SOURCE: Stiebel, Lindy. “‘As Europe is to Africa, So is Man to Woman’: Gendering Landscape in Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily.” Current Writing 12, no. 1 (April 2000): 63-74.

The geographies of adventures … enable writers and readers to remove themselves from the messy realities and textured experiences of here and now, enabling them to imagine alternatives, other possible worlds, departures from the status quo.

(Phillips 1997:168)

One of Rider Haggard's first biographers, Morton Cohen, writes that “[f]or many Englishmen, Africa became the Africa of King Solomon's Mines” (1960:94). What Haggard continued to do after this, his first successful African romance, was to work the same canvas, repeating certain features, embellishing, adding, until he had created an instantly recognisable ‘Africa’ for his readers. In the same way that certain writers are always linked to fictional or real landscapes about which they have written, so too is Haggard, despite a few novels set elsewhere, finally tied to a kind of generic, Haggardesque ‘Africa’. In his African romances he took a real geophysical place, with verifiable historical events to which he frequently referred, and moved the whole into a series of “imaginative geographies of desire” (Jacobs 1996:34). Writing of Africa intermittently for his whole writing career of just over forty years, Haggard sustained a remarkably constant construction of Africa, perhaps because of, rather than despite, a changing political climate at home. At odds, post-1879, with Britain's handling of territories in South Africa and the changing policy particularly towards the Zulu people, Haggard drew a largely nostalgic landscape even for his earliest African romance. Old before his time, he left South Africa at the age of twenty-five already disillusioned with British party politics and in particular with Gladstone's handing back of the Transvaal to the Boers. This political disillusionment predated King Solomon's Mines (1885); thus the way was already prepared for a vision of a pre-Gladstonian, nostalgic African canvas, and this vision persisted throughout his writing career.

No doubt aided by his first physical sojourn in South Africa (1875-1881), Haggard achieved for his readers, certainly in his earlier romances, a more completely Africanised landscape than any fiction writer before him. However, it is important to keep in mind that Haggard physically wrote from outside Africa, thus enabling him to create a more exotic landscape of the imagination enhanced by the desire which separation engenders. Thus Olive Schreiner, writing from within South Africa, could respond to Andrew Lang's criticism of The Story of an African Farm as being too dour and unadventurous with these words:

It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen; ‘of encounters with ravening lions, and hairbreadth escapes’. This could not be. Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand. …

(Schreiner 1971:27-28)

Haggard and Schreiner met first in 1885, later again on a few occasions, and exchanged a few letters. Prior to their first meeting, Haggard sent Schreiner a copy of his first novel, Dawn, and expressed interest in making Schreiner's personal acquaintance, saying: “Your book [The Story of an African Farm] made a great impression upon me” (letter 21 October 1884). He again singled out this work of Schreiner's in his essay, “About Fiction”, where he calls it a work “written from within, and not from without”. He is not referring to geographic location but to the book's “impression of being the outward and visible result of inward personal suffering on the part of the writer”; it is a book “written from the heart” (Haggard 1887:180). Haggard later remarked in a letter to his brother Jack that he was attracted by Schreiner's intellect, pronouncing her rather patronisingly to be “my intellectual superior”, but admitting that he was repelled by her “complete and overpowering atheism” (17 February 1885). On one occasion he encouraged her to be more “cheerful” in her subject matter, advice which she rejected from one whom she obviously considered too florid and sensational a writer. The advice which she gives to a writer in the Preface to The Story of an African Farm would be rather to “squeeze the colour from the brush … dip into the grey pigments … paint what lies before him” (Schreiner 1971:28). Strange associates as they may seem, at one level both Haggard and Schreiner in their different styles and from their geographical locations were engaged in the same project:

both … were working on central questions of their age by showing (although sometimes indirectly) how the European nurtured individual tried to meet the challenge of a ‘primitive’ and totally other environment.

