 
The imperial imaginary – the press, empire,
and the literary figure
Although Olive Schreiner was the South African writer most famous in
Britain, the novels of South Africa that England loved best were
H. Rider Haggard’s. Through Schreiner and Haggard, s and s
Britons derived a sense of southern Africa, and two more different
versions of the region would be difficult to imagine. Schreiner used
essays, allegory, polemic, and fiction to try to paint a portrait of a South
Africa that Britons would respect for its differences yet want as a
somewhat autonomous member of the empire, perhaps equivalent to
Canada. The Story of an African Farm, for all of its spirituality and
experimentation, is at heart a Victorian realist novel, set in an Africa
about which Britons were increasingly eager to learn. The novels of
Rider Haggard, however, treated the reading public to a very different
southern Africa. ‘‘King Romance’’ filled his southern Africa with adven-
ture, passion, guns, and spears. But with the coming of the Boer War,
Britons looked beyond these writers associated with southern Africa.
For an imperial war, the services of the laureate of empire were needed.
This chapter moves from the African expert Haggard to the imperial
bard himself, Rudyard Kipling, and explores the effects of the British
public’s desire for a single, Kipling-shaped, sense of empire.
Both Olive Schreiner and Arthur Conan Doyle were able to contrib-
ute to public debate about the Boer War because of their positions as
prominent literary figures. Doyle had made his name through Sherlock
Holmes and historical romances; he had no direct connection to empire
before the war. Schreiner was a South African, but beyond that, she had
no particular political or economic expertise to allow her to command
respect for her views on what she called ‘‘The Political Situation.’’ And,
of course, Doyle and Schreiner were only two among many literary
figures who wrote in the periodical press about the war. The new

collaborat[ing] with structures of civil and military power,’’ as Deirdre
David has explained (Rule Britannia ). In according authority to im-
aginative writers on questions of empire, the Victorian press and read-
ing publics were acknowledging the importance of fiction to the fact of
empire – the necessity of cultural support for the political/economic/
military venture of war. Imagination was of necessity an important
ingredient in British public perceptions of imperialism. As Laura Chris-
man has pointed out in her analysis of Rider Haggard’s adventure
fiction, ‘‘For a community whose experience of actual imperialism was
profound and asymmetrical (people were both British subjects and
objects of the political and economic complex), the fantasies produced
by this popular form may well have seemed to promise more ‘knowl-
edge’of the race’s destiny than journalistic reports from the Boer War
 Gender, race, and the writing of empire
front’’ (). What would be more natural than to trust such adventure-
authors, to read not only their fiction but their own ‘‘journalistic re-
ports’’ in search of the (imaginative) truth about empire? No public
policy issue of the time relied so heavily as did imperialism on the British
public imagining both faraway places and a prosperous future. To that
necessity for imagining, we may add the urgency of war, and of the Boer
War in particular: the impact of the late-nineteenth-century news tech-
nologies meant that British readers eagerly awaited news from the
imperial front every day.
The Boer War, the first major imperial war against a white settler
population, required that the British people be able to imagine the value
to Britain of a strange landscape most of them would never see, positing
a future of wealth and ‘‘freedom’’ for white British-descended people in
that land. Perhaps more than any other imperial conflict, this war relied
on an imperial imaginary – the myths of British imperialism as they
interacted with its material conditions. As Edward Said notes, ‘‘Neither

different kinds of periodicals, prestigious and popular, conservative and
radical, on political controversies of many sorts, from the woman
question to the Jamaica Rebellion to copyright law.¹ As Joanne Shattock
and Michael Wolff have observed, the periodical press flourished to an
unprecedented extent in the Victorian age, and ‘‘[t]he press, in all its
manifestations, became during the Victorian period the context within
which people lived and worked and thought, and from which they
derived their (in most cases quite new) sense of the outside world’’
(Victorian Periodical Press xiv–xv). This became even more the case as
literacy rates increased and newspaper prices fell, until the turn of the
century’s burgeoning of the halfpenny newspapers. Imperialism’s pres-
ence in popular culture, outlined by such cultural historians as John
MacKenzie and Anne McClintock, was bolstered by the association of
popular literary figures with empire. In most cases, the literary figures
were able to provide the authority of experience alongside the romance
of the imaginative.
When the author in question had credibility through experience of
empire, the combination of credit for the authority of the imagination
(this author is worth reading) and the authority of experience (this
person has lived in that mythical place, the empire) was formidable.
Kipling, of course, had his Indian experience; on the basis of his
popularity and his journalistic experience he was asked by Lord Roberts
to edit a troop newspaper in Bloemfontein and even allowed to partici-
pate in a battle against the Boers. Arthur Conan Doyle served as a
physician in a field hospital during the war and was knighted for his
pro-British propaganda. H. Rider Haggard had been an imperial ad-
ministrator in southern Africa during the first Boer War in , and
Olive Schreiner was South African and came to be treated in the press
as representative of a particular strand of South African thinking.
Any author who would be known to the general public as an author

