a little
yellow face peeping out among the stones. … And the wild bucks have
gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and
only the stones will lie on here, looking at everything like they look
now. I know that it is I who am thinking, … but it seems as though
it were they who are talking” (African Farm, 16).50 Viewing this chro-
nology from an abstracted distance, Waldo both imagines a time that
preceded human existence and foresees one that will follow human
extinction; the stones, like the science of geology, have relativized
human existence by placing it in a non-anthropomorphic temporal
framework. Unlike contemporary social evolutionists who, according
to Fabian, attempted to reconstruct “stages leading to civilization,”
Schreiner’s protagonist seems to adopt a naturalized conception of
time that accepts “the stark meaninglessness of mere physical dura-
tion” while ordering “an essentially discontinuous and fragmentary
geological and paleontological record.”51 Waldo’s selective and con-
densed vision of this natural historical narrative, however, as well as his
placement of himself immediately after the Bushmen and wild bucks,
seems somewhat less than natural. Schreiner accords Waldo a privi-
leged place within this narrative, succeeding indigenous South Africans
and occupying the central moment of creative presence within the
novel – a moment from which the San, denied access to what Fabian
would term “shared Time,”52 have been omitted. In order to occupy
“shared Time,” to enter into a coeval exchange, argues Fabian, the
peoples under scrutiny may be distanced neither in “Physical Time,”
as Waldo does by locating the San in a different natural historical era,
nor in “Typological Time,” which Waldo accomplishes by referring to
the San’s hunter-gatherer practices.53 While Waldo acknowledges the
San as his South African predecessors, his present position as artist and
sole interpreter of the rock paintings works to efface the San’s lingering
presence and to subject their histories to his own narratives.
From his position as an ostensibly initiated reader of the landscape
and its historical text, Waldo constructs a narrative about the Bushmen
and their paintings still visible on the surface of the kopje’s rocks.
While relaying more strictly ethnographic details concerning the loca-
tion and materials of the paintings, Waldo also attempts to understand
the unknown painter as well as the possibility of alternate criteria of

aesthetic judgment:
He [the painter] did not know why, but he wanted to make some-
thing, so he made these. He worked hard, very hard, to find the juice
to make the paint; and then he found this place where the rocks
hang over, and he painted them. To us they are only strange things,
they make us laugh; but to him they were very beautiful. … He used
to kneel here naked, painting, painting, painting; and he wondered
at the things he made himself. (African Farm, 16)
While Waldo identifies artistic activity in another – “to him they were
very beautiful” – he nevertheless holds this other and his aesthetic at
a distance – “[t]o us they are only strange.”54 Waldo’s characterization
of the San paintings as strange and laughable, in addition to echoing
Schreiner’s description of viewing a thing “as an object which strikes the
eye,” finds reinforcement through the narrative voice, which refers to
the paintings as “grotesque” and implicitly subjects them to aesthetic
and ethnographic judgment. Found frequently among the repertoire
of terms in contemporary anthropological constructions of primitive
art, denoting its divergence from European standards of realist verisi-
militude as well as its ability to confound familiar artistic forms, the
grotesque also gained renewed popularity as an aesthetic category, most
famously theorized in Victorian England by John Ruskin in The Stones
of Venice (1851–53).55
Ruskin describes the grotesque as wild and monstrous, rude and sav-
age, yet indicative of a “deep insight into nature.”56 The grotesque,
explains Ruskin, lacks the “soft[ness]” and skillfully wrought forms of
the beautiful; unlike the sublime, it lacks “nob[ility]” and the consis-
tency that leads to a sense of wholeness.57 Instead the grotesque denotes
an aesthetic of fragmentation and incongruous juxtapositions. Ruskin,
however, attributes to the grotesque a social value that corresponds
with the rise of the British working class and the nostalgia for an ide-
alized form of non-exploitative labor. While these forms may appear
imperfect, argues Ruskin, they testify to the comparatively unalien-
ated working conditions of their creators, to the freedom allowed
them to employ their imagination and diverge from copying and the
mechanistic perfection of surfaces.58 Imperfection, according to Ruskin,
thus serves as “the sign of life in a mortal body” and evidence “of a
state of progress and change.”59 He consequently urges his readers to
“demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for
that is slaves’ work, unredeemed.”60 While Ruskin himself may have

preferred to classify southern African rock art with that of India and
the “Pacific islands,” which he labels “the barbarous grotesque of mere
savageness,” Schreiner’s representation of the paintings exhibits the
necessary criteria of Ruskin’s “noble grotesque.”.61 These paintings con-
jure the image of a painter relatively free, imaginative, endowed with
insight, and appreciative of beauty.
The term “grotesque” also enters into the narrator’s description of
Waldo’s woodcarving and thus forges an aesthetic link between Waldo’s
work and the Bushmen’s paintings. As a disenfranchised laborer on
the farm, Waldo’s identification with the grotesque suggests that he,
like the idealized Bushmen painters, may represent a form of primi-
tive resistance to the capitalism of European colonialism. Perhaps it is
no coincidence that Waldo was born in 1848, the year working class
revolution swept across Europe and ended in London before it began.62
Indeed, his refusal to sell his “grotesque” woodcarving to a European
traveler exhibits his degree of aversion toward an expanding capitalist
sphere of commoditization. Generally lacking the necessary portability
to render it fungible, southern African rock art represented to Victorian
observers a kind of non-capitalist art par excellence. As a self-taught
artist living at what the imperial metropole considered the border of
European civilization, Waldo works in the style of indigenous southern
African art and exhibits a “deep insight into nature.” While Waldo may
have adopted these forms from the indigenous southern African art-
works among which he has grown, Schreiner’s own ethnological beliefs
about the effects of climate and geography on the individual suggest
that Waldo may not simply employ a borrowed style; rather, these
native forms have become his own:
Were two infants removed from each other at birth, the one to be
brought up in Finland and the other in India, the mere climatic and
physical differences would, at the end of forty years, have rendered
them highly dissimilar both in physical constitutions and in many
intellectual and material wants, while their descendants at the end
of six generations would certainly represent distinct human varieties,
for which distinct laws and institutions would be requisite.63
Born of his southern African environment, although in many ways still

defined by the institution of the colonial farm and its European herit-
age, Waldo appears to develop “intellectual and material wants” that
distinguish him from his fellow Europeans and exhibit his ostensibly
Figure 9 Photographic detail of the Beersheba commando scene. Courtesy of the

KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
more authentic ties to the land. This aesthetic connection, however,

forges a politically tenuous relationship between the colonial creator
and his colonized predecessors, between a privileged presence and
a prematurely buried past. A glimpse of this past, and of San contact
with Europeans, nevertheless appears in now famous rock images such
as the commando scene depicted in Figure 9.
2 Schreiner’s Grotesque Realism
While Waldo himself may not survive the end of the narrative,
Schreiner’s novel serves as an “enduring monument” to the colonial
indigene and an emerging South African literary tradition.64 Leaving sto-
ries of “wild adventure,” “ravening lions, ... hair-breadth escapes,” and
“cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen” to imaginative
metropolitan writers “in Piccadilly or in the Strand,” Schreiner claims to

root the novel, like her character Waldo, in her native southern African
soil (African Farm, xxxix–xl). In her Preface to the second edition, she
explains her resistance to such colorful conventions of popular colonial
romances that diverge from “the facts” of southern African life familiar
to her: “[S]hould one sit down to paint the scenes among which he
has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him. … Sadly
he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the grey
pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him” (African
Farm, xl).65 The South African writer, Schreiner explains, must daily
encounter the relatively unmediated facts of colonial life, and romance
proves an unsuitable form for their containment. While the facts she
assembles may lead her narrative away from the romance, their organi-
zation within the narrative does not entirely conform to the dominant
nineteenth-century conventions of the realist novel and thus neces-
sitates its revision. Schreiner’s observation of the facts before her, like
those confronting her observing protagonist, informs her fragmented
and discontinuous fictional narrative. Like the art of her South African
protagonist, Schreiner’s novel exhibits the aesthetics of the grotesque.
Theories of the grotesque since the nineteenth century help to illu-
minate the narrative’s unconventional, experimental style. Dissatisfied
with the genres available to her, Schreiner incorporates into her osten-
sibly realist novel formal elements of the romance; dreams, letters,
allegories, and parodic sermons additionally comprise her extremely
heterogeneous style, which often self-consciously exposes the genres’
various rhetorical strategies in a proto-modernist fashion. This kind of
heterogeneity and contradiction most frequently characterizes the gro-
tesque as theorized by Ruskin. Wolfgang Kayser later attributed to the
grotesque both “the fusion of realms which we know to be separated”
and “the suspension of the category of objects.”66 More recently,
Geoffrey Galt Harpham has maintained that the grotesque “refuses to
be taken in whole because it embodies a confusion of type.”67 Failing to
coincide with a single category of classification, the grotesque, according
to Harpham, is a kind of “non-thing” that closely resembles what Susan
Stewart has called the ambivalent and the anomalous.68 Harpham
employs Stewart’s clarification of the terms anomalous, ambiguous,
and ambivalent: “The anomalous stands between the categories of an
existing classification system. … The ambiguous is that which cannot
be defined in terms of any given category. … The ambivalent is that
which belongs to more than one domain at a time.”69 The concepts of
ambivalence and anomaly help to explain why the European reception
of sub-Saharan African art during the nineteenth century so frequently

invoked the grotesque: African forms both defied European aesthetic
categories and introduced Europeans to alternate systems of value for
appreciating these forms. Harpham’s “non-thing” arguably emerges
after what Bill Brown would call an irregular exchange: when the
defamiliarized thing begins to grow newly intelligible – and therefore
no longer a thing – and can be glimpsed within and between two or
more systems of value and meaning simultaneously. This non-thing
not quite object, however, continues to trouble our perception of it
as a coherent entity. Harpham maintains that this confusion – this
strategy of deformation – may serve as an interval of “emergent com-
prehension” that ultimately leads to a kind of reformation, to “new
inventions.”70
Locating the grotesque in the moment preceding such discoveries,
during which old paradigms prove insufficient and new ones have
not yet taken their place, Harpham provides a conceptual framework
for discussing Schreiner’s aesthetic. He draws an analogy with radical
“scientific discoveries,”71 such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as
particularly prominent moments at which new paradigms and expla-
nations emerge: “This pregnant moment is a ‘paradigm crisis,’ when
enough anomalies have emerged to discredit an old explanatory para-
digm or model, and to make it impossible to continue adhering to it,
but before the general acceptance of a new paradigm. The paradigm
crisis is the interval of the grotesque writ large.”72 African Farm exhibits
such a “paradigm crisis” on several levels: generic, epistemic, aesthetic,
and political. Schreiner’s generic experimentation leads her work away
from the nineteenth-century realist novel yet does not fully gain it
admittance to the ranks of naturalism or modernism. The epistemic
shift from religious to secular stories of origins and narratives of history,
which the science of geology and later that of evolutionary biology
strongly affected, manifests itself within the novel, particularly through
Waldo’s own crisis and eventual conversion. An aesthetic shift appears
in Schreiner’s attention to the so-called primitive arts, at a time when
the gothic style had achieved renewed popularity, despite the ongoing
Victorian interest in Classicism, and when sub-Saharan art was only
slowly beginning to gain recognition among Europeans. The novel also
anticipates, or attempts to envision, a shift in political structure from
colonial to postcolonial South Africa. Schreiner’s struggle to revise the
genre of the novel, I would argue, involves finding a suitable form to
represent these new historic and artistic paradigms. While Schreiner
aligns the grotesque with indigenous southern African art, therefore,
this aesthetic also signals the novel’s relation to its broader social and
political context.
Schreiner’s alignment with the grotesque inspired her pursuit of an
alternative to the conventional realist novel as she perceived it. Her
description of the dominant approach to literary realism, particularly
its construction of characters and events, corresponds somewhat with
a social evolutionary narrative that attempts to construct the illusion of
a seamless causality, in which arbitrary, discontinuous, and incidental
“facts” find no place. She refers to this literary approach in her Preface
as “the stage method,” in which “each character is duly marshalled at
first, and ticketed” and will surely return at the appropriate moment to
“act his part”; this story closes with the fall of a curtain, the taking of
bows, and a satisfying sense of “completeness” (African Farm, xxxix).
The work of Charles Dickens, by contrast, offers an illuminating parallel
to Schreiner’s novel, which she wrote while reading Dombey and Son
(1847–8). Raymond Williams attributes to Dickens the realization
of “a new kind of novel” that could effectively represent increas-
ingly arbitrary and complex urban social relations.73 In his novels,
suggests Williams, men and women pass each other without recogni-
tion, sometimes colliding, but as the plot develops “unknown and
unacknowledged relationships, profound and decisive connections,”
originally obscured, begin to emerge. “These are the real and inevitable
relationships and connections,” suggests Williams, “the necessary
recognitions and avowals of any human society.”74 While sharing this
approach to character and plot development, Schreiner avoids such
closure at the end of African Farm and the characters do not all connect
in a world of necessary avowals. Schreiner, arguably, struggled to realize
“a new kind of novel” that would represent and critique the intrusion
of a European capitalist economy and social order in a predominately
rural southern Africa.
Instead of employing the “stage method,” Schreiner turns to what she
calls “the method of the life we all lead” (African Farm, xxxix). In this
approach, notions of Providence and even historical determinism give
way to contingency and fragmentation: “Here nothing can be proph-
esied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and
re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man
who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready”
(African Farm, xxxix). The sum of the work’s characters and events
thus does not construct a reassuring whole. Schreiner’s method, in this
respect, corresponds with Ruskin’s characterization of the grotesque
as a “narrowed and broken” vision; as an aesthetic of fragmentation, in
which partial glimpses of a presupposed yet inaccessible whole resist a

