Title: Waiting for the Barbarians Author: J.M. Coetzee Creation Date: 1980 Location: South Africa Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
J. M. Coetzee published Waiting for the Barbarians with Secker & Warburg in 1980, his third novel and the first to secure wide international recognition. He was teaching English literature at the University of Cape Town during the height of apartheid, when the South African state was conducting military operations against SWAPO in Namibia and maintaining racial domination through pass laws, the Group Areas Act, detention without trial, and torture in police cells. The novel was understood immediately as a meditation on the moral situation of the privileged white man inside a system of violent racial oppression — but Coetzee, characteristically, refused to anchor it in any particular time or place. The Empire is unnamed. The frontier is unspecified. The Barbarians carry no ethnicity.
This abstraction has generated persistent critical debate. Some readers see evasion — a way of achieving the moral authority of addressing apartheid without the political risk of naming it. Others see a universalising move that gives the parable its durability: the Empire is simultaneously South Africa and Rome and Britain and America, the Magistrate every functionary in every imperial system who maintains the machine while wishing he did not. The novel's thematic core is collaboration — what it means to administer a system whose violence one deplores, to benefit from the order one has not chosen but does not leave. What makes the novel canonical is its refusal to grant the Magistrate, who is also the reader's identification figure, any clean ethical exit. The critique of empire is also, inescapably, a critique of the critic's position within it.
The Imperial Machine
The Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians is stripped to its essential components: a centre that issues orders, a periphery that carries them out, a frontier population classified as a threat, a military apparatus to neutralise it, an administrative apparatus to maintain the intervals, and an ideology — never fully articulated, never seriously questioned — justifying the entire arrangement. The novel's central formal decision is the refusal to name any of this specifically. By making the Empire anonymous, Coetzee makes it universal. The non-South African reader cannot treat the critique as someone else's problem.
The Third Bureau is clearly the Security Branch. Colonel Joll is a Security Branch officer. The techniques he uses — the questioning that produces confessions, the confessions that produce more people to question — are those John Vorster Square refined into routine. But the apparatus is also Rome's frontier garrisons, Britain's colonial administration, any imperial system that maintains itself through the bureaucratisation of violence.
The Magistrate's administration represents the colonial machine in its benign mode — decades of relative humanity, pragmatic accommodation with the nomadic peoples beyond the frontier. His governance is the argument the empire's apologists always make: the system can be run decently, the individual administrator's humanity can modify the structure's violence. Joll's arrival destroys this argument by making the system's actual logic visible. The Magistrate's humane administration was always dependent on the Third Bureau's existence. The carrot required the stick. The benign face was possible only because the violent face was available. Joll does not bring violence to the frontier. He reveals the violence that was always there, the violence upon which the Magistrate's comfort was built and from which his clean hands were never, in truth, clean.
The Subjected People
The Barbarians appear primarily through two figures: the girl whom Joll's men have tortured, whom the Magistrate takes into his household, and the nomadic peoples encountered on his journey to return her. Both representations are marked by the novel's central refusal to grant the subjected people the kind of interiority that would make them legible to the imperial gaze. The girl — never named — has damaged feet and damaged eyes from the torture. She moves through the Magistrate's household with a stillness he cannot penetrate, enduring his nightly foot-washing ritual with a patience that is neither gratitude nor resistance but something he cannot classify. His desire to understand what the torture did to her is itself a form of the imperial gaze: he wants to see inside the subjected person, and her refusal to be seen is the only resistance available in the space between them.
The nomads at the salt lakes take the girl back without ceremony, without the emotional reunion the Magistrate had imagined. The novel does not enter their consciousness because its perspective is the Magistrate's, and the Magistrate's position within the Empire does not give him access to the Barbarians' inner world. The prisoners who pass through the fort — the old man who dies in his cell — are bodies in the system's hands, producing the confessions the system requires. The Magistrate himself becomes, in the novel's second half, a subjected person — arrested, tortured, reduced to the condition of the prisoners whose treatment he had passively witnessed. But the experience gives him not solidarity with the Barbarians but bodily knowledge of what the system does. Empathy requires equality, and equality is precisely what the imperial relationship denies.
The Reckoning
Coetzee's reckoning is with the collaborator — the person occupying the comfortable position inside the imperial system, who benefits from its order, deplores its violence, and does not leave. The Magistrate is this figure, and also, uncomfortably, the reader's identification figure. His dissent is real — he genuinely objects to what Joll does — but the dissent has been costless until Joll's arrival makes it costly, and the question the novel poses is whether costless dissent is dissent at all, or the system's most sophisticated form of self-legitimation: the conscience that permits the structure to claim it has a conscience.
The guilt examined is the guilt of the liberal — the person whose horror at the system's violence and whose complicity in its daily operation are both genuine, the contradiction unresolvable because resolving it would require either leaving (which would cost everything) or accepting (which would cost the conscience). The Magistrate's torture adds the physical knowledge of what the system does to bodies, a different kind of knowledge from abstract awareness, and it leaves him in a position of deeper rather than lesser complicity. He now knows what the system does because it was done to him, and he is still here, still inside.
The implied reader is the white liberal in a system of racial domination — the 1980 South African who could see apartheid's violence and would not leave — but the address extends to every reader whose comfort is maintained by structures of power applied to people they do not see. The novel says: you are the Magistrate. You know what the system does. You are still here. What are you going to do about it? The novel does not answer this question. It insists on the question, which is the reckoning's minimum demand.
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 Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
Waiting for the Barbarians was written in English — no translation is required. The most widely available editions are the Penguin Classics text and the Vintage International paperback.
By J. M. Coetzee, with an introduction by Derek Attridge. The standard Penguin Classics edition — contextual introduction with accessible pricing.
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