"The African Sickness"

South Africa's literature is remarkable for the fact that its women writers are better than the men. The best South African biography is Sarah Gertrude Millin's Cecil Rhodes; the best novels, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Pauline Smith's The Beadle (1926). Publication of The Fire-Raisers brings another woman novelist into the front rank of South African fiction.

Jean Heather Marris Murray, daughter of a Scottish emigrant father and a South African mother, was born in Pretoria. An Oxford scholarship took her to England, where she worked as a free-lance journalist throughout World War II. The Fire-Raisers is her first novel but is written with a skill and confidence that make it close to the most impressive story yet about the South Africa of Malanism and apartheid.

To Author Murray, Malanism is not a problem of politics or Anglo-Dutch disharmony; it is just one of the symptoms of a chronic disease which she calls "the African sickness"--a complicated ailment that has become so "normal" in South Africa that those who suffer from it are usually the last to know it.

The Enclosing Mountains. Author Murray's scene is a South African valley, bounded by mountains and the sea, and speckled with the houses and shacks of Dutch, English, French and Kaffir Africans. On the surface, it is like any other valley in the civilized world--"a poor community," says old Jacob Fieldfare, "[where] someone is always frowning over a bill, or scraping to buy a new coat. We tell lies and gossip, our faces are drawn with longing for possessions and qualities which we do not have: power, personality, happiness, electric light, golf championships, more brandy, exciting friends, fame, white skins, a second chance, youth, a penny off the milk or a penny on the milk ..."

But the people of the valley are suffering from one form or another of African sickness. Etienne Cavecon, a young schoolmaster, has the disease in its most benign form, "indolence." For Etienne, every day passes like every other, leaving him untouched, unchanged, unmoved, like a man asleep. His foster father Jacob, with whom Etienne lives, has spent his time observing life with such quiet detachment that he has "reached his sixtieth year without ever having had a serious illness or an enduring sorrow." Vigorous pioneers built the home of Jacob and Etienne, but in four generations the family has "shrunk to two quiet bachelors."

Elsewhere in the valley the sickness takes stranger forms, intensified by the fact that the people of European stock have "become aware of the narrowness and danger of their circumstances: the threatening sea, the enclosing mountains, and behind them the sullen weight of an awaking continent." Storekeeper Fluit, for example, is "gravely ill" with the conviction that "man, nature and evil powers" are all plotting against him, and that to survive he must be "sullen, suspicious and constantly on guard." His friends and neighbors feel much the same way, but they have discovered that the best antidote to gnawing fear is to fix their minds on a favorite obsession.

P:Widowed old Mrs. Harding is bothered by only one problem: Just where did she drop her dentures years ago? By sheer persistence, Mrs. Harding has turned "life" into a series of long tramps through the bush in search of her missing teeth.

P:Hobbyist Applesmith dreams of an all white Africa in which everything will "go like clockwork." He has lived in this dream for so long that he has begun to anticipate it by creating clockwork forms of living things. Applesmith's mechanical fox terrier bitch can be made to beg for tidbits. And, says Applesmith, "nothing in its expression reproaches you for denying it ... The owner of my bitch need never feel guilty."

P:George Hemper, a pal of Applesmith's, believes that the "secret of life" is in "size and proportion," spends his days cutting up dead animals and measuring their parts. He refuses to have children. "How often must I explain to you," he says to Mrs. Hemper, "that until we know the secret and meaning of life, we have no right to produce more of it?"

P:Mr. and Mrs. Jobson are a rich English couple who have fled to Africa to escape the British income tax. They add a rich touch of irony to The Fire-Raisers because of their conviction that they have migrated from a slave state to a free democracy. The only flaw the Jobsons can see in Africa is the alarming number of "black faces" that are visible in it. "I think it would be a very good thing if they were all sent elsewhere," says Mrs. Jobson vaguely.

The Burning Bush. Into this ailing, ingrown community Author Murray introduces Heroine Agatha, a colored girl who passes for white and is pregnant. Agatha's only real function in The Fire-Raisers, apart from putting an end to Etienne's bachelordom. is to be utterly normal and healthy--to sit calmly, creating real life among people who are doing their utmost to dodge it. In proportion as Agatha swells in bulk, the valley dwellers swell in hysteria, as if they must at all costs escape the growing terror of the future. By the time Agatha's baby is born, they have become mad enough to set the whole bush in flames.

Like most madmen they have excellent "reasons" for destroying the very ground they walk on. Old Mrs. Harding thinks it will make it easier to find her teeth. Hemper hopes to take advantage of the fire to steal and "measure" Agatha's baby (he will give her a clockwork one. made by Applesmith. instead). Also among the "fire-raisers" are an innocent Kaffir boy, who merely wants to cook a decent meal, and Negro Servant Benjamin, who has lost patience with the sickness of his masters. "Burn, Africa, burn," he cries, as he strikes his match, "to tell the white man that danger is before him. Burn, to tell him that we are Africans, that we are men, that you are our country."

Author Murray (who now lives in Surrey) resembles another prepossessing Commonwealth novelist, Guiana's Edgar Mittelholzer (TIME. Jan. 11), in the audacity with which she flirts with fantastic characters and odd situations. But Author Murray's chief triumph is as a specialist in African sickness. Her bedside manner is worthy of Chekhov in wit and diagnostic sharpness; in spirit and human sympathy it never departs from the grand old female tradition of the South African novel.

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