SOURCE: Ogede, Ode. “An Early Image of Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Society: Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2000): 251-56.

In the following essay, Ogede argues that Schreiner's 1883 novel anticipates a tradition of African protest writing that includes the works of Bessie Head, Alex La Guma, and Nadine Gordimer, and that therefore Schreiner should be considered an anti-apartheid writer.

If we had to identify one work which indubitably envisaged the collapse of apartheid long before it made any sense to entertain such an idea, it would be The Story of an African Farm, an intensely lyrical novel which shook the literary world when its white author Olive Schreiner published it in 1883, drawing world attention to, and then foreseeing the end of, racial segregation even as it was taking root in what was later to be known as South Africa. As the...