Significantly, the British settlers of 1820-and those who followed them-introduced a new dynamic into colonial society. Others prospered by raising sheep and selling the wool, as Em’s late father appears to have done in the novel. The result was that more than half of the new settlers abandoned their farms, setting themselves up as merchants and traders instead. Mostly members of the lower middle class, they generally had more experience as artisans than as farmers, and their inexperience was compounded by the terrain in their new location, which was ill-suited to farming. The immigrants were a mixture of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish stock. The Colonial Office in London selected 4,000 men, women, and children (out of 80,000 applicants) to participate in the settlement scheme. In 1820 the British Parliament, hoping to solve problems of unemployment and social unrest in Great Britain, approved a sum of 50,000 pounds to transport British settlers to South Africa’s Zuurveld region and establish them as farmers on lots of approximately 100 acres. By contrast, few immigrants of British stock settled in South Africa before the nineteenth century. They had been settling in the interior of South Africa since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bringing the customs and institutions of their homelands with them, adapting these traditions to their new country. From 55 to 60 percent of the white population consisted of the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners. The first official census of the Cape Colony, taken in 1865, reported 180,000 “Europeans” or “whites,” 200,000“Hottentots” and “Others” (designated as “coloured people”), and 100,000 “Kaffirs,” a term used at the time to designate the South African blacks, who had become the main labor force in the eastern districts. At the time the novel begins, the region was inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples and by Afrikaners (then called “Boers,” the Dutch term for “farmers” the group was mainly of Dutch descent). Schreiner does not pinpoint the location of the African farm in her novel, but it is most likely situated in Cape Colony, which had been controlled by Great Britain since 1896, where Schreiner herself spent much of her life. Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place The British in South Africa The Story of an African Farm was published two years later under the pseudonym “Ralph Iron.” As The Story of an African Farm amply demonstrates, Schreiner-who declared herself a free thinker as an adolescent-questioned the traditional roles of women, the entrenched models of race and class that permeated Victorian culture in South Africa and elsewhere, and the very existence of God. In 1881 Schreiner traveled to Great Britain, hoping to train as a nurse in Edinburgh, Scotland, but having to abandon that plan because of ill health, she resumed writing full-time. Her most famous work draws attention to the lives of working-class people, especially women, and she took pains to publish it at a price that its working-class audience could afford. In 1874 Schreiner became a governess, working for several Boer families and writing in her spare time. She spent much of her childhood at various mission stations, and as an adolescent she kept house for her older brothers and sisters. Home-educated and largely self-taught, she wrote one of the most influential and controversial novels- The Story of an African Farm-of the late Victorian era. Three children living on a remote farm in nineteenth-century South Africa grow up to meet very different fates.Įvents in History at the Time the Novel Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Novel Was Writtenīorn in Wittebergen, Cape Colony, in 1855, Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner was the ninth child of a German missionary, Gottlob Schreiner, and his English wife, Rebecca Lyndall. A novel set in South Africa during the 1850s and 1860s published in English in 1883.
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