Olive Schreiner: Story of a South African Woman
Noted on March 8, 2009 by Christopher Bennett in
This is the second of two entries in recognition of International Women's Day on March 8. This entry includes excerpts from Chris Mitchell's article, "Olive Schreiner: Story of a South African Woman." The article was originally written for "Making Waves," the Southern African Media and Gender Institute's newsletter. Read the first entry, Chris' personal reflections on her encounter with the manuscripts here.
The writings of Olive Schreiner are an important contribution to the history of South Africa. Ms Schreiner’s staunch support of equal rights in late 1800s and early 1900s has been heralded as regionally unique and historically prescient in the awakening of similar rights movements worldwide…
Schreiner’s most popular work is The Story of an African Farm, first published in 1883 under the pseudonym of Ralph Iron in order to bypass the legal limitations towards women authors. The work is generally known as South Africa’s first novel and met wide-acclaim as well as criticism for bringing to the forefront issues of agnosticism, race discrimination and women’s rights...
In 1889 Olive became involved in Cape Town politics when she lashed out at Cecil Rhodes, the architect for South Africa’s imperialistic endeavors, for his racist ideology in a satiric allegory entitled Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. Schreiner suffered wide ostracism in the white community for the views expounded in the political pamphlet. In 1898 she authored a polemic entitled The South African Question by an English in South Africa in an attempt to enlighten the English of their country’s discriminatory practices which lead to the Boer-English conflict. Schreiner was locally ridiculed, her home was burned destroying most of her original manuscripts, and she was eventually placed in a concentration camp by the English military for her support of the Afrikanner cause…
Her personal letters are an intimate display of a personal frustration and sadness felt towards the ardent political beliefs that destroy and hurt those who have a right to compassion and protection. She pleads to Ghandi, “Truly you…cannot be willing to shed blood in this wicked cause,” speaking of the Indian community’s support of the English in the Boer War. In 1909 speaking to close friend Lady Innes regarding the imposing apartheid proclivities of the South African government she writes, “I can see such a dark future of continued retrogression, and the oppression of the weaker race.” From London in 1920 she laments of the hardships of the necessary WWI rationing noting candidly that the shortages affect everyone but the rich, who can still get everything…
Olive Schreiner held strong to her beliefs in equality amidst ardent views to the contrary. She was persecuted and jailed in the way that many others suffered in the fight against discrimination. Seeing her quill pen and ink writing and touching the yellowing, rusting paper at the National Library, one gets a true sense of her never-failing activism that her deteriorating health made more and more difficult. The early penmanship is readable and well-lined. Later the writing is large, wandering over the page, individual words difficult to distinguish. South Africa ardently upholds its heroes of apartheid; it should remember those, especially the women, who saw the ills and fought the battles long before Nelson Mandela and the ANC. South Africa has a vibrant source of history within the walls of the National Library. It is up to its citizens to research and discover its treasures so that the complete story of this beautiful country can be admired and its strength passed forward.
All quotations of written material provided through the papers and manuscripts of Olive Schreiner, Boxes 1 and 3, the National Library Cape Town Special Collections, Cape Town. Biographical information excerpted from wikipedia online encyclopedia (http://www.wikipedia.com), ZAR.CO.ZA (http://www.zar.co.za/schreiner.htm), and Pegasos (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/schrein.htm). For free access to authored material including pamphlets visit The Gutenberg Project (http://www.gutenberg.org).