Common/wealth: Contested commons and proleptic critique

Abstract

In May 1917, two South African feminist friends and critics of empire then in London sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister and delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply: “Your speech was fine”. Whether intended sincerely (as in “very fine”) or as faint praise (“fine as far as it goes, but”) is not known, but the ambiguity is fitting for an association and description with such contested associations – and one that, by some accounts, originated in the colonies (from an idea proposed by Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and South Africa’s then-Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog). It is fitting, too, that one of the cable’s authors was Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), leading novelist of the “New Woman”, advocate of sex equality, and clear-sighted critic of empire’s presumptions, rapacious designs, and gendered and ethnic biases, as well as of the race politics taking shape in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century. Even as we read Schreiner’s work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, this essay contends that it is worth considering the value of the proleptic critique it embodies for an understanding of the ongoing limitations — but also use-value — of the term “Commonwealth”, as well as of any term that might replace it. The outlines of Schreiner’s critique suggest that the term might yet encode a counter-ideal that points to an ongoing latent potential for the common to be reactivated as promise of a more equal and just division of empire’s spoils.

On 15 May 1917, Olive Schreiner and Betty Molteno, two South African-born friends then in the United Kingdom, sent a telegram to Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Union of South Africa’s Defence Minister, who was visiting London as a delegate to the Imperial War Cabinet, in response to his early proposal for a Commonwealth of Nations. It read simply, “Your speech was fine” (Schreiner, 1917). Whether these proto-feminists and critics of empire, also long-term acquaintances of Smuts, intended this sincerely (as in very good) or, as the editors of the Schreiner Letters Online project suggest, as faint praise (in other words, fine as far as it goes, but…), is not known. Praise or judgment would both be fitting: Schreiner and Molteno shared a complex dual identification with Britain and South Africa, while their first-hand experience of the political economy of colonies provided them with grounds from which to be sceptical of high-flown rhetoric that might be seen to endorse the discontents of empire.

The idea of an association of dominions, understood as discrete nations, within a greater British Commonwealth of Nations, was confirmed in the wake of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and nuanced under pressure from two dominions with especially complex politics of ethnic accommodation, Canada and South Africa. Their Prime Ministers — William Lyon Mackenzie King and J. B. M. Hertzog, respectively — are said to have exerted particular influence on an Inter-Imperial Relations Committee chaired by Earl Balfour, who gave his name to the 1926 Declaration that defined dominions as

autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations. (Martin, 1975: 213, qtd. in Dubow, 2017: 290)

Despite guarantees of constitutional sovereignty for the dominions, the 1931 Statute of Westminster reaffirmed dominions’ ongoing allegiance to the Crown (Dubow, 2017: 291), suggesting an ongoing subordination. This vassal-like (or vassal-lite) status came to be challenged in the “white” dominions, especially as their domestic nationalist ambitions — and anti-colonial movements — gained strength. ¹

“Commonwealth” might in other words be thought to encode a form of doublethink as a term always already riven with contradictions: whose wealth, exactly? Common amongst whom? As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in their 2009 book of this name, Commonwealth might be heard to describe the “common wealth of the material world — the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty — which in classic European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together” (vii). Hardt and Negri add to their definition “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (2009: viii).

The body of work produced by Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) in her fiction, essays, and letters foresaw these contradictions even before the term’s modern political use, offering a rich critique of empire’s presumptions, ambiguous designs, and gendered and ethnic biases. We read her work today with an eye to its own prejudices and contradictions, of course. Nadine Gordimer noted Schreiner was trapped in the “prison-house” of colonial vocabularies (1987), while Anne McClintock observed in her reading of the complex imbrication in Schreiner's work of proto-feminism and ideas about race inflected by the social Darwinism of their time, that some of the author’s “abstraction[s] […] served to conceal and thereby ratify, the very real imbalances in social power around her” (1995: 267). ² Nonetheless, Schreiner’s critique, embodied in a literariness (in her fiction) that mediated its purchase on socio-political Realpolitik and in forthright challenges to “ethnocentrism and racism” (in her political journalism) that were “ahead of her time” (McClintock 1995: 293, 294), offers a still-salutary prompt to shape our understanding of the ongoing use-value — and limitations — of “Commonwealth” in literary and cultural studies, and also of any term that might replace it.

