Equality or unity? Black Consciousness,white solidarity,and the new South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter and July’s People

Abstract

In the early 1970s, the Black Consciousness movement called on black radicals to dissociate themselves from dissident white South Africans, who were accused of frustrating the anti-apartheid cause in order to safeguard their ill-gotten privileges. In turn, liberal whites condemned this separatism as a capitulation to apartheid’s vision of “separate development”, despite the movement’s avowed aspiration towards a nonracial South Africa. This article considers how black separatism affected Nadine Gordimer’s own perspective on the prospect of achieving this aspiration. For Gordimer, Black Consciousness was necessary for black liberation, and she sought ways of reconciling white dissidents with black separatism. Still, these efforts didn’t always sit well together with her continuing belief that if there were to be a place for whites in a majority-ruled South Africa, then they needed to join blacks in a “common culture”. I consider how this tension marks Gordimer’s portraits of whites responding to being rejected by blacks in Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. In both novels, white efforts to resist apartheid’s racial segregations appear to be at odds with black self-liberation, with the effect that whites must find a way of doing without the as-yet deferred prospect of establishing a “common culture” in South Africa.

Introduction: inequality, “Separate development”, and the new South Africa

Speaking at the University of Cape Town in 1979, Nadine Gordimer opened by asking whether “men” can “make a common culture if their material interests conflict” (1988: 134). Gordimer had long been convinced that majority rule in South Africa was inevitable, no matter how long, arduous, and costly the struggle to achieve that future would prove to be. As such, she also firmly believed that any prospect of the country’s ruling white minority finding a place in that future depended on them building a “common culture” with their black compatriots, a culture that would bring the two together, as opposed to their enforced separation under apartheid. Hence her incessant “quest to construct a hybridized cultural expression, a fusion of African culture and European literary form”, which “represents a way beyond the limitations of South African society where apartheid, by preventing different groups from knowing each other, restricts narrative possibilities” (Head, 1994: xii). For Gordimer, defeating apartheid entailed abolishing both white supremacy and “separate development”, a position that was typical of many of the groups who fought apartheid, as evidenced by the particular salience of the term “nonracialism” in the South African context. As Shannen L. Hill notes, by the 1980s, nonracialism had “become a rejection of racialist ideas (and their consequences) in all forms”, as opposed to “multiracialism”, which the African National Congress (ANC) had professed up until the 1970s (Hill, 2015: xvii; see also MacDonald, 2006). As Hill explains, “[t]he distinction is important. While multiracialism sought to unite members of different parties (and ‘tribes’), nonracialism sought to dissolve these distinctions” (Hill, 2015: xx).

According to Daniel R. Magaziner, by the late 1960s nonracialism had attained the status of an implicit consensus among apartheid’s opponents, for whom “[t]o be politically legitimate meant being ‘colourless’” (Magaziner, 2010: 27). Over the following years, though, a generation of young black radicals rejected nonracialism, at least as a means of resisting apartheid, and called on black people to distance themselves from white dissidents. These young radicals were the Black Consciousness movement, and their mission was to restore in black people a sense of pride in being black, which would prompt them into actively pursuing their own liberation. Contrary to impressions among both supporters and opponents of apartheid, Black Consciousness was neither racialist nor multiracialist. Instead, black separatism was meant not as an end in itself, but rather as a way of rectifying the marginality of black voices and interests in the anti-apartheid struggle of the late 1960s, which had come to be dominated by white-led liberal groups that hoped to bring apartheid down through parliamentary means, rather than violence, lawbreaking, or armed insurrection. This agenda effectively appointed white liberals as “defenders and saviors of the oppressed” (Gerhart, 1978: 267), given that only whites could stand for parliament and only whites could vote in general elections. Unsurprisingly, by 1968, liberals had resolutely failed to achieve any meaningful change. A new approach was badly needed, but when it came, liberal whites widely condemned Black Consciousness as a capitulation to apartheid racialism, rather than a timely break from a liberal ethos that had long become “a sterile dogma disguising an unconscious attachment to the status quo” (Gerhart, 1978: 260).

