The Conservationist

The Conservationist is a novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, published in 1974. It was a joint winner of the Booker Prize for fiction that year.

Mehring is a rich white businessman in South Africa under apartheid, and his possessions do not behave the way he expects them to. His wife and son have gone, his mistress leaves him, his foreman and labourers become indifferent to his plans for the place, and he is not much interested in any of them either.

He buys a four-hundred-acre farm outside the city on an impulse and then tries to explain the purchase to himself as a search for meaning. He knows nothing about farming and the black workers do the actual work, which leaves him an outsider on his own land; four hundred acres was, as the novel puts it, a thing of his race. The farm is also a tax arrangement and a convenient place to take his girlfriends, and the land answers him with drought and then flood.