As The Journal of Commonwealth Studies puts under erasure a term no longer taken as shorthand for proto-postcolonial cultural energies, I am suggesting that Schreiner’s work might already have understood the term’s ambiguous force and value — one that is in contrast to the more contested history of its constitutional and political development. Indeed, one might argue for the significance of Schreiner’s example for Smuts, with whom she had a longer-term correspondence, and whose role in the elaboration of the ideas that led to the framing of the Commonwealth of Nations has sometimes been overlooked, as scholars like Saul Dubow (2017) have argued. In what follows, I think through Schreiner’s proleptic critique of the inevitable political accommodations perpetrated during that framing — and position her work as encoding a counter-ideal that might rescue the common in Commonwealth from its association with an organization regarded (too easily, I suggest) simply as inheritor of colonial or imperial. Tracing a line from Schreiner through Smuts or vice versa situates Schreiner’s works firmly in any project to argue for the importance of South Africa as a key context in which the modern framing of the Commonwealth developed. It also reveals Schreiner’s writings as a site of key ethical demands that the commons in Commonwealth reflect a real sharing at home, not only an imagined community at state level. The later history of South Africa in the twentieth century (as is true, arguably, for almost every other country in the present) suggests that such critique, proleptic though it might seem by virtue of its analysis of social formations that require supersession, was always going to face headwinds. Perhaps it is our task, as critics in this forum, to take Schreiner’s lead in insisting on hearing the commons in Commonwealth as marking a residue of utopian activism.

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The immediate prompt for Schreiner and Molteno’s cable was a speech Smuts gave at the Savoy on 15 May in which he described the dominions “as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth”, a view elaborated later to the British parliament where Smuts cast the Commonwealth “as a dynamic, evolving system of states and communities under a common flag” (Dubow, 2017: 289). The South African statesman was here offering a formulation shared by a larger group, and developed (Dubow argues) in the crucible of Southern Africa immediately after the Anglo-Boer or South African War (2017: 304). There is evidence, too, that Smuts himself was indeed the first to use the term in this way — in a letter in 1902, in reference to a “stable Commonwealth in South Africa in which Boer and Briton will both be proud to be partners” (Dubow, 2017: 289). Dubow suggests that it was the 1899–1902 conflict in South Africa that “helped to mould the aspirations of the British dominions and conditioned Britain to accept dominion nationalism” (2017: 304). An emerging consensus amongst leaders in the dominions — Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa — that there ought to be a mechanism to recognize the emergence of local nationalisms bolstered a movement that had been in evidence for some time, too. British journalist Richard Jebb’s influential Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905) described the empire “as a field of ‘expanding loyalties’”, Dubow notes, explaining that by “‘loyalty’, Jebb meant not only devotion to Britain and the monarchy, but also the emergence of what he termed colonial ‘self-respect’” (2017: 287).

It was in South Africa that this nationalism was stirring with the most heat, given the conditions that had made the South African War perhaps the first truly international conflict — in terms of the support the Dutch (or Boer) republics garnered from quarters as divergent as the Irish Republican movement and Imperial Russia, and the drawing into the war of imperial forces from not only Britain, but Australia, too. After the establishment of the (white-ruled) Union of South Africa in 1910, seen as an important and successful early conflict-resolution exercise in the rest of the empire (despite leaving the Black majority out of the settlement), a “resurgent Afrikaner nationalism helped to shape the Statute of Westminster and to open […] continuing membership for countries preferring republican status” (Dubow, 2017: 305). India, famously, chose to remain in the Commonwealth despite breaking with the Crown in 1947, seeing the association as a political affiliation with pragmatic advantages. The evolution of the organization that resulted has continued with the admission of countries with no former association with British imperial rule: Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, was admitted after South Africa’s re-entry in 1994, apparently at the urging of Mandela as thanks for that country’s role in the struggle against apartheid (Dubow, 2017: 303; see Bourne, 2022). And it was apartheid that, some argue, gave the Commonwealth a point around or against which to rally, even if there were attempts from some of the former “white” Dominions, and Britain itself, to mitigate criticism.

Indeed, Dubow argues, much of the Commonwealth’s identity has been “defined in terms of its relationship to South Africa” (2017: 305), both at its (extended) founding moment, and after 1948, as a rallying point for new discourses of anti-racism and decolonization (2017: 284), though the apartheid regime also exposed rifts between old and new members of the Commonwealth. South Africa’s exit from the Commonwealth after the narrow victory for the Republic in the (whites-only) referendum of 1961 was less an expulsion, as popular history recalls, than an elbowing out on a technicality, Dubow contends, despite the best efforts of the (white) leaders of the Commonwealth at the time (2017: 297). How to criticize the domestic politics of Commonwealth countries has always been a sore point for the Commonwealth: South Africa tested the rhetoric of the commons early, but Nigeria and Zimbabwe have provided flashpoints since.

