The Story of an African Farm
Glossary
B
- Bonaparte Blenkins
- A ragged Englishman with a pendulous red nose who arrives on foot at the farm claiming kinship with Napoleon and a colorful, invented past. Otto's charity persuades a skeptical Tant Sannie to take him in, setting in motion the con-man's rise through the household by flattery, fabrication, and performance.
- Related: Otto, Tant Sannie
- Bushman Paintings
- Faded red-and-black rock art of oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and fantastical beasts, preserved under a shelving rock on the kopje and attributed to the vanished San ("Bushman") people who once lived on the land. Em, Lyndall, and Waldo sit beneath them during the great drought, and the children muse on the unknown painters, making the paintings an early emblem of vanished lives and unanswered questions the novel returns to.
- Related: The Kopje, Waldo
D
- Doss
- Waldo's small dog, present through much of his childhood and adolescence on the farm. When Waldo leaves to see something of the world, he entrusts Doss to Lyndall's keeping, and the dog becomes a quiet thread of continuity between the two of them across their separation.
- Related: Waldo, Lyndall
E
- Em
- The yellow-haired, freckled daughter of Tant Sannie's late second husband, and stepdaughter to Tant Sannie. Gentle, practical, and unassuming beside her cousin Lyndall's brilliance, Em stands to inherit the farm and grows into the novel's figure of quiet domestic constancy.
- Related: Lyndall, Tant Sannie, Gregory Rose
G
- Gregory Rose
- A self-admiring young Englishman who arrives to take up a tenancy on the farm, given to writing florid letters home about his own feelings. He quickly settles on gentle Em as his "affinity" and becomes engaged to her, before Lyndall's return unsettles his sense of where his devotion truly lies.
- Related: Em, Lyndall
- Gregory's Search
- Gregory Rose's long, single-minded journey to find Lyndall after she leaves the farm, culminating in a sick-room at a country hotel where his devotion leads him past every ordinary boundary of pride and convention to stay at her side. The episode inverts the novel's expectations of gender and self-sacrifice.
- Related: Gregory Rose, Lyndall
H
- Hottentot
- A period term used in the novel for the Khoikhoi (Khoisan) people, as with the "yellow Hottentot maid" who attends Tant Sannie. Like other racial terminology in the text, it reflects 1880s colonial usage rather than the novel's own moral vocabulary, and it is now considered an offensive and outdated ethnic label, generally superseded by "Khoikhoi" or "Khoisan."
- Related: Kaffer, Tant Sannie
K
- Kaffer
- A period term used throughout the novel's 1880s South African setting to refer to Black African farm laborers and servants, as in the "Kaffer huts" clustered near the homestead's sheep kraals. The word reflects colonial-era Cape Dutch usage of the time and is now recognized as a racial slur; it is preserved here only as the text's own historical vocabulary, not as a term of description.
- Related: Hottentot, The Karoo
- Kraal
- A stone- or thorn-walled enclosure used to pen livestock overnight, standing near the homestead alongside the farm laborers' huts. The kraals are a fixture of the farm's daily rhythm of herding and shearing.
- Related: Ostrich Farming, The Karoo
L
- Lyndall
- Em's orphaned cousin, raised alongside her on the farm — small, strikingly beautiful, and precociously sharp-tongued from childhood. Even as a girl she chafes against the narrowness of the life laid out for her and speaks of leaving the farm to see the wider world.
- Related: Em, Waldo, Tant Sannie
- Lyndall's Stranger
- A tall, keen-eyed traveler who arrives by night and waits for Lyndall in the old cabin. In the novel's most unflinching conversation, she explains to him — plainly and without illusion — exactly why she will not marry him, even as their bond continues on her own terms.
- Related: Lyndall, Lyndall's Terms
- Lyndall's Terms
- The startling condition Lyndall sets when Gregory Rose lays his devotion at her feet on the kopje: she will take his name in marriage and nothing else it customarily implies. The scene turns marriage itself into an object of negotiation and critique rather than romantic destiny.
- Related: Gregory Rose, Lyndall, The Kopje
- Lyndall's Views on Women
- The sustained critique Lyndall delivers to Waldo after returning from four years at finishing school — polished, restless, and scornful of the narrow education and marriage market it prepared her for. She argues that women are trained from childhood for ornamental dependence rather than real work or thought, a position that makes her the novel's clearest voice of Victorian-era feminist protest.
- Related: Lyndall, Waldo
O
- Ostrich Farming
- The farm's economic backbone, referenced from the opening chapter's mention of the ostrich-camps beyond which one of Tant Sannie's late husbands is buried. Ostriches are raised in fenced camps for their plumes, a real and lucrative Cape Colony industry of the period that forms the unglamorous financial backdrop against which the characters' larger ambitions play out.
