GORDIMER'S COUNTRY

To understand the context in which Gordimer began writing it is important to recognize the peculiar history of South Africa, a history fought over and continuously rewritten by the different groups within the country's boundaries. During the apartheid era, South African historical propaganda tended to advance the view that the whites reached South Africa before the black inhabitants, or, more moderately, that the two groups got there together. Many histories of South Africa need to be treated with great caution. One useful account is that of Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, which is particularly relevant to the area in which Gordimer grew up. Leonard Thompson's A History of South Africa can also be recommended. In The Seeds of Disaster, John Laurence gives an excellent account of Afrikaner propaganda and doublespeak.¹ Heidi Holland's The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress is a readable account, based on interviews with ANC spokespeople. The distortion or suppression of historical fact was one of the weapons of apartheid. In 1978 when Floors van Jaarsveld, a Pretoria professor of history, questioned the view that divine intervention was responsible for the victory of the Boers over the Zulus at Blood River, a group of men burst into the University of South Africa's lecture hall and tarred and feathered him. Because of the shortage of educational materials in South African schools, in 2001 black children were still being taught from apartheid-era history books, one of which devoted precisely three pages to black South African history.

The facts of colonial conquest are not in dispute. The first white settlers (Dutch) reached Table Bay in 1652, to be met by “Hottentots” and “Bushmen” (the Khoikhoi and San peoples), whose land was swiftly taken over. Nonetheless, in the 1960s South Africa's ambassador to Great Britain referred to the interior of South Africa in the eighteenth century as totally uninhabited territory.² Other historical accounts tended to describe the Bushmen as having little contact with whites or with having withdrawn to the semi-desert of the Western Cape of their own free will. In fact in 1774, after more than a century of white settlement, a white commando is reported as having killed 503 Bushmen and taken others prisoner. As late as 1862, white farmers in the northern Cape Colony were pursuing a policy of exterminating Bushmen. Historians recognize that the history of the white annexation of the Cape tends to be unknown because the two groups, Bushmen and Hottentots, are no longer around in any numbers to dispute the question.

Contrary to claims that the Boers (settlers of Dutch origin) were entering uninhabited lands, there is also clear evidence of a large Bantu-speaking black population, one which had been there for a long time. Archaeologists have estimated that there was extensive black mining on the famous gold reef of the Witwatersrand well before the arrival of any whites. Excavation of Iron Age sites in Phalaborwa shows a chronological sequence beginning from as early as 8 A.D., and positively documented from the tenth century onwards. Phalaborwa is a rich copper field in the northeastern Transvaal with fifty-foot deep Bantu mineshafts. Gordimer refers to the antiquity of black mining in “Something Out There.” Until the 1930s the belief had remained prevalent that the Bantu (black) peoples came into what is now South Africa only around 1652. But in 1937 Afrikaner archaeologist L. Fouche excavated a Sotho settlement in the northern Transvaal and was able to date pottery to 1200 A.D. Subsequent discoveries have confirmed the situation. It is now clear that the ancestors of the Bantu-speaking peoples had settled south of the Limpopo River by 300 A.D. Once the Dutch East India Company had founded a refreshment station at Table Bay, however, the Afrikaners (or Boers) expanded steadily, conquering the Khoisan and also importing slaves from Indonesia, Ceylon, Madagascar, and Mozambique. Britain took the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1795; the Dutch regained it by treaty in 1803; lost it once more in 1806; and staged a rising in 1815. Between 1816 and 1828, Shaka created the Zulu kingdom and there was warfare across much of southern Africa. In 1820 British settlers reached the Cape Colony. The Great Trek began in 1836—the mass migration of some five thousand Boers from the Cape Province into Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal—and is glorified in Afrikaner history as a God-inspired pilgrimage of a devout and Christian people. Voortrekker diaries themselves demonstrate the truth was that the British wanted to free the Boers' slaves, and that the Boers would not comply. (The slaves were of various races, and to complicate the issue, freed slaves went on to own slaves themselves.) From this point on, warfare is the one constant in the country's history, including the British defeat of the Xhosa (1835); the Afrikaner victory over the Zulus at Blood River in 1838; the wars between Lesotho and the Orange Free State (1856–58); the defeat of the British by the Zulus at Isandhlwana in 1879 and the British defense of Rourke's Drift (familiar in its heroic version as the basis of the film Zulu); the Jameson Raid between 1895 and 1896; and the Boer Wars (1899–1902), now rechristened the War Between the Whites, with the infamous British concentration camps. More than twenty-eight thousand Afrikaner civilians, mostly children, died in these concentration camps, of dysentery, measles, and other diseases. The British burned thirty thousand farms, exiled captured leaders abroad, and crushed resistance. Black Africans also suffered. There were at least 116,000 in the camps and many of them died there. When the Peace of Vereeniging was signed in 1902, the British clearly planned to swamp the Afrikaners with English-speaking immigrants and establish British supremacy, and made no provision for the extension of the franchise to blacks.

