"The Old Chief Mshlanga" (Doris Lessing)
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Life is a mysterious journey -- it is a constant movement, or series of displacements from safety and comfort to that which is new and sometimes painful. Doris Lessing's 1951 story "The Old Chief Mshlanga" is an account of the experience that causes a young English girl living in South Africa to feel for the first time that she was out of place in a land she had always been taught to assume belonged to her and to the other English people who ruled over it. The story is a form of coming-of-age fiction in which Lessing represents a crossing over from what is known to what is unknown. As the girl in the story crosses the boundary between the two she is changed and what seemed familiar to her is now so strongly and permanently modified that her younger self no longer seems a part of her. She has a new historical view of her people and of the Africans who lived there long before the English came. But she also has a more fundamental view of herself. At the age of fourteen she has moved beyond the security of her childhood and stepped, literally and symbolically, into an unknown world. The great change in the story is indicated by the change in the speaker's position. At first, as she describes her younger childhood the speaker only describes the girl as "she". It is not until the moment the speaker begins recounting the all-important first meeting with Chief Mshlanga that she suddenly switches from a third- to a first-person narrative voice with the significant words, "
. . .
ading and she begins to accumulate information about the land where she is living. She starts to leave the security of unquestioning childhood behind as she comes across disturbing ideas--such as the Africans having some claim to their own land. The speaker met the chief several times in the course of a year; eventually going out of her way in the hope of seeing him. She became fascinated with him, not so much as an individual but as the key to all the questions she now has about the unknown that exists outside of her known world. All of her new interests began to change her and "soon [she] began to carry [her] gun in a different spirit; [she] used it for shooting food and not to give [her] confidence" (2007). As she changed her childhood racism and fear faded away and she saw the world around her clearly. She saw the beautiful landscape and, as she began to treat them decently, "the black people moved back, as it were, out of my life" and into the view she had acquired of the world (2007-8). Now she saw them as occupying the land; being at one with it in an ancient way that should she could not fully comprehend.
But this new view still did not satisfy her completely and she restlessly felt that the separation between her
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Approximate Word count = 1280
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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