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Waiting for the Barbarians Summary. The main protagonist of the novel is a nameless civil servant, who serves as magistrate to a frontier settlement owned by a nameless empire. The Empire, a vague colonialist regime, sets itself in opposition to the “barbarians,” mysterious nomadic peoples who live in the wild lands bordering the Empire ...
- Chapter 4
The fourth chapter begins as the magistrate describes a man...
- Characters
A colonel in the Empire’s army, Joll visits the Empire’s...
- Chapter 4
In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee has written a powerful, multilayered allegory. Its central theme deals with the implications of imperialism, but this examination creates a much wider array of harmonic overtones, which concern human nature in a broader sense.
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Dec 12, 2014 · Waiting for the Barbarians was written in 1980, during the apartheid regime in South Africa. But what it says about torture remains true today. If the state wants to stand up to barbarity, it...
- Events in History at The Time of The Novel
- The Novel in Focus
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Apartheid
Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory in which South Africa is never explicitly mentioned. However, the links between Coetzee’s fictional “Empire” and the practices of South Africa’s Nationalist government are clear. The novel was written in 1979, at a time when, due to the much-publicized death of Stephen Biko in 1977, torture in South Africa had suddenly become the focus of international attention. Biko, whose story is told below, was only one of many revolutionary leaders detained and...
Torture and the case of Stephen Biko
Such extreme laws did not go unchallenged. In fact, they provoked continual unrest and protest within oppressed communities. The government retaliated by building an elaborate security force to monitor revolutionary activity. The police, as well as intelligence officers, were granted more and more power to deal with political troublemakers in whatever ways they felt necessary. A series of harsh laws were passed to restrict political opposition and extend the power of the security forces. Inde...
“IN DETENTION”
Official accounts of prison deaths often blamed suicide or accidents for the deaths of political prisoners. In his poem “In Detention,” Christopher van Wyk explores the absurdities of this official rhetoric: According to the U.N. report and the findings of Amnesty International, these “methods” sometimes included psychological techniques like solitary confinement, but were most often physical and brutal in nature. Allegations were made that there “is an appliance for administering electric sh...
Plot summary
Waiting for the Barbariansis told from the perspective of the old Magistrate who watches over the affairs of a small frontier settlement on the outposts of the Empire. The Magistrate has held this position comfortably for decades; the town itself is sleepy and quiet, though kept in check by a vague, ever-present fear of the unknown “barbarian” presence existing outside its gates. Though the barbarians function as a scapegoat for the townspeople and rumors of war preparations and attacks circu...
The torturer
J. M. Coetzee describes Waiting for the Barbariansas being about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience” (Coetzee in Gallagher, p. 120). The novel itself, while clearly alluding to South Africa and often seeming to allude to the death of Stephen Biko, is ultimately universal in scope, exploring, in broad terms, the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the torturer and the tortured. But to the novel’s Magistrate, it all remains a mystery. He neve...
Sources and literary context
Waiting for the Barbarians was one of many South African literary works in the 1970s to explore the question of torture, which “has exerted a dark fascination on many … South African writers” (Coetzee in Gallagher, p. 112). Though Coetzee refuses to confirm that the “Empire” in Waiting for the Barbarians is analogous to South Africa, it is clear that the sudden worldwide attention on the prevalent use of torture by the South African Police, as well as the image of the much-lionized Biko, shac...
Amnesty International Report on Torture. London: Duckworth, 1975. Beinhart, William, and Saul Dubow. “Introduction: The historiography of segregation and apartheid.” In Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa. Ed. William Beinhart and Saul Dubow. New York: Routledge, 1995. Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Pen...
Waiting for the Barbarians is a 2019 drama film directed by Ciro Guerra in his English-language directorial debut. The film is based on the 1980 novel by J. M. Coetzee. It stars Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, Gana Bayarsaikhan, and Greta Scacchi.
Waiting for the Barbarians is a 1980 novel written by John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African and Australian novelist who was winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Dec 21, 2022 · Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel written by J.M Coetzee. Under the strict regulations of the dominant culture of The Empire, people known as the barbarians must follow the laws and abide by the people who make up The Empire. The Barbarians are often seen as a lower class of people.
