White Women Writers and Their African Invention (review)

The two white women writers who constitute the primary focus of this text share a certain degree of recognition as feminists of their respective eras; as the title suggests, both were white women living in colonial Africa. In this text, Simon Lewis suggests that in their writings about Africa, not only do they invent the Africa of their experience, but they also invent themselves. Lewis examines the ways Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen) Out of Africa (1937) engage with questions of race privilege, gender inequality, and national identity.

Lewis takes the phrase "I had a farm in Africa" from the opening of Blixen's memoir as a device to structure his reading of the ways in which these two writers construct the concepts "I," "had a farm," and "in Africa." In his first section, "I," Lewis provides some key biographical details. Both lived on/owned farms in colonial Africa. Schreiner lived in South Africa on the eve of the Congress of Berlin that formalized the European scramble for Africa. Out of Africa, set in Kenya, appeared one year after Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. For both, writing is cast as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. Lewis suggests that the sense of otherness both women felt—Schreiner as the child of a German father and Blixen as a Dane, both living in British colonial settler communities—led them to avoid in their writing the prevailing racial stereotypes. He further suggests that their avoidance of marriage and conventional domestic life facilitated their lives as writers.

In his "Had a Farm" section, Lewis examines the two writers' literary construction of the landscape in terms of the ways they attempt to resist a British imperialist literary tradition but are, at the same time, complicit in it. He casts Schreiner's African farm in the context of Victorian travel writing and European landscape art, attributing to her a sense of self-consciousness of her descriptions. The vastness, sameness, and emptiness of her landscapes may demonstrate resistance to the European naturalist tradition but at the same time risks contributing to the colonialist imagining of "empty," unused land, awaiting domestication. Throughout, Lewis is careful to remind us of the material conditions that allow Schreiner and Blixen to "have" African farms. Blixen's own 6,000-acre coffee plantation was part of the land granted to the settler population by the colonial government in Kenya, as if it had not been inhabited and farmed for generations by indigenous Africans. Lewis suggests that Blixen's ahistorical portrayal of the farm she "had," one that required the labor of many Africans to produce a crop for export, lends itself to later co-optation in the commodification of Africa—by the film industry, as inspiration for theme parks, and as a destination for the rich to recreate in the form of safaris.

The distinction between the two women writers, and Lewis's preference for Schreiner, is more clear in the third section of the text, much of which focuses on a comparison of Schreiner's later novel, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. While her earlier work often "forgets" the real-life Africans of her landscapes, Trooper Peter Halket is, from Lewis's description, overtly and "impolitely" anticolonialist, unlike Conrad's more ambiguous Heart. Lewis challenges us to consider why it is that Heart is "the point of reference for Euro-American writing about the Congo," having attained canonical status. "Meanwhile, Trooper Peter Halket doesn't get the academic treatment at all outside of South Africa" (169). Lewis astutely reminds us that we have the opportunity to engage with texts like Trooper Peter Halket, to rethink what works we continue to canonize, and to be vigilant about a "mainstream Western media [that] serves [sic] to perpetuate cultural, economic, and actual violence against Africans" (180).