totalizing vision held together by the logic of causality or inevitability.75
Schreiner’s novel stages the abrupt appearance and disappearance of
quantitatively marginal characters, does not – and cannot – resolve the
conflict of major protagonists like Lyndall, and avoids the construction
of psychological depth in most of her characters, many of whom remain
exaggerated caricatures like Tant’ Sannie and Bonaparte Blenkins.76
Several of the more grotesque moments in the novel attempt to
escape the psychology of the characters entirely or, at least, to shift
the reader’s attention to a parallel, yet non-anthropomorphic, per-
spective such as that of Waldo’s dog. This non-anthropomorphism
corresponds with the revelation of Waldo’s natural historical vision as
well as the iconography of the rock paintings; these moments in the
narrative ascribe to the reader an uncannily non-human position, also
prevalent in the writing of Conrad and Kingsley, from which to view
the human characters and remind the reader of Waldo’s suspicion that
even the stones are watching him. Such a shift in perspective lures
the reader outside of the rational, psychologized characters’ realm of
deliberate action and reaction, of planning and enacting their futures,
and of reflecting upon and ordering their memories of the past. After
Bonaparte has destroyed Waldo’s prized sheep-shearing machine,
the perspective shifts to Doss the dog, which “watched [Bonaparte’s]
retreat with cynical satisfaction” while observing his master “on the
ground with his head on his arms in the sand” (African Farm, 74).
Entering a more allegorical register, the narrative leaves its protagonist
face down in the sand to recount the dog’s distracted play and slow
torture of a nearby beetle. The fate of both the beetle and Waldo meet
in the final sentences of the chapter, concluding with “[a] striving, and
a striving, and an ending in nothing” (African Farm, 74). As Burdett
observes in relation to this post-Darwinian scene, perhaps metonymi-
cally suggested by the beetle, “The world and its history are no longer
humanized, either temporally or spiritually.”77 The grotesque, suggests
Kayser, embodies this type of “estranged world,” in which accepted
values are dislocated and “the categories which apply to our world
view become inapplicable.”78 By depicting the moment immediately
following the machine’s destruction from Doss’s perspective, the nar-
rative forgoes the emotional devastation of Waldo’s loss, for which
the reader has been prepared, to focus on the senseless cruelty of the
dog’s disinterested play. Such a perspectival shift corresponds with
what Roslynn D. Haynes considers attributes of Schreiner’s residual
Romanticism: her use of allegory (literally, “other-discourse”) and
symbolism, which coincide formally with her “characteristic mode of

thinking by analogy” and conceptually with her Spencerian belief in
“a unity underlying all nature.”79
Allegory, in particular, provides Schreiner with a preferred strategy
for questioning and beginning to re-envision outmoded forms, from
the forms of individual words to those of larger social structures. In
his much quoted distinction between symbolism and allegory, Paul de
Man argues that “allegory designates primarily a distance in relation
to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to
coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal differ-
ence.”80 Immanent meaning, whether religious or secular, no longer
resides in the figure or the word, and allegory according to de Man is
the literary form that embodies this temporal disjunction. Rather than
providing the sense of redemption, Burdett argues, Schreiner’s allegories
therefore offer a form of consolation and resist “the structure of synec-
doche, where the symbol is part of the totality that it represents,” while
“emphasiz[ing] an irreparable loss [“activated by modernity” that] the
narratives explore.”81 Whereas Waldo’s loss of stability afforded by his
father’s “God” whom he disowns, or Lyndall’s by the patriarchal order
and its model of “love” she rejects, may well be products of modernity,
part of the problem is that the world they inhabit is not modern
enough. According to de Man, “[A]llegory exists entirely within an
ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless
future.”82 Many of Schreiner’s allegories position themselves in relation
to this future, one in which tarnished forms may again prove suitable
for thought: “A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will
take a century before it can be purified and brought to use again.”83 As
Mark Sanders has argued, Schreiner’s allegories temporally disrupt old
symbols – using them while not using them, invoking them only to
expose their insufficiency – while “refer[ring] to, and even from within,
a time that will have been realized in the future.”84
Schreiner’s story of the hunter in African Farm serves as an allegory
about modern allegory as well as about the protagonists’ respective
struggles to realize a more favorable future.85 Traversing a foreign
landscape populated with allegorical figures that attempt to hinder
him, a hunter embarks on a journey resembling that of John Bunyan’s
pilgrim. Schreiner’s allegorical pretext is therefore itself an allegory,
and one that she treats with temporal as well as epistemic distance.
Schreiner’s pilgrim pursues an elusive and indeterminate Bird of Truth,
an absolute that offers him neither eternal life nor salvation after death;
rather, his “salvation is in work” (African Farm, 131). The progress of
this pilgrim assumes a particularly nineteenth-century value in which

the guide Wisdom is born of “The-Accumulated-Knowledge-of-Ages”
(African Farm, 127). On his journey, when the path forged by previous
generations ends, the hunter must carve his own into the landscape;
“[w]ith his shuttle of imagination he dug out stones,” built stairs, and
scaled a wall (African Farm, 131). Imagination in this allegory, as in
Schreiner’s novel and Ruskin’s aesthetics of the grotesque, serves as the
faculty that envisions possibilities and proposes solutions from which
subsequent generations if not the present one may benefit. Although a
feather from the Bird of Truth drops into his hand at the moment of his
death, the hunter never glimpses this truth located amidst mountains
of “immeasurable height” (African Farm, 131). Resisting synecdoche, the
feather as fragment does not provide a glimpse of the whole but rather
consolation that such a whole might nevertheless exist. While the feath-
ers when woven together are said to create a net for holding Truth, there
appears to be no end to this project in sight; it is a process of continual
unfolding rather than a complete revelation.86 Reproduced in Schreiner’s
influential 1890 collection of allegories, the hunter’s journey parallels
that of the women from “Three Dreams in a Desert” who, like locusts, lay
their bodies down over a river in order to form a bridge that subsequent
generations of women may cross.87 Schreiner’s allegory ultimately serves
as the literary mode for beginning to envision a future that the staunch
realism of her novel, generically as well as ethically, refuses to fabricate.
If both Waldo and Lyndall die disinherited and before their time within
the confines of the realist narrative, is it precisely because they have been
born before their time; therein lies the relationship between failure and
development in the novel. As Lyndall laments, “[I]f I might but be one
of those born in the future” (African Farm, 154).
Outside of her allegories, Schreiner frames her seemingly contingent
and fragmentary fictional world of characters and events within a het-
erogeneous and stylized narrative that similarly serves to highlight the
grotesque novel’s use and frequent mistrust of language. The mistrust
of words, in fact, emerges explicitly several times throughout the novel,
which largely favors observation as the more reliable source of knowl-
edge. A debate between the perceptive Lyndall and the benevolent
yet vulnerable overseer Otto arises over the reliability of Bonaparte’s
stories. Lyndall’s mistrust of Bonaparte’s words strikes at the very
foundation of what Otto believes he knows; spoken or written, the
word serves as Otto’s “irrefragable evidence” (African Farm, 22). When
Lyndall questions the validity of Bonaparte’s narratives, Otto reveals his
religious adoration of the word: “How do you know that anything is
true? Because you are told so. If we begin to question everything – proof,
proof, proof, what will we have to believe left? How do you know the
angel opened the prison door for Peter, except that Peter said so? How
do you know that God talked to Moses, except that Moses wrote it?”
(African Farm, 28). Otto reacts against the declining capacity for belief in
the word amid the growing demand for verifiable, observable evidence.
Bonaparte, a physiognomically suspect and ill-dressed figure who has
recently arrived on the farm by foot, constructs an elaborate story of
his allegedly noble lineage, his tragic loss of material assets at sea, and
the recent death of his horse. While Otto’s critique of positivism may in
many ways be justified, his implicit trust in the man who could repeat
his story three times without variation prevents him from recognizing
the visible, external signs of Bonaparte’s treachery. Careful observation,
however, enables Lyndall to identify Bonaparte’s deception. While Otto
believes Bonaparte’s claim that he is a nobleman whose horse died the
day before he approached the farm on foot, Lyndall reads Bonaparte’s
lies on the soles – or lack thereof – of his dilapidated shoes.
Otto fails to interpret the text of his surrounding circumstances,
despite his ability to discern and foretell the events of the romance
he reads. Otto easily identifies in the written work the deception of its
antagonist, as he exclaims, “Ah, I thought so! – That was a rogue! – I saw
it before! – I knew it from the beginning!” (African Farm, 61). Ironically,
Otto cannot foresee the roguery of Bonaparte, who ultimately deceives
Tant’ Sannie and turns her against her loyal and hardworking overseer.
Reading conventional romances thus does not prepare the reader for
the types of lessons Schreiner incorporates in her novel. As a production
necessarily comprised of words, Schreiner’s novel responds to the medi-
um’s potential duplicity by foregrounding rhetorical forms to expose
their signifying power and their potential abuse. The sermon delivered
by Bonaparte, convincing for its stylistic and syntactical borrowings as
well as for its speaker’s bodily performance of spiritual sensibility, thus
impresses its listeners who either do not recognize its perversion of
Christian doctrine or do not at all comprehend English. Surrendering
oneself to the formal presentation of the utterance and its “inscrutable
charm,” without recognizing what lies behind it, results in dangerous
and potentially deadly misreadings (African Farm, 39). Schreiner’s novel
of ideas thus serves as a novel of readerly education in which we are
called upon to recognize and interpret a variety of rhetorical strategies
and genres and to perceive their uses and abuses.
The grotesque provides Schreiner’s novel with a form that reflects
her ambivalence toward preexisting paradigms and the language she
necessarily employs, while locating her novel within a southern African

context. Rhetorical structures and individual words have additionally
grown inadequate and, before finding new models to take their place,
Schreiner exposes their current insufficiency through an often ironic
process of deformation similarly deployed in her allegories. This
aesthetic links Schreiner’s novel to Waldo’s woodcarvings as well as the
Bushmen paintings, estranged from their native interpreters as “the
Boers have shot them all.” The novel thus announces and enacts its
ostensibly indigenous authority to provide both an interpretation of the
paintings and an account of the painters.
3 Histories and “Bushman” Painters
Whereas the Boers did not shoot all of the San by 1862, the year
represented in the “Plans and Bushman-Paintings” chapter, nor by
1883, the year of the novel’s publication, the infiltration of Dutch and
British colonists – and their sheep – into the northern Cape as far as the
Orange River dispossessed many surviving San of both land and subsist-
ence. A variety of rock paintings, like the image in Figure 10, offer San
perspectives on recurring conflicts with Europeans. According to the
archaeologists Janette Deacon and Thomas Dawson, the introduction
of merino sheep, which Tant’ Sannie owns,88 raised the colonists’ stakes
in taking over territory lying between the Orange and Sak rivers in the
northern Cape – territory “known as Bushmanland.”89 The British Crown
displaced the land’s previous residents the /Xam San and the Korana in
1847, after deeming the largely unfertile region suitable for grazing. “After
the introduction of merino sheep to the Karoo,” Deacon and Dawson
explain, “colonists put pressure on Britain to annexe the land and stop
cross-border conflict.”90 This disruption of San lifestyle, as well as their
relation to the land and its water sources, resulted in desperate raids
on European livestock, consequent incarceration and forced labor, and
also employment by local farmers. Louis Anthing, Resident Magistrate
and former Civil Commissioner of Namaqualand, recommended to the
Colonial Secretary of Cape Town in an 1862 letter “that the Bushmen
be given land of their own as well as sheep and goats” in compensation
for the British annexation of the karoo.91 Following the Korana War of
1868–9, in which the British Northern Border Police prevailed against
Korana and San resistance, a government notice proposed a solution
to this problem of landlessness by announcing the inscription as serv-
ants of “destitute women and children [and occasionally men] who
[were] continually coming into Camp to beg for food.”92 Applications
Figure 10 Detail of the Beersheba commando scene, copied by Patricia

Vinnicombe. Courtesy of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg, South
Africa
for servants were received from all over the Cape, while imprisonment
continued to provide an option for containing further acts of resistance.
In the meantime, San rock art attracted the attention of anthropologists
and linguists in large part precisely because of the threat of San exter-
mination. The paintings’ history of interpretation, as well as the images
themselves, reflects this demographic struggle.
The philologist Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, who accepted the
position of official translator to the Governor of the Cape, Sir George
Grey, in 1856, conducted the first of his famous series of interviews
with San speakers at the Cape Town Gaol as early as 1857. Bleek first
met with /Xam San speakers when Anthing brought several men to
Cape Town in 1863, whereas the /Xam San whom Bleek began to inter-
view extensively in 1870 were survivors of the Korana War and had
been incarcerated in the Breakwater Prison. Bleek’s interest in record-
ing San languages and narratives increased with the ground-breaking
publication in the July 1874 issue of the Cape Monthly Magazine of
Maluti San folklore and chromolithograph copies of rock paintings
from present-day Lesotho.93 Joseph Millerd Orpen, the surveyor, later
parliamentarian, and husband of Olive Schreiner’s cousin Élise-Pauline
Rolland (with both of whom Schreiner lived as a governess in 1870),

