J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians Revisited: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism

At this point, J. M. Coetzee’s most famous novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, has been called upon to represent any number of colonial or postcolonial themes, concepts, and regimes, among other representations of oppression in political discourse. The novel is set in an unnamed Empire, at the fringes of a remote outpost where natives on horseback who are pushed into the mountains, along with other natives who are simply living as fishermen off the land, are dominated by white-skinned, seemingly European forces. It depicts the horrors of what an Empire does to those who do not submit to its hegemony and who simply cannot submit to that hegemony due to their cultures and the colors of their skins. Repeatedly, critics have noted multiple versions and interpretations of this novel. Saying anything new seems to be quite a challenge to the literary critic who still finds the novel relevant in an increasingly shrinking globe. Indeed, the novel is still relevant in a world where forms of oppression are (re)exposed every day (i.e., sex trafficking, forced labor, economic exploitation, etc.), and the desire to present the novel in a new light is great. Yet, in this “almost” inability to say something new, a re-reading of the novel through the lens of how postcolonial socio-political-economic regimes reinforce the position of the colonizer to a point of a postcolonial socio-political-economic paralysis seems to be a different way to see the novel, given an historical reading that aims to reveal just how much a colonial regime (whether historical or in the present) handcuffs even those within the colonial Empire who desire to “do right” by those dominated by the regime.

Even though it would be a challenge to place a writer like J. M. Coetzee in a national or regional context, I argue that J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is embedded in a deep South African cultural history. In other words, the context of the novel is embedded in an historical economic “hostage-taking” by the IMF and World Bank, which by way of financial support (or loans) helped enforce an apartheid regime in South Africa, creating conditions that required Coetzee to step back from an overt “plain-language” critique to the form of symbolic representation. Symbolic representation appears to be Coetzee’s effort to inform the broader world of the actual terrors and crimes against humanity that existed in South Africa in the 1970s into the early 1980s. ¹

In J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Derek Attridge gives a sense of warning against reading Waiting for the Barbarians as pure allegory. In creating a pure allegorical reading, a situation in which X is equated to Y, Attridge suggests that there is much lost in what the novel can represent. He says of Waiting for the Barbarians, “As in all Coetzee’s fiction, the work is full of detail far in excess of any allegorical reading” (Attridge, 2004, p. 49). However, many critics still read Coetzee’s narrative as an allegorical representation of apartheid South Africa, and there is plenty of evidence to help support such claims. This being said, Attridge’s (2004) point is clear: equating the novel only to apartheid South Africa does little justice to the complexities of the narrative, as well as the multitude of other possible representations it allows (p. 43). To this end, my reading attempts to avoid pinning Waiting for the Barbarians as merely an allegory of apartheid South Africa and chooses words such as “symbolic” and “representation” that allow the narrative not only to speak to 20th-century apartheid South Africa, but also to allow us to expand the narrative to a 21st-century post-apartheid South Africa. The choice of words here is careful and calculated, for while an allegory can suggest one set of representations only (in many instances), symbolism and representation allow for more expansive readings that stretch beyond only one set of particulars. Additionally, it allows Coetzee’s narrative not to become a relic of a bygone apartheid regime, but also a living document of a neoliberal world in a country that suffers from post-apartheid injustices. This broader, more expansive reading keeps Waiting for the Barbarians relevant in the 21st century, and it allows for reading the narrative into the 21st century. Attridge’s warning against reading as pure allegory is a necessary gesture for looking at this novel initially as a novel about apartheid South Africa and later as a representation of the neoliberal policies that inhibit the state in the 21st century. With Attridge’s warning in mind, I proceed to look both at the past and the present to see how the novel remains relevant to South Africa, neoliberal policies, and the liberal humanist.

Furthermore, in discussing what he calls “the inductive method,”Uhlmann (2020) notes that by avoiding “fixed meanings” “literature … is able to examine questions that are left to one side by more ‘exact’ disciplines” (p. 72). In this manner, such avoidance of pure allegorical readings allows critics such as Wiegandt (2019) to argue that Waiting for the Barbarians is a work that is a “sustained inquiry into torture and, more generally, the effects of violence on intimacy” (p. 78). In other words, heeding Attridge’s criticism of reading any of Coetzee’s novels as allegory allows for more nuanced or otherwise imaginative interpretations of the text. With this in mind, it is not impossible, then, to see Coetzee’s work as, in the first instance, a working through of a South Africa struggling under the grips of a colonial remnant called “apartheid,” and in the second instance a forewarning of what can happen in a land dominated by another colonial remnant called “neoliberalism” and what that neoliberalism can do to the liberal humanist. Through such imaginative readings, we see that Coetzee’s narrative addresses both, because his non-fixed representations keep his novel relevant, as I will show, well into the current crises that exist for South Africa in terms of neoliberal policies and for the paralysis of the liberal humanist in the face of such neoliberal policies.