To this history of political violence the historian has to add the peculiarly violent nature of the country's industrialization. Diamond mining began in Griqualand West in 1867; gold mining began on the Witwatersrand in 1886. Between 1886 and the First World War, a space of thirty years, the area was transformed from an agricultural backwater to a colony with the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated gold-mining industry. These same three decades involved four different governments, plus an attempted coup. The South African gold industry was producing 27 percent of the world's gold by 1898, 40 percent by 1913. In the process the forty mile stretch along the line of the gold reef from Gordimer's birthplace in Springs in the east to Krugersdorp in the west became a landscape disfigured by mining headgear, ore dumps, railway lines, dams and pools of waste water, and the hastily erected homes of the miners. To quote Charles Van Onselen: “Into this cauldron of capitalist development poured men, women and children drawn from all over the world, giving the Rand a cultural diversity and social texture that bubbled with excitement and vitality.”³

This was a masculine world of robber barons and roughnecks who knew little about culture but were out to get rich. Immigrant miners tended not to bring wives and children with them, whether they were skilled white miners from Cornwall, Cumberland, and Lancashire, or less-skilled black workers from the Cape, Transvaal, and Mozambique. As a result drinking, gambling, and prostitution became major social evils. Ambrose Pratt, a visiting Australian journalist, remarked in 1910, “Ancient Babylon and Nineveh have been revived. Johannesburg is their twentieth-century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor.”⁴ The Transvaal ruling classes tacitly encouraged the consumption of alcohol and the recourse of white workers to prostitutes in order to maintain control of them. Many black miners were recruited in Mozambique, where the Portuguese had already introduced them to alcohol; once their wages were spent, they had to keep on working and remain on the Rand, rather than heading for home, thus providing a pool of labor. There was therefore an enormous market for cheap liquor on the Reef, and large numbers of prostitutes plied their trade there, from 1888 onwards. In 1896 there were more than one thousand professional prostitutes in Johannesburg. Later attempts to control the sale of alcohol were more successful than those aimed at cleaning up vice. The opening of the railway line from the port of Lourenço Marques in 1895 placed the Rand within easy reach of several European ports, with the result an influx of French, German, and Belgian prostitutes. At the same time, by an unfortunate coincidence, Russo-American organized criminals fled from New York to establish brothels in Johannesburg. Gordimer makes fun of the claims of her character Dr. Grahame Fraser-Smith to ancient lineage, in “Something Out There,” by tracing his ancestry back to a late Victorian brothel-keeper.