Critical attention to Black Consciousness in South African literature has focused mostly on black writers affiliated with the movement, especially the so-called Soweto poets that included Mongane Wally Serote, Njabulo Ndebele, Sipho Sepamla, Mafika Gwala, Mbulelo Mzamane, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, and Boyd Makhoba (see Attwell, 2005; Mzamane, 1992; Ngwenya, 2012). More recently, Shannen Hill (2015) has addressed the visual culture of Black Consciousness. There has been comparatively little engagement with how white writers responded to the new movement, especially its repeated imputation that there was no such thing as a white opponent of white supremacy. David Attwell has illustrated how the murder of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in police custody prompted J. M. Coetzee to completely reconceive his 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians (Attwell, 2014; see also Poyner, 2006: 68). Biko’s death also influenced the writing of André Brink’s A Dry White Season (1989) but, according to Isidore Diala, the novel still “expresses the deep anguish of the representative white liberal arising from the Black Consciousness Movement’s rejection of white help in the fight for black emancipation”, and thus Brink’s own “reservations about the compartmentalization of people into racial laagers, white or black” (Diala, 2002: 431).

Gordimer’s engagements with Black Consciousness are the best known of any white writer, especially in a public lecture she delivered in 1971 titled “Speak Out: The Necessity for Protest”, and her UCT lecture from 1979, “Relevance and Commitment”. In the latter, she admitted to “using the schema of a Black Consciousness philosophy”, and indeed she welcomed Black Consciousness as a healthy development and a necessary step towards black liberation. Moreover, she sympathized with the movement’s searing critique of liberal whites, who were accused of paternalism, complacency, and a lack of genuine commitment to pursuing meaningful change in South Africa. Like other sympathetic whites, she pursued a new, “radical” sensibility for white dissidents that entailed opposing apartheid “on behalf of [them]selves”, instead of on behalf of the oppressed black majority. In her fiction, she envisioned white “radicals” who were motivated by a need to “liberate” themselves from an apartheid regime that dehumanized oppressors and oppressed alike, rather than an anxiety to secure a place in “the new” South Africa by gaining acceptance among those who would become its ruling majority, for whom white “liberals” were no longer any better than white “racists” (Turner, 1972: 21). Still, these visions of white people pursuing their own liberation often continued to suggest that the future prospects of white South Africans rested on that of establishing a “common culture” with their black compatriots. This paper traces this tension between Gordimer’s efforts to repurpose white opposition to apartheid in ways that were conducive to black separatism, and the conviction that if whites were to have a place in a post-apartheid South Africa, then they had to join blacks in a “hybridized cultural expression”. I argue that she never manages to resolve this tension, with the effect that in her fiction, the success of white radicalization in response to black separatism becomes measured, paradoxically, according to whether white dissidents continue their own struggle without black support — whether practical or moral — and whether this separate action gives rise to a “common culture” that overcomes it by the end.

I attend primarily to how this tension marks Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981). Neither novel makes explicit reference to Black Consciousness, but the movement’s influence on both is apparent insofar as both novels portray white dissidents coming to terms with being rejected by black people, not just as political allies, but even as friends. In both novels, white dissidents react to this rejection with considerable anxiety, insofar as it appears to defer indefinitely the prospect of achieving a “common culture” between black and white South Africans. Nonetheless, in both novels, this rejection proves necessary to challenging ineffective orthodoxies among apartheid’s opponents, including the dogmatic insistence on defying apartheid’s racialized social segregations by practising nonracialism. This insistence has failed to produce anything like a significant challenge not only to those segregations, but also to apartheid’s racialized social inequalities and oppressions. Indeed, in both novels, this insistence has led to the one all but eclipsing the other, certainly among dissident whites who condemn black separatism for endangering the prospect of achieving a “common culture”, without even considering whether it might be a more effective way of achieving equality between black and white South Africans. In fact, these white dissidents do not even notice the irony of white opponents of white supremacy telling black activists what they can and cannot do, and so this reaction to being rejected betrays latent white-supremacist tendencies among dissident whites. Nonracialism, it seems, has not only failed to abolish racial inequality in South Africa, but has even become an alibi for such inequalities as they pertain among apartheid’s opponents. In Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, the twin goals of abolishing racial inequality and racial apartness are effectively at odds, and Gordimer’s white dissidents confront the prospect of abandoning the latter in order to achieve the former.

