Doris Lessing The Old Chief Mshlanga Essay

Almost every story is a reflection or a past experience of its author s life.

Every author, often even unconsciously, leaves a trace of his own psyche in
his or her work. Moreover, it is the purpose of literature to tell about
life.According to our assignment, my partner and I will try to show how Doris
Lessing s life experience influenced one of her own stories, The Old Chief
Mshlanga, which we chose, and how the chosen story reflects Doris Lessing
s life in its symbols.Doris Lessing, though born in Kermanshah, Iran in 1919,
spent her childhood years and her youth living on a farm in Rhodesia, now
Zimbabwe. She attended a girl s high school in Salisbury, but never
graduated.Doris Lessing lived in Rhodesia from 1924 to 1949. It is already in
London, where she moved to, she started writing professionally. She went
through many stages in her life: she has been an active participant in the
struggle for black liberation, a socialist, a feminist, and even a Sufi mystic,
but all throughout those stages she was a writer.Her books, novels, and
stories are largely concerned with people and problems involved in the
social and political upheavals of twentieth century Africa. Daughter of a
white settler, Lessing has written that living in Africa is to be reminded
twenty times a day of injustice (Western Literature, 1794).The story of The
Old Chief Mshlanga is about a fourteen-year-old girl whose name is not
mentioned otherwise than her African nickname Nkosikaas-- chieftainess .
The adolescent Nkosikaas, who is also the narrator, tells her story of how
she grew aware of the immense landscape of Africa, how she met the old
chief Mshlanga who intrigued her that she even visited his kraal (village),
how her dislike of locals and her fear of them (she carried a gun and had
dogs to protect her because of that) grew into an easy
friendliness for the Africans (Western Literature, 1799). The story ends in a
conflict between the narrator s father and the old chief over twenty goats.
Although the chief s tribe gets relocated and looses the goats, they are the
ones who have the narrator s respect.Since Lessing s work reflects a certain
psychological realism, the story of The Old Chief Mshlanga tends to be
autobiographical. The author, thus, is little Nkosikaas. The impressions of
Nkosikaas are really the memories of impressions of Africa of Doris Lessing s
youth. As the author said herself, (Africa) is not a place to visit unless one
chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from majestic silence lying just over
the border memory or thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that a man is
a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape (Western
Literature, 1794). Being only a small creature - it is one of the realization the
main character makes towards the end of the story.The author is a woman
and a feminist. One of the struggles of feminism is to be a man s equal.
However, the situation is reversed in this story. Since the main character is a
girl, she feels superior to every man, for the exception of her father, and
towards the end, the old chief. We believe that is a similarity between Doris
Lessing and her character.Another similarity between the two is loneliness of

both, Lessing and the narrator. The narrator spends most of her time
walking with a gun over her shoulder and her dogs following her through the
various grasslands and hills. She is alone looking for excitement. Just like the
narrator, the author is walking through life discovering things, also often
alone.The personal issues of the narrator s life cannot be distinguished from
those of Doris Lessing. Lessings psychological realism works perfectly it is a
story of a person who lived it.