Throughout the 1890s the Rand was a society characterized by large numbers of single men, living close to their workplace, the whites in boarding houses, the blacks in mine compounds. There were slumps and booms in the mining industry, and the mine owners evolved various strategies for holding down the costs of African labor, including the importing of 63,397 Chinese workers between 1904 and 1907. Gordimer's grandmother's experience of discovering a murdered Chinaman under her kitchen table, while her husband was out gambling, is emblematic of the kind of society she was living in. As well as providing cheap labor, the Chinese presence allowed the mine owners to undercut black wages even further. Indians were also imported into Natal, outnumbering whites in this area, and including a young London-trained barrister, Mohandas Gandhi, who went to South Africa in 1893, organized several campaigns against the unjust laws of the period, and left for India in 1914, taking with him the technique of passive resistance which was to have significant effects on the future histories of South Africa, India, and, in the Civil Rights conflicts of the sixties, the United States. Attempts were also made to introduce more white domestic servants from Europe, partly to begin to remedy the lack of family life among the miners (which had drawn adverse comment from British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1902), but also to make black male “houseboys” available for mine work. In order to stabilize the white working class population, the mining companies began in the early years of the twentieth century to put up quarters for their married, white workers. In 1897 only 12 percent of the European mine employees were married and had their families with them. By 1912 the figure was 42 percent. On the one hand the growth of family lives was a welcome shift away from the male-dominated world of the earlier years. Yet it also increased the social distance between white and black miners, who now lived in very different social worlds. In the early years of the colony, there was a degree of resistance to the mine owners from the lower classes, who often adopted each other's tactics and strategies irrespective of race; black washermen, organized along Zulu military lines, wore turbans adopted from Asian custom and went on strike like the white working class when their livelihoods were threatened; Cape “Malay” cab drivers added their signatures in Arabic script to a petition to President Kruger in the name of the working classes. But the separation of the races meant that industrial action was less easily coordinated in the twentieth century. White miners enjoyed supervisory roles whereas black workers were poorly paid and maintained unskilled positions.

APARTHEID

Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923, six years after the Russian revolution, five years after the close of the First World War, and five years after the founding of the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of the Afrikaner elite which signaled the beginning of an era of rising Afrikaner power in South Africa. Historians have seen the period between 1910 and 1948 as a period of segregation, as the whites strengthened their grip on the black population. A series of “colour bar” measures also prevented blacks from competing with Afrikaners (a more impoverished group than English-speakers), who slowly gained economic ground. Many Africans were being transformed from sharecroppers into tenant and wage laborers. Migrant labor was common, with blacks traveling from the “reserves” to work for whites, most of whom never set foot in a reserve and spoke no African languages. A few blacks managed to gain access to education (and were exposed to Liberal white values) through mission schools, and in 1912 Africans founded the South African Native National Congress, which later became the ANC. In 1924, J. B. M. Hertzog's Nationalist-Labour Pact gained election victory, further encouraging Afrikaner nationalism and racial segregation. The Wage Act was passed to protect unskilled white workers; other legislation protected white semi-skilled workers. White (but not black) women got the vote, thus reducing the black proportion of voters. In 1925 Afrikaans (rather than Dutch) became an official state language, and after considerable agitation, the flag of the country incorporated the Union Jack and the flags of the Afrikaner republics. In 1934 Hertzog and Smuts formed the United Party (though Hertzog lost influence later when he tried to keep South Africa neutral in the Second World War). The Natives Representation Act (1936) disenfranchised many Africans formerly qualified to vote. In the thirties a group of Afrikaners, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch reformed minister, founded the Purified National Party, and in 1938 took over celebrations of the Great Trek centennial, describing the Voortrekkers in heroic terms, including their opposition to the mixing of races. In 1943 the African Congress Youth League was founded by Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Nelson Mandela; three years later the African mine workers' strike closed down nine mines and paralyzed twelve others. Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, deals with this period but the strike is glossed over.

Conditions in the mines in South Africa remained arduous. Men worked in intense heat in a crouching position, and between 1933 and 1966, nineteen thousand gold miners, 93 percent of them Africans, died in accidents. The African miners were housed in single sex compounds of between three thousand and six thousand men, sleeping on concrete bunks or homemade beds in dormitories, outside which they also ate, no other facilities being provided. No women were allowed in the compounds. The mines themselves were run on military lines, with white shift bosses and compound managers commanding underground “boss boys” who controlled the mass of laborers. Many miners came from outside South Africa; Gordimer recalls them in tribal dress, in her childhood. Black Africans also began to be increasingly urbanized. Small towns tended to have a white, modern area separated from a black “location” of shacks and huts, squatters hurriedly erected dwellings, with no electricity and only earth closets as sanitation.

