The Oak Tree was Huge: Reading Koppie's Story at the Hoek

Abstract

Koppie's Story is the unpublished manuscript of a novel written by Frances Cope, a colonial farmer's wife, in the early 1880s. It begins in 1879, a pivotal year in terms of the catastrophic socio-environmental impact of the colonial government's invasion of Zululand, and ends in 1880 when the railway from Durban reached Pietermaritzburg on its way into the Interior. By this time the imperialists had effectively won a decisive round against the local inhabitants, and as the territory started to be opened up for industry and agriculture, things were in place to do battle with the land. In the novel, this framing story is seen from a domestic vantage point. Koppie, the protagonist, is primarily concerned with home, that complex world of eco-social relationships that her family built. In this essay, I read the manuscript on the farm where it was written, and am drawn into the contemplation of animals wild and domesticated, the intimacy of an inhabited veld, the resilience and tenderness of people, and of seeds. Each thing in this world of the farm seems to bear the imprint of wars of occupation.

Keywords:

• Anglo-Zulu war
• colonial woman’s narrative
• creative nonfiction
• eco-social imperialism
• Jack Cope
• place

Notes on Contributor

Julia Martin teaches in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape. She has a particular interest in environmental literacy and creative non-fiction. Her publications include A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), and (in collaboration with Gary Snyder), Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Clarification of names and places: in this essay, I visit a farm in the Mooi River district of KwaZulu Natal with my husband Michael Cope, and our young twins, Sophie and Sky Cope. The farm, originally named The Hoek (now De Hoek), was previously owned by members of his family, and his father Jack Cope grew up there. The central character in my account is Frances Cope, who in the early 1880s wrote the untitled manuscript which I call here Koppie's Story. She was Jack Cope's grandmother, remembered as Granny Cope. I would like to thank Michael Cope and Andrew Bank for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

2. Jeff Guy’s biography of Bishop Colenso, The Heretic, gives a meticulous and compelling account of the events of these years. In particular, as regards the ‘Zulu threat’, he shows the extent to which colonial public opinion was manipulated to nurture the idea of this terror (Guy 1983: 249–270). See also his The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom (1979, 1994) on the specific strategies involved in the invasion of Zululand.

3. Though it seems in retrospect unarguable that the ‘moment’ of 1879 was a decisive catalyst for change in the region, it is not my intention either to suggest that a few months of military encounters were all it took to subjugate an entire kingdom, or to underestimate the extent and significance of ongoing resistance to imperial conquest. For a substantial analysis of the complex engagements of the immediately ensuing years, and the particular role played by Harriette Colenso in the opposition to colonial injustice, see Jeff Guy's The View Across the River: Harriette Colenso and the Zulu Struggle against Imperialism (2001).

4. On the position of chiefs such as Inkosi uPhakade with regard to the Shepstone administration, see John Lambert (1989: 374), and for a discussion of the “Zulu war dance” by 500 men that Phakade convened for Shepstone and other government officials in 1876, as described by Rider Haggard (the first thing he ever wrote for publication), see David Chidester (2014: 146–8).

5. On the escalation of industry and agriculture, the related expansion of communications infrastructure, and an associated accumulation of capital in Natal during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, see Bill Guest, “The New Economy” (1989).

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation [grant number 80995] and the University of the Western Cape.