(Mis)Guiding Readers through Colonial Kenya and South Africa

Abstract

[eng] This chapter discusses two romantic historical novels by Jennifer McVeigh set in South Africa and Kenya: The Fever Tree (2016) and Leopard at the Door (2017). The chapter contextualises these contemporary novels within of a long orientalist tradition of texts responsible for the romanticised depiction of African landscapes and the dehumanisation of African peoples, despite the author’s support of a progressive, anti-colonial agenda – her attempt to repair and make amends for that particular past. These ideological tensions are discussed through an analysis of the novels as well as the reading guides featured in the publisher’s website intended to monitor group discussion and guide her readers through the texts. This chapter contends that these reading guides ultimately reinforce the neo-orientalist contents of the novels and foster specific responses on the part of their Western readers, which far from being reparative, perpetuate long-held notions of Africa conveniently repackaged for a twenty-first-century female reader avid for exotic experiences.