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Engendering the post-apartheid farm novel: Anne Landsman's The Devil's chimney

There are good reasons why the farm has constituted a major focus of white South African writing. It was as a farm of sorts that the Cape was first settled by Europeans, and it was through the desire for land that the trekboers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed back the frontiers of the colony. As J.M. Coetzee shows in White Writing, nineteenth and twentieth-century art in South Africa has been assigned a multiplicity of tasks to do with exploring, naturalising or questioning relationships between settler and land. Coetzee identifies two 'dream topographies' in South African pastoral projects. The first, typified in Afrikaans by the work of C.M. van den Heever and in English by that of Pauline Smith, divides up, domesticates and peoples the landscape, establishing idealised orders through myth or nostalgia. The other trend, initiated by Olive Schreiner, portrays an 'alien, impenetrable' Africa that resists the efforts of the farmer and, by extension, of the writer, to establish a dialogue, a reciprocity 'that will allow him an identity better than that of visitor, stranger, transient' (1988: 7-8). The former mode of representing the farm has served to support various strains of conservative ideology; the latter, as in Schreiner's treatment of gender issues and colonial politics, lends itself more to critical interrogations of issues of identity and entitlement. In both cases, the farm serves as more than simply a locale for the unfolding of narrative events. It encircles and subsumes these events, providing a material basis for abstractions about landscape, belonging and culture. In the post-apartheid period, these categories begin to buckle under the pressure of a necessary re-evaluation of the place of the farm in South African literature. As Jennifer Wenzel notes, after apartheid retum to the land becomes return of the land, and relationships on the farm become less about 'people and things' and more about 'people and people' (2000: 96). Serious literature cannot but register the fact that socio-political change has overtaken the conditions of possibility for representing the farm as pastoral idyll or locus of identity. Anxiety about chaotic land reform in Zimbabwe, ongoing crime against farmers, and the activism and police harassment of the Landless People's Movement around the time of the 2004 elections are three visible symptoms of a deep unease about land ownership in South Africa. There is a perception that the Land Claims Commission is bogged down in bureaucracy. Exploitation of farm workers, racism and gender violence are commonly reported features of post-apartheid farm life. What is more, the revelations of the TRC with