Equality, solidarity, and Black Consciousness

The origins of Black Consciousness in South Africa lie in the decision by black members of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to form the South African Student Organisation (SASO), a breakaway group that only admitted black members. The move was meant to counteract the increasing marginalization of black voices, interests, and agendas in NUSAS, whose membership was predominantly white. NUSAS had a longstanding reputation for outspoken opposition to apartheid, but had steadily drifted to the political right during the 1960s (Maimela, 1999: 136–37), “largely confining itself for several years to symbolic multiracial activities and protests after-the-fact against government and infringements on academic freedom” (Gerhart, 1978: 258). Leading figures like Jonty Driver had made occasional efforts to revive the Union’s former radicalism, but they were met with little enthusiasm among the white majority of grassroots members (Maimela, 1999: 130–31). As early as 1964, black members were already becoming “increasingly dissatisfied with what they regarded as the non-committal role which NUSAS played in the liberation struggle for all the black people of South Africa”, and they “began to make allegations that the Union’s leadership had virtually no prospects of ever changing or altering government policy or structure” (Maimela, 1999: 136). SASO’s founders finally split from NUSAS in 1968, using as a pretext the allocation of racially segregated sleeping arrangements at the Union’s July 1967 congress (Maimela, 1999: 137–38). ¹ Plans for SASO’s inaugural conference were formalized at Marianhill in 1968, with the event taking place at Turfloop on 1 July 1969.

The phrase “black consciousness” did not appear in any of SASO’s publications until about a year later, and even then there was not much of a coherent sense of what it referred to. The concept would take shape over the next couple of years, as SASO’s members gradually made sense of the group’s purpose in periodicals like SASO Newsletter, Black Viewpoint, and Black Review. Above all else, Black Consciousness was about instilling pride and self-worth in black people, who had become overawed by white power. Writing in SASO Newsletter under his now-famous pseudonym “Frank Talk”, Biko declared that “the type of black man we have today has lost his manhood. Reduced to an obliging shell, he looks with awe at the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the ‘inevitable position’” (1978: 28). Biko painted a vivid, bestial picture of “the type of black man we have today”, one who “brightens up in sheepish obedience […] in response to his master’s impatient call” — “a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity” (1978: 28–29). As long as they resigned themselves to white supremacy, these wretched figures would never be free. Black liberation, therefore, had to begin with

mak[ing] the black man come to himself; to pump black life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. (Biko, 1978: 29)

This process involved “infus[ing] the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook on life” (Biko, 1978: 49), all of which had been denigrated in comparison with white society. Again, for Biko, blacks had been complicit in this undervaluation of their own cultural heritage, wherever they had refused “to club together as blacks because we are told to do so would be racialist”. Biko here refers to paternalistic white liberals “telling us that it is immoral to withdraw into a cocoon, that dialogue is the answer to our problem”, gestures that Biko found ironic insofar as they “refuse to credit us with any intelligence to know what we want” (1978: 50–51). For white liberals, it was irrelevant whether or not blacks wanted “integration”, given their conviction that “if you stood for a principle of non-racialism you could not in any way adopt what they described as racialist policies” (1978: 65). This was indeed the substance of many critical responses to Black Consciousness from white liberals during the early 1970s. Thus, in a 1971 editorial for The Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods described SASO as “one of the sad manifestations of racist policy at Government level”, and accused the group of “doing the Government’s work” (quoted in Howarth, 1997: 53). ² Similarly, in 1972, Alan Paton dismissed Black Consciousness as an ideological “twin of White Nationalism” (Paton, 1972: 10), a sentiment that NUSAS founder Leo Marquard echoed later that year, when claiming that “for the most part I find it impossible to distinguish the language and idiom of black consciousness from that of nationalism” (Marquard, 1973: 2). ³