- Related: The Karoo, Kraal
- Otto
- The elderly German overseer of the farm and Waldo's father, identifiable by his salt-and-pepper suit and grizzled beard, familiar to everyone on the farm. A devout, trusting Christian, he is unfailingly kind to strangers — a quality that makes him easy prey once Bonaparte Blenkins arrives.
- Related: Waldo, Bonaparte Blenkins
R
- Ralph Iron
- The male pseudonym under which Olive Schreiner first published The Story of an African Farm in 1883. The novel's preface, written in this persona, defends its loosely episodic method — in which strangers drift in and out of the narrative unannounced — as truer to the shape of real life than conventional plotting.
T
- Tant Sannie
- The heavyset Boer widow who owns and mistresses the farm. Superstitious, shrewd about her own interests, and given to malapropism and folk belief, she has already buried two husbands and treats her stepdaughter Em and orphaned niece Lyndall with rough, uneven affection.
- Related: Em, Lyndall, Upsitting
- The Boer Wedding
- The countryside-wide celebration of Tant Sannie's remarriage, drawing neighbors from across the district to feast and dance. Amid the festivities, Lyndall talks with Waldo late into the night about her school years, while Em quietly begins to notice where Gregory's attention has started to drift.
- Related: Tant Sannie, Gregory Rose, Em
- The Book-Burning
- An episode in which Em finds a box of books left by her late father in the farm loft, and Waldo's hunger to read them collides with Bonaparte Blenkins, who burns one of the volumes as a show of authority and takes the loft key into his own keeping. It marks the height of Bonaparte's control over the household's access to knowledge.
- Related: Waldo, Bonaparte Blenkins
- The Flogging
- The episode in which Bonaparte Blenkins, presiding over a shortfall of dried peaches, has Waldo horsewhipped and locked away. It is the cruelest single act of his reign over the children, and it is here that Lyndall, white-faced and quiet, vows that she and the other children will not always be powerless.
- Related: Bonaparte Blenkins, Waldo, Lyndall
- The Great Drought
- The severe drought of 1862 that opens the novel's action, parching the Karoo and its farms. It is under its pressure that Em, Lyndall, and Waldo, as children, first sit together beneath the kopje's Bushman paintings and speak of the futures they each intend to claim.
- Related: The Karoo, Bushman Paintings
- The Hunter Allegory
- A story told to Waldo by the cultivated stranger, about a hunter who glimpses a fleeting reflection of something beyond the ordinary world and thereafter gives his whole life to climbing a mountain in search of Truth, driven on by the promise of a single white feather. It crystallizes the novel's central image for the costly, solitary pursuit of meaning.
- Related: Waldo's Stranger, Waldo's Crisis of Faith
- The Karoo
- The vast, semi-arid plain of the Cape Colony's interior on which the farm sits, covered in stunted karoo-bush and milk-bushes and ringed by low hills. Its emptiness, heat, and drought-prone climate shape the isolation and hardship of every character's life.
- Related: The Kopje, Ostrich Farming
- The Kopje
- A small, solitary rocky hill near the homestead, described as a heap of round ironstones piled as if over a giant's grave, crowned with a clump of prickly-pears. It is the novel's central geographic landmark and gathering place — the site of childhood games, secret talks, and, later, decisive adult conversations.
- Related: The Karoo, Bushman Paintings
- Transport-riding
- The itinerant ox-wagon freight trade Waldo takes up during his years away from the farm, hauling goods across the Colony's roads. His long letter to Lyndall recounting ships, shops, and transport-riding forms his account of what "tasting life" beyond the farm actually turned out to be.
- Related: Waldo
U
- Upsitting
- A Boer courtship custom, dramatized when a mournful widower comes to court Tant Sannie by "sitting up" with her late into the night, candle by candle, under the household's watchful eye. The ritual, complete with its own rules of propriety, supplies one of the novel's set-piece scenes of social comedy.
- Related: Tant Sannie
W
- Waldo
- The herd-boy son of the German overseer Otto, introduced as a child lying awake in religious terror, counting the ticks of his watch as the souls of the unsaved. Bookish, mechanically inventive, and prone to intense private struggles with faith and meaning, he becomes the novel's philosophical center.
- Related: Otto, Lyndall, The Kopje
- Waldo's Crisis of Faith
- Waldo's recurring, anguished struggle with religious belief, introduced when he lies awake counting the ticks of his watch as unsaved souls dying, and later dramatized when he makes a sacrifice on the kopje that goes unanswered. His private doubt runs alongside — and eventually against — the loud, performative religion practiced by Bonaparte Blenkins.
- Related: Waldo, The Kopje
- Waldo's Stranger
- A cultivated, unnamed traveler who stops at the farm, reads the carvings Waldo has cut into a fence-post, and repays the boy's inarticulate longing with the allegory of the Hunter. He functions as an intellectual mentor figure, giving Waldo's private searching a language and a companion, however briefly.
- Related: The Hunter Allegory, Waldo