Jane Rosenthal Chameleon on the Gallows by C Louis Leipoldt (Human & Rousseau)
This novel, written in 1929, was the first of what CLouis Leipoldt conceived of as a trilogy. This is the first time it has been published, in conjunction with a new paperback of its sequel, Stormwrack (first published in 1980; both were edited by Stephen Gray).
The setting is the valley of the Olifants River, the Cederberg and the Village (Clanwilliam) shortly after the Second British Occupation. Here Everardus Nolte, who has suddenly come into money, buys a farm, assumes a new name, and is able to leave behind him his old existence as a harness maker as well as an incident which has blighted his life.
Leipoldt describes a quaint and archaic world, in some ways an idyllic society. A modern reader will be aware of absences in the fabric of society as “the natives”, as he confusingly calls all people of darker skin colour, appear only peripherally. Interestingly, when Nolte arrives as a newcomer, one of the questions which concern the locals is whether or not he is “one of us”, meaning a white man. This is something of a red herring when it comes to what it is that might really make Nolte unacceptable in the valley.
Leipoldt gives us a clue as to what the real question is in the title, which encapsulates in a casually poetic way two of the widely diverse issues affecting Nolte’s life: capital punishment and adaptation to change symbolised by this tiny indigenous reptile. Leipoldt, way ahead of his time, considers in some detail the moral implications of the death sentence and its effect on the community.
The novel opens with an interview between Nolte and a magistrate who is in some doubt as to whether he should shake his hand, now that Nolte is a person of means and no longer so easy to ostracise. This is the first of several such “dialogue” scenes, many of them sharply comic, in which Leipoldt reveals a relentlessly exact talent for catching socially determined styles of speech.
The mission station of Neckarthal (clearly Wupperthal, founded by Leipoldt’s grandfather) is drawn in some detail and its influence on all the people of the valley contrasted with that of the churches of the white settlers, the Dutch Reformed and the Anglican.
These perceptive episodes are interspersed with passages in which Leipoldt seems to have lost interest and resorts to reporting the narrative. Yet there is more than enough merit in this novel to sustain the reader, presenting a microcosm of South African life at the point at which it was to elect its first Parliament.
Stormwrack continues the story a generation later, when all that has been achieved by way of fusing Dutch and English settlers into white South Africans is torn apart by the Anglo-Boer South African War.