Briefly sketching the history of apartheid in South Africa, one can see how the IMF and World Bank become complicit both in the enforcement of an apartheid regime and, after the end of apartheid, continued the conditions of Empire beyond the reach of what is supposed to be social equality. As is well known, the 18th- and 19th-century colonization of South Africa by first the Dutch and then the British set up the land for centuries of oppression and domination. One cannot forget that one of the first concentration camps known in the modern world was established in South Africa by the British in an effort to quell any uprisings by the black-skinned native Africans. The long history of colonization stretches into the 20th century when, in the 1950s and 1960s, the all-white South African government instituted the policies now known as apartheid, represented by what was then called the National Party. As Worden (2012) puts it, “racial discrimination” became “the cornerstone of apartheid [and resulted in] the division of all South Africans by race” (p. 105). The long struggle of native South Africans against this apartheid regime was represented by the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), who initially chose to fight apartheid peacefully. This peaceful resistance lasted only until the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which resulted in the deaths of many protestors and “marked a dramatic turning point in South Africa’s history” (Worden, 2012, p. 118). Declaring a state of emergency, the apartheid government arrested ANC and PAC leaders and banned the organizations. Further movements, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, among others, sprang up as a result, and they too suffered from violence by the apartheid regime. One such incident was the Soweto Student Uprising wherein 15,000 schoolchildren marched through Soweto and were confronted by the police who “fired and killed several students” (Worden, 2012, p. 131). Perhaps the most famous death in the entire Black Consciousness movement was the murder of Stephen Biko, who was murdered at the hands of the police. This murder actually plays a crucial role, though in a symbolic fashion, in Waiting for the Barbarians.

While all these political endeavors by whites against the native black Africans seem to be initiated by the unjust human desire to separate one race from the other, financial backing of the apartheid regime was crucial. Such financial backing came from the IMF and World Bank, organizations that gave the South African all-white government the funds with which to enforce racist policies. Amounts ranging from $20 million to $30 million or more were lent to the South African government by the World Bank between the introduction of apartheid in 1948 through the 1980s (Bond, 2000, pp. 159–160). Thus, the neoliberal ² economic practices of world lending institutions served to enforce the continuation of an imperial regime, far after colonization had waned across the globe after the Second World War.

The long, cruel history of apartheid South Africa lingered into the 1990s, until South African President F. W. de Klerk freed ANC leader Nelson Mandela on 11 February 1990, and soon thereafter ended apartheid, seeing a mostly peaceful transition of power from an all-white government to a native black African government. The ANC rose to political power for the first time since its initial organization nearly half a century earlier. However, not is all as sweet as it seems. While the IMF and World Bank had funded the apartheid regime that existed until de Klerk, the organizations did not disappear once the separation of races was made illegal in the country in the 1990s. Instead, the IMF and World Bank made considerable loans to the new South African government, which in terms of amount and policy, became impossible to pay back, resulting essentially in a neoliberal control over the now black majority government, really continuing hegemony over South Africa, albeit this time through economic policy and not political policy, as Coetzee explains in his interview with Watson (1978, pp. 21–24). This neoliberal economic presence, which is a class-based doctrine, continues to this day, and it impoverishes many Black South Africans, as well as handcuffs the black majority South African government with economic hardships that damage the country’s ability to move forward and become a sustained world power in the 21st century. Thus, neoliberalism, as a hegemonic class-based doctrine and political economic practice, extends the process of colonialism, albeit in a different form, into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To expose this continuous process of domination and colonization, in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee examines colonial discourse, the contradiction inherent in the discourse of Empire, and the failure of a liberal humanist to maneuver successfully with or against the neoliberal tide.

This brief and reductive history of the South African socio-political-economic policies and governments serves one purpose: it exposes the inability of an escape from neo-colonial domination. This is where paralysis occurs, for when a colonial power becomes dismantled, remnants still remain, and they remain in a very crippling manner. This hegemony, enforced by neoliberal economic policy, is where Waiting for the Barbarians enters into a new kind of discussion. Instead of simply being Coetzee’s gesture to the abhorrent apartheid policies of the South African government (and as he puts it, any colonial or racial oppression across the globe), the novel speaks well into the 21st century because, in the figure of the Magistrate, Coetzee exhibits the absolute inability of a liberal humanist, even one who is consequentially part of an Empire or dominating regime, to escape that regime long after that power has apparently dissolved, disappeared, or pulled out of power of its own free will. In fact, what Coetzee shows in his Magistrate, living out his life in an outpost on the fringes of a dying Empire, is that the neoliberal world that exists and persists after Empire paralyzes any efforts of those who once belonged to the Empire. One cannot escape the imperial mindset. In other words, Coetzee’s Magistrate, who tries to defy the Empire by way of communicating with the colonized, defending their human rights, and living life “outside” the boundaries of the laws and rules of the Empire, cannot truly escape the clutches of that Empire, even after it fundamentally disappears. Thus, the narrative still exhibits an unpleasant truth: while sufferings of colonialism such as apartheid might end, the lingering effects of such inhumanity continue well into the future; and, because of policies set in place long before the demise of an Empire, there is truly no escape from the colonial mindset whatsoever, especially with the mindset of a liberal humanist who barely acts to effect any real change.

Waiting for the Barbarians in the 21st century asks its readers to take up the mantle of the liberal humanist and overcome the paralysis the novel exhibits (especially in the form of the Magistrate) and work to dismantle the unjust practices hegemonic regimes press upon the under-privileged. Yet, how one does this is an unanswered question—a challenge of the highest degree. Coetzee’s novel presents the first step through the process of symbolism: he presents the representation of post-imperial paralysis. In fact, the act of reading this narrative is part of this first step. For, if one reads this narrative in a 21st-century neoliberal world, and comprehends what I plan to argue about present-day socio-economic oppression, one will see how the novel addresses the failure of an objection to neoliberal socio-economic politics by an equally failed liberal humanist. In other words, what Waiting for the Barbarians shows its readers of the 21st century is a world crushed by the effects of neoliberal policies and the impossibility of the liberal humanist to maneuver successfully with or against the neoliberal tide—a bleak and stunning message indeed. ³

