As an adolescent, I was a passionate enthusiast of novels by Sir Henry Rider Haggard. I read everything that was in the collection of the McDonald Avenue public library. Not only King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and She and Allan's Wife and Ayesha, but also some of the non-"African" adventures as well. I particularly recall Eric Brighteyes and Montezuma's Daughter. Yesterday I read King Solomon's Mines (1885) for the first time in fifty years and I couldn't be more unhappy that I did so. It's a toxic mixture of imperialism, brutality, racism, sexism, classism — a compendium of ethnocentric Victoriana gathered into a single atavistic novel. I'm familiar with the academic doctrine that to judge the past by contemporary liberal values is to commit the fallacy of "presentism," but I'm sorry, friends, I'm mortified that I ever, even as a youngster, could have fallen for this appalling mishmash. How could I have tolerated the paternalistic Englishmen and the child-like natives?
Here are two representative incidents from King Solomon's Mines. The first: three Englishman are tramping through Africa. They come upon a herd of elephants. They shoot and kill them. No explanation, no justification, no reason. The second: one of the Englishmen takes a liking to a young woman named Foulata. She dies, sacrificing herself, as is the custom in imperialist fiction, to save English lives. Rider Haggard's comment: "I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, 'Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?'"
I shouldn't have tampered with my fifty-year-old memories. But I've made a resolution: I'm going to wait fifty more years before I read another novel by Rider Haggard.
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