material phenomenon. As Patrick Brantlinger points out, British literary
figures had been writing about empire throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, both in fiction and in non-fiction. Brantlinger cites Trollope’s
travelogues of his visits to the British colonies in the s, and his letters
to the Liverpool Mercury on colonial issues (Rule of Darkness –), for
example. But as the myth (or myths, for certainly India and Africa and
the Far East generated different myths) of imperialism grew, peaking
with the New Imperialism of the latter part of the century, the involve-
ment of literary figures in the public discourse of imperialism likewise
grew. Kipling’s poetry, Doyle’s propaganda, Haggard’s history, all
worked in support of imperial ideology during the Boer War, while
Olive Schreiner’s essays and letters attempted to intervene against the
war. The presence of these specifically literary celebrities marks the
need for turn-of-the-century imperialism to invoke the imaginary in
The imperial imaginary
support of a project that needed public support. The work of the
pro-empire literary figures could not be enough, however, to secure
imperial hegemony, and an examination of the roles of Haggard and
Kipling in the public discourse of imperialism during the Boer War
reveals the faultlines in their own presentations of the imperial ideal.
H. Rider Haggard went to South Africa in  as a nineteen-year-
old attached to the service of his father’s acquaintance Sir Henry
Bulwer, the new Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. The young Haggard
worked at Pietermaritzburg for Bulwer, in charge of entertaining, set-
ting up household staff, and other secretarial duties. When Sir
Theophilus Shepstone offered Haggard the chance to accompany him
on his mission to annex the Boer territory of the Transvaal in , the
young man eagerly accepted. Shepstone was charged with convincing
the Boers to accept annexation so they would be under British protec-
tion from possible Zulu invasion, and Haggard was thrilled to be the one

autobiography that declared that Haggard’s ‘‘South African romances
filled many a young fellow with longing to go into the wide spaces of
those lands and see their marvels for himself’’ (quoted in Katz Rider
Haggard ), as, presumably, did the works of other, lesser, imperial
adventure novelists.⁴ Imperial adventure fiction was part of the cultural
milieu described by John MacKenzie in Propaganda and Empire – a non-
stop cultural undercurrent of empire in advertisements, fiction, art, and
other artifacts of everyday life. Haggard’s fiction has been seen as
contributing to the ideological hegemony of imperialism at the end of
the century (Katz Rider Haggard, Low White Skins/Black Masks, David Rule
Britannia, McClintock Imperial Leather, Chrisman ‘‘Imperial Uncon-
scious?’’, Bristow Empire Boys, Gilbert and Gubar No Man’s Land), but his
contribution went beyond King Solomon’s Mines and She. Haggard was
also active in the Anglo-African Writers’Club, edited the economic
journal African Review, and published non-fiction about African affairs.
Haggard’s success as an imperial adventure-writer was what gave
him a platform from which to preach, and Haggard had his say on
many different topics, including the Salvation Army and agricultural
reform. By the Boer War, having made his name creating an imagin-
ary Africa, Haggard had earned the right to write about the real Africa.
Rider Haggard’s role in the creation of late-Victorian Britain’s image
of southern Africa is akin to Kipling’s role in the creation of an image
of India. Young Haggard had pleaded the case for the empire in the
early s, when it seemed that few at home supported the goals of
colonialism:
How common it is to hear men whose fathers emigrated when young, and who
have never been out of the colony, talking of England with affectionate
remembrance as ‘‘home’’!
It would, however, be too much to suppose that a corresponding affection for
colonies and colonists exists in the bosom of the home public. The ideas of the

