Novel
Turbott Wolfe
William Plomer · 1925
Synopsis
Dying of a fever, Turbott Wolfe, a former trader and painter, looks back on the years spent running a store at Ovuzane, in Lembuland. He befriends his Black customers and clashes with the white settlers established there for generations. Around him, Mabel van der Horst marries Zachary Msomi, a Zulu intellectual, to the settlers' indignation, and Wolfe and his friends see in the mixing of peoples the future of the continent, which a small association calls Young Africa.
Context
Begun by its author at about the age of twenty-one, the manuscript left Zululand for the Hogarth Press at the beginning of 1925; Leonard Woolf accepted it two months later. The Ovuzane trading store is based on the one his family kept at Entumeni. In England, Desmond MacCarthy praised it; at home, the white press called it wicked and pornographic, and the Durban library kept it under lock and key. Long out of print, it has been reissued in Johannesburg by Ad Donker, accompanied by essays by his former companions on the magazine and by Nadine Gordimer.
Who it is for
A novel in English, told by a dying narrator looking back on his years at a trading post; its subject shocked its first South African readers.
Prizes and reception
Scandal in the author's country for its theme of love and marriage between Black and White people; Nadine Gordimer placed it alongside Conrad.