King Solomon’s Mines, a colonial novel

King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was a popular boys’ adventure novel by the Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It was the first English fictional adventure novel set in Africa . It tells of the search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of three adventurers for the missing brother of one of the party. The story is narrated by Allan Quatermain, a kind of big game hunter and adventurer who also leads the expedition. They have a lead/clue that the missing brother is somewhere in the interior of Africa, lost on his own quest for King Solomon's mines, a legendary place.
The novel is generally believed to have played a part in the British fancy for Africa, and the ‘scramble for Africa’. It is also considered to be the genesis of the Lost World literary genre, a precursor of science fiction.
The major interest of the novel now may be its scholarly value, the colonialist attitudes Haggard expresses, the way he portrays the relationships between the white and African characters.
1. Haggard does portray some Africans in their traditional—from a Victorian perspective—literary posts as barbarians, and constant racist commentary can be detected throughout the novel: the mildest form it takes is the superiority complex of whites over blacks. For instance, when it demonstrates the kind of technological gap that existed between the blacks and the whites, through the exhibition of firepower, referred to as ‘the magic tube that speaks’ .
2. On the other hand, he also presents the other side of the coin, showing some black Africans as heroes and heroines and he shows respect for their culture. For instance, Quatermain states that he refuses to use the word "nigger" and that many Africans are more worthy of the title of "gentleman" than the Europeans who settle or adventure in the country. Haggard even includes a budding interracial romance between a native woman, Foulata, and the white Englishman Captain Good: she cares for him after he’s been injured and later dies in his arms—she dies protecting him from death, thus evincing a noble disposition.
3. However, much less prejudice doesn’t mean no prejudice at all and the binary black/white polarity is maintained.
Indeed, the narrator-character, Quatermain, has no objection to the lady, whom he considers ‘very beautiful and noble’. Nevertheless, he tries to discourage the relationship, dreading the uproar such a marriage would cause back home in England. Ultimately, the love story between a white man and a black woman is made impossible. Haggard soon ‘kills off’ Foulata, though he has her die in Good's arms. Quite suitably so, I would add, as her death precludes the development of a romance between the white man and the black girl. Besides, she dies protecting her lover from death, which is also another way of putting her in her place in the Empire, so to speak, suggesting that the best colonized subjects couldn’t dream of a more desirable fate than death for the sake of their white masters . Here, the domination relationship is double: based on race and on gender. The heroine herself says the following, which surely reassured any Victorian reader shocked by the notion of interracial relations: ‘Can the sun mate with the moon, or the white with the black?’. A nice case of hegemony indeed.
Of course, this should be put into perspective, writer and audience being products of their time and passing moral judgements is not relevant here. Reading this book enables the reader to look at the world through a typical nineteenth century mindset. Two remarks:
1. Even so, the novel brims with images of racial excellence or inferiority based on the evolutionary ladder, the notion that primitive cultures were the fossilized survivals of earlier evolutionary stages.
2. Of particular interest is the recurrent representation of the British colonizer as almost exclusively male and the frequent feminizing of Africa and Africans.
The Englishness and the maleness of the characters is typical of colonialist literature at the time. As Elleke Boehmer puts it, ‘It was part of the imperial state of things that the Englishman in the colonies, free to rule as he pleased, scornful of values other than his own, sought as companions those of his own kind. They alone would have the understanding, the stature, and experience to match his own. Adventure fiction echoes this state of things’ . Colonial writings are full of scenes not merely of male bonding but of solidarity between men figured as self-mirroring and doubling, images of the self, of sameness (vs. otherness). The target public of imperial adventure tales was predominantly male, too. Haggard dedicated King Solomon’s Mines to ‘all the big and little boys who read it’.

On the other hand, the mountains, called the Sheba’s Breasts mountains, are presented as female, a feature that E. Boehmer sees this as deeply significant of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, as seen from the colonizer’s point of view. ‘This symbolism of the female body’, she writes, ‘captured salient traits of the racial Other: of a body receptive to the male and, if not, then requiring subjection’ (ibidem, p. 87).
Not surprisingly, Europe’s exploration/invasion and exploitation of Africa by Europe has repeatedly been described as a ‘rape; from that point of view, any exploration narrative, including incursions into some part of Africa, represents and re-enacts the violation of the African continent. And regardless of whether the novel is ‘racist’ or not, passages like the following, an excerpt from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reverberate in the reader’s mind as echoes of the original, historical violation: ‘We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness’.