(Maclennan and Christie 1973: 10)

Both were engaged in the issues of their age projected in part onto an African terrain which featured far more strongly than mere backdrop, though the distance between the spectacular city of Kor and the plain farm in the Karoo is vast.¹

One of the best known aspects of Haggard's African topography in postcolonial analyses of his writing is the extent to which it used “the imperial setting to tap a level of yearning which … seems almost indecent in its disregard for the standards of middle-class behaviour” (Bivona 1990:80). It appears that unconsciously Haggard projected a good deal of his latent sexual desire and that of his age, which was one of determined public prudery, onto his feminised African landscapes.² Writing in a time of domestic propriety at home, it seems inevitable that he would see the exotic imperial lands as offering an imaginative escape and a site of desire, both political on the manifest level and sexual at the latent level: “The landscape of potential empire becomes the landscape of pornographic fantasies and of sexual terrors” (Stott 1989:84).

It is important to stress that Haggard had no conscious intention in the creation of these highly sexualised landscapes and, indeed, his readers seemed by and large to be unaware of what today appears as obvious landscape sexualisation—Haggard was praised during his 1914 visit to South Africa as “one who for 30 years has been giving to the English-speaking world volume on volume of healthy, wholesome and thoroughly entertaining literature, in no page of which is there anything of a degrading or unmanly tendency” (quoted in Coan 1997:47). Haggard was a highly respectable member of the landed gentry, a farmer, a tireless participant in various government commissions, and was eventually knighted for his services to the empire. He had publicly more than once denounced lasciviousness in writing; when his ‘modern’ novel Beatrice (1890) was objected to by some for apparently criticising the institution of marriage, Haggard responded: “… I have always felt that the author of books which go anywhere and everywhere has some responsibilities. Therefore I have tried to avoid topics that might inflame even minds which are very ready to be set on fire” (1926, Vol 2:15). In his essay, “About Fiction”, he acknowledged that “[s]exual passion is the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man, for it lies at the root of all things human” (1887:176), and he criticised the French Naturalist school for

continually, and in full and luscious detail, call[ing] attention to erotic matters. Once start the average mind upon this subject, and it will go down the slope of itself. It is useless afterwards to turn around and say that, although you cut loose the cords of decent reticence which bound the fancy, you intended that it should run uphill to the white heights of virtue.

(1887:176-177)

It is interesting to note that Haggard uses a landscape image to illustrate his lecture on morality in writing, for it is onto the seemingly innocuous landscape rather than the people within it that the fears and desires of this late-Victorian gentleman and, by extension, his readers, are projected. As Etherington notes: “In Africa … the beasts which Victorians feared to encounter in themselves could be contemplated at a safe remove” (1984:50). Etherington could perhaps have included their desires too, as Africa, in writing of the time, is always locked into the binary oppositions of paradise/wilderness, pleasure/pain.

Africa, it should be noted, is generally feminised in late Victorian adventure tales and Haggard is no exception, although in a few of his romances the landscape is masculinised. In Allan Quatermain, for example, Mount Kenia is described with distinctly phallic undertones as “a glittering white glory, its crest piercing the very blue of heaven”. It is named by the natives the “Finger of God” which implies its overpowering masculinity (plus, incidentally, the belief that God must be white), but it is, for all that, curiously dead: “that white old tombstone of the years” (Haggard 1995:51-52). The phallic granite cone in Benita is “shaped by the hand of man out of a single gigantic granite monolith of the sort that are sometimes to be met with in Africa”. It can be ascended by steps in order to reach the top which “was fashioned in the shape of a cup, probably, for the purposes of acts of worship and sacrifice” (Haggard 1986:255). In both of these instances of the masculinisation of the landscape, Haggard has endowed the places with a spiritual significance: both Mount Kenia and the Bambatse cone are to be venerated. By way of contrast, the feminisation of imperial landscapes was largely a result of the work of Empire being mostly a masculine activity of assuming dominance over less powerful opponents and spaces; thus in a strongly patriarchal age the lesser half of a power equation would inevitably be feminised—“as Europe is to Africa, so is man to woman” (Bristow 1991:133). As the less powerful partner, African landscape was open to a powerful discourse of latent sexuality:

African landscape is to be entered, conquered, its riches are to be reaped, enjoyed. The phallic semiology accompanies the imperialist topoi, a conjunction based on the assumption that if explorers are ‘manly’ then what they explore must be female.

