Faceless Barbarians

            When I first began Waiting for the Barbarians, I was extremely perturbed with the lack of certainty about where, exactly, the settlement is. Going into the book I assumed, based on the origins of J.M. Coetzee, that this would be a novel about the colonization of Africa. However, the description of the girl’s eyes and hair and the constant references to “the frontier” recall allusions to Native Americans and the American Frontier; even the artwork on the cover of the book suggests that we are reading a story of the colonization of the Americas, or perhaps Asia. What also bothered me was the namelessness of “the girl”: the magistrate’s quasi-concubine.

            As I read on, however, the namelessness of the actual location of the settlement and the girl mattered less to me because there are countless victims of colonization, and that seems to be the point of the novel; perhaps it does not matter where this particular story takes place because there are so many stories similar to it. What matters are the true horrors of colonization: torture, murder, rape, displacement, genocide, etc. Even the magistrate does not receive a name; he is a, somewhat, complacent participant of imperialism—at least until things directly affect his own wellbeing. Like the “barbarians” there are nameless proponents of colonization who, while they may recognize the immorality of a nation’s subjugation of a native population, still continue to perpetuate the dominating force. Regardless of which specific settlement we happen to be looking at—whether it is in the Americas, Africa, or Asia—Coetzee is able to show the true face of colonization.