Coetzee’s representations, symbolic and otherwise, allow readers to see the novel as a critique of a global historical process that started to emerge in the late 1970s and dominate the 1980s and 1990s in South Africa and much of the rest of the world. This historical process, which has come to be called neoliberalism, is a continuation of the older process of colonialism. Much of the critical discussion on Waiting for the Barbarians focuses on its status as a critique of colonialism and colonial discourse (such critical readings in this vein include those by Attwell (1993, 2014), Watson (1996), Zamora (1986), Jolly (1996), and Wade (1990), among many others) and “this [is the] aspect of colonialism that receives the most extensive treatment in Coetzee’s fiction” (Watson, 1996, p. 14). In my article, however, I attempt to go beyond the idea that the novel only deals with various manifestations of colonialism and colonial discourse and claim that the novel makes it clear that there is no clear rupture when South Africa and the world transition to neoliberalism. To expose this continuous process of colonization into neoliberalism, Coetzee examines colonial discourse and experience, and ultimately the contradiction inherent in the discourse of Empire.

Coetzee examines the colonial discourse and experience by examining the relationship between the men of the Empire, like the Magistrate, and the “barbarians.” Even though the “barbarians” are barely present in the novel, they are always depicted in stereotypical terms to justify the Empire’s need for domination, violence, and torture. This is typical in any colonial context where the colonized are associated with barbarity, backwardness, underdevelopment, evil, and violence. For example, Fanon (1967) claims that “exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations, rational oppression, take turns at different levels in order literally to make of the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation” (p. 35). In the novel (1980), the natives are described as “barbarians,” “criminals,” “savages,” “dirty,” “animals,” etc. On his way to the barbarian girl’s people, the Magistrate meets “men mounted in shaggy ponies, twelve and more, dressed in sheepskin coats and caps, brown-faced, weather-beaten, narrow eyed, the barbarians in flesh on native soil” (p. 69). These barbarians are constructed as the Others who are “clothed in wool and the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk” (p. 71). Moreover, the natives are always described negatively in the colonial discourse. Memmi (1965) notes that “[e]verything in the colonized is deficient, and everything contributes to this deficiency – even [the colonized] body, which is poorly fed, puny and sick. Many lengthy discussions would be saved if, in the beginning, it was agreed that there is this wretchedness – collective, permanent, immense. Simple and plain biological wretchedness, chronic hunger of an entire people, malnutrition and illness” (p. 161). This is clear when the Magistrate describes the natives in negative terms. He says, “[t]hey are a bony, pigeon-chested people. Their women seem always to be pregnant, their children are stunted; in a few of the young girls there are traces of a fragile, liquid-eyed beauty; for the rest I see only ignorance, cunning, slovenliness” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 122). Here the Magistrate “cannot think of himself outside of his role of imperial agency” as Vaughan (1982) puts it (p. 125).

Not only are the natives represented as physically inferior, but they are also economically inferior. The Magistrate describes the economy of the natives as “subsistence economy,” which mainly depends on hunting and gathering—a non-capitalist society. Hence, they are the civilization’s “Others” who are “clothed in wool and the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk, foreign to the suave touch of cotton, the virtues of the placid grains and fruits” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 71). Furthermore, the nomads who “visit the settlement in winter to pitch their tents outside the walls and engage in barter; exchanging wool, skins, felts, and leatherwork for cotton goods, tea, sugar, beans, flour” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 37), establish the stereotypical of “Other” that is necessary for the Empire’s existence and domination over the barbarians.

The “Others” of Waiting for the Barbarians, these figures who are simple hunters and gatherers, are representative of those who stand outside the trappings, to a degree, of a neoliberal regime. Reporting to no one, they do not dominate the socio-economic landscape, and they live hand-to-mouth on a day-to-day basis. That said, the neoliberal regime, represented by Coetzee as the Empire, cannot allow anyone to live outside the boundaries of the neoliberal socio-economic structure. Thus, these “Others” are attacked and violated, indeed oppressed by the neoliberal regime in an effort to compel conformity and in order to consolidate power under its regime. As one will see, Coetzee’s novel becomes representative of what a neoliberal socio-economic power does not only to its own people, but also to those people who want desperately to stay outside such a system. In essence, such people cannot stand outside such a regime, for the neoliberal politics demands conformity and domination. No one can exist without the neoliberal socio-economic structure. This becomes abundantly clear when Colonel Joll captures those he feels are barbarians, but the Magistrate knows only to be simple fishermen, living off the land and of no real harm to the socio-economic political realizations of the Empire itself.

Stepping back a bit, not only does constructing the Empire’s “Other” justify the Empire’s dominance and superiority, but also it justifies violence committed against the “Other.” The novel, written in 1980, reflects the spirit of the 1970s and early 1980s, whether in South Africa or in some other countries all over the world. Gallagher (1988) writes: “One of the most horrifying realities of the twentieth century is the wide-spread existence of state-approved torture. Amnesty International cites allegations that torture in 1984 and estimates that in the 1980s more one-third of the world’s governments are responsible for torturing prisoners” (p. 277). In 1986, Coetzee, writing in New York Times Book Review, claims that violence and torture have “exerted a dark fascination on himself and many other South African authors” (qtd. in Gallagher, 1988, p. 277). In the novel, violence against the natives is atrocious, terrorizing, and brutal. Colonel Joll, an imperial officer, arrives to investigate the rumored attack of the barbarians on the Empire. During his investigation, Colonel Joll brutally tortures the prisoners he assumes are barbarians, but who the Magistrate recognizes as only fishermen. In one instance, Colonel Joll catches an old man with his son, thinking they are responsible for the supposed attack on the Empire. The torturer kills the old man, leaving the corpse in the same room where the boy is imprisoned. The Magistrate speaks:

While the boy still lies rigidly asleep, his eyes pinched shut, we carry the corpse out. In the yard, with the guard holding the lantern, I find the stitching with the point of my knife, tear the shroud open, and fold it back from the head of the old man.