Woods, Paton, and Marquard were altogether wrong in believing that Black Consciousness intended to supplant apartheid’s white ethno-nationalism with a black equivalent. Instead, as Biko and other leading figures maintained, the schism between black and white dissidents that Black Consciousness called for would eventually lead to a more egalitarian form of cross-racial co-operation. White liberals envisioned “a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established norm and code of behaviour set up by and maintained by whites” (Biko, 1978: 24). Being founded on liberalism’s supposedly “universal” principles, for liberal whites this vision of the future was “colourless”. But for SASO, it was thoroughly white: nothing about it was derived from African cultural forms or values. More to the point, white liberals had never considered the possibility that blacks would not approve of it, and so they had never thought of soliciting their consent. SASO, therefore, called on black radicals to distance themselves from white dissidents not as an end in itself, but rather as a means of achieving a more equal footing within what had so far been a profoundly unequal relationship, in which whites had done “all the talking and the blacks the listening” (Biko, 1978: 20).

In short, SASO refused to sacrifice racial equality for the sake of cross-racial unity. Under the guidance of white liberals, this latter imperative had seemingly eclipsed the former. Better, then, to have division, if it meant that blacks could make their voices heard in challenging the presumptions of complacent liberal whites, than an opposition that achieved cross-racial unity by silencing those voices, and thus repeating the very inequalities it allegedly opposed. Better still to have unity in the form of an equal partnership between blacks and whites, in which the former could be sure that the latter would both listen to such challenges, and cede them an equal say both in determining how South African society ought to be and in how that vision ought to be achieved. Either way, cross-racial unity was no longer so important that blacks were obliged to extend solidarity without condition to dissident whites. Instead, the latter had to earn that solidarity, precisely by listening to blacks and taking on board their calls for more radical action. Moreover, black people were naturally entitled to withhold that solidarity if they so wished.

“Racists”, “liberals”, and “radicals” in Burger’s Daughter

Still, it remained unclear what whites were meant to do to earn the trust and camaraderie of blacks, if it were indeed still possible for them to do so. Hence Paton’s exasperated, albeit rather glib tone when asking “[w]hat [do] SASO want liberals to do? […] Emigrate? Join the National Party?” (Magaziner, 2010: 30). According to Magaziner, “[t]he answer to Paton’s question was, more or less, nothing” (Magaziner, 2010: 31). This was not entirely the case, however, given Biko’s remark in 1971 that the white liberal

must fight on his own and for himself. If they are true liberals they must realise that they themselves are oppressed, and that they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous “they” with whom they can hardly claim identification. (Biko, 1978: 66)

In 1972, Rick Turner took up this notion, arguing that “for whites, in the face of the phenomenon of ‘black consciousness’, to believe that they must now simply shut up and leave it to the blacks would be a serious mistake” (Turner, 1972: 21). ⁴ Instead, in the face of Black Consciousness’s “rejection of the idea that the ideal for human kind is ‘to be like the whites’”, white dissidents had to realize “that it is also bad for whites ‘to be like the whites’. That is, the whites themselves are oppressed in South Africa” (Turner, 1972: 22). The extent to which this line of thinking was sustainable is, of course, highly debatable. What Turner was reaching towards was a way of reconciling white people with black separatism, of justifying their opposition to apartheid in terms of separate action, as the pursuit of one’s own freedom rather than that of someone else.

Gordimer’s early response to Black Consciousness was very similar. In 1971, she publicly declared that the time had come for “those of us who are outraged by and prepared to take responsibility for the injustices of our society [to] relinquish the role of proctor” (Gordimer, 1988: 101). Rather than continuing to “see [their] efforts […] as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of the blacks”, white dissidents were to oppose apartheid for their own sake, as a “demand to be fully human”, something they could never be as long as they were responsible — to whatever extent, and however unwillingly or indirectly — for the manifold injustices wreaked on their black compatriots. For whites, the message of Black Consciousness was not that they could regain black solidarity only by undertaking more radical action, but rather that regaining that solidarity should not be their motivation for pursuing apartheid’s downfall in the first place. Still, in Gordimer’s fiction, white radicalization retained that motivation. Thus, in The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979), the success of white radicalization appears to be measured by the extent to which unity between black and white dissidents is achieved by the end. Black separatism is referred to only implicitly in both novels. In Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer strongly suggests that young, outspoken black radical Duma Dhladhla has some affiliation with SASO, being a student at Turfloop who expounds black separatism in terms that echo Biko’s articles in SASO Newsletter. Meanwhile, as Stephen Clingman observes, The Conservationist does make occasional, fleeting references to black separatism as a recent development that compounded the haunting sense of white South Africans’ non-indigeneity, and subsequent, immutable alienation from the black majority, and even from the land itself (Clingman, 1986: 146–47).