had collected this folklore and copied these paintings while traveling
through the Eastern Cape with his Maluti guide Qing. In his published
response to Orpen’s report, Bleek emphasizes the importance of
analyzing San narratives and beliefs in relation to their paintings: “It
gives at once to Bushman art a higher character, and teaches us to look
upon its products not as the mere daubing of figures for idle pastime,
but as an attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of
the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it
with religious feelings.”94 In his time, Bleek was one of few researchers
who turned from the concern for primarily archaeological remains –
“a few ‘sticks and stones, skulls and bones’” – to “that which is most
characteristic of their humanity, and, therefore, most valuable, – their
mind, their thoughts, and their ideas.”95 Bleek thus attempted to turn
from the remains of a San past to those of their present. Respecting
“their humanity,” Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd were noted
for treating their informants – //Kabbo, /A!kunta, /Han≠kass’o, and
Dia!kwain, to name a few – as mutual collaborators in a project which
culminated in the 1911 publication Specimens of Bushman Folk-lore,
a parallel text edition in /Xam San and English.96
Bleek’s interest in San languages and arts, however, also reflected the
aspirations of his early anthropological colleagues in preserving traces of
an ostensibly primitive culture in an attempt to reconstruct a hypotheti-
cal human prehistory. In his 1875 report to the Cape Town Parliament,
Bleek adopts the emerging discipline’s discourse of authenticity in his
appeal for the small percentage of colonial revenue needed to continue
collecting what he considered “pictures of the native mind in its national
originality” before “the mental life of the Aborigines in its uninfluenced
primitiveness” would become “effaced.”97 While this manner of argu-
ment may have proved the most politically expedient in presenting
his case before Parliament, its conservative aspirations and rhetoric of
indigenous cultural effacement resonate with those of contemporary
salvage ethnographers and privilege “traditional” San beliefs over cur-
rent ideas and concerns. Significantly, Bleek proposes the erection of “an
enduring monument” to “the Aborigines” for a colonial posterity and
intellectual history without proposing a plan for the immediate relief of
the dispossessed peoples he grew to know and respect.98 Bleek’s series of
interviews, as other acts of collecting, may have exacted a heavy price.
Martin Hall has noted the tragic deaths of several informants and their
family members indirectly resulting from their journeys to or from the
Bleek residence in Mowbray.99 Perhaps to his credit, Bleek did eventually
come to understand the needs of his collaborators better; in exchange for

continued instruction in San language and folklore, Bleek promised one
of his informants a gun. The archive of research leading up to Specimens
of Bushman Folk-lore, moreover, remains a valuable resource for interpret-
ing San rock art. It offers a collection of what the San called Kukummi, or
“stories, news, talk, information, history, and what English-speakers call
myths and folklore.”100 Kukummi were said to “float from afar,” linking
places and persons across space and time.101
Bleek and Lloyd’s collection provides a glimpse into San perspec-
tives and systems of value, thereby revealing potential shortcomings
of the predominately positivist interpretations of the paintings then
in circulation. Among the most insightful of those researchers devoted
to largely visual interpretations of the images, Stow read the pictures
as forms of historical painting; the pictures’ iconography, therefore,
represented to Stow a record of actual practices and events.102 Stow
focused particularly on copying those images appearing to provide
San records of encounters with colonists, which would have served as
a material complement to his influential demographic study The Native
Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu
into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country.103
Building on Bleek and Lloyd’s research into San beliefs, however,
David Lewis-Williams proposes a reading that places less emphasis on
the paintings’ resemblance to European realism while revealing San
perspectives on materiality. Lewis-Williams notes how some images are
painted in a manner that implies “they are moving in or out of the rock
face via cracks, steps and other inequalities in the surface.”104 Combined
with an understanding of San spiritual beliefs, such images suggest
that rock shelters may have been the equivalent of waterholes in

the drier regions of the subcontinent and that the rock face was like
a veil suspended between this world and the spiritual realm. The task
of the painters and the shamans was to dissolve that veil so that one
could see through into god’s kingdom and experience something of
the wonder and fear of that level of existence. Painted rock panels are
windows on other worlds.105
Similar to waterholes, believed to connect the spiritual worlds above

and below with the visible, material world, rock paintings served as
sites of fluidity and travel between the two worlds. Shamans rendered
the spiritual world they observed and traveled to visible by enlivening
through performance and often creating these paintings. The recurrence
of painted handprints, Lewis-Williams suggests, may therefore represent

the shaman’s attempt at dissolving the veil of the rock surface and reach-
ing beyond; more than an index of the human, the print thus serves
as an index pointing to an invisible world. Stow’s famous misreading
of the image depicted in Figure 8 as a pool of water, therefore, may
instead show the surface of the rock dissolving or peeling away to expose
another world; rather than depicting eland drinking at a waterhole, the
image may point to eland as sources of power necessary for passing into
this world.
Reading rock images as sites of passage between the material and
spiritual realms therefore requires that observers situated outside San sys-
tems of belief rethink the category of “painting” as well as its attendant
European notions of subject–object relations. Addressing the paintings’
“‘non-real’ features,” for example, Lewis-Williams links their iconography
to the visions of shamans “believed to have the ability to see otherwise
invisible potency” within the spirit world.106 Harnessing this potency and
redirecting its energies toward San purposes represented one of the most
important roles of shamans. The descendant of a rock painter revealed
how the San used to dance and turn toward certain images in order to
enhance their powers and cross over into the spiritual world. “Paintings
of Eland,” Lewis-Williams therefore contends, “were much more than
‘pictures’”: “They were reservoirs of potency, waiting to come alive when
people danced in the shelter.”107 Reflecting on paintings produced in the
mid to late nineteenth century, he moreover suggests that “some San sha-
mans used their age-old spiritual weapons – those they employed in their
struggles against the spirits of the dead and malevolent lion-shamans – in
an attempt to protect their people from those who sought to wrest their
land from them.”108 The paintings, therefore, represented a form of
resistance that passed unnoticeably before the eye of the unacquainted
observer. They functioned not so much in the recording of events as
events in themselves, animated and reanimated through performance.
With the changes in iconography and figures of potency that the paint-
ings manifested, especially during the nineteenth century, these images
nevertheless do provide access to a form of history, although perhaps not
exactly the kind that Stow imagined.
While most nineteenth-century research favored traces of past San
traditions, Bleek and Orpen’s application of southern African folklore and
beliefs to the interpretation of rock paintings nevertheless differed from
other contemporary approaches that, like Waldo’s, relied more heavily
on observation. Many such reports referred to the rock images as mark-
ings or primitive writing, denoting the presence of a nearby waterhole,
or as meaningless ornament, unimaginatively scribbled on the walls

according to convention to while away the time. Those who recog-
nized San images as a fine art of comparable merit to that of Europe
devoted considerable attention to acknowledging particularly “admirable
attempts” at employing European conventions of drawing, including
the use of shading, perspective, and foreshortening. Reports of the 1870s
and 1880s by George W. Stow and Mark Hutchinson, published in The
Athenaeum and The Journal of the Anthropological Institute, respectively, as
well as those of Adolf Hübner, Gustave Fritsch, and Theophilus Hahn in
the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, adopted such interpretive strategies.109 While
appreciating the paintings as fine art suggested that their producers could
express thoughts and feelings beyond utility and immediate conditions,
this so-called elevation of the paintings also categorically extracted them
from indigenous forms of “communication or record” that E. B. Tylor
aligned with the practice of writing.110 Even oral traditions of commu-
nication, which Bleek and his collaborators strove to record, were thus
frequently discounted, including explications offered by contemporary
San who claimed to create paintings themselves.111
One of the most famous admirers of San rock images was the painter
and art critic Roger Fry, whose 1910 essay “Bushman Paintings” represents
one of the earliest critical responses to modernists’ interest in primitive
art.112 Fry’s essay was largely informed by the 1909 publication Bushman
Paintings, the lavishly illustrated folio catalogue to the 1908 exhibition
at the Anthropological Institute in London that featured Helen Tongue’s
copies of paintings and drew on the research of Bleek, Orpen, Stow, and
Lloyd.113 Fry’s response to the paintings reflects the whole gamut of
modernist associations attached to notions of the primitive; children,
hysterics, savages, and “Paleolithic man” enter into his discussion of
a “most curious phase of primitive art” that tends toward perceptual
rather than conceptual modes of representation.114 Like Schreiner, Fry
attributes to children and other ostensible primitives the ability to see
things as they “strike … the eye,” a faculty he claims “Neolithic man” has
lost. “[I]t was this habit of thinking of things in terms of concepts,” Fry
elaborates, “which deprived him for ages [for Fry, until the Impressionists]
of the power to see what they looked like.”115 Juxtaposing the paintings’
ostensibly “Paleolithic” and “ultra-primitive directness of vision” with
the “Neolithic” desire “to classify” things,116 however, Fry implicitly
denies the San painters and their descendants the authority to inter-
pret their own paintings. It is precisely this “desire to classify” that Fry
himself exhibits as an art critic, and moreover that which he considers
lacking in African societies in his later exhibition review entitled “Negro
Sculpture.”117 Fry consequently positions himself as an authorized reader

of African art, thereby exercising an interpretive license similar to that
of his scientific predecessors. Fry’s reception of San rock images demon-
strates how art and ethnology intertwine in this early formulation of
a modern primitivist aesthetic; an aesthetic, like Schreiner’s, founded on
an imaginative act of displacement.
Claims that no authoritative translators of traditional San culture
could be found helped further this interpretive license exercised by
many early admirers of the rock paintings. Several nineteenth-century
accounts in English and German, such as those of Adolf Hübner, Rev.
C. G. Büttner, and Max Bartels,118 maintained that the peoples presently
living near the paintings and carvings, upon questioning, knew nothing
of their origin or process. While these claims usually supported argu-
ments for the works’ antiquity, they also served to heighten the sense
of mystery constructed around their ostensibly silent and increasingly
silenced creators. As Paul S. Landau suggests, these people would not be
“bushmen” if they were not so elusive: “The essential quality of bushmen
was that they were forever ‘vanishing.’ One can even treat this as the sine
qua non of the definition of the ‘truest’ bushmen: they are never actually
encountered.”119 The absence of Bushmen from most of Schreiner’s novel
corresponds with this definition; in their absence, European primitives
may populate the land instead. Even Waldo, who exhibits a particular
sort of at-homeness in his natural surroundings, and who at the end of
the novel arguably merges with the landscape in death by serving as a
hill-like perch to the chickens that clamor over his still form, alters the
land by working if not owning it. The seemingly peaceful flock of sheep
that Waldo regularly tends, in need of the grass the seeds of which served
as a staple of the San diet, reminds us of the livestock for whose grazing
land colonists pressed northward to the Orange River.
While the San were forever “vanishing,” they were not entirely invis-
ible. The mythic Bushman survived as either memory or marauder in
fiction, while the dispossessed San of non-fiction populated jails, urban
labor forces, and outlying farms. The seemingly uncanny return of the
San as the displaced and forced laborer, whom Waldo encounters while
working as a transport rider near Grahamstown, ruptures the image of
the elusive San from a distant time constructed earlier in the novel. At
this point in the narrative, “the facts” do indeed “creep in”:
The Bushman boy was grilling ribs at the fire. He looked at me, and
grinned from ear to ear. “Master was a little nice,” he said, “and lay
down in the road. Something might ride over master, so I carried
him there.” He grinned at me again. It was as though he said, “You

and I are comrades. I have lain in a road too. I know all about it.” …
I sat up, and I took the brandy-flask out of my pocket, and I flung it
as far as I could into the dark water. … I never drank again. (African
Farm, 224–5)
Perhaps representative of the groups of San occasionally spared as

