South African Border Life

Tales of Unrest

Ernest Glanville, edited by Gerald Monsman

Publication Year: 2012

The life of the Anglo-African writer Ernest Glanville (1855–1925) was the stuff of fiction. As a young colonist he took long, lonely treks in the border country of the Eastern Cape, absorbing the superstitions and folklore of the Xhosa. He served as a war correspondent for the London Daily Chronicle in the Zulu War, riding with Basutos, Boers, colonials, mounted infantry, and regular cavalry scouts. After the war the venturesome Glanville wrote for and edited several London-based and South African publications, most notably the oldest newspaper in that part of the British empire, Cape Argus. Throughout his seventeen adventure novels and several collections of short fiction he wrote of what he had seen, done, or heard from eyewitnesses. Historical facts are mixed with supernatural elements of local myth and magic not merely to give his tales a powerful exoticism but to explore the borderland spaces of his time and place.

Published by: ELT Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

THIS NEW PUBLICATION of the remarkable but neglected tales of Ernest Glanville, a figure worthy to be included with the principal British writers in colonial Africa, continues a generic reconsideration and revitalization of the Anglo-African fiction...

Glanville’s Life and Work

pdf icon Download PDF (127.3 KB)
pp. 1-14

OVER HIS LIFETIME Ernest Glanville (1855–1925) wrote some seventeen novels and romances, four collections of shorter fiction, many newspaper articles, several travel guides and at least one promotional brochure advertizing farmland in the...

The Hunter as Polemical Ethno-Eco-Fiction

pdf icon Download PDF (118.9 KB)
pp. 15-22

THE HUNTER: A Story of Bushman Life (1926) is an ethnological and ecological story of the wilderness environment and the San hunters (or “Bushmen” as they were called in the colonial era).¹ It rightly deserves reconsideration as a landmark novel...

The Hunter: A Story of Bushman Life

pdf icon Download PDF (519.2 KB)
pp. 23-142

“Ukutwasa”: Cultural Constructs and Personal Myths

pdf icon Download PDF (94.0 KB)
pp. 143-149

GLANVILLE’S FIRST volume of fiction, Among the Cape Kaffirs (1888), collects two novellas set in the “back country” of his boyhood. “On the Border” is an account with a dead-on feel for regional detail about a tribal rising led by a witch doctor...

“Ukutwasa”

pdf icon Download PDF (260.3 KB)
pp. 150-196

IT WAS A HOT DAY in Lower Albany,¹ and the slow beat of the surf went over the land with a drowsy hum, sending to sleep all things but ants and white men, and the ants simply made a show of doing something. One white man, a stalwart young fellow...

Four Fantastic Fictions

pdf icon Download PDF (90.4 KB)
pp. 197-202

A GREAT DEAL may be said for narrative imagination balanced with a pervasive realism; but balance often cedes center stage to dramatic pleasure when a skillful spinner of fantastic yarns shows what he can do. In this section, the first three such...

“The Black Mamba”

pdf icon Download PDF (85.3 KB)
pp. 203-207

WE WERE TALKING about snakes at the little roadside winkle—a composite shop, where you could buy moist black sugar, tinned butter, imported; tinned milk, also imported; cotton, prints, boots, “square face,” tobacco, dates, nails, gunpowder...

“How the Melons Disappeared”

pdf icon Download PDF (80.3 KB)
pp. 208-211

I THINK I HAVE SAID that Uncle Abe knew everything there was to be known about farming, but he was content with his knowledge and never put it to practical use, unless it was in the growing of water-melons. His melons were the biggest and the sweetest...

“Abe Pike and the Ghonya”

pdf icon Download PDF (78.8 KB)
pp. 212-214

OLD ABE had strolled over to my place to see a new Harvester tried on a good crop of wheat. In the previous reaping season I had been left suddenly in the lurch by my Kaffirs, who had silently vanished in the night for other scenes without...

“The Schaaps Jackal”

pdf icon Download PDF (136.0 KB)
pp. 215-223

That is the sort of conversation that is flung on the night air all over South Africa by the greatest proficient in the art of sheep stealing. Talk of your Moss Troopers, your Border Raiders, your Red Reivers, your Rooi Kafirs,³ and all the other bold...

The Lost Heiress and the Politics of Imperial War

pdf icon Download PDF (162.6 KB)
pp. 224-232

GLANVILLE’S The Lost Heiress: A Tale of Love, Battle, and Adventure (London: Chatto, 1891) is in dialogue with his earlier news journalism, the dispatches he sent from the Anglo-Zulu front back to London. The novel goes beyond the mere facts of history...

The Lost Heiress: A Tale of Love, Battle and Adventure

pdf icon Download PDF (677.0 KB)
pp. 233-406

Back Cover

pdf icon Download PDF (145.0 MB)

E-ISBN-13: 9780944318423
Print-ISBN-13: 9780944318416

Page Count: 450
Illustrations: None
Publication Year: 2012

Series Title: 1880-1920 British Authors Series