Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (review)

Laura Chrisman's book focuses on the three writers of her title, H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, and Sol Plaatje, and their interrelated works on South Africa. Haggard's late- Victorian imperialist romances King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Nada the Lily (1892) provide a context for the later anti-imperialist fiction of Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) and Plaatje's Mhudi, completed in 1920 but not published until 1930. Mhudi, the first black African novel in English, moves Chrisman's discussion into the twentieth century, but its setting is nineteenth century and its argument about African resistance clearly belongs in the interpretive trajectory that Chrisman establishes.

Chrisman's book distinguishes itself from other postcolonial works in several ways. Her geographical emphasis on South Africa attempts to counterbalance the more typical focus on India as "the definitive site of British imperial culture" (1-2), the result in large part of Gayatri Spivak's theoretical prominence. Chrisman also, in her reading of Schreiner in particular, differentiates her work from Edward Said's analysis of the metropolis as unified in its view of empire. Finally, although Plaatje's Mhudi is a response to Haggard's Nada, models of "writing back to the center" or "hybridity" are deemed inadequate for this novel, in Chrisman's view, on the levels of both language and ideology. Critical at times of what she terms the "postcolonial theory industry" (21), Chrisman's work draws on feminism, cultural materialism, and Marxism. She offers close studies of the works under discussion, a clear line of argument that is intelligently informed by the standard theories of imperialism and monopoly capitalism as well as more recent postcolonial and cultural theory, and an analysis of race and gender that never lacks a political dimension.

The most compelling section of the book involves Haggard's fictional and non- fictional treatment of the Zulus. Chrisman provides a brief history of the Zulus in the nineteenth century during their rule by Shaka, whose military empire, itself built on the conquest of other peoples, suggests a Zulu/British affinity. The fall of the Zulu nation and eventual annexation of Zululand paradoxically affirmed and threatened the idea of the supremacy of the British empire. Accordingly, Haggard saw the Zulus as both "an ideal for British constructions of its own empire" (95) and, in their loss of power, a threat to his "imperial selving" (95). As a civil servant in South Africa in the late 1870s, Haggard worked with those colonial administrators in Natal and the Transvaal who had much to do with Zululand, but he did not always agree with British actions. Chrisman sees Cetywayo and His White Neighbours, Or, Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal (1882) as a text that reveals Haggard's "highly oxymoronic discourse in which the settler- colonial perspectives of Shepstone [Natal's Secretary for Native Affairs] constantly collide and combine with metropolitan perspectives" (90).

In his fictional rendering of the Zulu people, Nada the Lily, Haggard removed any trace of British responsibility for the annexation of their Zululand. Dingane, Shaka's successor, and Umslopogaas, Shaka's fictitious son, are portrayed as victims of their sexual attraction to the beautiful—and light-skinned—Nada; rather than white colonialism, women and heterosexuality doom the Zulu nation. Zulu militarism and white colonialism are alike subsumed by domestic intrigue.

In the second half of her text, Chrisman examines two counter-narratives of imperialism which reintroduce history and revise gender politics. Schreiner's white- centred Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, which targets Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company during the violent expropriation of Mashonaland and Matabeleland, has as one of its aims the removal of the Company's Royal Charter. Published two years before Heart of Darkness (1899), Trooper...