“The Lemon Orchard” is set in South Africa during apartheid, a period when the country’s government enforced racial segregation. This system was based on the ideology of white supremacy and the racist belief that non-white people are inherently savage, barbaric, and violent. In the story, four white men take a “coloured” (multiracial) man captive in the middle of the night and prepare to whip him as punishment for disrespecting a white person in their community. But the ways in which the white men speak and behave toward the coloured man reveal the baselessness of their hatred toward him, since the man’s alleged slight does not warrant how he’s treated in return. “The Lemon Orchard” thus serves as an allegory for the broader injustice of apartheid, as the story implicitly condemns South Africa’s racial hierarchy as despicably cruel, unwarranted, and dehumanizing for everyone in society.
The white men’s treatment of the coloured man is rooted in the social norms of apartheid, reinforcing the racist notion that non-white people are inherently inferior. As the four white men march the coloured man through the titular lemon orchard with the intent to whip him under cover of night, it’s clear that they view him as fundamentally different from and indeed inferior to them. They wake him up and force him out in the cold with only a thin raincoat, not even allowing him to tie his shoes. The reader immediately sympathizes with the coloured man, who shivers violently while the white men are bundled up in warm clothes. The coloured man is dehumanized, deemed undeserving of even a basic need like appropriate clothing, simply because the white men view him as inferior.
The white men also use language that draws a clear line between white people and Black or multiracial people. The coloured man’s name is never used: the narrative only refers to him by his racial category, and the white characters only call him Afrikaans racial slurs that essentially translate to “barbarian.” The leader of the group forces the coloured man to call him baas, meaning “boss” or “master,” creating a kind of master/slave dynamic between the white captors and their multiracial captive. The casual way in which the men use these slurs and enforce a racial hierarchy through language implies that such divisiveness and cruelty is commonplace and acceptable in apartheid South Africa. The white men continuously harass and belittle the coloured man with this offensive language in spite of the fact that he has not personally hurt or insulted these men in any way; they hurl abuse at him for no reason other than his race and his perceived slight toward another white man. Given the unreciprocated nature of this cruelty, the story implies that this treatment is wholly undeserved, implicitly condemning the racial hierarchy underpinning the white men’s behavior as baseless and unjust.
As the white men’s behavior toward the coloured man grows increasingly cruel, it becomes even clearer that their attitudes are embedded in a system that is entirely arbitrary—there’s no justifiable basis for South Africa’s racial hierarchy. The “crime” for which the coloured man is being punished was simply having “the audacity to be cheeky and uncivilised towards a minister” at the white men’s church. The coloured man did not actually harm anyone, nor does he retaliate against (or even respond to) the white men’s provocations as they walk through the orchard. The man is clearly not a barbarian or a criminal, yet he is automatically categorized as such under the racial hierarchy of apartheid and will be brutally whipped as a result. Indeed, the white men prove themselves to be the true savages, as they beat and continuously threaten to kill the coloured man (the leader of the group is carrying a loaded shotgun) for not answering them when they address him using racial slurs. Under apartheid, people like the coloured man are judged purely on the color of their skin rather than their moral character—an attitude that the story implicitly condemns through its sympathetic portrayal of the coloured man alongside the barbaric cruelty of the white men.
Racial hierarchy, then, is shown to be an entirely arbitrary and unfair way of organizing society. When simply being non-white is treated as a criminal offense, innocent people like the coloured man in the story end up being brutalized, and those at all levels of apartheid’s hierarchy—both the oppressors and the oppressed—are stripped of their humanity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Apartheid and Racial Hierarchy ThemeTracker
Apartheid and Racial Hierarchy Quotes in The Lemon Orchard
‘Do not go so fast,’ the man who brought up the rear of the party called to the man with the lantern. ‘It’s as dark as a kaffir’s soul here at the back.’ He called softly, as if the darkness demanded silence.
‘Cold?’ the man with the shotgun asked, speaking with sarcasm. ‘Are you colder than this verdomte hotnot, here?’ And he gestured in the dark with the muzzle of the gun at the man who stumbled along in their midst and who was the only one not warmly dressed.
This man wore trousers and a raincoat which they had allowed him to pull on over his pyjamas when they had taken him from his lodgings, and he shivered now with chill, clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering. He had not been given time to tie his shoes and the metal-covered ends of the laces clicked as he moved.
‘Wag’n oomblikkie. Wait a moment,’ the leader said, speaking with forced casualness. ‘He is not dumb. He is a slim hotnot; one of those educated bushmen. Listen, hotnot,’ he addressed the coloured man, speaking angrily now. ‘When a baas speaks to you, you answer him. Do you hear?’ The coloured man's wrists were tied behind him with a riem and the leader brought the muzzle of the shotgun down, pressing it hard into the small of the man’s back above where the wrists met. ‘Do you hear, hotnot? Answer me or I will shoot a hole through your spine.’
‘For God’s sake, don’t shoot him,’ the man with the light said, laughing a little nervously. ‘We don’t want to be involved in any murder.’
‘What are you saying, man?’ the leader asked. Now with the beam of the battery-lamp on his face the shadows in it were washed away to reveal the mass of tiny wrinkled and deep creases which covered the red-clay complexion of his face like the myriad lines which indicate rivers, streams, roads and railways on a map. They wound around the ridges of his chin and climbed the sharp range of his nose and the peaks of his chin and cheekbones, and his eyes were hard and blue like two frozen lakes.
The man who had jeered about the prisoner’s fear stepped up then, and hit him in the face, striking him on a cheekbone with the clenched fist which still held the sjambok. He was angry over the delay and wanted the man to submit so that they could proceed. ‘Listen you hotnot bastard,’ he said loudly. ‘Why don’t you answer?’
The man stumbled, caught himself and stood in the rambling shadow of one of the lemon trees. The lantern-light swung on him and he looked away from the centre of the beam. He was afraid the leader would shoot him in anger and he had no wish to die. He straightened up and looked away from them.
‘Well?’ demanded the man who had struck him.
‘Yes, baas,’ the bound man said, speaking with a mixture of dignity and contempt which was missed by those who surrounded him.
The blackness of the night crouched over the orchard and the leaves rustled with a harsh whispering that was inconsistent with the pleasant scent of the lemons. The chill in the air had increased, and far-off the creek-creek-creek of the crickets blended into solid strips of high-pitched sound. Then the moon came from behind the banks of cloud and its white light touched the leaves with wet silver, and the perfume of lemons seemed to grow stronger, as if the juice was being crushed from them.
They walked a little way further in the moonlight and the man with the lantern said, ‘This is as good a place as any, Oom.’
They had come into a wide gap in the orchard, a small amphitheatre surrounded by fragrant growth, and they all stopped within it. The moonlight clung for a while to the leaves and the angled branches, so that along their tips and edges the moisture gleamed with the quivering shine of scattered quicksilver.
