Abstract
I first encountered Nadine Gordimer as an undergraduate reading Burger’s Daughter (1979) for a module on adolescence in literature. The novel follows Rosa as she comes to terms with both the death of her father, Lionel Burger, and his legacy as a legendary leader of the anti-Apartheid movement. Having grown up in the midst of the struggle, Rosa never doubts that Apartheid is anything other than unjust and indefensible. Nonetheless, for much of the novel Rosa meanders, first in South Africa, from there to France, and then England. There, a very personal encounter with an old friend brings a sense of urgency back to Gordimer’s prose, as Rosa catapults herself back into South Africa, passing messages between militants, and ultimately being thrown into the prison where Lionel had died at the beginning of the novel.
As I began to work through the rest of Gordimer’s oeuvre, it soon struck me that her writings as a whole resembled Rosa’s journey. By the time she started publishing in 1949, Gordimer was already firmly opposed to Apartheid, a resolve that would never waver, not in the slightest. This assured resolve dominated her non-fiction, throughout which she exhorted white South Africans to oppose an unjust, illegitimate regime even as it claimed to serve their will — and even the best interests of so-called “non-whites”. This resolve, though, was often countered by uncertainty over how whites could contribute towards overcoming white supremacy – how they might go about “earn[ing] a civic and national status other than that of colonizer, eternal outsider” (Gordimer, 2003: 38) in “the new Africa” (Gordimer, 1959: 34). From the outset, Apartheid had its white opponents, but few of them shared this uncertainty over the role of whites in the resistance. Thus, for liberals like Alan Paton, whoever wanted a non-racial South Africa had to fight for it using non-racial methods, despite the fact that racialism defined practically every aspect of daily life under Apartheid. Indeed, for Paton, there was nothing about one’s whiteness that could compromise one’s integrity as an opponent of white supremacism.
As Gail Gerhart (1978) and other historians of Apartheid have documented, such uncompromising attitudes often led to complacency among liberal whites about the fact that their methods were woefully inadequate to the task of overcoming Apartheid. Hence the eruption of the Black Consciousness Movement in 1969, a blacks-only student movement that (officially) condemned all liberal whites as closet Afrikaner nationalists looking after their own interests. Gordimer had anticipated this development by several years, when observing in 1959 how blacks across the continent had tired of fighting alongside whites (Gordimer, 1959). Even then, though, Gordimer had no way of answering the question “Where do whites fit in?” — whether in “the new Africa”, in the wider anti-colonial effort, or more specifically in the struggle against Apartheid. If the necessity of dismantling Apartheid dominated her non-fiction, this uncertainty over the role of whites in doing so would mark much of her fiction. Several of her female protagonists up until July’s People would be dubbed “dead-end heroines” (Visel, 1988: 38) for the inconclusive outcome of their journeys towards a firmer, more productive conviction in the need for change. The itinerant Hillela of A Sport of Nature (1986) would succeed where Rosa and Maureen Smales of July’s People (1981) appear to have failed, watching her husband raise the flag of a new, non-racial, democratic South Africa. Hillela was described by one critic as a personal fantasy, a sign that Gordimer’s conviction in Apartheid’s imminent downfall had begun to falter (Visel, 1988: 39).
As a white opponent of white supremacy, Gordimer flatly refused to become an accessory to injustice. In many other respects, though, her writings were marked by the inconclusiveness of a thinker who carefully skirted the various dogmas that confronted one another under Apartheid. In essays like “A Writer’s Freedom” (1976) and “Relevance and Commitment” (1979), she declared that her primary commitment was, like that of any writer, to herself, but additionally to the task of forcefully conveying her own personal impression of the challenges facing South Africans, both under and after Apartheid. In her final novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), we find two former militants getting their bearings within the new South Africa, checking its pulse, and finding there a whole range of disputes that had previously simmered quietly under the dominating fact of white supremacy. Elsewhere, Gordimer has been commemorated as “arguably the foremost chronicler of racial apartheid” (Smith, 2014). It is true that critical attention to Gordimer abated somewhat after 1994, as if her work yields less when read outside the immediate moment in which it emerged and to which it responded, a moment marked by the unconditional imperative of ending Apartheid. As the post-Apartheid honeymoon continues to fade, though — as corruption charges mount against another ANC president, censorship laws are reintroduced, and unarmed striking miners are gunned down by police in Marikana — we begin to see how Gordimer’s commitment was irreducible to this sole imperative, no matter how much it marked her work.
If anything, then, Gordimer’s final survey of the post-Apartheid landscape conveys a social and political experience that would resonate with anyone who lives under the effects of Claude Lefort’s “democratic revolution” (qtd. in Mouffe, 1993: 11; also in Marchart, 2007: 95), that epochal moment when all complaints, all disputes and all demands suddenly became legitimate. As a result, it would in my opinion be reductive to read Gordimer solely as Apartheid’s “chronicler”. For her work explores how to make sense of an experience that obtains far beyond the context of Apartheid — namely, of being a beneficiary of, and hence an accessory to an injustice that one opposes. Subsequently, along the way Gordimer confronts not just the question of how to end Apartheid, but also what would come after it, what “new” demands would arise, and how a truly “democratic” citizen ought to respond. Despite the clarity of her convictions, as well as her sustained contributions to the anti-Apartheid struggle as an ANC activist, Gordimer’s writings convey a sense that she was never one for easy answers. Nonetheless, if a “democratic” society is one in which “politics” never ends (Mouffe, 1993, 2005; Rancière, 2010) — that is, one that will always allow for new antagonisms, even as it resolves existing ones — then Gordimer might well have exemplified how we ought to participate in such a society.