No Witchcraft for Sale

The story’s setting is mainly on the Farquar’s compound, which consists of their home, living quarters for Gideon and other servants, and quite a lot of land for farming. The compound’s location in South Africa is established through Afrikaans in the dialogue. Lessing creates a feeling for the location through imagery like “squawking chickens” and the grass toys Gideon makes for Teddy. The narrator also notes that Gideon lives on the compound because his home village is “hundreds of miles away” (67), indicating the rural and isolated setting.

When Gideon leads the family and the scientist on a long walk through the bush to look for his medicinal root, the reader gets the sense that they are surrounded by undeveloped land. The bush is an important aspect of the setting because Gideon and other native Africans have a special connection with the land and use what the natural world has provided for healing. In this section, Lessing describes the bush as “scorching underfoot,” and the Farquars struggle against the dusty wind, though it doesn’t seem to affect Gideon. With this, the bush remains a mysterious and dangerous place to white people that they are constantly trying to tame, control, subjugate, and profit from.

“No Witchcraft for Sale” is narrated in the third-person omniscient point of view, which means that the narrator has access to the inner thoughts and emotions of all of the characters, as well as a wider context that goes beyond the world of the characters. The narrator carefully describes changes in Gideon’s, Teddy’s, and the Farquars’ emotions as they navigate their complicated relationship. Rather than focusing on just one character, we see that each party experiences fondness, love, distrust, guilt, anger, and resentment at various times throughout the story. The narrator also provides us with a wider context when they note that stories similar to Gideon’s spread across the villages and that white people have generally been unable to access the native knowledge of medicinal plants. Lessing’s choice to narrate the story in this way allows her to fully illustrate the complexity of the relationships between white landowners, western science, native Africans, and more intuitive natural healing practices.

Lessing’s use of similes in this story not only puts vivid images in the readers’ minds but also reveals references that would have been common in the culture. When the narrator says, “The kaffir’s arm was swollen to the elbow, like a great shiny black bladder,” this gives us an idea of how severe the snake bite was and that the image of a “great shiny black bladder,” is something that a person in the time and setting of the story would recognize (69). Another example of simile is “The sun was like a bronze tray whirling overhead” (72), a description that reveals how hot it was on the day Gideon led the Farquars and the scientist into the bush. The Farquars go on to lament that they’re trudging through the bush rather than being served iced drinks by their servants; with this, the use of “bronze tray” in this simile represents how the Farquars exclusively view themselves as people to be served.

The third-person omniscient narrative style allows room for the author to create moments of irony in this story. There are times when the narrator gives the reader information that may contradict a character’s behavior or words, which allows the reader to determine if a character is genuine or untrustworthy.

The narrator tells us that the scientist is careful to steer his conversation with the Farquars toward the altruistic reasons to share the healing root with mankind, even though he is just as interested in the profiteering angle. This shows that he is being rhetorically manipulative and only using arguments that he thinks will convince the Farquars to help him get the root. By undermining the scientist’s trustworthiness, the narrator calls Western science and knowledge in the context of colonialism into question.

In one moment, the narrator is a distant observer that reveals the anti-Black biases of apartheid culture: “the old witch doctors whose ugly masks and bits of bone and all the uncouth properties of magic were the outward signs of real power and wisdom” (72). Here the narrator explains that the white colonists look down on native wisdom, but the things they label “uncouth” or crude indicate the people who have the most “real power and wisdom” when it comes to understanding and harnessing the land. The narrator’s observations here create dramatic irony in that the reader may understand the context of the story’s action better than the characters do.