children during the border wars of the 1860s and taken into colonial
servitude, the young wagon leader stands in sharp contrast to the
painter with whom Waldo previously identifies. On this occasion,
Waldo’s reluctantly imagined kinship – one not unlike that of Marlow
and his helmsman – repels him from his “comrade,” himself, and the
exploitation of human labor brought to the Cape by European colo-
nists. As Waldo says of the “grinding, mechanical work” inflicted upon
South Africans, “You may work a man’s body so that his soul dies”
(African Farm, 223).
Far from the idealized, creative and free artisan who once identified
with the Bushman painter, Waldo’s incarnation as a soulless, exploited
laborer enslaves him to unimaginative drudgery. Loren Anthony iden-
tifies the liminal position of landless colonists like Otto, Waldo, and
Lyndall as one of intense social ambivalence: “As landless whites they
mark a point of aporia between the fixed relations of landed whites and
dispossessed blacks which Schreiner cannot question.”120 As a trans-
port rider, however, Waldo is not only landless but also soulless and
enslaved. The figure of the Bushman in Schreiner’s novel thus delimits
the trajectory of Waldo’s formative experiences within colonial southern
Africa, from idealized free artisan to abject enslaved laborer. While Waldo
recoils in horror and self-disgust from the latter position, it remains the
only prominent one through which the elusive Bushman achieves
visibility in the novel’s present. This presence, however, appears as
a state of death-in-life; according to contemporary standards for authen-
tic Bushmen culture, this young laborer – separated from family and
tradition – has undergone a kind of cultural death. The resistant San of
Bleek’s, Orpen’s, and Stow’s widely acknowledged contemporary research
find no place within Schreiner’s novel, a fictional world in which both
the idealized and the abject are held at equal distance.
The figure of the Bushman painter, unlike that of his transport wagon
leader kinsman, has attracted much attention among present-day critics,
many of whom have attempted to qualify the novel’s statement on the
extermination of these native South African peoples. Coetzee glosses
Schreiner’s narrative by explaining how “the Bushmen who lived by
nature (in caves, not in huts) have been exterminated.”121 Other critics
of African Farm have frequently reproduced in their essays the logic of
Waldo’s eulogy, by claiming that “[o]f course, the Bushman is extermi-
nated,”122 by referring to “the vanished San culture,”123 or by explaining
that “the disappearance of the San … [was] almost total in the period
and Karoo region in which she set The Story of an African Farm.”124 While
such statements sometimes offer a more historically accurate account of
the situation, the rhetoric of “disappearance” – employed for alternate
purposes by conservationists and colonialists alike – places surviving
San in an unusual temporal position: frequently relegated to the past or
represented as an eternally vanishing presence, they occupy the troubled
spaces of a present moment repeatedly denied access to the future; to
the very potential for agency. Miklós Szalay has argued that while a great
number of San were indeed killed, many of them also survived through
acculturation and integration within colonial society. “Once the San
had been incorporated into the colony,” he explains, “they acquired
the same legal status as the Khoi, and over time came to be designated
as ‘Hottentots’”125; consequently, the San “were no longer visible to the
casual observer.”126 San children, subject to the “laws of apprenticeship
of Hottentot and Bushman children,” moreover did not possess the same
degree of relative mobility afforded their parents under the so-called
“Hottentot Laws”; once within the borders of the colony, San children
were necessarily placed under the “protection or service of a farmer.”127
While enabling farmers to acquire more pliant servants, these laws, as
W. M. Makay observed in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
also effectively served “to perpetuate the bondage of their parents in
the same service”; “service,” essentially, became slavery.128 Schreiner’s
statement that “the Boers have shot them all” places sole blame for the
San’s “disappearance” on the Boers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, while drawing attention away from the destructive effects
of British colonial law and practice. As Mohamed Adhikari observes,
“Although there was not complete extermination of the Cape San, there
was in effect complete destruction of San society as a result of European
colonization.”129 In her 1890 novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland,
Schreiner would return more directly to the British exploitation of African
labor; the Bushmen, however, do not appear in this fictional world.
While the San may no longer have formed a dominant presence in
the particular region where Schreiner herself lived and wrote, they had
neither completely vanished nor confined themselves to the role of drunk-
en transport wagon leaders. Schreiner’s omission of a contemporary San
resistance to colonial authority, as well as her choice to represent the San
as victims rather than aggressors, certainly may have aided her critique
of colonial corruption and virtual lawlessness on the unstable frontier.130
Throughout the novel as well as in her later political writings, however,
Schreiner also does not consider the return of or compensation for
annexed land. In her political essays on South Africa, Schreiner envisions
a harmonious, home-rule social body in which residents of African
and European descent would live peacefully together: “These two great
blended varieties, dark and light, will form the South African nation of the
future … always interacting side by side and forming our South African
nation. … [O]ur social polity must be developed by ourselves through
the interaction of our parts with one another and in harmony with our
complex needs.”131 Aggressive indigenous resistance to European claims
to the land would probably have disrupted such visions of regional social
harmony, as well as of its idealized representatives like Waldo. While
these “varieties” of South Africans may “interact … side by side,” they
do not wholly intermix in Schreiner’s social vision.132 Reserving the same
term for the “two infants removed from each other at birth” and subject
to different climates, Schreiner offers an anthropological argument for
the colonial indigene while nevertheless distinguishing “light” from
“dark” varieties in a way that foresees the social and demographic
landscape of South Africa’s future in the following century. Although the
faded “Bushman-paintings” of Schreiner’s novel may reveal traces of a
southern African past, of a suppressed pre-colonial history, they do not
provide their creators or ancestral interpreters with access to the present
narrative moment. While these paintings may have been considered the
“title-deeds” to the land, no one is present to claim it. Waldo serves as
the sole interpreter of these paintings and symbolically enacts his current
position as the undersigned’s rightful successor.
Schreiner’s novel, similar to the rock paintings it cannot fully
represent, attempted to demystify the material world at a time when
colonial capitalism made the lives of many feel mysteriously unfamiliar.
Although Schreiner likely did not read San paintings in relation to sha-
manistic attempts at lifting the veil of materiality, she did recognize in
their iconography figures “such as no man ever has seen or ever shall”
troubling the confines of European realism (African Farm, 10). She
moreover proved a sensitive enough reader to recognize that she could
not fully understand these images, and her invocation of the grotesque
demarcates the failure of European language and evaluative categories
to contain them at the same time that it attempts to name them. Like
her contemporaries Kingsley and Howarth, Schreiner recognized the
limitations of her authority as author, observer, and self-conscious
colonist. Despite the fetishistic role accorded to these paintings in the

novel, through which they serve as both memorial to and defense
against the presence of an indigenous African resistance, they prove no
more fully alienable within its symbolic network than they did within
contemporary European markets. The creators of these rock images, of
course, met with a different fate, both within the novel and without. In
nineteenth-century southern Africa, inalienable objects unfortunately
did not assure inalienable rights. To the present day, colonial realist nar-
ratives provide an imaginative space for exploring the real difficulties of
reconciling competing human and material interests in order to uphold
these rights. Like the Xhosa sculptures of Howarth’s Katrina: A Tale of the
Karoo, the curiosities troubling Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in the Karoo,
the collection of English mementos Kingsley observes at an African
trader’s house in Nassau Bay, or the intercultural commodities that
complicate Conrad’s and Joest’s respective narratives, these opaquely
represented rock images suggest the presence of alternate histories and
stories existing just beyond the margins of the realist text and working
to attribute meaning to people and things.
Notes
1. The names “Bushmen” and “San” are both controversial. See Paul S. Landau,
“With Camera and Gun in Southern Africa: Inventing the Image of Bushmen,
c. 1880 to 1935,” Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, ed. Pippa
Skotnes (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), 141; Robert J.
Gordon and Stuart Sholto-Douglas, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a
Namibian Underclass, 2nd edn (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000); and
David Lewis-Williams, “Introduction,” Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral
Folklore of the San of Southern Africa, ed. David Lewis-Williams (Cape Town:
David Philip, 2000), 2. Throughout my discussion, I use the term “Bushmen”
when discussing Schreiner’s fictional representations and “San” when referring
to the historical peoples generally accredited with having produced rock art.
2. George W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of
the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines
of the Country, ed. George McCall Theal (London: Swan Sonnenschein and
Co., Ltd., 1905), 4–5; Stow died in 1882, the year before the publication of
Schreiner’s novel.
3. According to Alan Barnard: “Bushmen retain, through birth, marriage, and
residence, rights of special access to particular territories. The right which they
lack – crucial to ‘ownership’ and ‘property’ as more narrowly defined – is the
right of alienation. Bushmen cannot dispose of areas which they occupy or
have special access to: they cannot sell them or give them away. They can only
utilize their resources, permit others to utilize them, and, in some cases only,
deny or discourage access” (Hunters and Herders, 242).
4. Sven Ouzman, “Indigenous Images of a Colonial Exotic: Imaginings from

Bushman Southern Africa,” Before Farming 1, no. 6 (2003): 7.
5. Stories that Float, 4.
6. Fragile Heritage, 24.
7. Artist and curator Pippa Skotnes makes this point when describing the
significance of San folklore, which she suggests the popularity of rock paintings
have overshadowed. Pippa Skotnes, “‘Civilised Off the Face of the Earth’:
Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2
(2001): 299–321.
8. While Gerald Monsman has considered the rock paintings and Waldo’s
woodcarvings “imbedded self-references” to the novel, Cherry Clayton
has discussed these visual works as comparable productions of “primitive
artist[s].” See Gerald Monsman, Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Landscape and Power
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 81; and Cherry Clayton,
“Forms of Dependence and Control in Olive Schreiner’s Fiction,” Olive
Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler,
ed. Malvern van Wyk Smith (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), 25. Other crit-
ics, such as Joseph Bristow and Loren Anthony, acknowledge Waldo’s appar-
ently primitive affinity with his southern African environment; Anthony,
moreover, reads the paintings as the sign of a repressed pre-colonial history.
Anthony’s study, however, emphasizes the limitations of Schreiner’s critical
vision and her inability to reconcile herself to the colonial past she inherits.
See Joseph Bristow, “Introduction,” in Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African
Farm, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xv. See
also Loren Anthony, “Buried Narratives: Masking the Sign of History in The
Story of an African Farm,” Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 4,
no. 2 (1999): 12. Carolyn Burdett similarly considers Waldo “a kind of met-
onym for the African landscape,” as he “is portrayed as intimately related to
the land.” See Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism:
Evolution, Gender, Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 41.
9. See Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and
South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000), especially 120–42.
10. Irene E. Gorak also recognizes in Schreiner’s work an emergent postcolonial
consciousness: “Schreiner shows that colonization has imported into Africa
its own conflicts, its own anxieties, its own inner darkness. To light up this
darkness with a hand-made, hand-held torch: this, as she sees it, is the fearful
but necessary task of the newly awakening postcolonial self.” See Irene
E. Gorak, “Olive Schreiner’s Colonial Allegory: ‘The Story of an African Farm,’”
ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 23, no. 4 (1992): 71.
11. Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), 27.
12. The Cape Town Gaol, the Breakwater Prison, and Robben Island all held San
prisoners during this time.
13. The verb “disappear” repeatedly invoked in relation to the San renders the
means by which they were physically slaughtered and institutionally disen-
franchised peculiarly passive.
14. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958; New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), 87. While adopting the phrase “South Africa(n)”
prior to the foundation of the Union in 1910 may now be considered anach-
ronistic, it was frequently used in the nineteenth century both as a general
geographic marker (like “West Africa”) and as the signal for an emerging
national identity. Despite the difficulties involved in disentangling place
from identity, I try to use the phrase “southern Africa(n)” in contexts empha-
sizing the former.
15. On the former, see Robert A. Nye, “The Medical Origins of Sexual Fetishism,”
Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 13–30.
16. “Fetishism,” 156.
17. Sigmund Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense,” 1938, trans.
James Strachey, Standard Edition 23, 277.
18. “Fetishism,” 156. Logan illuminates analogous forms of ambivalence in
“the structure of fetishism in Victorian writing” well before Freud. Victorian
Fetishism, 14.
19. In returning to the section title that appeared in the 2002 rather than 2004
version of this chapter and that alluded to the novel as a kind of modern
Künstlerroman in contradistinction to Lyndall’s “feminist Bildungsroman,”
I should note the 2007 essay by Jed Esty, who provides the most extensive
consideration extant of Schreiner’s novel in the more expansive context
of the Bildungsroman. Esty, in particular, reads the novel as a case history
revealing the genre’s “shift in register” during the period of high imperial-
ism and an emerging global capitalism “where the thematics of uneven
development attach increasingly to metropole–colony relations rather than
solely to national rural–urban tension” and become “more conspicuous …
in the modernist fiction of unseasonable youth.” The result, he argues, is
a critique of the genre’s structural and ideological investment – however
vexed – in a “progressive temporality” that moreover figures in the stunted
development of Schreiner’s protagonists. See Joshua Esty, “The Colonial
Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe,”
Victorian Studies 49, no. 3 (2007): 415, 426. For further reference to the novel
as a feminist Bildungsroman, see also Mark Sanders, “Towards a Genealogy
of Intellectual Life: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm,” Novel 43,
no. 1 (2000): 77–97 as well as Complicities, 23–40.
20. Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (New York: Schocken Books, 1980),
97.
21. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (1977; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 199.
22. “Buried Narratives,” 9.
23. In a letter to Henry Norman, Schreiner reflects on Lyndall’s apparent abil-
ity to overshadow her male counterpart: “I was glad especially that you felt
interested in Waldo, because few people care for him so much as for Lyndall,
and I am fond of him.” See Olive Schreiner, Letter to Henry Norman, 22 May
1884, Olive Schreiner Letters. Volume 1: 1871–1899, ed. Richard Rive (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 41. Among her contemporary readers who
did care for him, however, were her future husband, the farmer and later
anti-war activist Samuel Cronwright, and her militant, acquisitive friend-
turned-nemesis Cecil Rhodes. As she reveals in an 1892 letter to her publisher
T. Fisher Unwin, Schreiner took her character Waldo seriously and hoped his
story would particularly speak to working class male readers: “I insisted on An
African Farm being published at 1/- because the book was published by me for
working men. I wanted to feel sure boys like Waldo could buy a copy, and feel
they were not alone. I have again … allowed it to be printed at 3/6 as I felt sure
most poor lads would have it within reach.” See Olive Schreiner, The Letters
of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920, ed. Samuel C. Cronwright-Schreiner (London:
T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1924), 209. As the first edition of a single volume novel
generally cost nearly twice as much, Schreiner often struggled with her pub-
lishers to ensure that the work would reach its intended audience.
24. Doris Lessing, “Introduction,” The Story of an African Farm (New York:
Schocken Books, 1976), 7, 9.
25. “Introduction,” African Farm, xvi. Embedded quotation from African Farm,
74. How one chooses to interpret the word “nothing” guides whether we
judge Waldo’s character as an ineffectual failure or as a kind of Sisyphean
hero who, read through Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, would later be
embraced by Existentialists like Albert Camus.
26. Complicities, 25, 28.
27. “Colonial Bildungsroman,” 418, 419, 414, 422.
28. “Colonial Bildungsroman,” 419, 426.
29. Olive Schreiner, Letter to Havelock Ellis, 18 July 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 47.
Roslynn D. Haynes discusses this same passage in relation to Schreiner’s
Romantic exploration of childhood. See Roslynn Doris Haynes, “Elements
of Romanticism in The Story of an African Farm,” English Literature in
Transition 1880–1920 24, no. 2 (1981): 64.
30. Letter to Havelock Ellis, 18 July 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 47.
31. The stranger’s words to the child also resonate with those of Wordsworth:
“Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest, / Which we are
toiling all our lives to find.” See William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Poems in Two Volumes,
vol. 2 (1807): 153.
32. J. M. Coetzee, “Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa,” English in Africa
13, no. 2 (1986): 4.
33. “Farm Novel,” 4.
34. Waldo’s examination of the ice-plant exemplifies for Haynes how “[t]he
novel is studded with … precise [‘almost scientific’] descriptions, nearly
always of minute details, … [which] reflects the dual vision of the Romantic
mystics who saw ‘a World in a grain of sand. / And a Heaven in a wild
flower’” (“Elements of Romanticism,” 64).
35. As Showalter has observed, the novel’s author, Ralph, its protagonist,
Waldo, and its secondary character, Em, form Schreiner’s anagrammatic,
if at times ironic, tribute to Emerson (Literature of their Own, 199). As her
husband noted, Olive Schreiner recited lines from Emerson’s Essays “up to
the day of her death.” Cited in Karel Schoeman, Olive Schreiner: A Woman
in South Africa 1855–1881 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers,
1991), 285. Following Emerson’s London Lectures of 1847, the American
essayist’s works circulated widely among British readers and appealed to
several generations of Victorian Skeptics. Schreiner’s mother and earliest
intellectual supporter, Rebecca, read his essays in Healdtown, Cape Colony
in the 1860s; Olive Schreiner read his essays in earnest a decade later
(Woman in South Africa, 144).
36. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” 1836, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte
(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 14, 9.
37. “Nature,” 10.
38. In a later essay from 1900, Schreiner compares the earlier movement toward
independence in the United States with what seemed to her the inevitable
development of South Africa as an independent nation. See Olive Schreiner,
“The South African Nation,” Thoughts on South Africa (London: T. Fisher
Unwin, 1923), 367–83.
40. Stephen Clingman, “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the
1980s,” Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed.
Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), 41.
41. See Mary Somerville, Physical Geography (London: John Murray, 1848).
42. Olive Schreiner, letter to Havelock Ellis, 28 March 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 36.
44. On the representation of progressive time, see especially Patricia Murphy,
“Timely Interruptions: Unsettling Gender through Temporality in The Story
of an African Farm,” Style 32, no. 1 (1998): 80–101; Progress of Feminism; and
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). This scene, as critics have suggested, also
references William Paley’s famous watchmaker analogy used to argue for the
existence of God in his 1802 Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and
Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature.
46. Progress of Feminism, 39.
47. Waldo’s reading of the geological record as a type of historical template
moreover corresponds with Schreiner’s later comparison between geological
and social stratification in South Africa: “We are not a collection of small,
and, though closely contiguous, yet distinct peoples; we are a more or less
homogeneous blend of heterogeneous social particles in different stages of
development and of cohesion with one another, underlying and overlaying
each other like the varying strata of confused geological formations.” In
Schreiner’s analogy, however, the Bushmen, with their “primitive domestic
institutions,” and “the nineteenth-century Englishman fresh from Oxford,
with the latest views on social and political development,” coexist with one
another yet remain at a distance in “different stages of development.” See
Olive Schreiner, “South Africa: Its Natural Features, Its Diverse Peoples, Its
Political Status: The Problem,” 1891, Thoughts on South Africa, 51. According
to Schreiner, “In South Africa the nineteenth century is brought face to face
with a prehistoric world” (“South Africa,” 64).
48. Burdett similarly argues that the paintings signify an earlier stage in South
Africa’s history of colonization, “tell[ing] of Afrikaner settlerdom and the
dispossession of the San in the conflict for land and cattle,” whereas the
mention of diamonds and plans “hint at what is to come in the economically-
driven transformation of South Africa into an industrialized mining economy.”
See Progress of Feminism, 42. Gorak moreover observes: “The children in African
Farm anticipate their own future displacement in a painted cave that mirrors
drastic earlier disturbances of the local San” (“Colonial Allegory,” 63).
50. This passage closely resembles Schreiner’s account of the karoo in her 1891
essay “South Africa,” 41.
51. Time and the Other, 15, 14.
53. Whereas Physical Time serves as a “parameter of cultural process” and lends
itself to the measurement of movement along a linear, temporal scale (as in
evolutionary reconstruction), Typological Time is perceived more as a static
“quality of states” (preliterate versus literate, for example) or as the distance
between these states (Time and the Other, 22, 23).
54. Schreiner’s later discussion of San rock paintings in her essay “The Problem of
Slavery” notably differs from the more empathetic view that Waldo here exhib-
its. See Schreiner, “The Problem of Slavery,” Thoughts on South Africa, 106–47.
55. Schreiner’s list of readings prior to completing African Farm included the
works of John Ruskin. See Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination
of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1989), 20.
56. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, in The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition,
vol. 11, eds Edward Tyar Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George
Allen, 1904), 169.
57. Stones of Venice, 11: 171, 181.
58. Ruskin’s discussion of alienation corresponds with his critique of capitalism,
the “division of labor,” and the hierarchy of classes within the labor force.
“It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided,” he suggests, “but the
men: – Divided into mere segments of men” (Stones of Venice, 10: 196).
59. Stones of Venice, 10: 203.
62. Schreiner’s later friendship with Eleanor Marx, as well as her courting by
British socialists and subsequent disenchantment with them, is well known.
Even Lyndall’s narrative of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, a “Representative
M[a]n” admired in the late nineteenth century, takes the form of a working
class success story. Within the novel’s harshly realist frame, however, such
a romanticized figure can only exist as a parodic and sinister inversion of
“the power of intellect without conscience.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Napoleon, or, the Man of the World,” Representative Men (1850; Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 257; as well as Olive Schreiner’s Fiction, 63, and
Progress of Feminism, 20.
63. “The South African Nation,” 376.
64. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, “A Brief Account of Bushman Folk-lore
and Other Texts. Second Report Concerning Bushman Researches, Presented
to Both Houses of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope, by Command
of His Excellency the Governor” (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, London: Trübner
and Co. and Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1875), 2.
65. Monsman observes how Schreiner’s casting of the South African writer
as painter further strengthens her connection with the Bushmen. Gerald
Monsman, “Olive Schreiner’s Allegorical Vision,” Victorian Review 18, no. 2
(1992): 54.
66. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 185.
67. On the Grotesque, 6.

69. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 61.
70. On the Grotesque, 15, 17. Similarly, Kayser associates the grotesque with his-
torical periods in which “the belief of the preceding ages in a perfect and
protective natural order ceased to exist” (Grotesque in Art, 188).
71. Harpham draws on the work of T. S. Kuhn, specifically The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
73. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1970), 31–2.
74. English Novel, 33.
76. While caricatures have been associated with the grotesque since at least
the eighteenth century, Kayser additionally lists “the loss of identity,”
“destruction of personality,” and lack of “emotional perspective” among its
characteristics (Grotesque in Art, 185, 186).
77. Progress of Feminism, 23. Schreiner’s dung beetle is also likely a reference to
the sacred scarab (Scarabaeus sacer), valued in ancient Egypt as a symbol of
transformation, renewal, or the coming into being. This scene, in a sense, is
hence one of creative destruction, as it necessarily ushers in a new stage of
Waldo’s spiritual development.
78. Grotesque in Art, 184, 185.
79. “Elements of Romanticism,” 75; Olive Schreiner, Letter to Havelock Ellis,
8 April 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 37. As Burdett elaborates, “Spencer introduced
Schreiner to a scientific naturalism which was sympathetic to, and compatible
with, her romanticism” and which manifests itself through Waldo’s sense of
an “evolutionary connectedness” (Progress of Feminism, 28, 27).
80. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), 207.
81. Progress of Feminism, 79.
82. “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 226.
83. Olive Schreiner, Letter to Havelock Ellis, 12 July 1884, Letters, Volume 1, 92.
84. Mark Sanders, “Complicities: On the Intellectual,” dissertation, Columbia,
1998, 316.
85. The central placement of this allegory in the novel, observes Monsman,
“comment[s] in her novel on the significance of her novel.” Moreover, the
hunter, as “quester after the beau ideal, … doubles Waldo, Schreiner, and,
most importantly for Schreiner’s effort to find an indigenous voice, the
Bushman as Hunter” (“Allegorical Vision,” 53).
86. The allegory’s resistance to synecdoche nevertheless does contrast with
another of the stranger’s analogies used to describe the “truth” suggested by
Waldo’s sculpture, in which he contrasts “the whole story” perceivable in
a human finger with the mute fragment represented by a “Mumboo-jumbow
idol” (African Farm, 133). The comparison with the door “open[ing] into an
infinite hall” arguably suggests another. Considered together, these analo-
gies ultimately render the meaning of Waldo’s carving indeterminate and
ambivalent.
87. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1891), 56–7.

88. African Farm, 80.
89. Janette Deacon, “The /Xam Informants,” Voices from the Past: /Xam
Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, eds Janette Deacon and Thomas
A. Dowson (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 13–14.
90. “/Xam Informants,” 14.
91. Louis Anthing, Letter, 1 April 1862, reprinted in “/Xam Informants,” 14.
92. Notice dated 13 May 1869 and quoted in Janette Deacon, “Archaeology of
the Flat and Grass Bushmen,” Voices from the Past, 250.
93. See Joseph Millerd Orpen, “A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti
Bushmen,” Cape Monthly Magazine N.S. 9 (1874): 1–10.
94. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, “Remarks on Orpen’s Mythology of the
Maluti Bushmen,” Cape Monthly Magazine N.S. 9 (1874): 13.
95. “Brief Account,” 2.
96. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek and Lucy Catherine Lloyd, Specimens of
Bushman Folk-lore (London: George Allen and Co., Ltd., 1911).
99. Martin Hall, “The Proximity of Dr. Bleek’s Bushman,” Miscast, 143–59.
100. Stories that Float from Afar, 9.
101. Stories that Float from Afar, 9.
102. See Pippa Skotnes, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the
San (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 12.
103. Orpen’s brother, Conolly, similarly made an 1876 copy of a group of “reverse
gaze” images found north of Little Caledon River that reveal San responses
to Europeans. See “Indigenous Images,” 15, 12. Comparable images could
also be seen just outside Schreiner’s childhood home of Wittenbergen. See
Unconquerble Spirit, 28–9. I am grateful to Dr Sven Ouzman for bringing the
latter to my attention.
108. Stories that Float, 8.
109. George W. Stow, “The Bushmen,” Athenaeum (4 August 1877): 151–2 and
“The Bushmen Rock Paintings,” Academy 13 (1878): 463; Mark Hutchinson,
“On a collection of facsimile Bushman paintings,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 12 (1882): 464–5; Adolf
Hübner, “Eingrabungen von Thiergestalten in Schiefer auf ‘gestoppte
Fontein’, Farm von van Zyl bei Hartebeest fontein in Trans Vaal,” Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie 2–3 (1871): 51–3; Gustave Fritsch, “Buschmannzeichnungen
im Damaralande, Südafrika,” Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für
Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 10
(1878): 15–21; Theophilus Hahn, “Felszeichnungen der Buschmänner,”
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 11 (1879): 307–8.
110. “Writing,” 118.
111. While the oldest known southern African rock paintings are estimated at
27,000 years of age, many were produced through the nineteenth century and
possibly even during the early years of the twentieth. See Fragile Heritage, 5.
112. Roger Fry, “Bushman Paintings,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 16
(1910): 333–8.
113. Helen Tongue, Bushman Paintings copied by M. Helen Tongue, intro. Henry
Balfour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909).
114. “Bushman Paintings,” 337, 338.
115. “Bushman Paintings,” 337.
116. “Bushman Paintings,” 338, 337.
117. Roger Fry, “Negro Sculpture,” 1920, Vision and Design (New York: Meridian-
World Publishing Co., 1956), 98–103. As Torgovnick has noted, what
African artists ostensibly lacked were “the Frys of this world” (Gone
Primitive, 94).
118. See Hübner, “Eingrabungen von Thiergestatten”; Rev. C. G. Büttner, “Bericht
über Buschman Malereien in der Nähe von !Ameib Damaraland,” Verhandlungen
der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift
für Ethnologie 10 (1878): 15; and Max Bartels, “Copien von Felszeichnungen
der Buschmänner,” Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie,
Ethnologie und Urgeschichte in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 24 (1892): 26–7.
119. “With Camera and Gun,” 130.
122. Gerald Monsman, “Olive Schreiner: Literature and the Politics of Power,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, no. 4 (1988): 593.
123. Christopher Heywood, “Olive Schreiner and Literary Tradition,” in Olive
Schreiner and After, 59.
124. Complicities, 217, 3n.
125. Miklós Szalay, The San and the Colonization of the Cape 1770–1879: Conflict,
Incorporation, Acculturation (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1995), 97.
126. San and Colonization, 109.
127. San and Colonization, 98.
128. W. M. Makay, Commissioner of Inquiry, 7 May 1824, 91. Cited in San and
Colonization, 98.
129. Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The
Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Cape Town: University of Cape Town
Press, 2010), 87.
130. One of the primary reforms for which Louis Anthing unsuccessfully
fought included the establishment of magistrate offices near the most
volatile contact zones along the fluctuating frontier, which would ideally
provide both Africans and Europeans with local venues at which they could
file complaints. Schreiner’s portrayal of the herdsman’s wife, banished from
the colonial settlement and presumably waiting until nightfall to return,
does represent a form of African (likely Xhosa) resistance on the farm.
131. “The South African Nation,” 370.
132. Schreiner openly discusses her views of racial difference, in which she
discourages interracial reproduction, in her 1901 essay “The Value of
Human Varieties,” Thoughts on South Africa, 386.
Coda
The legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism continues to impact

object relations and museum culture of the present, which, in turn,
provide lessons to readers of nineteenth-century British realism and its
colonial archive. One institution in particular, Cape Town’s District Six
Museum, pursues the reconstruction of history as an ongoing, com-
munal project open to public collaboration. Featuring multi-media
displays, personal and public records, audio recorded testimonies,
on-site excavations, and tours within the museum as well as without,
this museum places its objects in the service of the ongoing struggle to
re-member and reclaim the last multi-racial neighborhood in Cape Town
to undergo forced removal and relocation, in 1968, after over a century
of organized removals. While the lands on which this community once
thrived became the object of public dispute and government appropria-
tion, many of the more mundane objects that sustained the daily lives
of its former residents remained – hidden beneath the bulldozed rubble
of the buildings that housed them. The District Six Museum highlights
its archaeological project of returning to this site as the material archive
of an ever-present history as well as the materialization of a collec-
tive trauma. This project is perhaps most directly exhibited in a room
displaying some of the quotidian yet personal objects found scattered
among the earth, observable directly beneath the observer’s feet through
a transparent floor. If, as Emile Durkheim suggested, history functions
like an unconscious,1 then the museum encourages its viewers to probe
this unconscious by engaging with its material archive in an attempt
to seek reconciliation with a traumatic past that continues to shape
the present. Among the museum’s permanent installations, Rod’s Room
(Figure 11), created in collaboration with local artist Roderick Sauls,
features one of the most powerfully resonant collections of objects in
217
Figure 11 Rod’s Room, Roderick Sauls, District Six Museum, Cape Town,
South Africa. Photograph by Paul Grendon
the museum that extends its archaeological inquiry from the last days
of District Six back to the centuries preceding Apartheid while speaking
to the colonial archive from which it additionally draws.
At once a personalized space rendering in material form the interiority
of a former District Six resident as well as a space that has been hast-
ily plastered over and imprinted with text reproducing verbal records
of racial discrimination under colonialism and then Apartheid, Rod’s
Room complicates distinctions between interior and exterior, personal
and public; depth and surface, subjects and objects. Unlike the display
titled Nomvuyo’s Room, as visitors to the museum have frequently noted,
this exhibit does not reconstruct a domestic interior that metonymi-
cally illustrates life in District Six prior to removal; it is, rather, the
space of memory and of loss. Amidst recognizable signs of habitation,
from partially open drawers to the spines of books set back in shelves
to pots and other household items jutting out from its surfaces, the
room’s glaring, white-washed walls reveal how interior spaces, whether
of the home or of the self, could be suffused with public discourse:
“turn white or disappear”; better yet, just disappear.2 As Sauls explains,
“The objective of the exhibit is to restore my lost identity, my African
heritage, my culture and memories.”3 This identity is both invoked and
Coda 219
complicated by a related heritage alluded to through the range of texts