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 7) ⁴

This physical brutality and dehumanization define the relationship between the Empire and its “Others,” the natives, or anyone else who might oppose the Empire, even the Magistrate himself. Colonel Joll returns from his expedition to root out the barbarians with a group of prisoners who are “roped together neck to neck, shapeless figures in their sheepskin coats” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 20). They are treated like “diseased” animals. Again, the Magistrate speaks:

The filth, the smell, the noise of their quarreling and coughing become too much. There is an ugly incident when a soldier tries to drag one of their women indoors, perhaps only in play, who knows, and is pelted with stones. A rumor begins to go the rounds that they are diseased, that they will bring an epidemic to the town. Though I make them dig a pit in the corner of the yard and have the nightsoil removed, the kitchen staff refuse them utensils and begin to toss them their food from the doorway as if they were indeed animals. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 19)

The dehumanization of the natives is part of colonization that defines the natives as “Others” who are “reduced to the state of an animal” as Fanon puts it. Fanon goes on: “And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms” (Fanon, 1963, p. 7).

This kind of dominance of the other could be considered a type of symbolic representation of the physical stress neoliberal policies have on people. For instance, the insurmountable loans lent by the World Bank and IMF are just as crippling to the South African people as Joll’s torture. Poverty caused by an incredible inability to exist under unsurmountable debt is itself a kind of torture. The result of such debt is starvation, famine, the inability to fend for oneself, feed oneself, feed the masses, house the masses, and so on. Indeed, the stretches of ghettos across the South African landscape simply reinforce the fact that the IMF and World Bank, built entirely on neoliberal policies, have crippled an entire nation and people. Furthermore, one might add that this crippling does not immediately affect the white citizens of South Africa, who for centuries were in absolute power. Instead, it is the born-poor South Africans who now, as they always have, suffer under such policies. The debt to be paid weighs on the backs of the black South Africans, while many (though not all, surely) white South Africans remain relatively untouched by these policies—for they have had riches since the beginning of the colonization of the nation and the continent. Generally, wealth remains in white hands, and wealth is a weapon. Coetzee’s novel, though one of physical torture and death, also gestures toward economic torture, but even more. It gestures toward economic crises that result in death caused by malnutrition, poor medical care, the AIDS crisis, and so on. Certainly, in the 21st century, neoliberal social-economic policies are just as violent as Colonel Joll’s reduction of these supposed barbarians to the state of wretched animals.

The violence, torture, and militarism of Coetzee’s dominating Empire are part of a wider set of global violence defining colonial nations. In this regard, Coetzee, in one of the interviews with Stephen Watson (1978), asserts that “the South African situation is only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neocolonialism” (p. 23). Coetzee globalizes the colonial experience and asserts the continuous nature of colonialism. Similarly, Attridge (1996) states that the “absence of precise historical and geographical grounding is a necessary feature of Coetzee’s fiction […] since the novels are addressed as much to those outside South Africa as to those within it” (pp. 184–185). Attridge asserts that

the South African struggle is part of a wider, and entirely concrete, struggle, […] it has a particular history which is continuous with the particular histories of all other countries participating in the rise of Western capitalism and the ideology on which it depends, and that one requirement in moving toward a resolution of the struggle […] is an understanding of the ways in which the cultural formations that we have inherited through those histories are […] complicit with the daily barbarities that occur in South Africa. (Attridge, 1996, p. 185)

This reading of Coetzee’s novel “serves to open up a perspective often ignored: to remind us that South Africa is part of a global historical process and that a certain mental structure created by this process is still rampant here and elsewhere” (Watson, 1978, p. 36). One can claim that Coetzee implicitly points out that violence is an ongoing and inherent process of a colonial situation represented by the old form of colonialism that exploited Africa and other countries centuries ago, and by the new imperial project which economically and physically cripples South Africa and other developing countries. For example, this stage of imperialism does rely on “consent” of the marginalized “Other”; however, militarism and coercion are always there to subjugate the “Other.” For example, during the years of South African apartheid (1948–1994), many Africans were brutally tortured and murdered and dispossessed of their land and segregated in public places (Worden, 2012, pp. 105–118). Not only did these acts violate the human rights of Black South Africans, but global institutions such as the World Bank and IMF also colluded with the apartheid regime and violently exasperated and intensified such acts. According to Bond (2001), the World Bank and IMF colluded with the apartheid regime in different ways. For example, the World Bank lent the South African apartheid regime “$100 million in loans to Eskom from 1951 to 1967 that gave only while people electric power, but for which all South Africans paid the bill [and the World Bank refused] to heed a United Nations General Assembly instruction in 1966 not to lend to apartheid South Africa” (p. xii). Similarly, the IMF lent the apartheid regime “more than $2 billion between the Soweto uprising in 1976 and 1983” (Bond, 2001, p. xii). The loans, as well as the technical assistance the World Bank and IMF offered to South African governments, helped “the apartheid government to switch to neoliberal economic policies” (Bond, 2000, p. 124). As a consequence of the economic, political, and social violence the South Africans experienced during the colonial and apartheid era, “the Africans made up 75 percent of South African population, but owned about 15 percent of land in South Africa and controlled about 2 percent of the nation’s wealth” by 1994 (Eades, 1999, p. 51).