In 1948 Malan's Afrikaner National Party won the elections, despite the fact that Afrikaners were only 12 percent of the population, and the apartheid era began. Apartheid (separateness) was essentially a political program of separate development founded on the idea that Africans were a distinct subspecies of humanity, permanently inferior to white people and with no historical claim to the land of South Africa. Twelve African leaders called immediately for African unity and supported the ANC Youth League proposal to engage in mass struggle. The battle—which was to end only in 1994 with the first free and fair elections in South Africa's history—had started. Many Nationalists had been openly pro-German during the Second World War; extremist Afrikaner organizations such as the Ossewa-Brandwag (“Ox-wagon Sentinel”) and the New Order had explicitly supported Nazi ideology. German radio broadcasts in Afrikaans had been beamed to South Africa. As a result the opposition, both Left and Liberal, saw their role as part of the wider struggle against fascism, particularly as a whole series of repressive legal measures came into force. In 1949 the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act made marriage between whites and members of other racial groups illegal. Gordimer describes the effects in The Lying Days as Paul tells Helen of mixed race couples arrested in their beds, and of couples who have lived together for years being suddenly forced apart. In 1950 the Population Registration Act classified everyone by race, as white, coloured, Indian, and African, though later even more nonsensical groupings were introduced, including “Other Coloured” and “Griqua,” and according the status of “honorary whites” to the Japanese. A central tenet of apartheid was that whites formed a single nation (whether they spoke English or Afrikaans) whereas blacks were from many different nations. In the same year the Immorality Act (with its various sequels) made interracial sex illegal. The Group Areas Act divided urban areas into racially exclusive zones, and the Suppression of Communism Act was introduced. (The Group Areas Act and its sequels effectively evicted blacks from any desirable areas, now reserved for whites, and was part of a group of measures designed to confine blacks to poor, non-urban areas, as a pool of labor to be used and then immediately returned to what eventually became ten “homelands.”) Hendrik Verwoerd became minister of native affairs. The Nationalists were unashamedly racist, and believed in European supremacy in South Africa. There was no longer even a pretense at “trusteeship,” or guardianship of blacks. “Baasskap,” or boss-ship, was the order of the day, and its symbol became the sjambok, or ox-hide whip. Politicians posed unashamedly clutching a sjambok, for photographs. One of the protests, a stayaway mounted against the Suppression of Communism Act, took place on May Day in 1950, the day on which Helen witnesses the police killing of a black protester in a township.

In 1952 the Defiance Campaign was launched by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress. Huge numbers joined the ANC. The opposition throughout the 1950s was essentially multiracial, and the way of life it represented is accurately portrayed in A World of Strangers, in the Sophiatown world of Steven Sitole. Sophiatown, an ethnically mixed and culturally flourishing township on the borders of Johannesburg, came to symbolize the hope of a multiracial future. Because the basis of apartheid was segregation, multiracialism appeared to be the best weapon with which to fight it. The Congress Alliance, a loose alliance of black, Indian, coloured, and white democratic groups, was a multiracial organization which proved by its very existence that the races could combine. Although not a Liberal movement, the ideology was in some senses Liberal, with an emphasis on passive opposition, nonviolent struggle, the virtue of parliamentary democracy, and the brotherhood of man. The ANC had denounced the actual Liberal party in 1953; in their turn many Liberals were suspicious of communist infiltration of the ANC. Nonetheless, Liberals played an active part in opposition to apartheid in the 1950s. In the end, however, there was little space for any middle ground. By now all those classified as African had to carry passes. A version of Orwellian “doublespeak” characterized South African legislation: the law which enforced this practice was entitled Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act (1952). The following year introduced the Separate Amenities Act, the Public Safety Act with emergency powers, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and the Bantu Education Act. The latter ensured that blacks were educated only to be fit for manual labor. In the education system developed (or underdeveloped) under apartheid, blacks had to pay for their own books and tuition; were exposed to only ill-qualified teachers, few of whom would have reached the standard of an American high-school graduate; and were taught in ill-equipped schools. In 1973, for example, only sixteen Rand was spent per head on black education, as opposed to three hundred and fifty Rand for whites. In 1954 the Native Settlement Act began the massive removal of non-whites. In 1955 the Congress of the People met outside Johannesburg and adopted the Freedom Charter; police broke up the rally, and the following year 156 Congress of the People participants were arrested for high treason. The protracted Treason Trial ensued. In 1956 Sophiatown was rezoned and rechristened Triomf (Triumph). The street on which the demolitions began was Toby Street, the road which marked the frontier between the worlds of white Johannesburg and the black township. Gordimer's protagonist in A World of Strangers, Toby Hood, had been aptly named.

