Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, PhD, Wabash College

Stage Irish and Boorish Boers

In Olive Schreiner’s "The Story of An African Farm" (1883), Bonaparte Blenkins, a self-proclaimed Irishman, represents what we now call the “Stage Irish” stereotype; he is explosive, hypocritical, and lazy. Schreiner, a South African writer, took an active interest in anti-imperial and anti-British writing and activism, and she was sympathetic toward the Irish cause.  Why, then, does the main villain in her novel enact cultural stereotypes of the belligerent and ignorant Hibernian? And why, despite Schreiner’s initial support of the Boers, is the Dutch woman in the novel grotesquely ignorant as she pursues a husband?

The Irish — many of them judges and politicians — served in the British colonial service on the sub-continent. Therefore, despite their subaltern status back home, they often occupied the roles of the colonizers and guardians of patriarchy in South Africa—the roles distasteful to Schreiner’s feminist and egalitarian sensibilities. I argue that Schreiner’s political sympathies in "The Story of an African Farm" are rooted in her fervent rejection of androcentric and faith-driven nationalism. Bonaparte and Tant’ Sannie are parodied because they represent what was most distasteful to free-thinking Schreiner: an apotheosis of gendered nationalist symbols of fertile Volksmoeder (“mother of the nation”) and a domineering, sanctimonious overseer of stolen land.