No Country for Old Men: the Life of John Lee and the Problem of the Aged Pioneer

This article uses a charity appeal made on behalf of one old white man in South Africa in 1912 as an entry into considering the importance of age for social histories of empire – and for settler colonialism in particular. John Lee, aged eighty-five when he made his appeal, demanded the restitution of a piece of land he claimed to have been given by an African king and, to gain public sympathy, had his life story published in the local press. The reception of that story by Lee’s contemporaries shows how the heroic imperial narratives of the nineteenth century were becoming less certain once the violent suppression of African peoples had been achieved and new colonial states established. Yet neither could Lee’s story be entirely discounted, not least because there were thousands of other ‘aging pioneers’ scattered across South Africa in the early twentieth century – each with his own account of the high imperial frontier. Though their memories often appeared exaggerated or deluded, the problem of these men’s credibility was made worse by the problem of their care. Lacking family members able to look after them – who might also validate the stories that they told – the problem of old age thus becomes an exploration into the consequences of heroic masculinity and the apparent invulnerability of the imperial pioneer.