Chapter 2 - Malaria and the Imperial Romance

Summary

H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines seems to perpetuate an imperial fantasy, by encouraging British readers to believe that they are separate from the severe physiological dangers of disease in Africa. However, the novel’s gothic and melodramatic qualities also highlight the unrealistic quality of this infallibility. This chapter shows that, by studying representations of malaria, one may observe the ways in which discourses of white vigor and health in imperial adventure narratives are haunted by their own counter-narratives. Sickness from malaria seems to be successfully displaced onto racial and national others, but by examining the shifting metaphors of yellowing skin, wasting, maps, parchment and mummies in the novel, one may see an underlying anxiety that tropical illness is not predictable or containable. The chapter places Haggard’s adventure fiction in dialog with discourses of South African medicine and colonialism, including the speeches of Cecil Rhodes. In conclusion, the chapter demonstrates that Haggard’s latent ambivalences about the possibility of South African colonial settlement manifest in his later life writing on disease and empire, wherein he discusses malaria at length in order to demonstrate his deep uncertainty about whites’ ability to survive in South Africa.