‘It will yet bathe this land in blood’: Olive Schreiner’s opposition to injustice in South Africa, through her letters

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) gained public prominence on the publication of her novel, The Story Of An African Farm, in 1883. At the time she was living in Britain where she was active in radical intellectual and political circles – including those working towards votes for women. She returned to South Africa in 1889 and spent the next 24 years living and working there.

A vocal opponent of British imperialism in Southern Africa, Schreiner was also active in the emerging South African women’s suffrage movement. She regularly corresponded with her friends and political associates in Britain, Holland and South Africa and it is through these letters that Dr Dampier has identified how Schreiner differed from many of her contemporaries through her stance on anti-imperialism, race and universal suffrage.

“Schreiner was a key figure in the South African suffrage movement who played an important role in forging political, social and intellectual links between the embryonic South African suffrage organisations and the wider global movement,” says Dr Dampier. “Some writers – including the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer – have accused Schreiner of prioritising her own liberation over the wider injustice in the country, but by reading her letters, it’s clear this wasn’t the case.”

Writing in Women’s History Review, Dr Dampier quotes from Schreiner’s correspondence, to emphasise the writer’s position on universal suffrage:

‘I am a one adult one vote man. I believe that every adult inhabiting a land irrespective of race, sex, wealth or poverty should have the vote; & that it is a power more needed by the poor, the weak, & feeble than the wealthy or strong.’

In 1909, Schreiner attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch a Citizen’s Franchise League, to campaign for equal votes for all. When in 1911, the leadership of the Women’s Enfranchisement Association of the Union decided to campaign for South African women’s suffrage on the same racial grounds as that afforded to men, Schreiner resigned from the organisation, explaining her position on racially segregated suffrage in her letters:

“I believe it will yet bathe this land in blood, unless it is done away with. I could not do anything that would strengthen it, as it would be strengthened if women were enfranchised on the same evil & rotten basis.”

She was also remarkably prescient of the grim future South Africa faced in following a racially segregated path and how tough the fight for equal rights for the black majority would prove:

“… in fighting in South Africa for justice to the native we are fighting a battle in which there is first a long dark terrible descent of years, into a depth of oppression & wrong before the slow ascent towards better things ever begins.”

Dr Dampier says: “Schreiner’s letters were not just about her politics, but were often used as political tools, as she encouraged her correspondents to pass them on and to repeat the views within them. Her letters show clearly that Schreiner was firmly convinced that women’s enfranchisement should never come at the expense of further black disenfranchisement, although in the event this is precisely what happened.”

“‘Going on with our little movement in the hum drum-way which alone is possible in a land like this’: Olive Schreiner and suffrage networks in Britain and South Africa, 1905–1913” by Helen Dampier is published in Women’s History Review: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1114319