This article examines Ernest Glanville’s collection of stories ‘Tales from the Veld’ (1897) and its place in the South African oral-style story tradition. Glanville’s tales are set on the Eastern Cape Frontier (South Africa) in the last part of the 19th century and employ a narrator, the loquacious but wily backwoodsman ‘Uncle Abe Pike’. This style of story reached its apogee with the ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ tales of Herman Charles Bosman. Little, however, is known about earlier users of the oral-style story and the contribution they made to the form. M. Van Wyk Smith (1990) considers Glanville’s Abe Pike tales in relation to the Cape Frontier romances of Glanville’s contemporaries James Dorant Ensor and Bertram Mitford. The works of these writers, he argues, ‘demonstrate the existence of a deeply flawed discourse, riven by doubts, ambivalences, and alternative voices’. The present article explores the nature of this ‘flawed discourse’ in Glanville’s stories, and reveals the presence in them of ‘alternative voices’. It argues that Glanville’s Uncle Abe is a complex figure who speaks in several voices. The ideology he articulates is complex and ambiguous: he is simultaneously racist and humane, condescending to the ‘Kaffir’ and sympathetic to Xhosa culture, loyal to the Queen and contemptuous of the colonial administration. Notes, ref., sum.