Perhaps nowhere is such a trade or economic process akin to what the World Bank and IMF did to the South African people represented than in Coetzee’s depiction of the barter that occurs when the Magistrate returns the blind girl to the barbarian people. Trusting in his own “good faith,” the Magistrate makes his offering of the girl to her people: “[f]rom my saddlebag I bring out the two silver platters I have carried across the desert. I take the bolt of silk out of its wrapping: ‘I would like you to have these,’ I say” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 70). However, the trade is not satisfactory to the barbarians, for what they need is not the silver or silk, but rather more essential needs: “She nods. ‘[…] He says he wants a horse too. For me’” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 70). To this, the Magistrate replies coarsely: “Tell him we have a long hard road before us. Our horses are in a bad way, as he can see for himself. Ask if we cannot buy horses from them instead. Say we will pay in silver” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 70).

What this shows, symbolically and by way of plain unfair economic conditions, is that it is the Empire that determines the strict terms of economic payments of debts or trades. The barbarian girl is ripped from her people, and the Magistrate, as a liberal humanist, believes his offerings of silver and silk to be enough to satiate the needs of the native people. Moreover, as a representation of neoliberalism that “views the human as economic entity whose freedom must be sanctioned by the state” (Mullins, 2018, p. 3), the Empire expects the Magistrate to act according to its logic and that is what he does when dealing the barbarians. His freedom and his views are “sanctioned” by the Empire no matter how he attempts to show that he opposes it. On the other hand, the needs of the natives are more practical: horses. This kind of reckoning is demonstrative of the kinds of unfair, or simply unintellectual, concerns for the native people themselves. It is not necessarily wealth—particularly the kind of wealth the Empire (or whites) perceives as essential—that the natives need. Rather, it is good to furnish life, existence, and sustenance the natives need. Furthermore, characteristic of the Empire (and the World Bank and IMF), the Empire refuses to give what the natives need, instead reserving the right of life and sustenance to itself, a bold and unjust system of barter when one considers that the native girl was ripped from her people and now the Magistrate simply refuses to give in to the demands that the native people make. Thus, the Empire, here, simply sets all the terms of the economic process, and in this example, one can see Coetzee exemplifying the way entities like the World Bank and IMF make existence on the fundamental human level impossible for native peoples. They give what is unneeded in repayment for rights upon which they infringed, and in return do not supply the necessary recompense to the people from whom they have stolen land—and lives. Here the role of the Magistrate as a liberal humanist is clear: even though he seems to be sympathetic as any liberal humanist in the age of neoliberalism, the Magistrate does nothing to effect any real change in the miserable life of the barbarians. In fact, the payment the Magistrate offers is no compensation for the history of violence the Empire has raged against the people of the land. On the contrary, he still uses the logic of the Empire when dealing with the natives.

The violence inherent in the South African apartheid regime is part of a global historical process of the 1970s and 1980s when the World Bank and IMF began to set the whole new era of neoliberal capitalism, with its focus on dispossession of the marginalized and the destruction of local economies by violent policies that contribute to dispossession, debt crisis, and uneven development. For example, the dispossession of the barbarians can be read symbolically as the dispossession of the marginalized people in South Africa, as well as other parts of the world. Dispossession is one of the major aspects of global capitalism (Harvey, 2003, p. 45). Dispossession is part of the Empire’s project in the novel. The Empire pushes the barbarians “off the plains into the mountains,” as the Magistrate puts it, even when he claims that he is “patching up relations—between the men of the future and the men of the past” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 71). This description of dispossessing the barbarians speaks to the ongoing processes of dispossession dominating the post-apartheid era. In his article, “The ANC’s ‘Left Turn’ & South African Sub-imperialism,”Bond (2004) states that

After all, the colonial system’s main consequence for Africa was the structuring of capitalist – noncapitalist relations in a manner described so well by Rosa Luxemburg (1968), and updated eloquently as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003) or more simply permanent ‘primitive accumulation’ (Perelman, 2000). While playing its subordinate role within world capitalism, Africa thus cannot hope to ‘develop’ but instead remains caught in various trade, debt, investment, technology and cultural traps which correlate growing international economic integration to worsening inequality. (p. 601)

The very idea of “Other” constructed by Empire is part of an ongoing process of colonialism that still operated in South Africa during and after the apartheid era. The invention of the barbarians as “Others” in Waiting for the Barbarians is a process that lies at the heart of colonialism. The Empire’s invention of its “Others” is another indication that there is no clear and distinct rupture when the world and South Africa mutate into another phase of imperialism. In the novel, the barbarians are represented as “Others” to justify the Empire’s existence, and the representation of barbarians in stereotypical, even animalistic, terms makes very clear the kinds of atrocities committed by the Empire against the barbarians. In a sense, the atrocities continue when the IMF and World Bank provide loans and financing to support an apartheid regime, and later expect return of the insurmountable debt. Nothing has changed for the black South Africans. Regardless of whether it is apartheid or endless debt, the black South Africans are submitted to an oppressive ideology, led by a neoliberal set of policies put into motion decades earlier, all of which led to the financial institutions that currently cripple an already struggling nation. Coetzee’s narrative simply continues to prove this notion, because the kinds of power exerted in the novel’s fictional outpost itself prove to be a separation of wealth and poverty.

To put it in other terms, inside the walls of the outpost, there is wealth. There is enough food and an economic structure, supported by the Empire out somewhere far away, that keeps most of its white citizens healthy and robust. On the other hand, just outside the walls of the outpost are fishermen and women living primitively. And, although they serve no harm to the outpost itself, they represent an ever-present threat to the dominant ideology. That is, they exist outside the domain of power, and hegemonic system is a power that prefers to dominate totally. This explains Joll’s rounding up of these people as prisoners—political prisoners, no doubt—and in capturing these political prisoners, Coetzee shows that the neoliberal powers will go to no end to totalize the dominance it needs to assert in order to support itself. Furthermore, because neoliberalism is so totalizing, institutions of power created to assert their individual dominance continue to demolish the spirit and lives of those once colonized and now given the blind hope of a better, free life.