Schreiner foresaw the doublespeak and held fast to a belief that an alternative sharing of wealth in common was possible. She had returned to South Africa in 1889, after nearly a decade in England, where she had travelled aspiring to a medical career, published The Story of an African Farm — which had become a cause célèbre — and fallen in with an intellectual circle led by Henry Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, Eleanor Marx, and others. Finding herself in a context hurtling towards armed conflict, Schreiner now wrote a series of essays, published in local newspapers (collected as Thoughts on South Africa after her death), defending the character and extolling the struggles of the proto-Afrikaner peoples then known widely as the Boers (farmers). Many of these essays — with titles like “The Psychology of the Boer” and “The Boer Woman and the Modern Woman’s Question” — appear to modern readers to be “curiously ambivalent”, to quote Ruth First and Anne Scott from their seminal revaluation of Schreiner as a significant feminist with context-specific ambivalences, stymied by a late-Victorian social-Darwinism (1989: 197). As they note, in moments Schreiner “seems to be looking to a transformed society free of race oppression; at others she seems to endorse the ideological justifications of white conquest” (First and Scott, 1989: 197).

In An English South African’s View of the Situation (1899), originally a series of newspaper articles in South African papers published as war seemed inevitable, Schreiner appealed to readers with the kind of twin loyalties the Commonwealth would expect, those “who love Africa, but love England also”, to prevent a conflict she foresaw would be catastrophic for those aspects of agrarian communalism she associated with the Boers (see First and Scott, 1989: 235). This construction would influence John A. Hobson’s reporting on the war, and his book The War in South Africa (1900), from which (along with its successor, the seminal 1902 Imperialism: A Study) Lenin would draw in describing imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” (First and Scott, 1989: 240). Schreiner’s defence of the Boers was principally a critique of capitalism, then developing a particularly virulent form of industrial extraction in the wake of the discovery in the region of diamonds in the late 1860s and gold in the mid-1880s. An express investment in the Boers, however, did not come at the expense of recognizing the common humanity of the Black majority, though it took time for this to be more clearly expressed.

By the time she published a letter to The Transvaal Leader on 22 December 1908, reprinted in pamphlet form as A Closer Union (1909), she would be able to enunciate the stakes that then appeared irrefutable: that there would be no happy outcome to the Union then forming without justice for the Black majority, a justice that demanded an acceptance of the centrality of African labour to “white” wealth, and of land to African identity. Despite the social-Darwinist assumptions about hierarchies of intellectual ability and the romantic investment in agrarian peasant culture in the way she described Black South Africans in this letter, there is a clear commitment to natural justice in her understanding that though they were “the makers of our wealth, the great basic rock on which our State is founded”, South Africa’s “vast labouring class” (1987: 187) was about to be excluded from the settlement that produced the Union (and whose energies, as suggested above, pre-empted the Commonwealth). She understood that “the problem which this century will have to solve is the accomplishment of this interaction of distinct human varieties on the largest and most beneficent lines, making for the development of humanity as a whole, and carried out in a manner consonant with modern ideals and modern social wants” (1987: 190), and that if “nine-tenths of our community have no permanent stake in the land, and no right or share in our government, can we ever feel safe? Can we ever know peace?” (1987: 194).

Schreiner acted on these convictions, too. Having helped to establish the Women’s Enfranchisement League of the Cape Colony (in 1907), she would leave it in 1910, as Union dawned, sensing that white women were likely to “fight only for themselves and abandon the unenfranchised native men and women of their land, the real underdogs” (to quote Schreiner’s niece Lyndall Gregg’s formulation of her aunt’s activist position) (Gregg, 1957: 13). “If, blinded by the gain of the moment, we see nothing in our dark man but a vast engine of labour […] then I would rather draw a veil over the future of this land”, Closer Union concluded prophetically (Schreiner, 1987: 192–193). Schreiner was a realist, however: as she wrote to her sister Ettie some years earlier (in 1904), a “majority of the people English & Dutch in this country want Closer Union because it will enable them to crush [. . .] the natives” (qtd. in Remmington, 2023: 123).

