Apartheid and Racial Hierarchy Theme Analysis

“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.