30 pages • 1 hour read
Doris LessingNo Witchcraft for Sale
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Social Hierarchy During Apartheid
One major theme of this and other stories Lessing wrote during this period is the damaging social hierarchy created by colonial policies, such as apartheid. In colonial Africa, authority figures and landholding people were white, and their servants and farm workers were Black. Racist ideology was inextricably woven into structures of social class and power to form a caste system that ensured the minority white population held outsized power. While the African nation in “No Witchcraft for Sale” goes unnamed, Lessing includes Afrikaans words like “kraal” and “baas” to hint at the story’s South African setting. With this, the interactions in the story are colored by apartheid, a system of institutionalized segregation.
Gideon and the Farquars accept their social stratification as preordained by God, best illustrated when Gideon says, “It is God’s will” (68), when talking to Mrs. Farquhar about the different paths their children will take. The narrator describes Gideon as a “mission boy,” lending to an overall message that these beliefs ruined the relationship Gideon could have had with Teddy and the Farquars. Teddy is socialized to believe that Gideon and other Black servants are inferior, even when as a child. He uses derogatory language toward Gideon’s son, and by the age of six, he speaks to Gideon as if he were his master despite being a child. Gideon shows he is disappointed in Teddy’s actions, such as when Teddy races around his son on his scooter and scares him, but no other adult corrects Teddy’s behavior. Teddy defends his actions by saying Gideon’s son is “only a black boy” (68), showing how apartheid social relations dehumanize Black people in the eyes of white colonizers. His parents model how white landowners should treat their Black employees and tacitly condone Teddy’s emulation of them. Throughout the story, Gideon laments the passage of time and that Teddy will grow up and be a “baas” like his father.
Lessing describes how the social structure causes Black and white people in the community to distrust each other. When the Farquars ask Gideon to tell the white scientist where his healing root is, he feels betrayed by people he thought were his friends. The Farquars, for their part, feel insulted by their employee’s insolence and contrast “their gentle, lovable old servant” with “this ignorant, perversely obstinate African” (70), indicating that Gideon can play one of two roles in the apartheid hierarchy: a docile servant or an adversary. While the Farquars are irritated by Gideon’s act of defiance, the impact is not long-lasting; their relationship returns to its old dynamics, and the Farquars laugh at what they perceive as Gideon’s prank. This hints that racist colonial hierarchies are deeply entrenched and will require greater intervention to overcome. In this very short story, Lessing demonstrates the impact of apartheid interpersonally as well as in a larger cultural context.
Native Wisdom as a Form of Resistance
Part of colonization involves suppressing the indigenous culture in favor of the colonizer’s customs and beliefs. Sometimes called cultural genocide, this includes practices like banning indigenous languages and religions, looting artifacts, and denigrating native expertise and knowledge. In South African apartheid, cultural genocide included suppressing indigenous languages in favor of English, Dutch, and Afrikaans. “No Witchcraft for Sale” demonstrates the effects of apartheid’s efforts to wipe out indigenous cultures and the way these populations resist by maintaining their knowledge of plant medicine, giving them a mode of power over white colonists.
Gideon is a character who has internalized some of apartheid’s lessons. A “mission boy,” the reader knows that he converted to Christianity but not what his religion was before. The mystery of Gideon’s original faith parallels the way native religious practices are suppressed by white Christian missionaries. Moreover, Gideon and the Farquars are shown to believe in a twisted form of Christianity that champions white supremacy; when Gideon reflects that Teddy will be his child’s “baas,” he thinks that it’s “God’s will.” This is similar to the version of Christianity that was taught to enslaved people on plantations in the American South, in which the “mark of Cain” was interpreted to mean dark skin and justified chattel slavery. Gideon lives away from his village and generally accepts his lot in life.
A wrinkle in Gideon’s indoctrination appears when Teddy is hurt by the snake. When Teddy’s eyes are swollen from snake venom, no chemical ointment in Mrs. Farquar’s medicine cabinet eases his pain, hinting that the dominant culture is not as superior as it believes. Gideon rushes outside and brings back a root, chews it into a pulp, and spits it into Teddy’s eyes, healing them. The narrator explains that the white people know cures are hiding in plain sight across the African landscape, but the native people are the gatekeepers of this knowledge. The depth of Gideon’s knowledge is on display in this scene; he can not only identify the correct plant but knows how to process it, elevating him and native medicine above Western doctors and medicine. Additionally, Gideon’s actions here allude to Jesus healing the blind, hinting that Gideon’s earlier statements about Christianity and God’s will are false. Instead, Gideon is righteous in his communication with the land and his customs.
The Farquars and other colonizers resent this knowledge because the native Africans will not just give or sell it to the white people who control them. Gideon is happy to heal others but not to give away this knowledge, and the Farquars identify his transformation from a faithful servant into an “African.” With this, the story asserts that maintaining native wisdom like healing practices is a way to resist colonization and stay rooted in African identity. Though colonizers denigrate this knowledge, calling its practitioners, “the nephews or sons of the old witch doctors [with] ugly masks and bits of bone,” they recognize that this practice embodies “real power and wisdom” that they can never possess (72).
Anti-Capitalism and the Commodification of Medicine
In the 1950s, Doris Lessing frequently critiqued not only apartheid practices but capitalist economies. By the time “No Witchcraft for Sale” was published, she was deeply interested in Marxist philosophy, which rejects the idea of an ownership class and a working class and advocates for a classless society and the elimination of private property. Combined with the principles of apartheid, capitalism created a deeply divided culture of wealthy, white owners and poor, Black workers in South Africa. “No Witchcraft for Sale” illustrates this stratified society and represents the anti-capitalist struggle in Gideon’s refusal to share information about his herbal remedy.
The Farquars’ compound is a microcosm of South African apartheid and capitalism. The wealthy Farquars own the land, and all of the Black servants work for their benefit. This is starkly illustrated when Gideon leads the family through the bush, and they complain that “[i]t was a terrible day, fit only for reclining on a veranda with iced drinks, which is where they would normally have been at that hour” (72). Despite living on a farm, the Farquars spend their time relaxing and being doted upon. Additionally, while the family and the scientist want to profit from Gideon’s knowledge, they do not want to do the work to obtain the root themselves, illustrating their roles as capitalists rather than laborers.
While Gideon is exploited in other ways, he resists this particular form of exploitation by refusing to give or sell his secrets. In a capitalistic society, basic items that people need to survive, such as medicine, are commodified and sold for profit. Gideon does not want this to happen to the natural resources he and his family have been using to heal people for generations. The white doctor and scientist function as antagonists because they represent the ways that Western science, medicine, and capitalism threaten the existence of native healing traditions. Their ideology clashes with Gideon’s, and it makes him angry when the Farquars ask him to betray his culture and heritage, a betrayal in itself. The narrator does not question his judgment even as the Farquars do, indicating that Gideon’s reasoning is sound. It is also revealed that other servants and community members conceal this information and support Gideon, indicating not just personal resistance on Gideon’s part but solidarity and working-class resistance more broadly.
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