Although Coetzee’s Empire does not geographically correspond to any actual setting, it represents some phases of colonialism in South Africa: “the phase of bureaucratized control which succeeds the phase of exploration and agrarian settlement and which heralds the phase of militarized totalitarian control” (Dovey, 1988, p. 209). The militarized totalitarian phase of apartheid is represented in Coetzee’s novel through representing the torture of the prisoners and constructing the barbarians as “Others.” Colonel Joll represents part of the militarized totalitarian control Empire adopts, and he is symbolic of the colonizing culture: violent, aggressive, and brutal. For example, the Empire’s repression is depicted in the character of Colonel Joll who is “the third Bureau’s important visitor” to the outpost town, where the barbarians are preparing to attack Empire, as the rumor goes (Coetzee, 1980, pp. 2–8). Colonel Joll believes that torture is the only way to get to truth: “first I get lies, you see—this is what happens—first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 5). He returns with a group of prisoners, and he exposes them to various types of torture, killing, violence, and humiliation: “Four of the prisoners kneel on the ground. The other eight, still roped together, squat in the shade of the wall watching, their hands to their cheeks […]. One of them writhes his shoulders in pain and moans. The others are silent, their thoughts wholly concentrated on moving smoothly with the cord, not giving the wire a chance to tear their flesh” (Coetzee, 1980, pp. 102–103). One of the prisoners was a girl and her father who was killed in prison. The girl was left maimed, half blind, with broken ankles as a consequence of Colonel Joll’s torture. This part of Empire is a metaphor of the global capitalist system where militarism is sometimes used to impose corporate capitalist values, and this type of Empire is the other face of neoliberalism. As Kirk and Margo (2000) state in their article, “Neoliberalism, Militarism, and Armed Conflict,” “as part of the nation-state apparatus, the military is on hand whenever necessary to intimidate and repress popular resistance to exploitative working conditions, to structural adjustment programs, or the privatization of resources in aid of profit accumulation” (p. 3). The integration of the world system into the neoliberal system is accompanied by violence and aggression. Therefore, the novel can be read in a post-apartheid context as it “continues to speak to subordination of subjects in the transnational ‘global war on terror’” (Wittenberg and Highman, 2015, p. 2). For example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq “sought to violently integrate Iraq into the emergent global economy and the U.S. [as a neoliberal] state acted on behalf of transnational capital” (Baker, 2014, p. 122).

Having seen the representation of neoliberal politics and social-economic domination long after colonialism, one thinks that it becomes necessary to see how one might stand up to such a crushing power, and, while doing so, suggest that the liberal humanist appear to be the only hope—however little hope such a liberal humanist can provide. If Colonel Joll represents the militaristic aspect of Empire, the Magistrate ⁵ represents the Empire’s sterile and immobile liberal humanist. Coetzee depicts the Magistrate as a liberal humanist who displays an understanding and sympathy for the nomads, is contemptuous of Colonel Joll’s use of torture to interrogate the natives, and opposes the Empire’s military. However, at the same time, he is part of Empire, someone who is complicit with it, and therefore Coetzee is able to critique the discourse of liberal humanism, as well as the contradictions inherent in the system of Empire. This kind of critique becomes a form of resistance by Coetzee, resisting the discourse of Empire by exposing the contradiction of the system. The novel is written at “a particular juncture in South African history: the phase of bureaucratized and increasingly militarized totalitarian control from 1948 onwards” (Dovey, 1996, p. 141).

In his article, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonist Literature,”JanMohamed (1985) makes a crucial point about the allegory he sees represented in Waiting for the Barbarians when he says that “[t]he novel thus implies that we are all somehow equally guilty [of racial paranoia, etc.] and that fascism is endemic of all societies” (p. 73). Furthermore, he explains that “[t]he fundamental strategy of all such fiction [i.e. Waiting for the Barbarians and other colonial allegories] is its unchanging presentation of the natives’ inferiority as an unalterable metaphysical fact” (p. 73). However, his most enduring point is that the Magistrate in Coetzee’s work is at once “liberal” and also “reluctant, passive” (p. 73). In making this point, JanMohamed illuminates my point precisely. In the barbarism, to use JanMohamed’s term, of the Empire, the Other (another of JanMohamed’s terms) is reduced to a limited, almost unfunctional capacity. In other words, even the liberal humanist is unable to make any significant changes in the face of Empire. In fact, JanMohamed states that Waiting for the Barbarians“does justice to the themes of a liberal’s complicity with fascism, his subsequent sense of guilt, and […] it shows without any hesitation that the Empire projects its own barbarism onto the Other beyond its borders” (p. 73). In brief, JanMohamed suggests that the Magistrate, whom I am calling here a liberal humanist, cannot function as a liberal humanist because of the barbarism of the Empire itself. JanMohamed rightly points out that the strength of the Empire in the novel, its overbearing protectors in the characters of Joll and Mandel (for instance), renders the Magistrate impotent. Even if he were to try to resist, as he does, the Empire’s wrongdoings upon innocent natives continue.

