Water scarcity becomes socially consequential through the language, institutions, and representations that organize access to it. This article examines how Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) constructs hydrosocial discourse through settler property, racialized labor, gendered authority, and unequal narrative attention. The study used historically situated close reading of the 1890 edition, attending to lexical classification, grammatical agency, focalization, and narrative duration, alongside a separate analysis of later illustrative mediation. The analysis identifies hydraulic enclosure as the connection between material water capture and the discursive privileging of settler life. Drought's universal language of suffering narrows into concern for livestock; San paintings remain visible but unread; and the flood scene places Black women workers' danger within a relative clause while extending attention to the protected household. Lyndall's fountain metaphor and Waldo's stream encounter unsettle mastery without restoring marginalized knowledge or prior sovereignty. The findings connect hydrosocial criticism with discourse studies by showing how ecological insight and colonial exclusion can coexist within the same narrative form. They also offer a passage-based approach for teaching critical environmental literacy and for comparing textual representation with edition-specific visual framing.