A broad commitment to natural justice was evident in Schreiner’s fiction from the outset, however. In Undine, published posthumuously, though likely started in late adolescence after time spent with siblings on the Kimberley diamond fields, Schreiner links women’s oppression and class oppression and puts both in conversation with John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy, which the autodidact had consumed as a precocious child, and which would remain an intellectual touchstone. Putting the book down one day, the young Undine does not see that “a little black beetle scudded hither and thither among its pages, all unnoticed” (1928: 86): questions of scale, and one might also argue race (no detail is not at least potentially allegorical in her writing), are clearly on Schreiner’s mind from the outset of her career. (Ironically, Undine’s childhood antagonist assumes she is reading “all manner of trash and sentimentality […] some of Mrs. Browning’s poetry and effete nonsense, I have no doubt” (1928: 92).)

Mill features in The Story of an African Farm, too, where it is naïve Waldo, the German overseer’s son, the embodiment of the agrarian communist Schreiner would later praise in the stereotyped Boer, who finds in the book that he is not alone (1992: 77). Here, too, an antagonist belittles the utopian fantasy, as the villainous Bonaparte Blenkins applies to the case his simple rule — “Whenever you come into contact with any book, person, or opinion of which you absolutely comprehend nothing, declare that book, person, or opinion to be immoral” (79) — and dismissing it as nonsense (“Polity-gollity-gominy” (81)), burns it. Subsequently, Waldo is gifted a replacement, likely Spencer’s First Principles (137), whose postulation of a synthesizing Absolute influenced the young Schreiner, too (see First and Scott, 1989: 58–60), and whose ideal of what Carolyn Burdett calls “evolutionary connectedness”, along with its “implication of progress, […] Schreiner found so compelling” (2001: 27).

The Story of an African Farm, with its unwed mother and its endorsement of a broad humanistic sympathy for a way of life not mortgaged to capital or patriarchy, was enormously influential as one of the first novels of the New Woman (see Munslow Ong and van der Vlies, 2023: 1–2, 9, 11). The politics of race is perhaps less unambiguously present in it and other (posthumously published) fictions, or indeed in the wildly popular dreams and allegories that appeared throughout the 1890s (though certainly, there is a sense of implied judgment at outrages committed by the Boer farm-widow Sannie and her henchman Blenkins in African Farm). They are perhaps most evident in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, Schreiner’s most political fiction, an 1897 attack on Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa company’s rapacious occupation of Mashonaland and Matabeleland and consolidation of it under Company rule as Rhodesia (which would be a significant test case for the British Commonwealth in the 1960s (Craggs, 2018: 50–52)). Schreiner’s narrative is a crude allegory in which a British soldier with little sense of the geopolitics of the moment, lured by a promise that the campaign will make his fortune, is confronted by Christ on a hill one night while on guard duty and convinced of the grave injustice to which he is party (see van der Vlies, 2023).

This narrative has had less of an afterlife than Schreiner’s African Farm, but its impact — and the terms in which it argues for a conception of common wealth — had significant purchase in fascinating and (only ostensibly) unlikely places. Howard Thurman, whose thinking was to be formative on the activism of the Revd Martin Luther King Jr, discovered Schreiner’s writing in the 1920s (see Barends, 2023: 138), and in 1973 produced a compilation of extracts from Schreiner’s work that gives some prominence to excerpts from this volume, which Thurman describes in his introduction as voicing “much of Olive Schreiner’s basic social philosophy and humanitarian graces” (xxiv). This is one more example of the extraordinary and sometimes surprising reach of Schreiner’s ideas, and in particular her arguments for gender equality and empathy for those cast as inferior by Western constructions of race hierarchy. A number of case studies of this global reception are explored in a volume published in December 2023, which I co-edited with Jade Munslow Ong (Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts) and which highlights Schreiner’s achievements as an influence on a great many leading writers and thinkers — from Virginia Woolf to Patrick White, Bessie Head to J. M. Coetzee, Gandhi (who regarded Schreiner as a friend) to the founders of the African National Congress and the Rhodes Must Fall movement (see also Graham, 2016). Gandhi, indeed, had purchased a copy of A Closer Union in a used bookstore in Cape Town before his return to India; it appears his connection with Schreiner was fostered through his links with Betty (Elizabeth Maria) Molteno, Schreiner’s co-author on the telegram to Smuts with which I began. Molteno spent time at Gandhi’s utopian settlement in present-day KwaZulu-Natal and acted as go-between in Gandhi’s dealings with a number of South African politicians (see Bagchi, 2023: 93). Other chapters in our Writing Networks and Global Contexts volume trace Schreiner’s impact on the Dutch (Drwal, 2023) and Swedish (Nivesjö, 2023) periodical presses in the early twentieth century, and on feminist and emerging modernist literary cultures in Aotearoa New Zealand (Barnes, 2023) and Australia (Jose et al., 2023).