Thus, as the chief imperial administrator in a small town on the remote border of an Empire, surrounded by “barbarian” people, the Magistrate carries out his imperial duties to keep the Empire safe from any supposed barbarians’ threats. He believes in universal values such as peace, love, justice, the rule of law that the Empire, the guardian of a civilization, should embody and promote. He states that,

The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble. Thus it is that, administration of law and order in these parts having today passed back to me, I order that the prisoners be fed, that having the doctor be called in to do what he can, that the barracks return to being a barracks, that arrangements be made to restore the prisoners to their former lives as soon as possible, as far as possible. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 24)

However, the torture and violence carried out by Joll and Mandel reveal the contradictions inherent in the Magistrate’s liberal humanist position, which represents the impotent position of a liberal humanist’s discourse narrating torture, suffering, and violence, dominating South Africa during the apartheid era, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s. The Magistrate does nothing to prevent horrors such as torture carried out by the Empire. In fact, he conforms to the logic of the Empire and thus renders impotent. Here, one can refer to the global neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank and IMF which seem to be opposing the militarized neoliberal state but they, just like the Magistrate himself, fail to transform their neoliberal discourse into any coherent forms of resistance that might help effect any real change to the atrocities of the neoliberal state. That is how I see that Coetzee, through his depiction of the Magistrate as a liberal humanist, is able to foreshadow the failure of liberal humanism in the age of neoliberalism. In both cases, the logic of Empire dominates.

The Magistrate’s narrative represents the liberal humanist discourse that is doomed to fail, as such a discourse does not and cannot offer an alternative to the militarized regime, nor can it effect any real change, and nor can it stop violence associated with the Empire. According to Dovey (1996), this failure is illustrated through

[t]he metaphor of blindness and sight: the Magistrate moves from a position in which he takes for granted his own superior sight or insight, commenting on the Colonel’s use of sunglasses in the novel’s opening paragraph and asking ‘Is he blind?’ to a position of blindness, saying at the end: ‘There has been something staring me in the face, and still I don’t see it.’ (p. 141)

While the Magistrate expresses his desire to oppose the militarized regime and works to expose the Empire’s discourse and history of oppression, the narrative of the novel makes it clear that liberal humanists, like the Magistrate, “convince themselves there is nothing they could do to stop the horrors of state oppression, and … [thus] must be considered the historical and economic accomplices in the system’s policy of injustice and discrimination” (Canepari-Labib, 2005, p. 96). In other words, the Magistrate fails because all of his liberal humanist attempts and attitudes turn out to be “ineffectual in relation to the kind of power vested in the figure of Colonel Joll” (Dovey, 1996, p. 142), who is metonymic of the aggressive and violent aspect of the colonizing/apartheid culture. With all the crime and torture committed by Empire and its men, the Magistrate neither actively participates in nor actively condemns the torture, violence, and abuse that are carried out by the Empire. According to Ng (2018), “the way in which the Magistrate finds himself trapped as an unwilling participant in the process of imperialism resonates with the sense of resignation encouraged by the neoliberal perspective” (p. 529).

Even though Colonel Joll brutally tortures the natives, the Magistrate never actively intervenes to stop the Colonel. He is even sometimes simply passive. When the Colonel Joll tortures the old man to death, leaving behind an orphaned grandson, the Magistrate shows sympathy to their conditions but does not even investigate the murder and torture. He states that,

I didn’t mean to get embroiled in this. I am a country magistrate, responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire. I collect the tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the junior officers who are the only officers […] we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the law-court twice a week. For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content. When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 8)

The Magistrate’s liberal humanist faith in the rule of the law, justice, and civilization does not stop the Empire’s brutalities, which are represented by both Colonel Joll and Warrant Officer Mandel. Moreover, the Magistrate does not realize that “the law does not delimit the use of power; rather, power ultimately defines the meaning of the law and circumscribes the realm in which it applies” (Moses, 1993, p. 119).

Similarly, the Magistrate’s failure to write a history of settlement and to interpret the girl’s bodily scars indicates his failure to understand the violent colonial past that cannot be mediated through a liberal humanist discourse. Moreover, his failure shows his “failed attempts to posit a meaning for both the script and the girl’s suffering” and this exposes a “liberal humanist crisis of interpretation” (Dovey, 1996, p. 141). Left crippled and partially blinded by torture carried out by Colonel Joll, the girl becomes, for the Magistrate, the embodiment of torture and violence he longs to understand. Although he claims that his motives are honorable and he does “what was right,” his relationship with the girl mirrors the hierarchal ordering of Empire. That is to say, those in power create and construct “Others” as they please. The Magistrate still operates within the power relations in a way that he always treats the girl as an object that needs care so he can assert that he is a benevolent ruler. The way he describes the girl is humiliating and degrading:

I feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight […] I feed her, shelter her, use her body, if that is what I am doing, in this foreign way. There used to be moments when she stiffened at certain intimacies; but now her body yields when I nuzzle my face into her belly or clasp her feet between my thighs. She yields to everything […] She sleeps as intensely as a child. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 30)

Similarly, the Magistrate tries to persuade the girl to recount the details of her torture, stating that “until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood [he] cannot let go of her” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 31). Unable to understand the girl’s abuse, he decides to return her to her home in an expedition that leads to his own demise, professionally and psychologically. The Magistrate is accused of being a traitor who cooperates with the Empire’s enemy, and he is brutally tortured.

