The best books on white Africans

Published in 1883, this novel was rediscovered as a classical account of ‘first-wave feminism,’ with Schreiner challenging the then taken-for-granted assumptions about marriage, femininity, motherhood, and gender inequality. Her main characters are white women, who are given ample opportunity to excoriate Victorian patriarchy and fake chivalry. Black characters are barely visible and, given her progressive feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist views, some will be disappointed that she does not engage meaningfully with Black Africans. The book has resonance for me because, although I am two generations down the line, Olive Schreiner was a close friend of my grandfather’s sister Betty, while my own grandmother, Lucy Molteno, was the last person to speak to her on the telephone late one night – she was found dead the next morning.

Camus was born in Algeria of European ancestry but was by no means privileged (his mother was a cleaner). On immigrating to France, he joined the French Resistance against the Nazis. In The Plague, set in the city of Oran (Algeria), he probes how the townspeople react to the outbreak of a deadly virus. With uncanny resemblances to the reactions to Covid-19, some are terrified, some fatalistic, some point fingers of blame, and some organize and resist – a response that echoes Camus’s preference for a ‘rebellion’ on behalf of humanity and social justice. Albert Camus was popular while I was working as a ballet dancer in Paris in the early 1960s when the Algerian war of independence was raging, and Europe was losing its colonial possessions one after the other.

This memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s childhood is a hilarious take on her family’s experience of farming in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a refreshing reminder of what it was like to live and grow up as a member of the white minority intent on remaining in power during a fast-changing, violent, and deeply unstable period in the history of southern Africa. It is a wonderful portrayal of some of the traumas of growing up with a witty, mad, and heavy-drinking mother who had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child, a chain-smoking father who farmed by day and fought terrorists by night, and a glamorous older sister. It is a book that keeps you laughing or crying the whole way through.

This great novel is set at the beginning of formal apartheid in South Africa (the apartheid government was elected four months after its publication in 1948). Paton is credited with successfully crafting a convincing Black character, Stephen Kumalo, a rural priest whose son murdered a white man known for his advocacy of racial justice. Paton’s novel is a remarkably prescient account of the racial tensions that were to accelerate in apartheid South Africa. His work is personal to me mainly because he was an important opponent of the apartheid regime and one of the founders of the Liberal Party of South Africa, which in those early days seemed a rather radical position for whites to be pursuing.

This book, which was published in 1952, is about a young white woman living in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I loved the way in which it captured the rather trapped feelings of a very young woman eager to escape the constraints of what she was experiencing as a highly restricted and narrow life. I always looked at Doris Lessing’s writings in a rather personal way because her daughter, Jean Wisdom, was in my class at school in Cape Town. Although we knew that her mother was a writer of some note, we had no inkling that she would ultimately win a Nobel prize for literature