Rider Haggard’s imperialist fiction was often staged in Africa where Haggard as a very young man, from 19 to 25 years of age, had been first a civil servant (as junior secretary to the Governor of Natal, South Africa) and later tried his hand at ostrich farming (Stiebel 2001:21 ff). Back in England Haggard “divided his energies between writing about African landscapes, the state of British farmlands and on agricultural matters generally” (Stiebel 2001:27), being a highly respected member of the landed gentry, a tireless participant in various government commissions, and eventually knighted for his services to the empire (Stiebel 2001:80). Unknown, of course, to the Victorian gentleman Haggard himself, the landscapes and the story of King Solomon’s Mines provide prime views of imperialist male imagination, anxieties and fears. An obvious illustration of the pivotal role played by sexuality in this context is the treasure map from King Solomon’s mines, written in blood by the dying explorer Jose Silvestre, and later guiding the male hero Alan Quatermain (Haggard’s alter ego, cf. Stiebel 2001:46) and his comrades in their quest to find the hidden treasure, and to penetrate and conquer the land. The map itself underscores the sexual nature of the quest.[46] If the map is turned upside down it becomes evident that it represents the body of a woman: the woman has no head, but the breasts are two mountains, named on the map as ‘Sheba’s breasts’, with the arms of the headless woman stretching out as mountain ranges to either side. The path our heroes must travel follows the passage between the breasts, continuing down to a triangular (three-peaked) mountain hiding the crucial place, the opening, the entrance into the interior, which is the passageway to the treasure itself. The penetration is a quest full of dangers and perils. Alan Quatermain and his comrades are on the verge of becoming absorbed and engulfed by the fearful forces which they have to confront. Now instead they succeed in crushing the keeper of the secret, Gagool, the old woman, the witch (as she is called) but also the ‘mother, old mother’ of the land, the one that holds all power of life and death (McClintock 1995:246). Here we meet African female regenerative power, of course in a grotesquely distorted version: Gagool is tremendously old and described as a ‘wizened, monkey-like figure’ more like an animal than a human being. In European cultural tradition there are standard ways of demonizing female power, perceived as threatening by men. Gagool, like so many women before her, is evil, she is a witch. According to Anne McClintock “colonial documents are eloquent on the unease with which white male administrators regarded the African isanusis, [diviners] who were dominantly female” (McClintock
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