Maru is set in similar territory [as When Rain Clouds Gather], and this time Mrs. Head concentrates on the relationships of a handful of educated Africans. Two young chiefs fall in love with a schoolteacher who, though brought up and educated by a missionary's wife (a character so well drawn that it is a pity she disappears so soon from the story), belongs to the despised Bushman tribe. The story depends on the belief—much insisted on but never quite realized in terms of character—that the two men, though friends, approach life, love and their own destinies in quite opposite ways. For both of them love for the girl involves the end of their friendship and a rethinking of their attitudes to the Bushmen, whom they have always used as slaves…. Margaret, the object of all this, is a remarkably passive, shadowy character, represented as intelligent and talented, yet hardly possessed of the hypnotic qualities attributed to her.
There are delightful touches in Mrs. Head's account of the village and its institutions, a comical showdown with the headmaster, glimpses of the benevolent tyranny exercised by the two heroes; but the friendship of the two men and their different responses to love are too often obscured by a wilful invocation of the arcane.
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