frustrated him as he watched the build-up to war in , and Haggard’s
publication of the relevant portions of Cetywayo and his White Neighbours as
The Last Boer War is an ‘‘I told you so’’ aimed at the British colonial
administrators who failed to learn from the experience of Haggard’s
southern African chief Sir Theophilus Shepstone.
The ‘‘Author’s Note’’ to Haggard’s The Last Boer War explains the
value in  of reading a history of the Boer War of . Haggard
asserts that ‘‘any who are interested in the matter may read and find in
the tale of  the true causes of the war of ’’ (vi). Haggard’s aim in
republishing the book is to justify the second Boer War while blaming
the British government for not learning the lessons of the first. The
message is this: had Britain taken a tough line with the Boers in and after
, there would have been no need to do so in . The problem in
South Africa, says this romance-writer and former colonial functionary,
is one of character. The Boer is lazy, corrupt, sneaky, and wants most of
all ‘‘to live in a land where the necessary expenses of administration are
paid by somebody else’’ (ix). The Briton, however, has different priori-
 Gender, race, and the writing of empire
ties in ruling southern Africa: ‘‘a redistribution of the burden of tax-
ation, the abolition of monopolies, the punishment of corruption, the
just treatment of the native races, [and] the absolute purity of the
courts’’ (x). It is a list reminiscent of Ignosi’s promises that he will rule
Kukuanaland justly and fairly in King Solomon’s Mines: ‘‘When I sit upon
the seat of my fathers, bloodshed shall cease in the land. No longer shall
ye cry for justice to find slaughter . . . No man shall die save he who
offendeth against the laws. The ‘‘eating up’’ of your kraals [taxation]
shall cease; each shall sleep secure in his own hut and fear not, and
justice shall walk blind throughout the land’’ (). What Ignosi learned
from his years of living with white men in southern Africa was the best of
the values of the white man, that is, the Briton. Restored to his throne in

their history and proceedings a special study, I venture through your columns
at this crisis in African affairs, perhaps the gravest I remember, to make an
earnest appeal to my fellow-countrymen.⁷
Haggard invokes his experience in South Africa as well as his ‘‘special
study’’ of the Boers to back up his claims to the attention of readers. But
it is not only as an African veteran that he appeals; he also makes a
modest allusion to his ‘‘profession,’’ with which, he can assume, every
Times reader will be familiar.
In a later letter about the war, Haggard is more direct about the
authority of literature; he states, ‘‘Within the last year I have addressed
the public thrice upon matters connected with the Transvaal.’’⁸ Those
three occasions, he notes, were a letter to The Times, a speech to the
Anglo-African Writers’Club, and the publication of his latest novel,
Swallow, a Tale of the Great Trek. The three genres work together to
influence ‘‘the public’’ to whom Haggard refers, and he weights the
novel equally with the others. Perhaps fiction would be taken seriously
as a form of public address on political matters of other sorts – certainly
literature had intervened in public matters before the Boer War – but
the conjunction of speechwriting, history-writing, journalism, and
novel-writing we find in Rider Haggard was a combination in which the
imaginary and the empirical reinforced each other. Haggard’s presenta-
tion of himself as an Africanist depends, in the end, as much on his
fiction as on his historical and political knowledge. What is curious,
however, is the very different versions of the Transvaal presented in
Haggard’s Boer War fiction and non-fiction.

Swallow, a Tale of the Great Trek is not at all a tale of the Great Trek,
although it does focus on Boers. Only a tiny part of its action-packed
plot hinges on the Trek, but, amidst the trials and tribulations of the
rather characterless main character, the novel does in fact reinforce a

