Encountering the imperial and colonial past through olive schreiner's trooper peter halket of mashonaland^[1]

Abstract

The feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) published an allegorical novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, in 1897 which became an instant cause célèbre, not least because it named Cecil Rhodes as the person directly, as well as morally, responsible for the genocidal policies enacted by troopers from the Chartered Company he and his associates controlled in Matabeleland and then Mashonaland. Trooper Peter Halket provides a useful means of thinking about the colonial and political presence in southern Africa, having been published at a key “moment” of imperialism within what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as the “contact zone”, a term she uses to discuss travel writing associated by her with the imperial project. The idea of the contact zone has its analytic utility unnecessarily limited by being confined to the historical juncture of “then and there”, not least because this elides the politics of a text's rereadings in the “here and now”; and, in addition, the importance of the context in which a piece of writing was conceived, published and originally read also needs to be fully recognised. Pratt's analysis thereby also overstates the determinism of the imperial project by totalising white responses to it. Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket is not “travel writing” in the specific sense used by Pratt; however, it has Africa as its focus of attention and inquiry and, as a best-selling and internationally-famous author, Schreiner's swingeing critique formed a component in the way that both metropolitan and colonial publics engaged with imperial expansionist projects and indicates the complexity of the “imperial moment” that Trooper Peter Halket is concerned with and also the importance of recognising that “imperialism” and “colonialism” were not coterminous