Context and the story behind the novel
What you must know about Coetzee, apartheid, Cavafy's poem and why the novel refuses to name anything.
Who Coetzee is: J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940) is a South African-born novelist — winner of the Booker Prize twice (1983, 1999) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2003). He wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980, at the height of apartheid: a regime then deploying torture and indefinite detention against political opponents. The novel emerged from — and against — that world, but Coetzee refuses to name it. The choice is itself an argument: by erasing the specifics he makes the allegory portable to any imperial regime, including, most pointedly, his own.
The dramatic situation: An aging, unnamed Magistrate runs a small frontier town in the desert outpost of an unnamed Empire. He has spent his career as a comfortable, mildly liberal civil servant, keeping order, hunting in season, sleeping with the local women, and not asking what the Empire he serves actually does to the people on the other side of the frontier. The novel opens when this routine is broken.
The story (what happens): Colonel Joll arrives from the Empire's capital wearing dark glasses, to investigate rumours of barbarian incursions. He interrogates captives — including an old man and a boy whom the Magistrate's own soldiers have rounded up — by torture; the old man dies. The Magistrate, sickened but compromised by his own complicity, takes home a barbarian girl whom Joll's men have tortured: she has been blinded (partially) and her feet broken. He develops a strange, obsessive nightly ritual of washing her body — caring for her, possessing her, unable to see her even as he stares at her.
He undertakes a difficult winter journey across the desert to return her to her people. On his return, he is arrested for 'treasonous communication with the enemy' and tortured himself, this time by Mandel. Stripped, humiliated and broken, he becomes a kind of barbarian in his own town's eyes. The Empire launches a great military expedition against the barbarians; the expedition collapses in the desert without ever finding them. The Empire's soldiers desert. As winter closes in, the town is half-empty and waiting for 'barbarians' who never come.
The title — and Cavafy: The title is borrowed from C. P. Cavafy's poem 'Waiting for the Barbarians' (1898/1904), in which a city has put on its finery to await the barbarians' arrival, but they never come, and the speaker realises that 'those people were a kind of solution'. The novel inherits the poem's central irony: that the 'barbarians' are needed by the Empire to define itself. The waiting IS the structure — and the barbarians' absence is the truth.
Contexts (use as a lens, never as biography):
| Context | How it illuminates the novel |
|---|---|
| Apartheid South Africa (1948-1994) | The unnamed Empire's torture apparatus, racial hierarchy and 'barbarian' rhetoric directly parallel apartheid practice, including the Bureau and the political detentions of the late 1970s |
| The Steve Biko murder (1977) and detention-without-trial | The novel was written in 1980, three years after Biko died under interrogation; the politics of imperial torture are not abstract for Coetzee |
| The long imperial trope of 'the barbarian' | From the Romans to the British in India, empires have manufactured 'barbarians' to justify expansion; Coetzee draws on this whole genealogy, not only on apartheid |
| Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) | The argument that the imperial West constructs the Eastern 'Other' as the screen for its own anxieties is a near-perfect lens for the novel — and was current as Coetzee wrote |
| Modernist allegory (Kafka, Beckett) | Coetzee inherits the modernist tradition of stripped, abstract settings that make political violence newly visible |
Why the novel refuses to name anything: There is no year, no country, no language, no map. The Empire is 'the Empire'. The Magistrate has no name. The Girl has no name. The barbarians never appear and never speak. Coetzee's refusal of names is the novel's method — not vagueness but the strategy that lets the book be at once about apartheid South Africa AND about every other imperial regime that has manufactured 'barbarians' to justify what it does to them. The novel is parable in the strictest sense.
- Coetzee = South African novelist (b. 1940), Nobel 2003; wrote the novel in 1980 during apartheid.
- Plot: routine → Joll tortures captives → Magistrate cares for the Girl → returns her → he is arrested and tortured → the Empire's expedition fails → the town waits for barbarians who never come.
- Title from Cavafy's poem — 'they were a kind of solution': the barbarians are NEEDED by the Empire.
- Allegory is the method: no named place, year, language or characters; 'Empire' and 'barbarians' kept abstract on purpose.
- Read apartheid as a lens, not a label — the novel is portable to any imperial regime.