Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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South Africa's literature is remarkable for the fact that its women writers are better than the men. The best South African biography is Sarah Gertrude Millin's Cecil Rhodes; the best novels, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Pauline Smith's The Beadle (1926). Publication of The Fire-Raisers brings another woman novelist into the front rank of South African fiction...
Jean Heather Marris Murray, daughter of a Scottish emigrant father and a South African mother, was born in Pretoria. An Oxford scholarship took her to England, where she worked as a free-lance journalist throughout World War II. The Fire-Raisers is her first novel but is written with a skill and confidence that make it close to the most impressive story yet about the South Africa of Malanism and apartheid...
...Author Murray, Malanism is not a problem of politics or Anglo-Dutch disharmony; it is just one of the symptoms of a chronic disease which she calls "the African sickness"-a complicated ailment that has become so "normal" in South Africa that those who suffer from it are usually the last to know...
...Enclosing Mountains. Author Murray's scene is a South African valley, bounded by mountains and the sea, and speckled with the houses and shacks of Dutch, English, French and Kaffir Africans. On the surface, it is like any other valley in the civilized world-"a poor community," says old Jacob Fieldfare, "[where] someone is always frowning over a bill, or scraping to buy a new coat. We tell lies and gossip, our faces are drawn with longing for possessions and qualities which we do not have: power, personality, happiness, electric light, golf championships, more brandy, exciting friends, fame, white...
...people of the valley are suffering from one form or another of African sickness. Etienne Cavecon, a young schoolmaster, has the disease in its most benign form, "indolence." For Etienne, every day passes like every other, leaving him untouched, unchanged, unmoved, like a man asleep. His foster father Jacob, with whom Etienne lives, has spent his time observing life with such quiet detachment that he has "reached his sixtieth year without ever having had a serious illness or an enduring sorrow." Vigorous pioneers built the home of Jacob and Etienne, but in four generations the family has "shrunk...