Title: Waiting for the Barbarians Author: J.M. Coetzee Creation Date: 1980 Location: South Africa
Summary
Waiting for the Barbarians is narrated by an unnamed Magistrate who administers a small frontier settlement at the edge of an unnamed Empire. For years he has governed peacefully, maintaining cordial relations with the nomadic peoples beyond the frontier. Then Colonel Joll arrives from the Empire's Third Bureau (secret police) to investigate reports of "barbarian" unrest. Joll's investigation consists of torture: he brutalises captured nomads to extract confessions that justify the Empire's expanding militarism. The Magistrate, horrified, tries to distance himself from the violence but finds himself drawn into complicity. He takes in a barbarian girl who has been blinded and crippled by Joll's interrogators, embarking on an ambiguous relationship with her that is part pity, part desire, part atonement.
When the Magistrate attempts to return the girl to her people, he is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured as a collaborator. The novel follows his degradation from respected official to broken prisoner, even as the Empire's military campaign against the barbarians collapses into farce and retreat. The Magistrate survives, but with no illusions about his own innocence.
Why This Book Matters
Waiting for the Barbarians is one of the most powerful allegorical novels about the nature of empire and the moral corruption of its agents. Though Coetzee sets it in no specific time or place, the novel is unmistakably rooted in the experience of apartheid South Africa, where a settler state maintained its power through systematic violence against Black populations designated as threats. The novel's genius is to universalise this experience without abstracting away its horror: the torture scenes are among the most disturbing and morally searching in modern literature.
The novel matters for its unflinching exploration of liberal complicity. The Magistrate is not a villain; he is a decent, cultured man who benefits from the Empire's violence while deploring it. His inability to act effectively against the system he serves — and his recognition that his compassion for the barbarian girl is entangled with his own desires — makes him one of the most honest portrayals of the "good" person within a brutal system. In a world of ongoing imperial violence, the novel has lost none of its relevance.
Historical Context
Coetzee wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980, at a peak moment of apartheid repression. The Soweto uprising of 1976, in which police killed hundreds of Black students, had shattered any pretence that apartheid could be maintained without escalating violence. The novel's depiction of state torture reflected the documented practices of the South African security apparatus, including the deaths of Steve Biko and others in detention. Coetzee, an Afrikaner who had studied and worked abroad, occupied an uncomfortable position within white South African society — neither activist nor apologist — and the Magistrate's moral paralysis reflects that position with painful honesty.
Literary Significance
Coetzee's prose in Waiting for the Barbarians is among the most controlled and precise in contemporary literature. The first-person narration creates claustrophobic intimacy with the Magistrate's consciousness, forcing the reader into the same position of complicit witness. The allegorical setting — deliberately stripped of historical specificity — gives the novel a parabolic power while the physical detail (the landscape, the bodies, the pain) prevents it from floating into abstraction. The novel draws on Cavafy's poem of the same title but transforms its irony into something far more disturbing. Coetzee's influence on subsequent South African and world literature is immense, and this novel, along with Disgrace, represents his highest achievement.
Research Notes
The Penguin edition is standard. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, with this novel cited among his major works. Critical literature on the novel is extensive, with particular attention to its treatment of torture, allegory, and the ethics of representation. For this collection, it represents the literature of apartheid-era Southern Africa and the broader question of how literature can address state violence without reproducing the voyeurism it critiques.
The Reading
I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?
The Magistrate of an unnamed frontier settlement watches Colonel Joll arrive, and the first thing he notices is the sunglasses. He has never seen sunglasses before. This small detail — the Magistrate's ignorance of an ordinary object — establishes the novel's setting at a slant: we are somewhere that might be the Roman frontier, or the British Raj, or apartheid South Africa, or nowhere in particular. The Empire is unnamed. The barbarians are unnamed. The frontier town is unnamed. Coetzee strips his allegory of every identifying marker, and by doing so makes it universal — a story about every empire, every frontier, every bureaucrat who serves a system he does not fully believe in.
The Magistrate has administered this outpost for years. He is a comfortable man, a man of habits and small pleasures: he eats well, he keeps a garden, he sleeps with women from the settlement, he collects archaeological artefacts — ancient wooden slips inscribed with an unknown script that he digs from the desert sand. He maintains cordial relations with the nomadic "barbarian" peoples who live beyond the frontier. There is trade. There is coexistence. The Magistrate regards himself as a decent man in a decent posting, and for years this self-regard has been undisturbed.