As Clingman also notes, this anxiety had preoccupied white South African writers ever since Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and as is clear in The Conservationist, Gordimer was no exception (Clingman, 1986: 135–36). This novel represents a somewhat pessimistic moment in Gordimer’s pursuit of a way for whites to overcome this alienation. The novel depicts the futile efforts of white industrialist Mehring to run a farm outside Johannesburg, not as a profit-making concern, but rather as a place to visit on weekends, where he can live out private fantasies like seducing young women from the city. Plans such as importing Spanish oak trees indicate that Mehring’s concerns are more aesthetic than economic. The farm accordingly becomes emblematic of the selfish absurdity of white power, as it is given over to indulging the personal fantasies of one solitary white man, rather than sustaining the impoverished black farmhands who live on the land they work. For all his power as a rich and influential white man, though, Mehring proves incapable of taming the forces of nature that sweep across the farm and determine its fate. These natural forces symbolically mirror those which at the time were challenging white supremacy across southern Africa, most notably in Mozambique and Angola (Clingman, 1986: 139).

Mehring represents a self-indulgent complacency that whites needed to abandon if they were to have a place in the new Africa that was emerging even along South Africa’s borders. Ultimately, however, a viable alternative to this mentality proves elusive in The Conservationist. The novel repeats SASO’s dismissal of white liberals in Gordimer’s depiction of Antonia, Mehring’s bombastic, self-righteous liberal mistress, who berates him for having earned his fortune off the back of disenfranchised, exploited black labour, only to turn to his considerable resources and influence when her opinions attract unwanted attention from the authorities. Having discredited the liberal alternative, Gordimer then considers something more radical, as embodied by Mehring’s son Terry, who strives to distinguish himself from his self-indulgent father by choosing a life of itinerant penury and getting involved in Namibian labour disputes. But as Mehring notes with wry amusement, Terry never manages to become something other than the white master in the eyes of Mehring’s black farmhands. Moreover, as the son of a white millionaire, Terry cannot ever know a life without the luxury of being able to choose penury, or the security of his father’s wealth to fall back on should he ever need to. If he is meant to represent an alternative to the whiteness his father embodies, Terry is no more capable than Mehring is of making a meaningful connection with black South Africa. As a result, The Conservationist is pessimistic regarding the prospect of even radical whites ever making such a connection.

Burger’s Daughter initially appears marked by a comparable pessimism regarding South African communism’s established radical tradition. Rosa Burger’s father Lionel was a renowned leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), respected both internationally and among his fellow Afrikaners. After Lionel’s death in prison, his old comrades assume that Rosa will continue his legacy, an expectation that she comes to feel as a burden, not least because she feels increasingly detached from communist doctrine. Her misgivings are compounded at a social gathering midway through the novel, where she witnesses a heated exchange between Duma Dhladhla and Orde Greer, a white press photographer whom Rosa recognizes from Lionel’s trial. Orde describes himself as a communist, although Rosa was never sure whether he truly was “one of us or not” (Gordimer, 2000/1979: 143). ⁵ Yet Duma cares little for such distinctions, given that “[a]ll collaboration with whites has always ended in exploitation of blacks” (157). “Whatever his political ideas?”, Orde asks, “[y]ou don’t believe there is any political ideology, any system where the beliefs of a white man have nothing to do with his being white?” (158). Orde, of course, has one such ideology in mind: Marxism, which Duma nonetheless rejects as “white nonsense”, another example of how “[w]hite liberals run around telling blacks it’s immoral to unite as blacks”, instead of as “human beings” or as “the working class” (162).

