Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889–1968)

I didn't realise it until I started reading it, but this goes together with Millin's earlier novel about Coenraad Buys, King of the Bastards (1949), which overlaps with it in time. I'll have to look for that: apparently she got Jan Smuts to write the foreword, which gives an indication of where she must have stood in mid-century South Africa.

Johannes van der Kemp (1747-1811) was one of the many "stranger than fiction" figures who pop up in Southern African history. An Enlightenment scholar at Leiden who became a libertine army officer, got chucked out of the service for marrying outside his own social class, qualified as a doctor in Scotland, and then, late in life, experienced a religious conversion and was one of the first group of Evangelical missionaries sent out to the Cape by the London Missionary Society, where he became a thorn in the side of the Dutch and (later) the British colonial authorities, as well as antagonising the Boers. Most improbably of all, he found common ground with the rebellious and anarchistic patriarch Coenraad Buys when the two met at the court of the Xhosa king Gaika (modern spelling Ngqika: Buys had recently become his stepfather).

In turning van der Kemp's life into an historical novel, Millin is clearly fascinated by the strong passions that drove the twists and turns of his improbable career, with its odd mixture of Enlightenment humanism, evangelical Christianity, and powerful sexual impulses. And she enjoys his provocation of the racist sensibilities of the Boers, and has fun imagining the three strong female characters she brings into his life: Susanna, the married woman who becomes the mother of his daughter; Helena, his working-class first wife; and Sally, the mixed-race teenager he marries in his old age. But I don't think it entirely succeeds: Millin is just a bit too polite, perhaps, or hasn't quite made her mind up what it is that is really driving van der Kemp. Probably she finds van der Kemp's absolute opposition to racism and slavery more important than the sincerity or hypocrisy of his religious beliefs, and she doesn't want to obscure that by offending either her religious readers or the atheist ones.

An interesting period piece, anyway.… (altro)