(Torgovnick quoted in Gregory 1994:131)

The soon-to-be-clichéd use of phrases such as ‘virgin’ territory to describe African land which had yet to be ‘penetrated’ attests to the implicit if unconscious sexualising, specifically feminising, of African landscape in books of Empire, and it is to Haggard's ‘bodyscapes’ that I now turn.

Predictably, Haggard's African romances that had been published by 1892 are the most erotically charged, written as they were at great speed and shortly after Haggard's return from South Africa where he had been a young man, first a bachelor then newly married. Of these romances, the one most commented upon in terms of a sexualised geography is King Solomon's Mines and its treasure map (Patteson 1978; Bunn 1988; McClintock 1990, 1995; Bristow 1991). As this novel is so well researched, however, I will rather look at Nada the Lily, Haggard's ‘Zulu’ romance which is less well known and a text that has both historical and contemporary interest dealing as it does with the colonial encounter and its results.

Nada the Lily (1892) is Haggard's song of praise to the Zulus of the ancien regime, his aim being, as he puts it, “to convey, in a narrative form, some idea of the remarkable spirit which animated these kings [Chaka, Dingaan] and their subjects, and make accessible in a popular shape, incidents of history, which are now, for the most part, only to be found in a few scarce works of reference …” (Haggard 1949:ix). Nada the Lily is dedicated to Sir Theophilus Shepstone, at one time Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal and Haggard's mentor, and the novel describes the downfall of the Zulu kingdom as seen through the eyes of an ancient witchdoctor, Mopo, father to Nada and foster-father to Umslopogass, a secret son of Chaka. The narrative weaves fiction and history together through the reigns of Chaka and Dingaan, and it chronicles the first fatal contact with the Boers. One critic reads it as “a tribute to expiate the British people's guilt over their ‘liquidation’ of the peoples of South Africa, especially the Zulus” (Adewumi 1977:106). Haggard states in his Preface that he will “for a time forget his civilisation, and think with the mind and speak with the voice of a Zulu of the old regime” (Haggard 1949:x), and it is indeed remarkable for the age that Haggard does try to create a completely Zulu world peopled entirely by black characters, although undoubtedly seen through a paternalistic prism. Despite his stated intention to speak with a Zulu voice however, when it comes to certain descriptions of the landscape it is very much the voice of Haggard that the reader hears. Particularly the passages dealing with Ghost Mountain show a high degree of sexualisation which is witness in part to Haggard's private anxieties about women's sexuality but now is specifically cast in terms of black women's sexuality:

So Umslopogaas rose and crept through the narrow mouth of the cave. There, above him, a great grey peak towered high into the air, shaped like a seated woman, her chin resting upon her breast, the place where the cave was being, as it were, on the lap of the woman. Below this place the rock sloped sharply, and was clothed with little bushes. Lower down yet was a forest great and dense, that stretched to the top of a cliff, and at the foot of the cliff, beyond the waters of the river, lay the wide plains of Zululand.

(112)

Haggard believed that he had been a Zulu and loved a Zulu woman in one of his previous incarnations: in one of his “dream visions” he sees himself in a scene together with his black companion and their children; he is attacked, speared and retreats to his hut “where I fall into the arms of the woman and die” (Haggard 1926, Vol 2:168-169). His descriptions of Ghost Mountain, however, project an image of a deathly, fearful and primordial sexuality onto the landscape. Perhaps this is due in part to the mountain's being associated with “an aged woman” (Haggard 1949:81) with whom any sexual contact might be considered taboo, even incestuous. Unlike the supine woman of the map in King Solomon's Mines whose breasts soar heavenward promising, superficially at least, a youthful fertility, the woman-mountain in Nada the Lily sits upright, solid, “her chin resting upon her breast” (112), her face turned down to her lap/cave, unable to meet the male gaze.