incorporated in the exhibit, including the history of slavery, relocation,
and forced labor; of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial typologies
as well as the classificatory terms and written documents that legislated
them; and of the discriminatory use of mundane objects, from books to
“whites only” benches, all of which formed part of what Fanon termed
the “historico-racial schema”4 circumscribing and objectifying individu-
als under colonialism and Apartheid.
The whited walls of Rod’s Room, inspiring comparisons ranging from
buried civilizations to prison cells,5 also strikingly resemble pages of
text, with partially visible objects pressing through and rupturing its
imprinted surfaces. This text, however, is white, not black: white text
etched into white walls, simulating the simultaneous effect of erasure
as well as enunciation. Words, in the public and private spaces of
reading, have the power to name, to determine, or to realize, but also
to objectify, to negate, or to erase. “COLOUREDS ONLY,” “WHITES
ONLY,” “BLANKES ALLEENLIK”6: public words line the interior of this
space, covering over and distorting the quotidian objects with which
one engages while attempting to compose one’s sense of “self as a body
in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.”7 The white writing
on white walls, however, also threatens to disappear, simultaneously
revealing the inherent instability of polarizing, racist discourse while
augmenting the work’s complexity and ambivalence. The room as text
is moreover mirrored in the text of the English book lying atop a folded
quilt on the floor. Resembling a Bible, whether perceived as a public
symbol of authority or as a personally meaningful text in which to find
oneself, this book, according to Annie Coombes, “turns out to be an
embroidered lexicon of moral and Christian values and even virtues
but ends in a litany of discrimination and prejudice.”8 The walls of
this space, like the pages of the colonial realist text, nevertheless have
the capacity to preserve objects, even if only in a largely distorted and
submerged form. The audio accompaniment to the exhibit – Rod’s
voice – offers a counter narrative to the room’s printed text, “almost as
if audible memory is seeping out of the walls” and the objects within
them.9 Rod’s voice – that sign of immediacy and authenticity rooted
within recorded oral testimony nevertheless refracted by time and
complicated by memory – is precisely what we cannot recover from
the text of colonial realism, especially in works considered outside of
an extended colonial archive. Colonial realist narratives increasingly
acknowledged similar representational limits while beginning to ques-
tion the authority of writing itself.
Beginning with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and concluding with

Carey-Hobson’s The Farm in the Karoo and Schreiner’s The Story of an
African Farm, this inquiry highlights a general movement, by no means
strictly linear or developmental, toward an increasing skepticism by the
end of the century regarding the ability to know and to control others
by rendering their objects transparent and exchangeable, whether as
commodities, specimens, or realist signs. Carey-Hobson’s 1883 novel,
through its emphasis on preserving the natural and cultural history
of Cape Colony as a collection of representative specimens of both
scientific and economic interest rather than singular curiosities, attempts
to elucidate the “facts” it imaginatively reproduces, whereas Conrad’s
later novella puzzles over certain objects as enigmas and exposes the
fallibility of Victorian ethnography. Where imaginative attempts at
comprehension and “possession by metonymy”10 might inevitably fail,
however, colonialism’s more literal strategy of possession by primitive
accumulation would prove all too brutally realizable during this period.
I have nevertheless been suggesting throughout this book a more than
homologous relationship between these two strategies of possession
or acquisition to the extent that imaginative works may draw on non-
fictional representational strategies in authorizing their realism while
simultaneously helping to lay the ideological groundwork for political
action, whether colonialist, anti-colonial, or postcolonial. What these
selected narratives arguably witness, therefore, is the emergence of an
increasingly anti-colonial self-consciousness in colonial realist narratives
that register an often oblique and opaquely recorded awareness of
African resistance to the especially violent history of imperial expansion
in the final decades of the century.
Although The Farm in the Karoo and The Story of an African Farm
could not seem more different in their approaches to an emergent
South African realism – one highly descriptive, the other formally
experimental – these two novels published during the same year
exhibit comparable investment in Victorian techniques of anthro-
pological observation to the extent that they produce strikingly
similar portraits of Africans and their objects. The two novels’ respec-
tive chapters featuring San rock art, in particular, stage comparable
moments of colonial ekphrasis written for a largely British metro-
politan audience by deploying familiar, schematically ethnographic
techniques of translating into words images like those their authors
had observed at first hand. Accounts of location, condition, iconog-
raphy, materials, and presumed process dominate nineteenth-century
anthropological and archaeological writing on these images as evidence
Coda 221
of their authenticity, and in both instances this interpretive schema

circumscribes their representations as realist objects. In the context
of Carey-Hobson’s larger project of rendering Cape Colony visible,
whole, and fertile for colonization, these images, despite their status
as troublingly non-productive curiosities, conform to colonial systems
of classification. Schreiner’s novel, begins to suggest the limitations
of these systems, while nevertheless rendering the images transparent
enough in order to validate their incorporation within a narrative of
white South African history. Whereas San rock images appear largely
alienable within Carey-Hobson’s descriptive apparatus, a growing
sense of their inalienability in Schreiner’s novel is precisely that which
renders them ideal symbols of an emerging postcolonial South African
identity resistant to British colonialism. Waldo, the character most
directly aligned with the South African colonists’ double vision as both
colonizer and colonized, at once alienating and alienated, straddles
this dualism through strategies of disavowal and displacement. Both
novels, to the extent that they cannot wholly control “the facts [that]
creep in upon” them, nevertheless register the presence of competing
narratives outside of the realist text (African Farm, xi).
Anna Howarth’s novels of the following decade address the limits of
realism more directly by incorporating formally as well as conceptually
African perspectives and values in tension with colonial capitalism’s
ethics of acquisition, production, and reproduction. These tensions
register in Jan, an Afrikander through the conflicting interpretations of
the photograph, highlighting the opacity of an object usually valued
for its transparency and for serving as a model for both ethnographic
and realist writing, as well as through a narrative doubled by conflict-
ing genres and ways of reading. Elucidating the photograph in narrative
form reveals how the image is not fully legible and alienable within
any one system of value and meaning. The photograph, viewed from
Jan’s perspective, opens up onto a realist narrative of colonial race rela-
tions, revealing Jan’s conflicted identifications and desires as well as his
contrary ethics of generosity and reciprocity. Jan, the novel suggests,
experiences this sense of doubling himself, as a half-British, half-Xhosa
colonist who must learn to navigate both British and African systems of
value and who, perhaps like Blyden, feels “alienated from himself” by
feeling alienated from as well as objectified by both societies.11 Viewed
from Reginald’s perspective, the photograph triggers all of the anxiety,
self-doubt, and horror associated with gothic narratives by conjuring
the return and illumination of an all but forgotten and repressed fam-
ily history. Howarth’s Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo, written the following
year, gestures more obliquely toward a perspective outside of colonial

capitalism and its literary analog in realist narrative by indirectly
attributing a kind of agency to an otherwise mundane sculpture that
ultimately doubles the novel’s dominant narrative and suggests alter-
nate causalities at work in driving the plot forward. The “real likeness”
of Charlie that the sculpture presents may indeed point to constructions
of reality and of likeness outside of realist mimesis while suggesting
without ever fully disclosing a more intimate and permeable relation-
ship between referent and representation, person and thing, that resists
Richard Stanton’s attempts at severing this relationship through the
object’s commoditization and dismemberment (Katrina, 88).
Kingsley’s major writings, roughly contemporary with those of
Howarth, explore the possibilities of such comparatively more
permeable relationships and their general illegibility within European
evaluative systems through her study of West African fetishism. More
than Howarth, Kingsley attempts to illuminate alternate systems of
meaning and value for her European readers in order to improve
intercultural understanding between Europe and West Africa. Objects
in Kingsley’s narrative are therefore presumed to be knowable, given
sufficiently conditioned observation and an open mind, and yet
the ethnographic categories and writing practices Kingsley employs,
despite all her self-consciousness of their limitations, occasionally
foreclose potential meanings. Kingsley’s pursuit of “the real African”
encourages her to uphold the disciplinary emphasis on authentic-
ity, which renders more hybrid cultural forms troublingly opaque.
While her narrative invites us to imagine ourselves paying a visit to
the local medicine man in search of a more suitable protective charm,
the imports she observes in the homes of Anglicized Africans living
nearer the coast inspire no comparably illuminating narratives. While
she recognizes the inalienability of authentic objects that must be
understood in their cultural contexts, she fails to recognize the sugges-
tiveness of imports not fully alienable from their European contexts as
they are incorporated into contemporary African societies. Objects, as
revealed in both Kingsley’s writing as well as that of her contemporary
Edward Blyden, serve as a battleground between Victorians and
Africans attempting to represent traditional as well as emergent
African subjectivities. Rather than embracing Kingsley’s resistant
yet comparatively static image of West Africa’s future, Anglophone
Africans like Blyden resisted the position of “an object in the midst of
other objects” by seeking for West Africans the mutual recognition and
regard due Europe’s contemporaries.12
Coda 223
Conrad’s Marlow represents an ethnographic observer analogous to

Kingsley, while expanding her passing reflection on the interesting
“psychological study” a “carefully kept journal of a white man” living
entirely “among natives” would afford (Travels, 101). While we have
very limited direct access to Kurtz’s writings, Marlow’s narrative does
offer its own case study of the omissions, denials, and justifications for
upholding the lie of colonialism in Europe.13 Illuminating as Marlow’s
narrative may be in unmasking such general colonial pretences as intro-
ducing “order” and “the doctrine of the nobility of labour” to western
and Central Africa (Travels, 671), this storyteller’s desire for “straightfor-
ward facts” leaves him confounded in the presence of enigmatic details
that trouble his yarn (Heart of Darkness, 17). Like Kingsley’s general
disregard for ostensibly inauthentic African adoptions of European
imports, Marlow’s narrative glosses over yet repeatedly notices the
import items collected by Africans. Seemingly transparent as categori-
cal examples of ornamentation or clothing, they in many ways prove
as opaque for Marlow as the non-commoditized, mysterious thread of
worsted. He draws no closer to understanding, much less mastering, the
African laborer who wears this thread than he does the African woman
adorned by brass wire and glass beads. That, for Conrad, is perhaps part
of the point, as his fictional realist narrative no more fully circumscribes
Africa and Africans than King Leopold’s, or, for that matter, Queen
Victoria’s, foreign authority.
As Johannes Fabian suggested over a quarter century ago, recognizing
our interlocutors as equal participants in a conversation involves
accepting each other’s histories as part of our own.14 Like the histories
excavated, reconstructed, and displayed at the District Six Museum, such
a conversation might best be approached as a communal project placing
people in dialogue with each other across space and time through
the objects that draw us together and set us apart. Colonial realist
narratives, for all of their potential shortcomings, continue to form part
of this conversation. Like their metropolitan contemporaries, colonial
realists worked to the best of their abilities to impose a meaningful
order, aesthetic and ethical as well as social and political, onto the
world they observed. Their narratives offer indirect testimony to the
representational difficulties these authors confronted as well as to some
of the material histories they sought to record and construe. Writing a
scholarly monograph about these narratives hardly seems like part of this
communal project, regardless of the diversity of perspectives consulted. It
is nevertheless also my hope that such books, like other quotidian objects,
enable the conversation to continue, even across years of silence.
Notes
1. According to Durkheim: “We can ... succeed in discovering [the ‘unconscious’
‘forces (that) govern us’] only by reconstructing our personal history and
the history of our family. In the same way, … only history can penetrate
under the surface of our present educational system.” Emile Durkheim, “The
evolution and role of secondary education in France,” 1906, Education and
Sociology, trans. Sherwood D. Fox (New York: Free Press, 1956), 152.
3. Artist’s statement appended as wall label, reprinted in Annie E. Coombes,
History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic
South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 138.
5. See, for example, History After Apartheid, 138.
6. Roderick Sauls, Rod’s Room, District Six Museum, Cape Town, South Africa.
8. History After Apartheid, 139.
9. “Rod’s Room,” International Coalition of Sites of Consciousness, 10 April 2011,
http://www.sitesofconscience.org.
10. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009), 73.
13. While Marlow lies to Kurtz’s Intended as well as fictional Belgian readership,
he of course offers fuller disclosure to his own fictional circle of listeners as
well as to Conrad’s circle of readers. By questioning the rhetorical efficacy
of metaphor, moreover, Conrad discloses a lie similar to those famously
identified by his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche: “What, then, is truth?
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in
short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed,
and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which
one has forgotten that this is what they are. … to be truthful means using
the customary metaphors – in moral terms: the obligation to lie according
to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.” From “On
Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 1873, The Portable Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 46–7.
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italics denote an illustration.
Achebe, Chinua 46, 47, 48, 52 and Conrad 60, 63–5