The Alexandria bus boycott took place in 1957. In 1958 Verwoerd became prime minister and introduced the homeland policy. Africanists broke away from the ANC to found the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), an event which suggested that multiracialism was losing ground. In 1959 the State-Aided Institutions Act closed access to libraries for blacks, and the Kafakaesque quality of South African existence was heightened when the Extension of University Education Act deprived universities of the right to admit black students without government permission. Occasion for Loving opens as Tom Stilwell becomes involved in a campaign against the Act. Yet when he goes to a meeting to discuss the Act, a black man tells him he is irrelevant; the novel culminates in a bruising encounter between white and black which reflects the end of multiracialism and the growth of black nationalist separatism. It was becoming clear that apartheid was a matter of brute political power and systematic economic exploitation, and that peaceful opposition was fruitless.

On 21 March 1960 one word—Sharpeville—rang out around the world, when a PAC campaign against the pass laws ended in a massacre, with sixty-seven unarmed protesters shot dead, 186 injured by the police. Over eighteen thousand people were detained; large numbers went into exile. African political organizations were banned and the struggle for freedom went underground. South Africa was ostracized in world affairs, and the underground began plans for strategic violence. In 1961 South Africa became a republic and left the British Commonwealth. Inside the country the military wings of the ANC (Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation), the PAC (Poqo, Pure), and the white African Resistance Movement (ARM) began sabotage campaigns. The ANC and PAC established headquarters outside South Africa. Reaction was swift. In 1962 detention without trial and the policy of house arrest were introduced. Umkhonto we Sizwe was broken after Mandela's arrest in August, with the arrest in July 1963 of the remaining leaders a body blow to the movement. In 1964 Mandela and other Umkhonto leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage. Bram Fischer was also arrested but jumped bail and went into hiding, orchestrating the underground campaign until 1965, when he was recaptured and sentenced to life imprisonment. In The Late Bourgeois World, the shift from peaceful opposition to a revolutionary ethos and violent resistance in the 1960s is focused on the character of Max, a failed white saboteur. The statistics for acts of sabotage tell their own story: 203 cases in the first half of 1964, none in the whole of 1965. The early 1960s has been persuasively interpreted as a failed revolution; certainly the counter-revolutionary forces were triumphant. The heroine's potential decision to use a bank account to channel funds to the underground also reflects reality. In the 1960s various people were brought to book for acting as conduits for underground funding.

In 1966 Verwoerd was assassinated and B. J. Vorster became prime minister. By this time repression had intensified, with the extension of powers of detention without trial from twelve days in 1962 to 180 days in 1965. The opposition press was stifled, partly by direct censorship, partly by the detention or banning of its major figures. A person under a banning order was confined to his home between dusk and sunrise; obliged to report to the police once a week; and was forbidden to write, teach, broadcast, speak in public, or meet more than one person at a time. In 1970 the Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act was designed to enforce a “homeland” citizenship on every black person in South Africa. “Homeland” was a euphemism for the Bantustans supposedly reserved for members of different tribes, many of whom had no connection with the localities at all. Gordimer has noted that her home in Johannesburg is in a suburb under which lies the archaeological remains of a vast seventeenth-century Tswana settlement, though it is a hundred miles or more from this affluent white area to the “homeland” of Bophuthatswana.

