If asked who is the most delightful heroine in English fiction, I suspect many people would opt for Elizabeth Bennet: though my personal vote would be for Cassandra Mortmain (of I Capture the Castle in case you won't know). But whom, I wonder, would you nominate as the most captivating villainess? An obvious choice for me is Vernon Lee's Medea da Carpi (of 'Amor Dure' in Hauntings) whose relentless ambition fuelled her career of treason, betrayal, murder, adultery and heaven knows what else to gain her ends. But that very career has an even more potent echo, as it were, in Rider Haggard's unforgettable Mameena (or wailing wind), the 'Child of Storm'. Probably it is only to my generation (and earlier) that the name Mameena would mean anything. This is sad indeed, if true. Doubtless Haggard's wonderful adventure yarns -- surely among the best ever written -- are not 'politically correct' nowadays and shelves of children's paperbacks in bookstores no longer seem to offer King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) as they did for years, even when most of Sir Henry's other novels were long out of print. If so, this is ironic for Haggard always presented the black Africans as they were and as nobler, more courageous and often better mannered and informed that their white counterparts. Any 'racism' in Haggard's books is directed more against other Europeans than Africans or Asians. What is more, it has often seemed to me that his fictional treatment of women is realistic, and of sex, frank.
It is a wondrous saga of three novels in which the evil, but hapless Zulu girl rises from nothing to bend rulers to her will, embroil them in quarrels and with her beauty engineer murder, treason and betrayal. She is -- both living and dead -- the tool by which the wizard Zikali (The thing-that-should-never-have-been-born) brings about the downfall of the royal house of Chaka. Marie (1912), Child of Storm (1913) and Finished (1917) are the three books, but the saga begins in Nada the Lily (1892) and continues in She and Allan (1921) and The Ivory Child (1916): the last being one of the best mystery romances ever written. It should perhaps be said that although Haggard himself (in the Introduction to Finished) names the trilogy dealing with Zikali's revenge as beginning with Marie, Zikali comes only obliquely into that story and Mameena not at all. But the massacre of captive Boers by Dingaan, incited by Zikali, is crucial to the downfall of the Zulu kings. In all, the saga is a masterpiece of plotting and the sweep of its action is replete with supernatural wizardry. The end, with Zikali conjuring horrible visions and spirits of the dead to terrorize the dying Cetawayo, is reminiscent of the conclusion of Haggard's Cleopatra (1889) where her victim, Harmachis, does the same in his hatred for the dying Queen.
There is a lot of sex in Haggard's writings and it is rather surprising to count up just how many 'involvements' Hunter Quatermain has along the way, not only polishing off two wives in tragic deaths (Marie Marais of Marie and Stella of Allan's Wife, 1889), Lady Luna Holmes/Ragnall and many others, but of course his literally undying romance with Mameena herself. At one point in Finished Mameena's shade proves her identity to the sceptical Allan by giving him details of their secret love-making and his enslavement by her beauty -- 'she could even crawl gracefully' -- he had written. 'Notwithstanding her wickedness -- and I suppose she was wicked -- there was something horribly attractive about Mameena,' says Quatermain in Child of Storm. Haggard writes movingly and understandingly of the love of the beautiful sorceress Nombe for the Hungarian girl Heda Marnham (also in Finished), for whom she ultimately sacrifices her life, as well as about the obsessive love of the baboon-woman Hendrijka, for Quatermain's second wife, Stella. After her suicide, Mameena's spirit remains close by Quatermain's side throughout many adventures, forewarning him of danger and how to escape its consequences, saving her worst venom for that very same Nombe, who tries to kill him. Mameena was willing to give up everything in life for Quartermain, except her ambition. After death there is no evidence that her murder, treachery, adultery and plotting has earned any retribution or remorse -- she is still the same Mameena! On the contrary, Allan's Hottentot servant Hans -- his companion in many early adventures and who dies in The Ivory Child (keeping company with Quatermain was a death-warrant!) -- sees a vision of Mameena receiving the Zulu royal salute: to become Queen was the object of her scheming. When Quatermain and old Umslopagaas, the Zulu hero of Nada the Lily and Allan Quatermain, journey with Hans at Zikali's bidding to consult Ayesha, the daughter of Isis, in that gripping adventure yarn She and Allan, and at the end Ayesha grants Allan his wish to see all those dead ones (women particularly) whom he has loved, he finds to his utter despair that not one of them is aware of him or has remembered him in any way in the afterlife. Not even Stella who did appear briefly to comfort him after her death in Allan's Wife. Only the faithful Mameena comes to him as the woman who has truly loved him (yet is still earthbound) and he has a touching glimpse of his old dog, Smut, who also excitedly recognises his master.
The history of Ayesha -- immortal woman -- and daughter of Isis (according to her autobiography: Wisdom's Daughter, 1923) also runs through several volumes of course: She (1887), She and Allan, Ayesha (1905) and is linked to other novels also.
Old Zikali (the Opener of Roads), the Adept and most notorious witch-doctor in fiction, turns up in other novels too, including Heu-Heu, or The Monster (1924), again with Quatermain and Hans. Allan remains haunted not only by the dead Mameena but by the living Lady Luna Ragnall of The Ivory Child with whom he has further (mis)adventures in The Ancient Allan (1920) and, after her death, in Allan and the Ice-Gods (1927). In these 'drug' novels, the mesmeric properties of the Taduki herb (similar to that of Heu-Heu) are involved. These (and other) novels of Haggard's abound in ghosts, spirits, wraiths, genuine werewolves, harbingers, prophecy, necromancy, black magic and witchcraft, mesmerism, reincarnation. Of writers on the supernatural, however, only Ev Bleiler and Mike Ashley give him his due as one of the Colossi of supernatural fiction, and Glen St John Barclay (The Anatomy of Horror, 1978) gives an excellent appraisal of Haggard's fiction overall as 'Love after death'. There is more of 'the supernatural' in Haggard than in (say) Blackwood and it is surprising that so many commentators on supernatural themes in English fiction dismiss Haggard (presumably largely unread apart from possibly She) or ignore him completely.
You cannot contain the wind and Mameena spills over into far more than just her own immediate adventures. She would not like to be so ignored and forgotten I know, so this modest salute to her beauty and achievements is written in the hope that it will, at least, encourage the (re)reading of Marie, Child of Storm, She and Allan, Finished and The Ivory Child. I just hope when Quatermain finally died (along with old Umslopogaas whose heroic death still brings tears to my eyes!) in the Zu-Vendis city of Milosis, that he was kind to the shade of Mameena who had loved and protected him for so long, when others he had loved had forgotten. 'I have spoken' . . . as the Zulus say!