Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland

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First published: 1897
Pages: 62

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About this book

Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland is an 1897 political fable by Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), the South African writer famous for The Story of an African Farm. The short novel presents a young English trooper in Rhodes's Chartered Company forces during the Matabele and Mashona risings, who is visited at his night fire by a stranger, unmistakably Christ, and confronted with the atrocities of the colonial war he serves: the shot prisoners, the burned kraals, the seized cattle and land. Schreiner published the book with a frontispiece photograph of put to death Africans, directly attacking Cecil Rhodes and the Chartered Company at the height of their power. The book cost her dearly in colonial society and stands among the earliest anti-imperialist fictions in English.

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About the author

Olive Schreiner

Schreiner published The Story of an African Farm in 1883 under the name Ralph Iron, having written it while working as a governess on Karoo farms, and it did something no English novel had done, which was to put the South African veld and a woman refusing marriage in the same book.