Cosmas Desmond's The Discarded People painted a horrific picture of black resettlement areas. Desmond was banned in 1971 and his book became unquotable. Various territories became “self-governing”: Transkei, Ciskei, Zululand, Bophuthatswana, and Lebowa. International governments understandably refused to recognize these fictional countries as nations (thus depriving many black South Africans, now redesignated as citizens of a Bantustan, of passports and identity.) The Bantustans also hardened neo-tribal antagonisms. The early seventies was the period in which it became obvious that the future of white South Africa was directly connected to that of other southern African regimes—Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe. By 1972 the first white farms came under guerrilla attack in Zimbabwe. The army officers' coup in Portugal in 1974, with the fall of the Caetano government, presaged the end of Portuguese domination of Mozambique. The independence struggle in Mozambique had been an inspiration to black South Africans—and an image of horror to the dominant white groups, who saw their buffer states crumbling. Inside South Africa the “laager” mentality was gaining ground, with increased defense spending and military service, stronger frontiers, and the picking off of the last vestiges of institutional opposition. (The “laager” was originally the term for an encirclement of Boer wagons, to protect against attack.) At the same time black resistance was hardening. In 1968 Steve Biko founded the black South African Students Organization (SASO), promoting the Black Consciousness Movement, which gained steadily in influence culminating in the founding in 1975 of the Black People's Convention (BPC), with Biko as its president.

A second word flashed around the world: Soweto. On 16 June 1976 the Soweto Revolt took place after fifteen thousand schoolchildren protested against the compulsory use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction, and the police opened fire on demonstrators killing two children. Violence swept the country, and it took the police and army the better part of a year to regain control. The revolt was widespread, spontaneous, and cost black South Africa dearly. By 1977 the official death toll (probably a gross underestimate) was 575 dead and thousands injured. In 1977 Biko was arrested and died from brutal treatment in police custody. He had been in custody for twenty-six days, kept naked and manacled. By 1979, P. W. Botha, who became prime minister in 1978, was facing a much strengthened ANC, which, although in exile, had attracted increased support after Soweto and was pressing for international isolation of South Africa by boycotts, sanctions, and embargoes.

In August 1983 a thousand delegates of all races, representing 575 organizations, founded the United Democratic Front (UDF) to coordinate internal opposition to apartheid. In 1984 a new constitution provided for participation in government by Asians and “coloureds” (but not blacks); the elections were marked by widespread violence and boycotts, plus strikes, with fifty-eight acts of sabotage against the state and twenty-six attacks on the police. Inside the country in the following year there were school and bus boycotts, worker stayaways, attacks on black police and councilors, more strikes (involving 240,000 workers) and 879 deaths by political violence. Outside the country, international pressure was growing. The South African forces attacked alleged ANC bases in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia in 1986, and an indefinite, nationwide state of emergency was declared. Under the state of emergency it is estimated that thirteen thousand people, many of them children, were detained and tortured. The pass laws were repealed in 1986. In 1987 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike for three weeks, with half a million people participating. In 1988 South Africa signed an accord with Cuba and Angola for staged withdrawal of troops. In 1989 F. W. de Klerk succeeded Botha as state president, supported by reform-seeking whites, and immediately began consultations with the ANC leadership.

“Mandela freed”—again the world recognized a landmark in history in 1990, when Mandela was unconditionally released, and the ANC and other outlawed organizations were no longer banned. Mandela refused to leave prison until all the ANC leaders had first been set free. Conflict between Inkatha (the Zulu Chief Buthelezi's party) and the alliance of the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions now became endemic. In 1992 de Klerk called a whites-only referendum to obtain a mandate for reform. CODESSA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa), a multi-party group, negotiated a new constitution. 1992 was also the year in which Chris Hane, widely supported as an ANC youth leader, was assassinated. The ANC attempted conciliation with rival groups such as the PAC. In 1993 de Klerk and Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1994 the ANC was elected with 62 percent of the vote in the first free elections, and on 9 May, Mandela was elected president of the republic of South Africa. The exiles were returning to South Africa, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began operating in 1993, under the Chairmanship of Bishop Desmond Tutu. South Africa presented a very different face to the world, including a constitution that now guaranteed freedom of sexual preference and the right to life, with a moratorium on the death penalty, two of the most important plot strands of The House Gun. Crime and violence were spreading, and the international press gave almost as much coverage to the taxi-wars and car-jackings in Johannesburg as to the legislative struggles. The spread of AIDS and the prevalence of rape in South Africa cast shadows over the utopian images of freedom. A long and painful process of change was ahead.

