Olive Schreiner: Feminist Prophet of South African Democracy

Were Olive Schreiner (1855­1920) alive today she would exult in the transformations in South Africa that climaxed in the 1994 presidential election of Nelson Mandela. By the mid­to­late 1890s Olive Schreiner had emerged as the foremost South African critic of British imperialism, ethnocentrism, and racism ­ Cecil Rhodes’ most eloquent opponent. Through political treatises, public addresses, and works of fiction replete with trenchant argument and fiery warning, she labored valiantly but in vain to alter British attitudes and policies. A staunch Cassandra, she predicted the disastrous outcome of an Anglo­Boer War (1899­1902) and the racist legislation and constitution of the South African Union to follow upon the war’s end. Simultaneously, she prophesied the eventual triumph of a multiracial and feminist South African democracy.

A pragmatist no less than an idealist, she set forth for consideration by the South African National Convention (1908­9) constitutional measures to realize her democratic vision, proposals that culminated in her treatise, Closer Union (1909). This document eerily anticipated current political directions in South Africa. Fearful of large, centralized nations, Schreiner advocated a fairly decentralized federal constitution, with two legislative houses, akin to the American Congress, forging equal political and economic opportunities for all races and both sexes. She appealed to white self-interest, warning whites that they could not progress amid millions of subjugated peoples and that blacks would ultimately revolt. Envisioning the new capital for the nation, she called for a

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changed site, free from local chauvinist British and Dutch traditions that alienated outsiders and also apart from commercial and financial centers that aroused anxiety over business influences exerting undue power in the new government. Concluding Closer Union, Schreiner proposed that the political leadership her new constitution demanded must understand and sympathize with all of South Africa’s peoples, prize the unique virtues of each of its people’s culture, and work to reconcile the races. Without such capacities, a South African union would “be a poor piddling thing when we [finally] have it”

As we know, the new South African constitution enabled, instead, passage of hideous racial policies. Schreiner vigorously protested. Vice-President of the Cape Women’s Enfranchisement League, Schreiner stepped

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down from her post and resigned from the group when it refused membership to black and colored women.

Since the young Schreiner had not believed in an egalitarian multiracial nation, her arrival at such a position involved complex psychological shifts. The study of her life (see my The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism) offers invigorating challenges to the psychohistorian.

Schreiner, the ninth child of her British mother and German born father, was born in a remote, mud floored Wesleyan mission house on the border of Basutoland. In her youth she suffered asthma and angina spasms, the death of her beloved younger sister, and corporal and verbal abuse for her anti­Christian beliefs and unconventional behavior. Her parents and older siblings, who called her queer and sinful for her “tomboy” and willful behavior, propelled her, if we apply Kohut’s concepts, to find alternate, self­confirming self-objects. These she found among the maligned and marginalized Boer and African women. Many of their ways of being she heralded as equal if not superior to those of English women. She also found solace in the South African landscape, the unimpeded stretches of the karoo. As a child meditating in nature, she experienced ecstatic visions of a peaceful universe, free from arbitrary judgment and cruelty. These visions inspired her lifelong efforts for societal change.

Schreiner’s turbulent adolescence as a governess included a wrenching love relationship. Early adult frustration followed as she strove to become a doctor. Her 1880s stay in England as the famous author of The Story of An African Farm (1883) had a double-edged impact on her mental health. She formed close and self-affirming ties with leading scientists, social reformers and sexologists (e.g., Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis) and championed progressive literary, political and social causes; but health and interpersonal pressures led to her breakdown. Ever resilient, she resorted to travel, writing, and in 1889 a return to South Africa to gain insight into her distress and strength to persevere.

In South Africa in the mid­1890s Schreiner faced assault by Boers and Britons, including family and friends, for becoming an outspoken opponent of all forms of social and political injustice and oppression. Her marriage in 1894 to Samuel Cron Cronwright­Schreiner (her husband honored her request that he adopt her surname) nourished her political radicalism. Despite numerous miscarriages and the death of one infant, and though her marriage later weakened, she composed important fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Dreams and Woman and Labour) to the end of her life.

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