Douglas Blackburn (1857–1929)

Douglas Blackburn was an English journalist who spent about 20 years working in the Transvaal and Natal around 1900. He published half a dozen satirical novels about South African life and the Boer War. Prior to that — Wikipedia tells us — he had been involved in a fake telepathy scam in Britain.

This was his first novel, which appeared in London in 1898, had a second edition in 1908, and then disappeared until the South African Universities Press produced a reprint of the first edition in 1978.

The book is presented as a vindication of the disgraced Transvaal public official Piet Prinsloo by his son-in-law, Sarel Erasmus, who takes us through the many hilarious scandals of Piet's life as landdrost (rural magistrate), veldkornet (a uniquely South African role, something between a militia sergeant and a part-time policeman), and finally mining commissioner. Sarel aims to show us how it was always the fault of someone else, but, needless to say, all this does is to demonstrate to us that his accident-prone father-in-law was not only graspingly venal, but also ignorant and gullible. But only slightly more so than everyone else in the amateurish Boer republic, from Paul Kruger down.

It's blatantly prejudiced, often to the point of being simply offensive, and quite clumsily written, but there are some very funny anecdotes scattered through the story that make it almost worthwhile. But probably the main reason anyone would want to look at this kind of book is to get a feel for British attitudes to the Boers during the mining boom and the lead-up to armed conflict. If Blackburn's readers believed even a tenth of what he was telling them, they would think of Boers as semi-literate, ignorant, corrupt, lazy, hypocritical about religion, addicted to cheating rooineks and kaffirs out of their money and labour, and to whipping the latter. No wonder the brothers and cousins of those rooineks went to war so happily.

More positively, it's also interesting to see how Herman Charles Bosman took essentially this same cheap and nasty comic formula, a couple of decades later, inserted subtlety and emotional complexity, and turned it into something that can still be read with pleasure a century later.… (mehr)