Colonel Joll disturbs it. Joll is from the Third Bureau — the Empire's secret police, its intelligence service, its apparatus of state security — and he has come to investigate reports of barbarian unrest along the frontier. The reports are vague, possibly fabricated, almost certainly exaggerated. But the Third Bureau does not deal in nuance. The Third Bureau deals in threats, and where it cannot find threats, it manufactures them.
Joll begins his investigation. He has captured a group of nomads — an old man and a boy, fisherfolk, no threat to anyone — and he interrogates them. The Magistrate, uneasy, asks about the interrogation. Joll is polite, professional, and his explanation of his methods has the chilling banality of a technician describing a procedure:
"First I get lies, you see — this is what happens — first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth."
The old man dies during interrogation. The boy is left with injuries that will not fully heal. The Magistrate sees the aftermath — the body, the blood, the broken boy — and he is horrified. But his horror does not translate into action. He does not confront Joll. He does not report the death. He does not resign his position. He retreats to his study, pours himself a drink, and begins the long negotiation with his own conscience that constitutes the novel's central drama.
Joll's expedition against the barbarians produces more prisoners, more interrogations, more broken bodies. The Magistrate watches. He protests mildly, is ignored politely, and continues to administer his settlement. He is complicit, and he knows he is complicit, and this knowledge is the novel's subject: the moral experience of a decent man inside a brutal system, the specific quality of guilt that belongs to those who are not cruel themselves but who benefit from cruelty, who deplore it in conversation and enable it in practice.
Then the Magistrate takes in the barbarian girl.
She is young, she has been a prisoner of Joll's, and she has been damaged. Her ankles have been broken — she walks with a shuffle, leaning on a stick. Her eyes have been injured — she can see, but poorly, as through a mist. The Magistrate does not know exactly what was done to her, and neither does the reader. The specifics of the torture are withheld, which makes them worse: the imagination supplies what the text refuses to provide.
The Magistrate brings the girl to his apartment. He washes her feet. He rubs oil into her broken ankles. He sleeps beside her but does not, for a long time, have sex with her. The relationship is the novel's most disturbing and most honest creation. The Magistrate tells himself he is helping her, caring for her, making amends for what the Empire did. But Coetzee will not allow him — or the reader — this comfort. The Magistrate's ministrations are obsessive, ritualistic, unclear in their motivation. He is drawn to the girl's body not in spite of its damage but because of it. The broken feet, the blurred eyes — these are the marks of the Empire's power, inscribed on her flesh, and the Magistrate reads them compulsively, touching the wounds as though they were a text he cannot decipher.
"It is as though she had no resistance to the speculations of my fingers."
What does the Magistrate want? He does not know. Coetzee does not tell us. The Magistrate's desire is tangled with pity, guilt, curiosity, and a form of arousal that shames him without diminishing it. He is a man whose moral life has been disrupted by the sight of what his Empire does, and his response is not political resistance but a private, bodily, confused attempt at redemption that is also, inescapably, an exercise of power. He took the girl in. He can send her away. She sleeps in his bed because he allows it. The inequality is absolute, and no amount of foot-washing can erase it.
Eventually the Magistrate decides to return the barbarian girl to her people. He organises a small expedition into the desert, travelling for days across barren country until he reaches the nomads' winter camp. The journey is described with Coetzee's characteristic precision — the cold, the sand, the emptiness, the slow dissolution of the settlement's certainties in the vastness of the landscape. At the camp, the Magistrate hands the girl over and asks her to stay. She does not say much. She does not thank him. She returns to her people with the same opacity she maintained throughout their relationship. The Magistrate has not saved her. He has not redeemed himself. He has merely returned what was taken, and the gesture, however sincere, changes nothing.
When the Magistrate returns to the settlement, the Empire is waiting for him. His expedition to the barbarians has been interpreted as collaboration — as treason. Colonel Joll's successor, Officer Mandel, arrests the Magistrate and subjects him to the same machinery of state violence that he had watched being applied to the barbarians. He is imprisoned. He is beaten. He is hung from a tree by his wrists and left to dangle while soldiers mock him. He is stripped, paraded through the streets, humiliated in front of the townspeople he once governed.
