She: A History of Adventure H. Rider Haggard

South Africa

In 1875, Haggard was sent to Cape Town, South Africa as secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, the lieutenant-governor of Natal. Haggard wrote in his memoirs of his aspirations to become a colonial governor himself, and of his youthful excitement at the prospects.[5] The major event during his time in Africa was Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. Haggard was part of the expedition that established British control over the Boer republic, and which helped raise the Union flag over the capital of Pretoria on 24 May 1877. Writing of the moment, Haggard declared:

It will be some years before people at home realise how great an act it has been, an act without parallel. I am very proud of having been connected with it. Twenty years hence it will be a great thing to have hoisted the Union Jack over the Transvaal for the first time.[6]

Haggard had advocated the British annexation of the Boer republic in a journal article entitled "The Transvaal", published in the May 1877 issue of Macmillan's Magazine. He maintained that it was Britain's "mission to conquer and hold in subjection, not from thirst of conquest but for the sake of law, justice, and order".[7] However, Boer resistance to annexation and the resulting Anglo-Zulu War caused the government in London to withdraw from pursuing sovereignty over the South African interior.[8] Haggard considered this to be a "great betrayal" by Prime Minister Gladstone and the Liberal Party, which "no lapse of time ever can solace or even alleviate".[9] He became increasingly disillusioned with the realities of colonial Africa. Victorian scholar Patrick Brantlinger notes in his introduction to She: "Little that Haggard witnessed matched the romantic depictions of 'the dark continent' in boys' adventure novels, in the press, and even in such bestselling explorers' journals as David Livingstone's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857)."[10]

During his time in South Africa, Haggard developed an intense hatred for the Boers, but also came to admire the Zulus.[11] However, his admiration of the Zulus did not extend to other African peoples; rather, he shared many of the assumptions that underlay contemporary politics and philosophy,[12] such as those expressed by James Hunt, the President of the Anthropological Society of London: "the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European...[and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans. The analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and apes, than between the European and apes."[13] The Victorian belief in the inherent inferiority of the 'darker races' made them the object of a civilising impulse in the European Scramble for Africa. Although disenchanted with the colonial effort, Haggard remained committed to this ideology. He believed that the British "alone of all the nations in the world appear to be able to control coloured races without the exercise of cruelty".[7]

Return to Britain

Rider Haggard returned to Britain in 1881. At the time, England was increasingly beset by the social and cultural anxieties that marked the fin de siècle.[14] One of the most prominent concerns was the fear of political and racial decline, encapsulated in Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895). Barely half a century earlier, Thomas Babington Macaulay had declared "the history of England" to be "emphatically the history of progress",[15] but late-Victorians living in the wake of Darwinian evolutionary theory had lost the earlier positivism of their age.[16] Uncertainty over the immutability of Britain's historical identity, what historian Tim Murray has called the "threat of the past", was manifested in the Victorian obsession with ancient times and archaeology.[17] Haggard was greatly interested in the ruins discovered at Zimbabwe in the 1870s. In 1896, he provided the preface to a monograph that detailed a history of the site, declaring:

What was the condition of this so-called empire, and what the measure of the effective dignity of its emperor, are points rather difficult to determine... now, after the lapse of two centuries... it is legitimate to hope, it seems probable even, that in centuries to come a town will once more nestle beneath these grey and ancient ruins, trading in gold as did that of the Phoenicians, but peopled by men of the Anglo-Saxon race.[18]

By the time that Haggard began writing She, society had more anxiety about the role of women. Debates regarding "The Woman Question" dominated Britain during the fin de siècle, as well as anxieties over the increasing position and independence of the "New Woman".[19] Alarm over social degeneration and societal decadence further fanned concerns over the women's movement and female liberation, which challenged the traditional conception of Victorian womanhood.[20] The role and rights of women had changed dramatically since the early part of the century, as they entered the workforce, received better education, and gained more political and legal independence. Writing in 1894, Haggard believed that marriage was the natural state for women: "Notwithstanding the energetic repudiations of the fact that confront us at every turn, it may be taken for granted that in most cases it is the natural mission of women to marry; that – always in most cases – if they do not marry they become narrowed, live a half life only, and suffer in health of body and of mind."[21] He created the character of She-who-must-be-obeyed "who provided a touchstone for many of the anxieties surrounding the New Woman in late-Victorian England".[22]