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What position might Schreiner have occupied in respect of the appellation “Commonwealth” (if that is one way to frame a question that addresses the fate of this journal’s name)? “Your speech was fine”, Schreiner and Molteno advise Smuts: Commonwealth is a fine idea; Commonwealth is fine as far as it goes, but it needs to assure wealth in common to all; your speech is fine, but is there going to be follow through? We might hear all of these responses in that condensed note. Schreiner would, however, no doubt have had some sympathy for those refusing the label; one suspects she might have preferred “South African writer” to “Commonwealth writer”, as she would have demanded “novelist” over “woman novelist”. Other such Refuseniks include Amitav Ghosh, with whose environmental and subaltern activism Schreiner would certainly have identified. Ghosh famously withdrew from the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2001, calling the prize’s criteria arbitrary. The Glass Palace was eligible, he wrote in a letter to the Times of India, “partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by imperial Britain. Of the many reasons why a book’s merits may be recognized, these seem to be the least persuasive” (Allison, 2001: 5). Such a label, Ghosh’s objection suggests, traps a writer in a category their work might actively be critiquing (Brouillette, 2007: 71).

There is great merit to this principled rejection, but I wonder whether there are ways to think, as Schreiner might (also) have done, about what commonalities the appellation references — investment in systems of representative government and common law principles, however compromised by prejudice and Realpolitik — and about the utopian residue of the communal if not the communist (Schreiner was a friend of Eleanor Marx, after all) that lingers in the appellation. ³ Literary critics, tending to paranoid reading — as diagnosed by Eve Sedgwick (2003: 123–51) — are usually quick to interrogate critical categories, and it should be noted that the term continues to name polities, both in the British Commonwealth and outside it, without apparent negative association. Australia is officially the Commonwealth of, and the term is in general shorthand use there to refer to the federal government, particularly in relation to legal and funding structures. It is also used in the constitutions of four states in the United States: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia (nominally Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands are also Commonwealths, though their place in the US is very different). There is some suggestion that “Commonwealth” was in favour in some of the American colonies in the 1770s for its putative anti-monarchical associations. Indeed, the architects of Union in South Africa — many, like Smuts, also later proponents of the Commonwealth — based some of their thinking on the example of federalism in the United States (Dubow, 2017: 289). Dubow notes the popularity, for example, amongst members of Lord Milner’s cadre of young Oxbridge-educated administrators (who worked towards the integration of the former British colonies and Boer republics into the Union of South Africa in 1910), of F. S. Oliver’s 1906 biography of Alexander Hamilton. There are movements, too, to reanimate the idea of the Commonwealth as a form of government, building on models of common-law and constitutional precedence to offer a model that follows developments in a number of Commonwealth jurisdictions (Canada, and in Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory) where legislature and courts are treated as supplementary rather than alternatives to bill-of-rights frameworks (Gardbaum, 2013: 1–2).

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, one of a group of Italian thinkers interrogating ideas of the commons in the early years of this century (Paolo Virno [2004] being another), in an arresting analysis of the politics of the future, is eager to find ways to reanimate what he characterizes as a more widespread belief in progress — and the future — in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Liberalism and social democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself, all the different families of modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the darkness of the present, the future will be bright”, Berardi notes (2011: 18). He continues to diagnose our present as one of “semiocapitalism”: “the general shape of commodities has a semiotic character and the process of production is increasingly the elaboration of sign-information” (2011: 106). Yanis Varoufakis (2023) offers a slight amendment to this idea, suggesting we are in an age of technofeudalism, as information, stored in the cloud, pushes even the largest multinational into the position of tenant. One senses Schreiner would have much to say about these analyses; in many ways, her work anticipates them. Although the term “Commonwealth” does not survive in this journal’s new title, with its renewed focus on the role of the literary in offering critique to guide us through, and against, what presents as empire’s ongoing designs on the commons in our own time, it lingers nonetheless as an ongoing challenge, I suggest, on account of continuing use in the public sphere. We might thus continue to take Schreiner’s lead in insisting on hearing the commons in Commonwealth as marking a residue of utopian activism to guide our ongoing critique.

November 2023, rev. March 2024