The depiction of adult cruelty and narrow-mindedness in the first part of the novel offers a trenchant critique of the abuses of power; Tant Sannie and the faintly Dickensian trickster, Bonaparte Blenkins, embody the worst aspects of conservative (specifically Calvinist) religiosity and anti-intellectualism. Lyndall tells Waldo, after he has been savagely beaten by Blenkins: “we will not be children always; we shall have the power too, some day” (94). The treatment of black and other indigenous characters by Sannie and Blenkins is likewise cruel and unsympathetic, while the kindly overseer, Otto, appears to empathize with them, seeking to assist a woman turned away from the farm after her husband is accused of stealing sheep. Schreiner is satirizing the widespread colonial treatment of servants as little more than property; but what is the reader to make of representations of black characters in the second part of the novel? In the final chapter, for example, a black child playing with curls of wood-shavings from Waldo’s carpentry is referred to as a “small naked nigger” and a “little animal” (261). Black figures remain largely invisible, or rendered in terms that hardly transcend the stereotyping of the day. This presents problems for the contemporary reader, but, as several critics have noted, Schreiner’s concern was with the effects of colonialism on white colonial society. In The Story of an African Farm, the tyranny endured by the children, and the expectations placed on women, both symbolize and reflect the operation of power in a colonial system, and its consequences. In particular, the novel’s critique of adult cruelty to children can be extrapolated to a critique of the cruelty of colonialism, which treated colonized people like children. The Story of an African Farm also inscribes the tragedy of colonization vividly in the white children’s musing, in the chapter “Plans and Bushman-paintings,” about the San people whose rock art adorns the kopje; as Waldo explains, they have now all been shot by the Boers (16).

In the novel’s second part, set approximately three years after the first ends, a generalized description of the processes by which a child (in this case, specifically Waldo) becomes disillusioned with the pattern of Christianity which he has been taught, mirrors the widespread crises of faith in late-Victorian society inspired by, among other things, Darwin’s theories of natural selection, and research into the fossil record. No divine power would structure the universe so relentlessly, the child thinks, realizing in terror that “[t]here is no order: all things are driven about by a blind chance” (114). He turns in wonder and relief to the world around him, and perceives in nature “[n]ot a chance jumble,” but a “living thing, a One ” (118). It is no accident that the names Waldo and Em, as well as Schreiner’s pseudonym, Ralph Iron, echo the name of the great American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work Schreiner greatly admired. In the second chapter of part two, an unnamed stranger offers Waldo an allegory of a hunter who dies in pursuit of a white bird symbolizing truth. The allegory in fact suggests the futility of a positivist scientism, a judgment that the novel as a whole strives to endorse. Enthused by his misunderstanding of the allegory, Waldo leaves the farm, a hunter in search of his own symbolic white bird, but returns, chastened, at the end of the novel. Grappling with death and the absence of the consolation drawn from belief in an afterlife, he draws on his love of the farm, and a transcendent and transcendentalist vision of the unity of things remaining: “It is but the man that dies, the universal Whole of which he is part reworks him into its inmost self ” (259).