South Africa in English-Language Children's Literature, 1814-1912 (review)

In a slim volume that belies its span, Elwyn Jenkins has surveyed books written about South Africa for English-speaking children for the best part of a century, beginning with Priscilla Wakefield's informational book, The Traveler in Africa: Containing some Account of the Antiquities, Natural Curiosities, and Inhabitants, of Such Parts of that Continent and its Islands, as have been most explored by Europeans. The Route traced on a Map, for the Entertainment of Young Persons (London, 1814), and concluding with a spate of books published in 1912, "when overseas authors stopped setting their books in South Africa, leaving the country's juvenile literature to its own devices" (6). Himself South African, Jenkins points out that "South Africans can enjoy ironies about [early portrayals] of their country which foreigners might miss, or be struck by the gap between their constructs and the reality, and by the literary and linguistic violence with which the country was forced to conform to exogenous models" (9). The book begins engagingly, with an invocation of titles published in South Africa and England promising adventure, exoticism, and wild animals, or better yet, all three, set in the alien landscape of South Africa: Lost in African Jungles, With Shield and Assegai, In the Land of the Lion and the Ostrich: A Tale of Struggle and Adventure.

Jenkins's task to read, summarize, and establish a heritage for South African children's literature is complicated by the fact that many of the books he discusses were written by people who neither lived in South Africa, nor considered South Africans their primary audience. Books about South Africa were often written primarily to inform British children about the world and their country's activities abroad, or to enable English children to enjoy vicarious adventures on the other side of the world, while South Africans themselves appear to have read both British and North American novels by Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner (58-59). Nevertheless, Jenkins argues that these books about and by South Africans should be appreciated in the broad context of the British Empire.

And indeed, the activities of empire appear to have been the dominant subject and theme of books about South Africa, from descriptions of the early work of missionaries to the legacy of war among Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaner, and British peoples. By far the dominant genre was the boys' adventure story, while girls' domestic stories never achieved much distinction compared to the accomplishments of Canada's L. M. Montgomery, the U.S.'s Louisa May Alcott, or Australia's Ethel Turner (48). The other major accomplishment of South African writers during this period was the appropriation inspired by and in the spirit of Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" series of animal stories from black African oral traditions. Indeed, among the few books surveyed that are still in print are the romances of Rider Haggard, collections of black South African folktales, and Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories, themselves imitations of the oral animal tale.

The strength of Jenkins's study is in its breadth—very few people have access to, let alone the inclination to read, scores of early books about South Africa. Having a catalogue and description of the books in one readable volume is a service to the global children's literature community. Also a strength is Jenkins's writing style, unburdened either by excessive jargon or a rigidly "p.c."—in this case, postcolonial—analysis. For example, rather than exploring at predictable length the extent to which these authors are racist, which is a given, Jenkins follows the surprising twists and turns of their discourses, which sometimes uphold and sometimes undercut dominant ideologies. I was surprised to learn of the role that American (i.e., U.S.) children's and young adult literature of the frontier played...