British rule and set off beyond the Vaal River to establish a new
homeland: ‘‘in those times there was no security for us Boers – we were
robbed, we were slandered, we were deserted. Our goods were taken
and we were not compensated; the Kaffirs stole our herds, and if we
resisted them we were tried as murderers; our slaves were freed, and we
were cheated of their value, and the word of a black man was accepted
before our solemn oath upon the Bible’’ (). Such sympathy towards
the Boers seems far afield from the sentiments Haggard had expressed
in the South African on  October : ‘‘[I]f a Boer were asked to define
his idea of a perfect Government, he would reply, ‘‘A Government to
which it is not necessary to pay taxes’. . . Where then is the money to
come from? Ask the Boer again, and his response will be a ready one –
from the natives.’’⁹ With hostilities with the Boers already building in
early , a novel sympathetic to them was not particularly well timed;
it was published in the same year as Haggard’s The Last Boer War, which
was much less sympathetic. But behind Swallow’s romance plot and
likeable Boer narrator, the book leaves the reader feeling that British
The imperial imaginary
control of southern Africa is inevitable, if perhaps sad for old-style
Afrikaners. Vrouw Botmar says,
to this day I am very angry with my daughter Suzanne, who, for some reason or
other, would never say a hard word of the accursed British Government – or
listen to one if she could help it.
Yet, to be just, that same Government has ruled us well and fairly, though I
could never agree with their manner of dealing with the natives, and our family
has grown rich under its shadow. ()
The more sensible and liberal-minded Suzanne was more pro-British
than her mother and her father (whose own father had died at Slagter’s
Nek). And even Vrouw Botmar herself has to admit that the British have
been fair to the Boers, even while being excessively generous to Africans.

committed in the administration of areas of southern Africa, and it is
there that we can reconcile the politics of Swallow with Haggard’s other
writings. From Slagter’s Nek on, British misunderstanding of the Boers
had caused resentment and alienation, and resulted in needless confron-
tation in a region that, in Haggard’s view, should have been under
strong but humane British control all along. Haggard refuses to go along
with the pro-Boers who attribute the move toward war to a defense of
mining capitalists, but asserts instead that the war is also important to
‘‘our national repute amidst the natives of South Africa,’’ who are
‘‘watching very keenly.’’¹² In his sense of the history of African-imperial
relations Haggard was well beyond any other literary figure of the
period, and well beyond many political figures as well. As Norman
Etherington points out, Haggard understood the nuances of many kinds
of relations in the region – Swallow, Etherington notes, gives a detailed
portrait of the chaos that resulted for small tribes caught in ‘‘the
crushing’’ that followed the rise of the Zulu monarchy (Rider Haggard ).
This detailed description of the history of Africans in the region, for
Etherington, ‘‘rather than the fragmentary references to the Great Boer
Trek, makes Swallow one of the best historical romances to come out of
South Africa’’ (Rider Haggard ). Nevertheless, it is the Boer story that
frames all in Swallow, and it is unlikely that the forced migration of
smaller African tribes was the aspect of the novel to which Haggard was
referring when he called The Times readers’attention to the story.
Haggard presented the story in terms of its relevance to Boer-British
relations, with African history relevant insofar as it helped to motivate
Boer and British actions.
Swallow ends in the s, with a postscript from the transcriber of the
tale, the narrator’s great-granddaughter, Suzanne Kenzie. The basic
romance of the story has been a South African one, the obstacles to the
happiness of a Boer girl and her Scottish lover, but we finish the tale in a

on ‘‘empire,’’ took a much different approach. The Boer War’s intersec-
tion with the New Journalism produced a natural place for Kipling. The
Daily Mail published his sketches from a hospital train and the shame-
lessly sentimental ‘‘The Absent-Minded Beggar,’’ The Times published
his polemical articles on South Africa, the Daily Express his Boer War
fiction, and the army his contributions to the Bloemfontein Friend.The
imperial imaginary demanded the participation of empire’s prime
spokesperson in this troubling imperial war. But while Kipling produced
much poetry, fiction, and polemic about the war, he was unable to
produce what was in effect being demanded of him from all sides – a
coherent, unified empire.
Edward Said focuses on imperialism’s place in the works of ‘‘Ruskin,
Tennyson, Meredith, Dickens, Arnold, Thackeray, George Eliot, Car-
lyle, Mill – in short, the full roster of significant Victorian writers’’
(Culture ), and on the ways the British imperial identity affected the
world view of such figures as they came to ‘‘identify themselves with this
power’’ () that was imperialism. Significant writers, for Said, are not
the writers being read by the masses in the circulating libraries, such as
 Gender, race, and the writing of empire