Beatrice Beit-Beauford Character Analysis

Best friend to Kuki, unexpected buddy to Genie, and art patron to Vida de Villiers, Beatrice inherits the Beauford Farm and Estate—the farm compound where many of the novel’s characters live—from her father, an impoverished English aristocrat who bought the land cheaply during the colonial era and exploited the native people as cheap labor to enrich himself. An inquisitive and unorthodox person, Beatrice loves her school friend Kuki very much despite Kuki’s meek embrace of conventional wisdom and eventual marriage to Emil Coetzee, whom Beatrice abhors. Beatrice attends Oxford University and returns to her home country—an unnamed British colonial territory in Africa implied to be Southern Rhodesia (pre-independence Zimbabwe)—as a political radical. She turns her farm into a “multiracial commune and artists’ colony,” for which the colonial government does not prosecute her only because she is extremely rich. After Beatrice gives birth to biracial twin boys and donates money to African nationalist forces fighting the white-dominated colonial government, however, Emil Coetzee tries to have her prosecuted for treason. She is flying with her sons to face the charges when Golide Gumele shoots down her plane; she survives the crash, but her sons and several others die. In her later years, Beatrice enters a nursing home and struggles with Alzheimer’s Disease. During this period, she strikes up an unexpected friendship with Golide’s daughter Genie, buys the sculptures of Genie’s lover Vida, and donates them to a public park—making Vida famous. She also sells the Beauford Farm and Estate to an orphan street gang, The Survivors, for a dollar. Though very elderly and disoriented, Beatrice joins the convoy to the farm that witnesses Genie’s postmortem ascension skyward on silver wings.