Coetzee narrates the Magistrate's torture with unflinching precision. The pain is rendered not as a dramatic spectacle but as a physical experience — the specific quality of each kind of hurt, the way the body responds, the sounds that come involuntarily from the throat, the smell of fear. The Magistrate, who watched the barbarians being tortured with a queasy distress that did not prevent him from eating dinner afterward, now learns what the barbarians knew: that the Empire's power is, at its base, the power to inflict pain on bodies. Everything else — the law, the administration, the sunglasses — is decoration.
The Magistrate survives. He is released — not pardoned, just discarded, no longer useful as either administrator or prisoner. He wanders the settlement as a ghost, homeless, begging for food, sleeping in corners. The Empire's military campaign against the barbarians, meanwhile, has collapsed. The soldiers who marched out with such confidence straggle back in disorder, starving, defeated by the desert rather than by any enemy. The barbarians did not fight. They simply withdrew, and the Empire, unable to find an enemy to destroy, destroyed itself.
This is Coetzee's most devastating insight: the barbarians do not need to attack. The Empire creates its own enemies because it needs enemies to justify its existence. Without barbarians at the gate, the apparatus of state security has no purpose. The Third Bureau, the army, the entire structure of frontier defence — all of it requires a threat, and when no threat exists, one must be invented. The barbarians of the title are not real barbarians. They are a necessary fiction, a story the Empire tells itself to explain why it must remain armed, vigilant, and cruel.
The Magistrate, stripped of his position and his illusions, lives through the winter in the empty settlement. The townspeople ignore him. He scavenges, he reflects, he writes. In the novel's final pages, he attempts to compose a record of his experience — a history, a testimony, something that will survive him. But the words will not come right. He cannot find the form for what he has seen and done and had done to him. The novel ends with the Magistrate standing in the town square, watching children build a snowman, and thinking about what he might write:
"I think: 'There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it.'"
The Magistrate never achieves the understanding he seeks. He never grasps the full meaning of what happened to him, to the barbarians, to the Empire. His self-knowledge, throughout the novel, is partial, compromised, entangled with the same liberal self-regard that made him complicit in the first place. He is a better man than Colonel Joll — more humane, more conflicted, more capable of doubt — but his humanity does not exempt him from the system he served. He washed the barbarian girl's feet, and the Empire broke them first. The washing would not have been necessary without the breaking, and both acts — the cruelty and the compassion — occurred within the same structure of power.
Coetzee's novel is, among other things, a devastating critique of liberal complicity — of the position occupied by decent people within indecent systems. The Magistrate is a liberal in the precise sense: he believes in law, in due process, in the individual's rights, in the possibility of governing humanely. And these beliefs are useless. They do not prevent the torture. They do not protect the barbarians. They do not even protect the Magistrate himself when the system turns on him. The liberal conscience, Coetzee suggests, is not an alternative to imperial violence but a more sophisticated form of accommodation with it — a way of living inside the system while maintaining the illusion that one is somehow separate from it.
The novel's allegorical surface — the unnamed Empire, the unnamed frontier — was widely understood as a reference to apartheid South Africa, and it was. But the allegory's power lies in its refusal to be limited to a single referent. Coetzee wrote about every empire, every frontier, every moment when a state decides that its security requires the subjugation of another people and recruits decent men to administer the subjugation. The novel has been read through the lens of Abu Ghraib, of Guantanamo, of the War on Terror, and it speaks to each with the same uncomfortable precision. The barbarians are always at the gate, because the Empire always needs them there.
"I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it upon myself to be involved in the dungeons and the torture. I have an aversion to reading reports of the proceedings of judicial commissions."
This is the Magistrate's confession, and it is the confession of every comfortable person who has ever looked away from the violence that sustains their comfort. Coetzee offers no redemption and no escape. The Magistrate does not become a hero. The barbarians do not triumph. The Empire does not fall — it merely retreats, regroups, and will return. What remains is the Magistrate's incomplete testimony, his unfinished history, his knowledge that he has been part of something terrible and that his decency was never sufficient to make him innocent.
The snowman in the final scene is a figure without features, without name, without the distinguishing marks that would make it human. The children pat its surface smooth. The Magistrate watches, and does not understand, and the novel ends in the space of that not-understanding — the space where complicity and conscience coexist, where the barbarians are always coming and never arrive, where the Empire waits for an enemy it has already created.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The novel was written originally in English and requires no translation. The standard edition is the Penguin paperback (1980), widely available.
Penguin Books. The standard available edition. Written originally in English.
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