CULTURE

A writer's era is, of course, as much literary as political. During Gordimer's youth the only South African novelists widely known were Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Sol Plaatje, and Sarah Gertude Millin. Jock of the Bushveld, the story of a dog, was probably much more popular. One novelist, Joy Packer, developed a large European following between the 1950s and 1970s, essentially writing naively racist romances for female readers. As far as more serious writing was concerned, John Cooke has noted the vigor of South African publishing after the Second World War, when a clutch of important novels appeared: Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy (1946), Dan Jacobson's A Dance in the Sun (1955), Phyllis Altman's The Law of the Vultures (1953), and Harry Bloom's Episode in the Transvaal (1955).⁵ In 1956 a conference of writers and critics meeting at the University of the Witwatersrand heard soundly confident descriptions of a flourishing literary scene from William Plomer and Alan Paton, among others. But by the early 1960s Gordimer was almost the only member of the group to be producing fiction in South Africa. The only other novelists to have maintained a long-term concern with their era in South Africa were Es'kia Mpahlele, André Brink, and J. M. Coetzee. Alan Paton came back into the literary world with Ah, but Your Land Is Beautiful only in 1982, his first novel in thirty years.

A dominant feature of the apartheid era was censorship. Three of Gordimer's novels were banned. The censorship bureau was active in every province and only three censors needed to agree in order for a book to be banned. The censorship judges generally had no literary qualifications, but were loyal to the ruling National Party bureaucrats. They were paid for their services. In the period between the first censorship act in 1955 (followed by a more comprehensive act in 1963) and 1970, eleven thousand books were banned. There were ninety-seven definitions of what is undesirable in literature. The list of banned books included pornography and political propaganda, works of political analysis (Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon), sexually explicit novels (John Updike's Couples and Rabbit Is Rich), and such subversive texts as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Blaise Pascal's Pensées. The writer was not informed that the book was banned; it was merely listed in the Government Gazette in the weekly list of bannings (which also included records, posters, art works, and even T-shirts, if they bore a political slogan). Writers had to become very ingenious to get around the problem of banning. Books were sometimes banned for sale and distribution, but not for possession. If the reader had already bought the book, he or she could keep it (but, officially, not lend it to anybody else). Some documents were, however, also banned for possession, as was the case with the student document that Gordimer placed verbatim in the text of Burger's Daughter. Possession of Burger's Daughter was therefore also a criminal offense. Getting the book into the country disguised as other merchandise was one solution. Burger's Daughter came into South Africa in unlabeled parcels (the sight of Gordimer's name would have been enough to ensure that it was embargoed) and a couple of thousand copies got around before the censors caught up with it. Another solution was to distribute books in foreign language editions. A book banned in English might not be banned in other languages. A World of Strangers was not available in English but was available in translation. It had been available in English in hardback for eighteen months, but the paperback was banned the day it came out (perhaps because the readership for a hardback is assumed to have a larger stake in the South African economy than those who can only afford a cheap edition). It remained banned for twelve years. The Late Bourgeois World was banned for ten years.

A banned book published abroad could not be brought into the country. Another tactic of the censors, however, was to allow the book to enter South Africa and then to embargo it for a period. Gordimer's Livingstone's Companions met this fate, as did The Conservationist (embargoed for ten weeks). Since books often make most of their sales in the period shortly after publication, any censorship at that point tended to be disastrous to the author's profits, and to destroy the popular sales of the book. Even if the embargo was then lifted, the time delay while booksellers reordered, and the absence of reviews, tended to kill the book. Ironically perhaps, the fledgling Afrikaans novel was hardest hit, since if banned there was nowhere else in the world for the writer to publish. English-speaking writers could at least publish abroad, and once established abroad, the banning of their books created very bad publicity for the South African government, as in the case of Burger's Daughter, in which protests from John Fowles, Heinrich Böll, and a host of others created a storm of international press coverage. Gordimer made the most of the situation. When André Brink's publisher refused to publish his novel 'n Oomblik in die Wind in 1975, because his previous novel had been banned, a small group of academics decided to begin samizdat publishing as “Taurus,” publishing clandestinely and distributing through mail order. (“Samizdat” in Russian means circulating underground, as opposed to “tamizdat,” publishing abroad.) Gordimer heard of Taurus and approached the group to publish her text on the history of the banning of Burger's Daughter—What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works (1980)—after which, in partnership with her South African publishers, they published several of her works. She wanted to be associated with their active protest; they were glad to have the support of a figure of her standing.

