Taking time off from the Battlefield Tourist Route, Stephen Gray hunts down the bestselling Rider Haggard
Granted, with perpetual sellers of his like King Solomon’s Mines of 1885, She and so on for 60 more rattling adventures, Henry Rider Haggard put South Africa on the reader’s map of the world. His timing was right. He introduced to the newly literate, cresting Victorian Empire those Boers (who beat their men one-to-six at Majuba), those Zulus (who wiped them out at Isandhlwana), and even those sturdy emigrant British colonials like himself.
But the point of my journey was to determine what traces this literary forefather had left behind on our South African map. Stephen Coan, the scholar who is arts editor of The Natal Witness, has edited Haggard’s Diary of an African Journey (University of Natal Press) for first-time publication. Perhaps interest in that unfashionable pioneer is due to stir afresh, let’s say at least among the boyish action faction.
Coan’s tome is certainly an eye-opener. He has meticulously edited, with an apt apparatus of introduction, notes, maps, pictures and a fine list of modern equivalents, the heartfelt report that Haggard wrote up in 1914 while travelling back through Southern Africa. He was elderly by then and recently knighted, returning 33 years later to his old haunts, greeted everywhere by the press and public as a celebrity.
But his real task was a backstage one. Serving on a royal commission, he had given up his gentlemanly way of life in Norfolk and the desk at which he became an immensely wealthy graphomaniac. He was to investigate what is still our most sore issue: land distribution.
To his enduring credit, he was repeatedly shocked by the effects of the 1913 Land Act. To see able and ingenious agriculturalists of all kinds deprived of a rural livelihood went deeply against his nobler instincts. He foresaw that World War I, which brought his investigation to a hasty close, would merely darken the future further with its deadly industry.
Haggard had actually been the gung-ho youth who ran up the flag in Pretoria with the British annexation of 1877. Now, in 1914, he returns to it as the capital of a whole new country. Privately, Coan reveals, he visits the grave of the friend’s wife who first seduced him. Better for all that their joint offspring had perished too, Haggard concludes rather crassly.
In Pretoria today there is still this souvenir: Rider Haggard Street in the shadow of Unisa. But of its famous “Jess’s Cottage”, in which their illicit trysts occurred, there is no trace. Instead of a great tourist attraction with a clucking farmyard and vines, a KFC outlet.
In Northern KwaZulu-Natal near Newcastle is Haggard’s Hilldrop House, the national monument where the terms of the peace were thrashed out before the Transvaal retroceded in 1881. Although Eugene O’Neil’s Cottage nearby, where the actual treaty was signed, is disgracefully rundown, Hilldrop House is in great nick. Now a well-managed guest farm, it is superbly restored within lavish gardens of poinsettia and frangipani.
At Hilldrop they certainly have a cheerful way of fielding the phone: “Rider Haggard’s Hilldrop House, how may we help you?” Haggard wept when he found it intact 85 years ago, because he had invested his all there once, in more hopeful days. Now they speak as if he had just knocked out the pipe of his own tobacco on the fender of the blazing fireplace.
From Hilldrop one may visit the reconstructed Fort Amiel, where even the real-life bloodstained battle-axe, the scalper of enemies by tens, of the fictional Umslopagaas (old spelling), is proudly on display. There is much other Haggard memorabilia which ties up with the new book, especially to do with his young son, Jock. His wife had to be delivered of him in a tent outside, so as not to disturb Paul Kruger and Hercules Robinson, who were dining in the rented- out parts of their residence.
If one plans to follow the return of Rider Haggard through his engrossing private African diary (there is also a Haggard link at Ghost Mountain Inn near Mkuze), perhaps one should recall that once some local critics, such as Oliver Walker in his Trek columns, considered Haggard had indeed created South African literature. He did open up that plodding Protestant style that would so move the world in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.
Later South African authors derided Haggard. Roy Campbell longed for a period when the Haggards rode no more. Sarah Gertrude Millin remarked he wrote by the light that never was. Edward Davis used to call his perpetual mouthpiece, hunter Allan Quatermain – well, that Quarterbrain. And as for the immortal, half-dressed She-Who- Must-Be-Obeyed, staple of the Killarney Film Studios in Johannesburg: the parodists soon had her down as She-Who-Must-By-Now- Be-Decayed.
Start a Haggard holiday at Hilldrop, with its avenue of tamarisks leading up to a boulder-strewn koppie, its lawn that is a hadeda runway and its genial bar. By the pool, open Coan’s mammoth assembly at chapter four. As the old codger arrives back at this splendid Rooi Point estate, before touring all of Zululand in copious detail, one almost gets to liking him. He was so conscientious.
But also note this: for all his effort, in a fit of depression on that stoep Haggard once was persuaded that Natal was not going to work out at all. So he abandoned it. He packed up his waggon for Vancouver.
For information on Hilldrop, phone Lelanie Theron or Andre Joubert at (034) 315-2098