This Was the Old Chief's Country

Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories #1

by Doris Lessing

All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954.
'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

In this Edition:
The Old Chief Mshlanga
A Sunrise on the Veld
No Witchcraft for Sale
The Second Hut
The Nuisance
The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange
Little Tembi
Old John's Place
'Leopard' George
Winter in July
A Home for the Highland Cattle
Eldorado
The Antheap
Includes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963.

Genres: Short Stories, Africa, Fiction

418 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Doris Lessing was born into a colonial family. both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).

Reviews

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading "A Sunrise on the Veld" with a student tonight blew me away - Lessing's imagery, rhythm and themes are awe-inspiring! Looking forward to more and to aspiring to work as hard as Doris Lessing did in my writing! Elegantly constructed, beautiful imagery!

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doris Lessing's short stories are always incredible in that she can get the essence of a character in so few words that you feel like you know them, where they came from, where they're going.

Lessing depicts a world in which the white man is the master and the black man a servant with a sharp, critical eye. From the story of the old chief who lost his land but preserves his dignity, to that of a newly arrived English lady who feels charitable towards her servant but lands him in jail, to the society of farmers far away from the cities, with its own rules of morality and good behaviour. An incredible book.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lessing's stories explore the differences between who the colonialist think that they are, where they are from, what they are doing in Africa and the realities that they all know lie under these ideals, the inhospitable veld throwing their confused inner selves into sharp relief.

p 8 "This child could not see a msasa tree, or the thorns, for what they were. Her books held tales of alien faeries, her rivers ran slow and peaceful, and she knew the shape of the leaves of an ash or an oak, the names of the little creatures that lived in English streams, when the words 'the veld' meant strangeness, though she could remember nothing else."

[Kleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avec une précision glaçante, mais dans une langue d'une poésie à couper le souffle, Doris Lessing dissèque la vie coloniale et ses fondements racistes en Afrique des années 30 à 50. Si son évocation des lieux est bouleversante, celle des gens n'épargne personne, sans jamais tomber dans la caricature.

[Sedeck Gaidy]

The tales are the best way to remain in the memory of people as long as they are alive. It lasts that a sign or mark that many civilizations have passed around us all. Thus this moving is unforgettable.

[Daniel Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine you, me, and the boys going to Rhodesia, driving some Lamborghinis, tell the chef to cook us some mealie rice, then chill at the kopje, jacuzzis. Eating some boiled beef and carrots. Can you imagine the feeling bro?

Rhodesia was truly the Forex trading for divorced dads in the 1940s

[Morgane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read: A Sunrise on the Veld, The Second Hut, The Nuisance, Little Tembi, Events in the Skies

[Alexandra Noga · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a reason Lessing won the Nobel prize for literature. 4.5*

[Tinashe Dzambacheka · Rating 5 out of 5]

a different perspective

[Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last year I met a little Afghan girl, a refugee with her family in Pakistan. She had lived in a village that had water running through it from the mountains, and it had orchards and fields, and all her family and her relatives where there. Sometimes a plane crossed the sky from one of the larger cities of Afghanistan to another. She would run to the edge of the village to get nearer to that shining thing in the sky, and stand with her hands cradling her head as she stared up … up… up… or she called to her mother “An airplane, look!”

And then the Russians invaded, and one day the visiting airplane was a gunship. It thundered over her village, dropped its bombs, and flew off. The house she had lived in all her days was rubble, and her mother and her little brother were dead. So were several of her relatives. And as she walked across the mountains with her father, her uncle, her aunt, and her three surviving cousins, they were bombed by the helicopters and the planes, so that more people died. Now, living in exile in the refugee camp, when she thinks of the skies of her country she knows they are full of aircraft, day and night, and the little plane that flew over her village with the sunlight shining on its wings seems like something she once imagined, a childish dream


Doris Lessing, the British Nobel Prize winning author, passed away today at the age of 94. She was born in Kermanshah, Iran and spent her childhood in South Africa before moving to the UK. She was described by the Noble Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”. In parallel to her writings she was an antiwar and women-right activist and did her best to improve the world she was living in by using her candid, brave and feminine mindset. This Was the Old’s Chief’s Country is a collection of astonishing short stories. All the stories happened in Africa, a beautiful and marvelous continent, with a tragic history. It is a book of ordinary people, black or white, but the color of the book is neither black nor white it has every different color you can imagine. Characters are colorful as well, and it goes deep in to African society and shows how people suffer and cope with discrepancies and prejudices in a similar way although they are different in many aspects.


“When you first go down, you get paid like a prince and the world’s your oyster. Then you get married and tie yourself up with a houseful of furniture on the hire-purchase and a house under a mortgage. Your car’s your own, and you exchange it for anew one every year. It’s a hell of a life, money pouring in and money pouring out, and your wife loves you, and everything’s fine, parties and a good time for one and all. And then your best friend finds his chest is giving him trouble and he goes to the doctor, and then suddenly you find he’s dropped out of the crowd; he’s on half the money and all the bills to pay. His wife finds it no fun and off she goes with someone else. Then you discover it’s not just one of your friends, but half the men you know are in just that position,crooks at thirty and owing nothing but the car, and they soon sell that to pay alimony. You find you drink too much – there’s something on your mind, as you might say. Then, if you’ve got sense, you walk out while the going’s good. If not, you think: It can’t happen to me, and you stay on.”

[Parikhit · Rating 3 out of 5]

'This Was The Old Chief's Country' took me into a past that was, a past that has redefined the world that we know of now, set in a continent where we all begun, the grasslands, the gentle hills, trees scattered amidst the grassy plains, rivers meandering through the vastness-Africa. My first ever Doris Lessing and glad am I to begin this year and bid adieu to the past year with 'The Was The Old Chief's Country'.

A varied collection of short stories and novellas, to me, however, the subdued sound of helplessness formed the common chord in the eclectic compilation. Be it the early white settlers choosing to leave a homeland and make the virgin territories of Africa a new home or the dwindling coloured people losing a home that was theirs for centuries and fading into insignificant corners, helplessness pervades. The vast, untamed plains of Africa conjure adventure, hope, the willingness to conquer yet loneliness and helpless surreptitiously make their cold presence felt.

Yes, the collection does speak about the colour issue but it never overpowers. It is more about the various sights and sounds of Africa, kopjes, eroded plains, mealie cultivation, gold mines, farmlands, distant hills, the ever changing landscape of Africa, men moving in and out of perhaps the greatest continent on earth. I did single out stories that will be my personal favourites and include 'The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange', 'The Nuisance', 'A Home for the Highland Cattle' and 'Event in the Skies'.

3.5/5.