Africa in The Hamlet (Location)

"Africa" is mentioned three times in The Hamlet. The first two locate "Africa" in the context of European colonialism. When Ratliff visits Columbia, Tennessee, and discovers that it is an untouched market for selling his sewing machines, his joy is compared to the feelings of "the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory" (61). A few pages later the narrative depicts Will Varner and Flem Snopes settling the accounts of Varner's tenants in Frenchman's Bend and looking like "the white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost" (67). The third uses "Africa or China" figuratively to describe the way the young men of Frenchman's Bend bonded together around their ritualized courtship of Eula: "They might have been a masonic lodge set suddenly down in Africa or China" (142). The description of Flem as a "native headman" is the only hint of an actual 'African' presence in these passages.