Adhikari, Mohamed 206 and fetishism 44, 52–3
“Afrikander,” term of 162 and Kingsley 18, 77–9, 101, 102,
Albany Museum, Grahamstown 125, 105, 114, 222
126, 133, 139 in Story of an African Farm, The 21,
alienable/alienability/alienation 3, 177, 205
5–6, 8, 12, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 76, authority/authorization 2, 10, 11,
94, 107–9, 112, 150, 153, 186, 14–16, 18–20, 22, 23, 29, 31–5,
208, 221, 222 38–41, 44, 45, 60–5, 76, 97–9,
and realism 3, 4, 5, 23 101, 102, 112, 124, 130, 156, 198,
see also inalienability 207, 219
allegory 195
and de Man 195 Baines, Thomas
in The Story of an African Kaffers having made their fortunes
Farm 181–2, 194–6 leaving the colony (1848) 147
Anatsui, El 62, 63 Bartels, Max 204
Aniakor, Chike C. 62–3 Barthes, Roland 10, 43, 155
Anthing, Louis 198 Bastian, Adolf 31, 33, 35, 36, 41,
Anthony, Loren 180, 184, 205 77, 80
Anthropological Institute 38, 39, Bataille, Georges 147–8, 162
40, 203 Beche, Henry de la
anthropology/anthropologists 2, 5, Awful Changes 86, 86
7, 13, 16, 22, 33, 35, 49 Beersheba commando scene 190, 199
and facts 13, 15, 16, 33, 34, 40–4, Benjamin, Walter 15, 53, 64
52, 75, 78–80, 105–6 Bhabha, Homi 1, 9–10, 15, 16, 29,
guides 15, 16, 38–44, 75, 105, 135 31, 32, 44, 45, 46, 75, 78–9, 99,
professionalization of 16, 35–6, 102, 106, 109, 110, 334
39, 92 Bleek, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel
and racial typecasting 76, 105–6 149, 199, 200–1, 202
and time 40, 42, 43, 75–6, 78–9, Blyden, Edward Wilmot 17, 18,
106, 107 74–6, 92, 104–14, 123, 124, 222
Apartheid 19, 218 adoption of first-person plural 107
Appadurai, Arjun 89 and African laborers 108
archaeology/archaeologist 13, 14, African Life and Customs 18, 104,
21, 141, 175, 198, 200, 217, 218, 105, 107, 108–9
220 African Society and Miss Mary
authenticity/authentication 1, 3, 5, Kingsley, The 104, 105,
6, 14, 15, 16, 34, 35, 40–4, 52–3, and authenticity 105, 112–14
200, 219, 220, 222 and “black man’s burden” 18
and autonomy 65, 105 Black Spokesman 105, 106, 107,
and Blyden 105, 112–14 111, 114
237
238 Index
Blyden, Edward Wilmot – continued Carey-Hobson, Mary Ann 19–20,

Christianity, Islam, and the Negro 124–45, 166, 177, 221
Race 105, 111, 112 At Home in the Transvaal 139–40
and facts 18, 104–5 The Farm in the Karoo see Farm in the
and fetishism 18, 75, 107, 112, Karoo, The
113 Carey-Hobson, William 142
and Kingsley 18, 103–8, 112, 113 cassava 58
and Liberian project 112–13 charms 12, 13, 31, 45, 52, 54, 56,
“The Liberian Scholar” 96, 104 59, 61, 88, 165
and race prejudice 74–7, 98, 105, Chrisman, Laura 177
109, 110, 111–12 Ciolkowski, Laura 97
reception of 113–14 Clifford, James 38–9, 52
and time 105, 106–7 Clingman, Stephen 184
“A Vindication of the African cloth, European 12, 16, 45, 48, 50–2,
Race” 105 60–1
Boehmer, Elleke 11 African 50, 59
brass 16, 45, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 59, Coetzee, J. M. 141, 182, 183, 187,
60, 223 205–6
bricoleur 37 Cole, Herbert M. 62–3
Bristow, Joseph 181 colonial discourse 9–10, 15, 20, 38,
British Association for the 44, 45, 100
Advancement of Science colonial indigene 21, 178, 179, 180,
(BAAS) 38, 39 190, 207
British Museum 127 commodity/commoditization 2–4, 6,
Sainsbury African Galleries 62 8, 12, 14, 16, 17, 50, 53, 54, 92–4,
Broca, Pierre Paul 105 96, 103, 130, 139, 147, 166, 220,
Brosses, Charles de 49 222, 223
Brown, Bill 6, 7, 11, 12, 83, 102, commodity fetishism 8–9, 16–17,
192 18, 56, 59, 89, 129
Buckland, Francis T. 86 Conrad, Joseph 14, 45–61, 99, 123
Bunyan, John 195 Heart of Darkness see Heart of
Burdett, Carolyn 186, 194, 195 Darkness
Bushman Paintings 203 and authenticity 60, 63–5
Bushmen see San Coombes, Annie 219
Büttner, C. G. 204 Crais, Clifton 3, 130, 142, 143, 147,
Buzard, James 132 149
Crummell, Alexander 113
Caledon Code (1809) 142 curiosities/curiosity 1, 56, 74, 76, 81,
Cape of Good Hope Association for 101, 102, 103, 114, 165, 178, 180,
Exploring Central Africa 127 203, 220
Cape Monthly Magazine 199 in The Farm in the Karoo 20, 125,
Cape Slave Code (1754) 144 127, 130, 134–6, 138, 140, 141,
Cape Town 144, 145, 165, 208, 221
District Six Museum 217–18, 218, currency 2, 56,
223 African forms of 3, 49, 50, 51, 60,
capitalism/capitalist 4, 8, 9, 14, 19, 61, 62, 91
20, 22, 57, 92, 108, 109, 129, 144,
149, 150, 177, 186, 189, 193, 207, Darwin, Charles 40, 77, 192
221 Davey, William John 108
Index 239
Dawson, Thomas 198 Fabian, Johannes 38, 39, 40, 42, 80,
de Man, Paul 47, 132, 195 88, 91–2, 107, 185, 187, 223
Deacon, Janette 198 Fang 2, 38, 76, 91, 103, 112, 114
Derrida, Jacques 37 Fanon, Frantz 18, 75, 107, 109–11,
description, Lukács on 136–8 112, 114
diamonds 89, 123, 137, 138–9, 161, Farm in the Karoo, The (Carey-
186 Hobson) 19–20, 123–6, 131–53,
Dickens, Charles 193 220–1
disavowal 12, 17, 21, 31, 32, 33, 38, and characterization 138
44, 45, 79, 178–9, 184, 221 and collection/collecting 124–6,
District Six Museum (Cape Town) 132–41, 144–5
217–19, 218, 223 curiosities/curiosity in 20, 125,
double/doubling 10, 32, 100, 103, 127, 130, 134–6, 138, 140, 141,
124, 153, 155, 165, 221, 222 144, 145, 165, 208, 221
and Writing European sculpture horned viper in museum 124–5,
29–30, 31 133
Du Bois, W. E. B. 107, 113 and practice of observation 123,
Durkheim, Emile 217 126, 132, 133, 135–7
and realism 124–5, 132–3, 146,
Eastern Cape 142 153
economic imperialism rock art in 138, 140, 220, 221
advocation of by Kingsley 91, 92, specimens in 19–20, 125–7,
93–5, 101, 103 129–31, 133–6, 138–40, 145,
in Heart of Darkness 61 208
Ellis, Havelock 181, 182, 184 squatter in 141–2
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 183 tensions between metonymy and
Enlightenment 7, 22, 81, 84 metaphor 20, 125, 131–2, 153
Esty, Jed 181 farm novels 19, 124, 182
ethnography/ethnography 15–16, Fernando Po 95, 97
18, 29–45, 49, 50, 52, 140, 220 ferns, collection of 135, 138
and Blyden 104–14 fetish/fetishism 7, 16, 17, 32, 34, 49,
and colonial realism 14, 17, 19, 81–2, 178
31, 35, 45 and anthropological facts 15, 16,
and field guides 15, 16, 38–44, 34, 38, 44, 45, 59, 94
75, 105 and Bhabha 15, 34
and Heart of Darkness 45–61 and Blyden 18, 75, 107, 112, 113
and Kingsley 76–104 commodity 8–9, 16–17, 18, 45, 56,
and philology 31, 36–7 59, 129
positivist methods of 33, 42 and Freud 178–9
pursuit of authority 38–44 in Heart of Darkness 16, 45–6, 49,
and Writing European sculpture 16, 54, 55–6, 59
29–31, 30 and Hegel 82
ethnological museum 6, 31, 36 history of term 53–4
Ethnological Museum, Berlin 29–31, and hybridity 16, 34
62 and Kingsley 17, 81, 82–3, 86, 87,
exchange/exchangeability 1, 2–4, 5–6, 89, 90, 103, 222
7–8, 13, 17, 19, 49, 53–4, 57, 76–7, and Marx 56
90–2, 129, 130, 139, 146, 176 and quest for authenticity 44,
gift 148–51, 153 52–3
240 Index
fetish/fetishism – continued in The Story of an African Farm

and race 15, 75, 106–7, 109, 21–2, 177, 180, 182, 183, 188–9,
154 190–8, 207
skin pigmentation as 106 guides, anthropology 15, 16, 38–40,
and Story of an African Farm, 75, 105, 135
The 21–2, 177, 178–80, 208
field guides, see guides Haddon, Alfred Cort 43
First, Ruth 180 Haggard, Henry Rider 38, 123
Flint, John 94, 96, 97 She 5
Folklore 15, 20, 146, 150–3, 199, Hahn, Theophilus 203
200, 201, 202 Hall, Martin 200
Foucault, Michel 43 Harms, Robert 50, 57, 61
Frank, Katherine 86 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt 191, 192
Frazer, James George 40 Haynes, Roslynn D. 194
Freedgood, Elaine 7, 8, 12, 132 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 1–2, 14,
Freshfield, Douglas W. 42, 77 16–17, 31, 37, 45–61, 63, 83,
Freud, Sigmund 9–10, 30, 34, 55, 87–8, 94, 98–100, 220, 223
109, 178–9 African woman, portrayal of 45,
Fritsch, Gustave 203 47, 48, 59–60
Fry, Roger 203 cassava in 58
“Bushman’s Paintings” 203–4 charms in 45, 57–8
“Negro Sculpture” 203–4 economic imperialism in 61
ethnography in 45–61
Gaika, chief 130–1, 157 fetish/fetishism in 16, 45–6, 49,
Galton, Francis 40 54, 55–6, 59
generosity flow of import and export objects in
in The Farm in the Karoo 16–17, 45–6, 48–52, 59–60, 208
145–53 ornamentation in 16, 59–60
in Jan, an Afrikander 153, 154–8, tension between metonymy and
162, 221 metaphor in 17, 35, 46–7, 88, 99
and practices of exchange 148–51, and thread of white worsted 1–2,
153 7, 12, 16, 31–2, 45, 46, 47
Geographical Society 38 uncanny in 46, 55
gift exchange systems 148–51 and second person narrative 88
Glanville, Ernest 123 writing Europeans in 16, 54–5
glass beads 1, 3, 16, 45, 48, 50, 51, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
59, 60, 223 The Philosophy of History 82
GoGwilt, Christopher 100 Heinrich, Wilhelm
gold 56, 89, 103, 123 “Hottentot Fables and Tales” 149
Gordimer, Nadine Hemphill, J. C. 113
The Conservationist 165 Herder, Johann Gottfried 37
gothic 20, 192 Hints to Travellers 42–3, 77, 80
in Howarth’s Karoo novels 153, Hollingshead, John 55
154, 155, 158, 159, 166, 221 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 135
Grey, Sir George 199 Hottentot, see Khoekhoe
Griqua 143 Hottentot Laws 206
grotesque 188, 191, 191–3 Howarth, Anna 19–20, 152–66, 177,
and Ruskin 188–9, 191, 193–4 221
Index 241
Jan, an Afrikander see Jan, an Kingsley, Mary 12, 13–14, 17–18, 38,
Afrikander 39, 49, 58, 74, 75–104, 123, 124,
Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo 19, 20, 134, 208, 222–3
124, 153, 162–6, 208, 221–2 and African adoption of European
Hübner, Adolf 203, 204 goods 18, 95–8, 102–3
Hut Tax War (1898) 17, 91, 108 and African coastal
Hutchinson, Mark 203 “middlemen” 19, 95–7
Huxley, Thomas Henry 87 and African values 90–2, 94
hybrid/hybridity 1, 6, 10, 16, 18, 20, and authenticity 18, 77–79, 101,
29, 32–3, 78–9, 102 102, 105, 114, 222
and European ethnographer 16 and Blyden 18, 103–8, 112, 113
and fetish 34 criticism of 113
and economic imperialism 91, 92,
Igalwa 95 93–5, 101, 103
inalienability 5–6, 12, 22, 153, 208 and facts 13, 18, 78–80, 87, 104–5
and San 21, 175, 176, 180, 221 and the Fang 2, 38, 76, 91, 103,
International Exhibition (London) 112, 114
(1862) 19, 133–4 fetishism and object relations 17,
South African Court at 133–4 76–7, 81, 82–4, 86, 87, 88, 89,
ivory/ivory trade 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 90, 222
55, 57, 58, 59, 89, 90, 95 humour of 86, 113
and Hut Tax War (1898) 17, 91,
Jakobson, Roman 132 108
Jameson, Fredric 4, 5, 13 and irony 85–6, 88
Jan, an Afrikander (Howarth) 2, 13, and ivory trade 89
19, 20, 123–4, 153–62, 221 and land laws, indigenous 108
exchange practices 153, 154–8, 162 letter to Liberia 103–4, 113
and gothic 154, 155, 158, 159 and ornamentation 101–2
photograph in 155–8, 221 and photography 18, 79–80, 101, 102
and realism 124, 153, 154, 159 and Prince Makaga 97–8, 102, 103
reckless generosity 153, 154, 158, and second-person narrative 88–9,
162 107
sacrifice 154, 158, 159, 160, 162 Travels in West Africa 2, 17, 45,
uncanny in 20, 153, 155, 165 75–81, 83–92, 94–8, 100–3, 223
Joest, Wilhelm 1, 2, 3, 6, 14, 52–3, and the uncanny 17, 84–5, 86, 89,
123, 208 101, 103
Johnston, Harry (H. H.) 42, 43, 61, 79 vision of future African
Jonker, Platje 143 trader 102–3
visual-spatial methods 18, 91–2
Kant, Immanuel 49 West African Studies 2, 17, 18, 79,
Kat River Settlement 142, 145, 147, 148 81, 90–1, 93
Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo, see Klein, Herbert S. 50
Howarth Kopytoff, Igor 2, 5–6, 15, 50
Kayser, Wolfgang 191, 194 Korana War (1868–9) 198, 199
Khoekhoe 141, 142, 143, 145–6, Kreilkamp, Ivan 47, 48
147, 148, 152, 206
Khoisan, see Khoekhoe or San Lacan, Jacques 111
King William’s Town 1, 3 Landau, Paul S. 204
242 Index
language Nietzsche, Friedrich 48

