Prester John was written as a boys' adventure story set mostly in South Africa. It was published in 1910 when Buchan was 35. The South African background was based on the two years from 1901 which Buchan spent as a private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner to South Africa and later governor of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
Although the novel contains observations on relations between blacks and whites, the clash of different cultures and civilisations and the role of imperial paternalism, it needs to be read primarily as a fast-moving novel of adventure in the style of novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard.
The story set in the early years of the twentieth century is told by David Crawfurd. His father, a Scottish minister, has died. 19-year old David goes to South Africa to be an assistant to the keeper of a general store on the veld. David becomes aware of an imminent uprising by thousands of native Africans led by a black minister, the Reverend John Laputa. David had met Laputa some years before in strange circumstances. Laputa has assumed the title of successor to the mythical medieval priest-king, Prester John.
It is not possible to condense into a short space the many exciting incidents which are vividly described and make up the story. It will suffice here to say that David is the only white man (apart from a treacherous Portuguese, Henriques) to attend a great gathering in a hidden cave in the mountains at which Laputa is invested with a fabulously valuable necklace handed down for centuries.
David's presence is discovered and he is taken prisoner. The African army, led by Laputa, marches south. David manages to steal the necklace and escape but is recaptured, having first been able to hide the necklace. He is made to go with Laputa to recover the necklace.
David escapes again and falls in with a friend, Captain Arcol a government officer who has been working to frustrate the uprising. David returns again into the hills where he finds Henriques dead and Laputa, severely wounded by Henriques, in the cave in the mountains.
To tell more of the story might spoil the pleasure of first-time readers, who will not however be surprised to know that there is a happy ending to a story of this kind.
Ronald H Hargreaves April 2001
Buchan's many sharp South African experiences, mingled with what he had learned of the region before his Transvaal posting, were fused particularly powerfully in his Prester John, first published in 1910.
A work which enjoyed a wide circulation in a series of low-priced Nelson's reprints, this adventure story embodied several of the colonial and pastoral themes which had clearly exercised Buchan's political and literary imagination in South Africa. The classic Buchan hero is a young Scotsman, Davie Crawfurd, who rises to manhood from his Scottish schooldays, ventures out to immerse himself in trade and commerce in the rural Transvaal, and ends up quashing an evil African rebellion led by a treacherous African, the Reverend John Laputa. Prester John is steeped in an atmosphere of plottings and 'risings' by disgruntled black underdogs, manipulated by villainous men in touch with 'primitive' demonic forces. The Transvaal is an idealised white colony, governed by a strict racial order. Crawfurd is resourceful, determined, heroic and efficient - a vaulting Buchan hero who understands deeply the imperative for resolute order and enforced hierarchy. The bad figures are not only the misled 'hordes' of Africans, bereft of rationality or individual dignity. They include a 'half-caste' Portuguese individual, who not only deals illicitly in diamonds, but also mixes in undesirably with Africans. This miscegenation makes him a social degenerate, and a standing threat to the imperial civilising mission.
Buchan ends his story neatly. Having snuffed out the rebellion, Crawfurd makes his pile and returns to Britain with his rightful share of colonial wealth. What he leaves behind is a place not merely restored but keeping a much closer watch on what needs to be done to shape the future of South Africa's 'lesser races'. That rests in the need for 'training' of a particular kind. Not, as Buchan concludes, for the creation of too many troublesome 'missionaries and black teachers', but for improved 'technical' proficiency for black men as workers. During the seven-year gap between the author's departure from South Africa and the publication of his highly successful South African novel, Buchan kept well abreast of South African developments as the post-war state moved towards white union (in 1910) on the economic basis of expanding commercial agriculture and mining growth. In this, there could be no question of racial mixing, nor of allowing unproductive squatting on the land, nor of leaving 'the native problem' unattended. It was for the ruling race to preserve order and to maintain the subject position of Africans. As popular fiction, Prester John was in many ways John Buchan's most fertile expression of the solution to South Africa's 'native problem' in the early twentieth century. There can be no underestimating the stature of the Buchan legacy as part of the country's colonial tradition.
Bill Nasson Cape Town, 2002
(taken from Bill Nasson's article 'John Buchan's South African vision', published in the Spring 2002 issue of the John Buchan Journal, available through Journal Orders.)
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