Another aspect of liberal humanist discourse is the contradictions that are inherent in the Magistrate’s liberal belief in civilization, law, and progress. Early in the novel, he states that “all my life I have believed in civilized behavior” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 23). At the same time, he has an abnormal relationship with a barbarian girl, washing and rubbing her body, sleeping with her, massaging her feet and hands, and drying her body (Coetzee, 1980, pp. 25–30). He feels sympathetic for the girl but then he “resents” the idea that he sleeps with her: “There are other times when I suffer fits of resentment against my bondage to the ritual of the oiling and rubbing, the drowsiness, the slump into oblivion. I cease to comprehend what pleasure I can ever have found in her obstinate, phlegmatic body, and even discover in myself stirrings of outrage. I become withdrawn, irritable” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 41). Other times, he finds pleasure in her: “Nothing seems more natural than to seat her on the bed and begin to undress her” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 41). In all cases, he is the same person: “I am the same man I always was: but time has broken, something has fallen in upon me from the sky, at random, from nowhere: this body in my bed, for which I am responsible, or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it? For the time being, perhaps forever, I am simply bewildered” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 43). This aligns with his feeling sympathetic with the prisoners, while at the same time giving way to disdain and indignation at “their animal shamelessness,” “the filth, the smell, the noise” (Coetzee, 1980, pp. 18–19).

Even though one might claim that the Magistrate has good intentions, and he is trying to expose the brutalities of Empire, his liberal humanist position makes him complicit in the narrative of Empire. After returning the girl to her tribe and crossing the limit of the Empire, the Magistrate is arrested and accused of being a traitor. He becomes what Memmi (1965) calls “a colonizer who rejects colonialism” (p. 89). He himself acknowledges his complicity with Empire. Although he always insists on his distance from Joll and his brutalities, he comes to acknowledge his complicity:

Whom will that other girl with the blind face remember: me with my silk robe and my dim lights and my perfumes and oils and my unhappy pleasures, or that other cold man with the mask over his eyes who gave the orders and pondered the sounds of her intimate pain? Whose was the last face she saw plainly on this earth but the face behind the glowing iron? Though I cringe with shame, even here and now, I must ask myself whether, when I lay head to foot with her, fondling and kissing those broken ankles, I was not in my heart of hearts regretting that I could not engrave myself on her as deeply. However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is marked for life as the property of a stranger […] (Coetzee, 1980, p. 132)

And finally, the Magistrate affirms that he and Joll are two sides of the same coin: “For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less” (Coetzee, 1980, p. 133). Here, Merivale (1996) states that the Magistrate seems to “represent an old order of would-be-humanism, forced to give way to Colonel Joll’s brutal new order” and the Magistrate “tries to oppose these wall-like forces of Empire with his feeble weapons of reason, learning, and good (for South Africa read: ‘liberal’) intentions” (p. 159). Similarly, JanMohamed (1985) states that the novel as an allegory “focuses on a liberal Judge’s reluctant, passive participation in the fascist activity of his country” (p. 73). And the Magistrate himself questions his own position in Empire:

What, after all, do I stand for besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behavior towards captured foes, and what do I stand against except the new science of degradation that kills people on their knees, confused and disgraced in their own eyes? Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners with their backsides in the air? Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No! Easier to be beaten and made a martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped? The old magistrate, defender of the rule of law, enemy in his own way of the State, assaulted and imprisoned, impregnably virtuous, is not without his own twinges of doubt. (Coetzee, 1980, p. 106)

Thus, the Magistrate fails to transform his new understanding of Empire into comprehensible forms of historical consciousness that might help imagine any viable solution and to effect any real change to the brutalities of Empire as a liberal humanist who has strong “belief in the power and efficacy of the judiciary system, in ‘civilization’ and continual progress of humankind, an abhorrence of violence, accompanied by an attitude of tolerance and rationality; and, more significant than all of these, a belief in individual autonomy and freedom of choice” (Dovey, 1996, p. 141).

What I have tried to do in reading Waiting for the Barbarians is to demonstrate that the novel speaks well into the 21st century. The novel encourages us to make our own interpretation and to see how the novel utilizes symbolic representations to show that colonialism has never ended and there is no clear point when South Africa and the rest of world, once dominated by colonialism, turns to neoliberalism, even though the latter has been promoted as a liberal form government that enhances liberal values, individual freedom, and free market. To expose this continuous process of exploitation, Coetzee, I claim, is able to highlight colonial discourse and experience, and the contradictions inherent in the discourse of Empire. Furthermore, I explain that what Coetzee shows in his Magistrate is that neoliberalism paralyzes any efforts of those who once belong to the Empire. In other words, South Africa has never experienced real independence even after colonization officially ended; postcolonial South Africa has been crushed by the policies of neoliberalism promoted by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, that serve to enforce the continuation of an imperial regime, far after of colonization became a part of world history. And, at the same, the Magistrate, as a liberal humanist, fails to challenge the rhetoric of Empire and hence fails to effect any real change except pitying the natives.

Furthermore, the Magistrate’s liberal humanism does not provide any viable position and solution to the brutalities of the Empire and does not possibly negotiate the oppressive conditions of what is truly an extension of colonialism—neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, by way of its monetary enslavement of South Africa, and indeed all countries once part of the broader Western efforts of colonialism, simply reinforces and reinstates the power it appeared to have given up in the past. Therefore, even the liberal humanist, seeing injustices and trying to act against them, is still part and parcel of the larger problem of colonialism, by way of neoliberalism, and cannot negotiate himself outside of that power structure. Insofar as that liberal humanist is trapped by the ongoing process of colonialism, he can do nothing to effect true liberation for the people so long afflicted with the disease of colonial Empire. Waiting for the Barbarians, then, speaks to the late 20th century and far into the 21st century, almost prophetically, by providing the argument that colonialism and its morphing into neoliberalism simply exhibits an enduring legacy of colonial rule, paralyzing not only the liberal humanist, but damaging, perhaps even beyond compare, those under the thumb of the colonial/neoliberal West.