analogy between artefacts and 36–7 Niger Oil Company 96
Layard, Edgar 127 Nnoromele, Salome 98
Leopold II, King of Belgium 50, 61 Nomvuyo’s Room 218
Lessing, Doris 180–1 Notes and Queries on Anthropology
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 37 39–44, 105–6
Lewis, Samuel 112
Lewis-Williams, David 201, 202 Olivier, Sydney 108–9
Liberia 17, 95–6, 111, 112–13 Omasiza mbulala (Xhosa
Kingsley’s letter to 103–4, 113 proverb) 157
Liberia College 104 opacity 7, 9, 10–11, 12, 13, 16, 21,
Livingston, Thomas W. 112 46, 102, 223
Lloyd, Lucy 200, 201, 203 Ordinance 50 (1828) 142, 143
Locke, John 22 originality, concerns for 1, 41
Lubbock, John 40, 77 ornamentation 31, 42, 52, 53, 61,
Lukács, Georg 4, 7–8, 9, 47, 136–7 101–2, 175, 223
Lyell, Charles Orpen, Joseph Millerd 199–200, 202
Principles of Geology 185 Ouzman, Sven 175
Makaga, Prince 97–8, 102, 103, 104 palm oil 103

Makay, W. M. 206 Parry, Benita 17
Man’s Cloth 62, 63, 64 Peires, Jeffrey Brian 3, 148–9, 152
market capitalism 8–9, 146 Petrie, William Flinders 40
relation to realism 4–5 philology 31, 36
shaping of late Victorian novel photography/photographs 42–3
8–9 and Jan, an Afrikander 155–8, 221
Marx, Karl 8, 56, 89, 93 and Kingsley 18, 79–80, 101, 102
Masters and Servants Act (1856) 142, negative 9–11, 12
144, 146 Pietz, William 7, 49, 53, 54, 56,
Mavungu 77, 78 81, 84
Metaphor 4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 34, 99, Pitt Rivers, Lieutenant General
124, 128, 129, 130 (Augustus Henry Lane Fox) 35,
and metonymy in Heart of 36, 37, 39–40, 41, 42
Darkness 17, 35, 46–7, 88, 99 Pratt, Mary Louise 85
and metonymy in The Farm in the Price, Sally
Karoo 20, 125, 131–2, 153 Primitive Art in Civilized Places 62
metonymy 12, 20, 22, 34, 48, 51,
130, 131, 141, 144, 220 Quinn, John 64
and metaphor see metaphor
Mfengu 143 race 10, 20, 36, 39–41, 93, 94, 104,
Michaels, Walter Benn 5 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 145,
mimesis 4, 47, 99, 222 156–7, 159, 207, 221
Müller, Friedrich Max 36 racial discrimination 18, 76, 105–6,
109, 143, 157, 158, 161–2, 219
Naipaul, V. S. 98, 99, 100, 102 Read, Charles Hercules 43
Native Races of South Africa, The 175, realism 7, 11–13, 15, 19, 20, 23, 43,
201 114, 124, 163, 166, 208, 217, 219,
naturalism 8, 47, 132, 183, 192 220, 223
New Africa, The 103 and alienability 3, 4, 5
Index 243
comparisons between colonial and Hottentot Laws 206

discourse and 9–10, 16, 45, 100 relation to land 175–6
and ethnography 14, 17, 31, 35 relations with Europeans 177–8,
in The Farm in the Karoo 124, 198–9, 206
132–3, 146, 153 and rock paintings see rock art
in Heart of Darkness 46, 47 in The Story of an African
in Jan, an Afrikander 124, 153, 154, Farm 177–8, 183, 184, 186–8,
159 204–7
and market capitalism 4–5, 8, 9, “vanishing” of 204, 206
146, 153 Sanders, Mark 181, 195
and mimesis 4, 222 Sarbah, John Mensah 91
in Story of an African Farm, The Sauls, Roderick 217–18
182, 191–4, 196 Saussure, Ferdinand de 4
reality effect 8, 9, 13, 60, 125 Schreiner, Olive 12, 14, 19, 132, 153,
repression 11, 12, 184 175, 176–200, 204–8
Rivers, William Halse Rivers 43–4 anti-colonial sentiments 177, 180
Robben Island 144 empathy with the San 177
rock art 20–1, 175–6, 176, 179, 190, letter to Havelock Ellis 181, 184
198, 199 resistance to colonial romances 191
appreciation of as fine art 203 and Spencer’s First Principles 184–5
in The Farm in the Karoo 138, 140, Story of an African Farm see Story of
220, 221 an African Farm, The
as form of resistance 202 Thoughts on South Africa 189, 207
and Fry 203–4 Trooper Peter Halket of
history of interpretation of 20–1, Mashonaland 206
175, 199–204 Scott, Ann 180
and inalienability 12, 175 Semper, Gottfried 41
as sites of passage between material shamans 201–2
and spiritual world 21, 201–2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 181
in The Story of an African Farm Showalter, Elaine 180
20–1, 176–80, 186–9, 207, 208, Sierra Leone 17, 94–5, 97, 112
221 Hut Tax War (1898) 9, 17, 108
Rod’s Room (District Six Museum) Sierra Leone Weekly News 107
(Cape Town) 217–19, 218 signification 16, 18, 33, 75–6, 106
romance, contrasting of with slave trade/slavery 22, 50–1, 57, 58,
realism 4–5 90, 112, 114, 189, 219
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36–7 abolition of (1806) 142
Royal African Society 74 Somerset, Charles 157
Ruskin, John Somerville, Mary 184
and grotesque 188–9, 191, 193–4, South African Museum (SAM)
196 126–31, 128, 139
The Stones of Venice 188 display of Xhosa man’s skull
130–1
Said, Edward 7, 87 specimens 13, 33, 200, 201
salt 103 see Farm in the Karoo, The
San (Bushmen) 21, 140, 148, 175, Specimens of Bushman Folk-lore 200,
198, 198–205 201
and acculturation 204–5, 206 Spencer, Herbert
connection to ancestors 176 First Principles 184–5
244 Index
squatters 141–2, 147, 164 Torgovnick, Marianna 47, 59

Stanley, Henry Morton 50 totality 4, 5, 9, 13, 132, 137, 166
stereotype 33, 40, 44, 106, 108–11, transparency 4, 6, 9–10, 12, 13, 15,
154, 158 16, 18, 21, 30, 31, 43, 46, 52, 60,
Stevenson, Michael 3 102, 106, 124, 221, 223
Stewart, Susan 129, 131, 191 Travels in West Africa, see Kingsley
Stocking, George W. 38 Tylor, Edward Burnett 40, 41, 49, 77,
Story of an African Farm, The 80, 81, 203
(Schreiner) 20–2, 166, 176–208, Primitive Culture 55–6
220–1
and allegory 181–2, 194–6 Uithaalder, Willem 143
anti-colonialism in 180, 182 uncanny 9, 10, 11, 12, 34, 55, 131
and authenticity 21, 177, 205 in Heart of Darkness 46, 55
childhood perception in 181 and Howarth 2, 20, 153, 165,
colonial indigene in 21, 178, 179, 166
180, 190, 207 in Jan, an Afrikander 20, 153, 155,
and fetishism 21–2, 177, 178–80, 165
208 and Kingsley 17, 84–5, 86, 89,
and grotesque, the 21–2, 177, 180, 101, 103
182, 183, 188–9, 190–8, 207 and Story of an African Farm,
and inalienability 12 The 21, 204
land/landscape in 177, 170, 180, “Unreasonable Child to Whom the
182, 183–7, 190 Dog Gave its Deserts, The”
mistrust of words 196–7 149–51
and observation 182, 196–7, 220
realism 182, 191–4, 196 vagrancy 142–3
rock paintings in 20–1, 176–80, Vagrancy Act (1879) 143
186–9, 207, 208, 221 Vagrancy Ordinance 142, 143
San in 177–8, 183, 184, 186–8, value 3, 5–7, 9, 13, 18–20, 21, 35,
204–7 49, 53, 61, 91, 92, 103, 140, 154,
Waldo Farber character 21, 177, 188
179–89, 204, 205, 221 exchange 4, 5, 8, 50, 51, 56, 57,
“Story of Hlakanyana, The” 151–2 60, 90, 92, 138
Stow, George William 175, 202, 203 use 6, 8, 51, 52, 54, 57
The Native Races of South Africa Victoria and Albert Museum 19, 136
175, 201 von Luschan, Felix 53
Suleri, Sara 100
Summers, R. F. H. 128 Wagner, Roy 140
synecdoche 39, 46, 47, 195, 196 Waitz, Theodore 77
Szalay, Miklós 206 Washington, Booker T. 113
Watt, Ian 48
Theal, George McCall 151, 157 wealth
Theopolis London Missionary connection with death 57
Society 143 Weiner, Annette 5
Thompson, George 133 West African Studies, see Kingsley
Travels and Adventures in Southern Williams, George Washington 50
Africa 145 Williams, Raymond 178, 193
Tocqueville, Alexis de 180 Wise, T. J. 64
Tongue, Helen 203 Woodburn, James 150
Index 245
Writing European (Yoruban trade with Europeans 3, 152

sculpture) 16, 29–31, 30, 33–5 and Vagrancy Ordinances
142–3
Xhosa 1, 2, 3, 6, 129, 130–1, 146, Xhosa war (1851–3) 130, 131
148 (1877–9) 3
exchange practices 148, 149,
151–2 Yoruban sculpture, see Writing
in Farm in the Karoo, The 144, 146, European
147 Young, Robert J. C. 39
and Hlakanyana folklore 151–2
in Jan an Afrikander 154–62, 221 Zola, Émile 132
in Katrina, a Tale of the Karoo Zulu 38, 134
163–4, 165, 166, 208 Zwarts, Abraham 145

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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Deborah Shapple Spillman

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction: Reading Colonial Realism 1

1 Writing European, Yoruban, Nigeria, by 1900 30

trophies, or as curses? Nineteenth-century British authors attempting to

permission of Cambridge University Press. Every effort has been made

Friends and family members have contributed to this book more

Their nerves and sinewes are not alienable, as their

When passing through King William’s Town on an 1884 expedition

African laborer’s neck in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to

items as singular and “publicly precluded from being commoditized”

culture on realist narrative that help to foreground the relation between

afforded such arguably idealized experience. Potentially liberating in

period as “the age of modern capitalism” riddled by the problem of

systems of value in tension with those of market capitalism, little debate

ending in the picture,”48 Bhabha highlights how a text relying on the

Despite appearances, the text of transparency inscribes a double

Recognizing the “double vision” of colonial representation allows us

daily experience moreover generally prove more openly ambivalent and

by anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology,

only to question the conditions and processes of their production; they

foreground some of colonial realism’s counter narratives. Speeches,

written word – basically, attempts at rendering it more transparent while

the novella’s dominant narrative. Meaning in the novella as in Marlow’s

and revises many of the categories of ethnographic inquiry she has

and subjects of colonial life at a time when the country’s emergence in

Curiosities in the novel resist assimilation to this whole and repeatedly

considered geological evidence of the San’s claims to the land,

(1883) embodies these contradictions through its grotesque aesthetics

resources as well as forced removals and the institution of pass laws

12. “Cultural Biography,” 73.

breaks down, as signifieds in the absence of a stable point of reference

of decentering approaches” after Said, I would maintain that accounting

Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory

Falling under the curious, wooden gaze of the turn-of-the-century

Figure 1 Writing European, Yoruban, Nigeria, by 1900. bpk, Berlin / Ethnologisches

their own estranged image, implicates its viewers in an analogously

founder, Adolf Bastian, conceived of ethnological museums as

“Marlow interrogates the odd, inappropriate, ‘colonial’ transformation

produce such identities, whether the trappings of racist stereotypes or

artful of denials: that the ethnographer’s desire to observe societies

of value and meaning that place the mutually constituted authority

which anthropological practitioners exhibited mastery over their object

Drawing on functionalist theories of the origin of language, in opposi-

Johann Gottfried Herder, Pitt Rivers proposes a connection between

Guides to anthropological observation and record written in an

not performed by the same person.35 The methodology prescribed to

anthropology at this time as “the natural history of man.”44 The authors

facts ranged from detailed written records of informed observation, to

identification of natural forms, determined by the immediately available

The photograph before the age of digital and computer generated

before photographing them. Innocent and almost unconscious as

Ironically, such fieldworkers were practicing precisely the kind of

on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences”

2 Of Trifles and Trade: Conrad’s Ethnography

Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitia-

The textual enigma captivating Marlow as well as Bhabha introduces

Conrad pushes the trope of synecdoche to a limit-point where it

If synecdoche, as Paul de Man has suggested, represents as a kind of

shipments of ivory (Heart of Darkness, 21). Conrad’s choice of terms,

since the fifteenth century, “[b]rass rods,” according to historian Robert