South Africa is no longer under apartheid, but freedom brings its own problems. The uncertainties of the country as it emerged from the shadows were also those of its artists. As apartheid crumbled, the question which presented itself repeatedly was whether the South African novelist had lost his or her essential subject. Can the white novelist survive the end of apartheid—or has the artist's inspiration disappeared, together with the tools previously employed?

Recent debates in South African literary criticism have centered on the problem of the artist's role in relation to society, specifically in what has become known as the Albie Sachs debate, and in the response to the writings of Njabulo Ndebele.⁶ During forty years of opposition to apartheid, the avowed aim of literary practitioners was “solidarity criticism,” placing a strong emphasis on social realism and the evaluation of writing in relation to its adherence to a materialist dialectic. Writing was seen as a “cultural weapon” and was supposed to concentrate on expressing collective rather than individual experiences in a mode of popular realism. In 1989 Albie Sachs made a speech, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” a paper prepared for an ANC in-house seminar on culture. Sachs (somewhat teasingly) proposed banning the phrase “culture is a weapon of struggle”; he described solidarity criticism, and the instrumental view of culture in general, as impoverishing artistic production and as merely a means of appearing politically correct.⁷ Above all he argued that the result of solidarity criticism was simply to ensure that all South African literature was about the oppressor. In his description of recent South African writing, he lamented the narrow range of themes, the closing off of ambiguity and contradiction, and the stereotypical nature of character.

For Sachs the power of art lies in the capacity to expose contradictions and reveal hidden tensions. The concentration on the struggle had closed off whole areas of human activity. “And what about love?” asked Sachs, rhetorically. “Can it be that when we join the ANC we do not make love any more, that when the comrades go to bed they discuss the role of the white working class?”⁸ For Sachs the editing out of everything but the political, the filling up of novels with oppressors, trauma, misery, risked a further diminishment of the individual already threatened by apartheid. “What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?”⁹ A better strategy was to allow art to bypass, overwhelm, and ignore apartheid by establishing its own space.

In contrast to Sachs, Njabulo Ndebele's was a more measured and deeply thought response, expressed in a series of essays collected in Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991). Ndebele highlighted the dangers of a quasi-journalistic literature of indictment characterized by the psychology of the slogan and by intellectual powerlessness. Such literature may inform but cannot transform. Indeed Ndebele cautioned against an over-reliance on information, which could itself mirror the tactics of the opposition with its concern with information manipulation. Strongly influenced by listening to African oral storytellers (on trains and buses, on their way to work), he noted that their tales were not at all political. “When they talked politics, they talked politics. When they told stories, they told stories.”¹⁰ For him such storytellers were the makers of culture. Even when their stories were not centered on resistance, they had a social purpose. Similarly, for Ndebele, richness of character was not simply the product of bourgeois escapism into an ethos of individualism. Interiority could be a way in which the individual steps out of the network of exchange relations and values, away from the performance principle and the profit motive, and towards passion, imagination, and conscience.

Notes

1. Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand (Longman, 1982); Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); John Laurence, The Seeds of Disaster (London: Gollancz, 1968); Heidi Holland, The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress (London: Grafton, 1989).

2. Laurence, p. 293.

3. Van Onselen, p. i.

4. Van Onselen, p. 2.

5. John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 2.

6. Graham Pechey, “Post-Apartheid Narratives,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

7. Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” (paper prepared for an ANC in-house seminar on culture), in Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom, eds. Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990).

8. Sachs, p. 21.

9. Sachs, p. 21.

10. Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 37.