“Lemon Orchard” is a short story written by Alex La Guma, a South-African author, in the year 1962.
The setting of this short story is in South Africa along two long, regular rows of trees, in a season of late winter, meaning it’s still a bit chilly in the air. It is late at night and there’s a big moon in the sky, it’s also a bit cloudy. It is probably set in the year that this story was written, while the big segregation in South Africa was still going on.
The characters in “Lemon Orchard” is of a group of men, four of them mentioned in this story and their captive ‘colored’ man. There is the man with the small cycle lantern, a man who is the leader of the group carrying a loaded shotgun. All of the men in the party are warmly dressed, while there captive is the only one not wearing any thick clothes. This man is wearing trousers and a raincoat pulled over his pyjamas as if it was put on in a hurry.
The action in this story is of these men walking through the night with their captive who they took because ‘colored’, probably referring to a man with a nationality of maybe Asian, South American etc. It is a racist way of calling a man, concerning his skin color. It doesn’t say exactly what happens to this man, but it kind of hints out that these men are here to beat this guy up, probably to his death, just because he has a different skin color. Also because he is an educated man who is a teacher. This is because in that time the people believed that men with darker skin colors shouldn’t have had an education or be treated just the same as ‘white’ people.
The language style in “lemon orchard” is very interesting. Throughout the story these men speak English, but throw in every now and then some Afrikaans/Dutch words or phrases e.g. hotnot, kaffir, wag’n oomblikkie, oom etc. The rest of the language is pretty descriptive, and in the end there is a beautiful description of the moon, and the nature/surroundings of the lemon orchard that they were walking by.
The ideas/themes in this story are South African history and racist segregation. Since at that time the region had completely split up/segregated ‘white’ colored people and ‘dark’ colored people, giving the ‘white’/European colored people a larger advantage/respect than the ‘dark’ colored. The world was pretty racist at that time treating these native people with unfairness, nicknames and at times violence as an example in the story of these men, suspectedly, beating up this innocent man to his death.
As a conclusion of “Lemon Orchard” I saw it both as a very, VERY sad story, which to make it even more depressing, that this actually happened in real life. I also saw it as intellectual, with the different words they used and how languages from all over the world like to throw in words from other languages in their normal conversations. But truly, La Guma has really showed the readers of this world how the Afrikaans were so horribly treated at the time. You can’t really actually believe that this segregation had been going on for so long in South Africa and only ended in the 1990’s.