No Witchcraft for Sale

One major theme of this and other stories Lessing wrote during this period is the damaging social hierarchy created by colonial policies, such as apartheid. In colonial Africa, authority figures and landholding people were white, and their servants and farm workers were Black. Racist ideology was inextricably woven into structures of social class and power to form a caste system that ensured the minority white population held outsized power. While the African nation in “No Witchcraft for Sale” goes unnamed, Lessing includes Afrikaans words like “kraal” and “baas” to hint at the story’s South African setting. With this, the interactions in the story are colored by apartheid, a system of institutionalized segregation.

Gideon and the Farquars accept their social stratification as preordained by God, best illustrated when Gideon says, “It is God’s will” (68), when talking to Mrs. Farquhar about the different paths their children will take. The narrator describes Gideon as a “mission boy,” lending to an overall message that these beliefs ruined the relationship Gideon could have had with Teddy and the Farquars. Teddy is socialized to believe that Gideon and other Black servants are inferior, even when as a child.