posted on 06 Dec 2023

Rereading Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories

In 1973, Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories were published in two volumes as This Was the Old Chief’s Country and The Sun Between their Feet. At that time I had almost certainly never heard of Doris Lessing much less read anything by her, but those two books made an indelible impression: I remember precisely where and when I first saw them and I thought they radiated a mysterious intellectual glamour. 

Lessing was born in Iran where her father worked at the Imperial Bank of Persia, but in 1925 he left this job and moved the family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he bought a thousand acres of land for maize farming. This is where Lessing would grow up and eventually marry and live until 1943 when she left her husband and family and moved to London to make an independent life as a writer. 

The stories collected here were written throughout the 1950s and 60s and constitute all the African stories Lessing wrote up until about 1970; most are set more or less contemporaneously with their time of writing; a few are set earlier in the 1930s and 40s. Rereading some of them now I am struck again by their paradoxical beauty. For while depicting a white-dominated, late-colonial settler society which Lessing clearly opposed and which within a few decades would be swept away by a revolutionary national liberation movement, they are beautiful stories and not remotely the kind of didactic, sociological fiction one might imagine Lessing producing. They pulse with life and are profound, humane stories possessed of a Chekhovian gravity and complexity. It seems to me that they also share the same kind of lightness and transparency that Chekhov achieves and as with Chekhov, one reads them almost unaware that one is reading ‘stories’; we seem simply to be reading reality.

Lessing writes as much about the fault lines within white settler society – wealth, class, background, social status – as she does those that exist in wider colonial society. Consequently, certain ‘types’ recur in her stories: impoverished gentleman farmers who are one bad harvest away from bankruptcy; embittered, ageing wives whose life in an alien landscape is one of inescapable loneliness and disillusionment, ignored by husbands whose lives are consumed by the struggle of farming; lonely, exhausted couples, desperate for both companionship and labour are isolated by their own innate prejudices and snobbery – the white assistant managers recruited in desperation almost invariably turn out to be ‘not their kind’, and the rigid social structures of discrimination make meaningful relationships with black society impossible. This very particular colonial milieu that Lessing wrote about is one she knew intimately from the inside. 

As Chekhov did with imperial Russia, Lessing made of colonial Africa and the historical moment in which it existed a universal place in which all of life could be witnessed. And thanks to her skill and her crystalline prose, each story is fully and convincingly inhabited by its characters, by the incidents she describes and by Africa itself – a tangible presence, never less than real, but also rich in myth and metaphor.

I have never really managed to get to grips with Lessing’s novels, especially the later, more experimental work, but her African short stories are remarkable, and had she written nothing else she would still have been deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature that was awarded her in 2007. The stories are currently in print in paperback in two volumes published by Flamingo.

 

Alun Severn

December 2023