Galazi the Wolf, who saves Umslopogaas from the lions, describes his first encounter with the mountain in these terms:

… from time to time between the tops of trees I saw the figure of the grey stone woman who sits at the top of Ghost Mountain, and shaped my course towards her knees. My heart beat as I travelled through the forest in dark and loneliness like that of the night, and ever I looked around searching for the eyes of the Amatonga. … great spotted snakes crept from before my feet … and always high above my head the wind sighed in the great boughs with a sound like the sighing of women.

(113-114)

He sees the reputedly haunted Ghost Mountain as a “grey stone woman” whose pubic/womb area is guarded by a protective hymen-like boulder, as are various other feminised caves in Haggard (Stella's cave in Allan's Wife, Noot's cave in She, and the entry to the holy site of the Tree of Life and Death in The Ghost Kings: “a kind of cleft … not more than two feet in width, across which cleft were stretched strings of plaited grass” (Haggard: 1908:302)). Galazi recounts how at night, he makes his way to this cave situated between “the knees of the stone Witch, which are the space before the cave” (Haggard 1949:115) in great fear of the grey wolves which live there and of the “great spotted snakes” (114) of this lapsed corner of Eden. However, he manages to defeat the wolves, which are in fact ghosts of evil men, and there is no doubting his show of masculine bravado before the fearful cave: “I walked to the mouth of the cave proudly, as a cock walks upon the roof” (116). The cave houses the desiccated corpse of a man described in Haggard's usual necrophiliac detail, together with the leaders of the wolf pack whom Galazi kills. The ghost of the dead man instructs Galazi, the victor, to “climb to the breasts of the stone Witch, and look in the cleft which is between her breasts” (121). He does so and finds “as it were, a crack in the stone twice as wide as a man can jump” (122) in which are “the bones of men” (123), victims of the wolves who guard the Ghost Mountain. Haggard's characteristic nervous tic, “as it were”,³ as he describes a sexualised site is much in evidence in these descriptions of Ghost Mountain: “The cave was … as it were, on the lap of the woman”; “I had … come, as it were, to the legs of the old stone Witch”; etc. This little phrase is an unconscious hiccup before Haggard engages with his imagined terrain. Significantly Galazi, draped in the bloody, fresh skins of wolves, is hailed on his return to the village as one who has “won the lap of her who sits in stone forever” (126), a euphemism for sexual intercourse. It is used again when the Zulu princes Dingaan and Umhlangana are described as ones who “drink beer and sleep in the laps of their wives” (180), whilst both Galazi and Umslopogaas are “[g]hosts who live in the lap of the old Witch” (197). The woman-Ghost Mountain is a fearsome and ambivalent sexual partner in this book. She is a contradictory mix of haven (for Galazi and Umslopogaas) and of tomb (for Nada who dies within the womb-like cave having pushed the hymen rock too far and thus locked herself within, after which she goes mad), a blend of attraction yet revulsion. The mountain is, however, consistently labelled a “witch”, thus demonising this feminised site and casting it beyond the realm of the normal and into a supernatural realm of night fears. She is “a place of dead men” (119), Nada being the only woman brought to her for refuge, whereupon in jealous rage, the woman-mountain easily extinguishes the light from one who is loved by Umslopogaas who, together with Galazi, ought to be hers. This tragic end is recalled in The Ghost Kings in a scene where Dingaan is allowed to ‘see’ his own death reflected in a bowl of water:

I see a mountain whereof the top is like the shape of a woman, and between her knees is the mouth of a cave. Beneath the floor of the cave I see bodies, the body of a great man and the body of a girl. … I see a man, a fat man come out of the cave. … Two other men seize him. … They drag him up the mountain to a great cleft, that is between the breasts of her who sits thereon. … They hale him to the edge of the cleft, they hurl him over. …

(Haggard 1908:272-273)

This scene occurs, as Dingaan describes it, at the end of Nada the Lily. Ghost Mountain is thus unremittingly linked to the feminine and to the deathly, and although in some of Haggard's other texts the feminine is linked to more attractive landscape prospects, they too have a contradictory pessimistic tension pulling beneath their surface. As Bunn observes: “Haggard's texts produce fictive landscapes ideologically, but they do so under the shadow of contradiction and neurosis. The figure of Woman in the colonial text seems to me the point at which most of the contradictions become visible …” (1988:23).

Although there are other characteristic features of Haggard's African landscapes—Africa as vast Eden, as dream underworld, as home to ancient white civilisations—the most contradictory is his sexualising of Africa as bodyscape. The unconscious subtext of sexuality in Haggard's romances was part of the reason for his enormous popularity at the time. A contemporary of Freud, Haggard wrote romances which, in the words of Norman Etherington:

were immensely popular because they fed the imagination of a vast reading public that had already accepted the premises, but not the conclusions, of the looming Viennese psychology. … [Haggard] knew that sexual passion lies at the root of all things human. Though he did not know to what extent he had written these notions into his novels, a Freud or Jung could see them at once.

(1978:84)

The fact that Haggard's African romances—and particularly their symptomatic landscapes—can still resonate a century after his first major success (some, like King Solomon's Mines, have never been out of print) speaks for the enduring influence of his writings on the romance writers who followed him, especially the South African popular writers Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, as has been shown by, for example, Gray (1979), Chapman (1996) and Stiebel (1997).

Notes

1. The Haggard/Schreiner correspondence is briefly referred to in several critical works on Haggard including the chapter on She in Gilbert and Gubar 1989:35-36, 51-53; Cohen 1960:90; Hofmeyr 1980:133. Haggard's letter of 17 February 1885 is in Lewsen (1994). Haggard's letter of 21 October 1884 to Schreiner is held in the Harry Ransom Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

2. There is very little surviving record of how Haggard felt about his own sexuality or sexual life. He made one rare reference in a note written on 15 November 1918 where he writes: “He [Kipling] thinks that imagination such as mine is the sign and expression of unusual virility, a queer theory that may have something in it …” (in Cohen 1960:107). The telltale “may” suggests that Haggard privately agreed with Kipling. In a letter written to his wife Louie, en route to Tasmania on board ship in foul weather, he admitted his depressed spirits in a very uncharacteristic manner:

   This kind of solitary confinement is not gay. All one's failures and failings rise before one in a melancholy procession till one is sick of contemplating them … No wonder the people make love to each other furiously, for physical warmth I imagine, as much as anything else. However it is supposed to be very healthy …

   (19 March 1916, unpublished letter, Norfolk Record Office.)

   Many of Haggard's letters to his wife refer to his loneliness and melancholy as it seems that increasingly they spent time apart whilst Haggard was on business, or researching his novels, or Louie away visiting relatives. Etherington tries to make a case for “a son's incestuous longing for his mother” (1984:88) in order to account for Ayesha's power a propos Leo, but it seems to me that Haggard's longings were for a closer marital and sexual bond with Louie, and that this is part of the fuel that goes into his sexualising of African landscapes.

3. Variations of this ‘nervous tic’ when describing sexualised landscapes occur elsewhere in Haggard's romances. An example is found in this extract from Heu Heu:

   We were through the lip of the mountains, if I may so call it, and had entered a stretch of unbroken virgin forest, a veritable sea of great trees that occupied the rich land of the plain and grew to an enormous size and tallness.

   (Haggard 1972:106, my emphasis)

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