No Witchcraft for Sale

Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Iran in 1919. Her family moved to Southern Rhodesia in Africa—now Zimbabwe—in 1925 when she was six years old. At that time, Southern Rhodesia had only been a British colony for two years. She lived there until she moved to London in 1949. Her father bought 1,000 acres of land in Africa to farm, but it was never very successful, and her family did not have a lot of money. She was sent to a Catholic boarding school and left school at age 14 to begin working as a nursemaid for children in other homes.

Lessing spent 24 years in Africa during her childhood and early adulthood. Southern Rhodesia was adjacent to South Africa, and Lessing’s experiences as a white person during South African apartheid provided rich material for the many novels and short stories she would later publish. Lessing and her work are a product of English colonialism in Africa and part of the canon of colonial literature, although Lessing participated in anti-apartheid activism and was later banned from both Rhodesia and South Africa. “No Witchcraft for Sale” first appeared in the 1952 short story collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country and again in the 1964 collection African Stories.