Book Review : A Daughter of the Empire Finds Harmony With Africa

Dreams of the Kalahari by Carolyn Slaughter (Scribner’s: $16.95; 230 pages)

Bechuanaland is still an English protectorate when “Dreams of the Kalahari” begins; one of several options still offered by a diminishing British Empire to its superfluous subjects. If your chances of succeeding at home were limited by temperament, education or social class, you could always emigrate to one or another such outpost, where the rules weren’t so rigid or the competition so keen.

Emily Jones is the perceptive young daughter of just such an adventurer. Her father is a blustering, bigoted man who once had grandiose visions of himself “striding up and down in a helmet with a polished cane tucked under his left arm, viewing his subordinates with scorn, treating them with stiff, sharp discipline.” That fantasy has shriveled in the heat and glare of the South African desert, souring Bernard Jones’ disposition and reducing his once winsome wife to a cowering semi-invalid. His daughter has become secretive and defiant; learning to find her comfort and companionship among the African servants.

The Joneses live on an isolated farmstead in a house that parodies a suburban English villa. There are old society magazines piled on little tables, flower prints on the walls, but a lionskin rug is on the parlor floor, the head stuffed and left in place, the bullet holes still noticeable. A huge pair of kudu horns dominates the room, facing down the framed scenes of Dorset and the itchy plush lounge chairs shipped from England. Africa is not only encroaching upon the Joneses’ life, but defeating their attempts to preserve their outworn values.

A Liberal Stand

Though the focus of the novel is Emily’s passage from childhood to young womanhood, no book with an African setting is ever apolitical, and from the start, this one takes a clear liberal stand. Even at age 9, Emily is not only aware of discrepancies between the lives of the English and the Africans but deeply troubled as she watches the skimpy rations being doled out to the servants and wonders why they’re allotted so little meat when cattle had always been their entire diet. That, the maid Johanna tells the curious child, was before the European colonists had followed and demeaned her people still further. Then, Johanna whispers, “we were ourselves.”

From time to time the Africans can still be themselves, but never in the presence of their white employers, though sometimes Emily can glimpse the true personality and dignity behind the impassive obsequious masks. Increasingly, the child’s real life is lived in the kitchen, the native kraal and in her own mind. She stays as far as possible from her father’s incoherent rages and her mother’s debilitating migraines; observing the pathetic diversions and intrigues of the small embattled European colony only from a distance.

As the agitation for African independence gathers momentum, the tensions bring out the worst characteristics of the settlers, few of whom were ever exemplary characters to begin with. From Emily’s vantage point, we see the Europeans in all their wretchedness: the secret pederast preying upon his nephews and paying a terrible price for his vice; the brutal farmer who starves his hired hands and drives his wife insane; watching as Emily’s mother dissolves her beauty and her youth in drink and her father loses even the illusion of control over his destiny.

Living in Harmony

When her parents finally take a desperately needed holiday, Emily is sent to stay with old friends of theirs, an entirely different sort of family who show her that even in Africa, life can be lived in harmony with the people and the land. Emily thrives in this household, and gradually abandons the defenses that had made her seem so sullen and withdrawn at home. She follows the daughters of her hosts into a convent school, where she forms the attachments and attitudes that will shape her life in the years to come.

There is an adolescent passion for another girl, a hopeless love for a feckless older man; later a sojourn in the England that isn’t “home” at all but a land far more harsh and alien than the Africa in which Emily grew up. Though the narrative observes the obligatory conventions of its genre, the lovingly and respectfully re-created African setting exempts the book from ordinariness. As so many contemporary South African writers have proven, that anguished country can transform and intensify even mundane experience, investing it with extraordinary resonance.

Emily Jones is an idealist, but she will not be overwhelmed by Africa, like so many of her parents’ generation, because her expectations have been realistic from earliest childhood. As her journalist lover tells her, “Africa is what it is. That’s all.”