[Waiting For the Barbarians is] a grimly thoughtful book, impelled by a coherent saeva indignatio. Set in an imaginary colonial territory …, [it] is actually an allegory of recent events in Southern Africa. The hero is a humane minor official who worries about his relationship with the imperial state of which he is part. When a brutal colonel from the 'Third Bureau' arrives to start torturing native suspects, the sense of involuntary complicity becomes intolerable.

A platonic love affair with a native girl deepens his sympathy for the subject peoples and prompts a reconsideration of the concept of barbarism. Eventually, after a long trip into the desert, he returns to find himself an enemy of the state. Thereafter events can be read either as a retrospective account of the end of empire in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, or as a covert prophecy for the future of South Africa itself. Once...