It is left unclear whether Duma’s reference to Marxists as “liberals” is deliberate or a slip of the tongue. Either way, Orde responds by once again insisting on distinguishing white liberals from “white radicals […] who believe — like you — that reform is not the object”. “So what are you saying?”, Duma asks; “There are a few good whites […] And then? We can’t be tricked to lose ourselves in some kind of colourless […] shapeless […] ‘humanity’”. Later on, Orde asks Duma “[w]hat would you do if you were me?”. In response, Duma tells him that “I don’t think about that” (166). Rosa later remarks that in “asking for an estimate from Dhladhla”, Orde made “a fool of himself” (168). Orde here is desperate to convince Duma that as a committed communist, he is neither a “racist” nor a “liberal”, but rather a “radical”, and as such, does not deserve to be treated with the same suspicion Duma has of “liberals”. Duma’s attitude by no means represents that of all black people in Burger’s Daughter: indeed, those blacks belonging to Lionel’s generation scorn his student radicalism. Still, Duma makes it clear that for his generation, not even “radical” whites can overcome their alienation from the black majority. Compared with The Conservationist, in Burger’s Daughter the prospect of a “common culture” seems even slimmer, insofar as that immutable hurdle of white alienation is compounded by the active refusal from this new generation of blacks to cooperate with any and all whites.

Still, as Robin Visel has claimed, the novel’s ending suggests that Rosa does appear to “overcome her whiteness, her alienation, her otherness” (1988: 40). Shortly after witnessing Orde’s exchange with Duma, Rosa “defects” to a life of leisure in southern France, where she initially lodges with Lionel’s first wife Katya. An affair with a French lecturer takes her to London, where she comes across Zwelinzima Vilundlela, a young, exiled black militant who lived for a time with the Burgers after his father was imprisoned. Zwelinzima, though, vehemently rejects any notion that because they grew up together, he and Rosa share a special understanding. Indeed, he dismisses Lionel’s legacy as an impediment to black self-liberation, given the painful irony of how the most prominent, most celebrated opponent of apartheid happens to be white. As Zwelinzima wryly remarks, “[e]ven when we get free they’ll want us to remember to thank Lionel Burger” (329), even though “there are dozens of our fathers sick and dying […] in prison”; he observes, “I know plenty blacks like Burger” (328). This irony prompts Zwelinzima to echo the “polarised rhetoric” (MacQueen, 2011: 3) of Black Consciousness, asking Rosa why he should think of her or Lionel any “different[ly] from all the other whites who’ve been shitting on us ever since they came?” (330). Like Duma, Zwelinzima sees no difference between white “racists”, “liberals”, and “radicals”.

This exchange has a profound effect on Rosa, who promptly returns to South Africa to work as a physiotherapist at a black hospital, where she also tends to the wounded after the first Soweto riots break out in June 1976. In the riots’ aftermath, the authorities detain her without charge as part of an effort to ensnare her friend Marisa Kgosana, the charismatic wife of one of Lionel’s former comrades. The novel closes on a redemptive note, as Rosa and Marisa work together to maintain prisoner morale, and to slip coded messages to the outside world. According to Clingman, Rosa’s return is prompted by a renewed “sense of historical” or “necessary engagement” (Clingman, 1986: 191). No doubt this is the case, but equally she returns out of a need to challenge Zwelinzima’s claim that she is no different to white supremacists, and to distinguish herself from white liberals “who’ll pay but won’t fight” (331). We never find out how Zwelinzima reacts to the news of Rosa’s imprisonment, or if it even reaches him. Either way, he hardly felt obliged to think of Lionel as anything other than just another white “racist”, just because he died in prison. Moreover, Rosa’s imprisonment may well reunite her with Marisa, but Marisa never rejected her like Zwelinzima did, or like Duma rejected Orde. Burger’s Daughter might end on a more optimistic note than The Conservationist about the prospect of white dissidents finding acceptance among blacks, but this tone is undercut by the fact that Rosa finds this acceptance among a pre-existing network of radicals who reject the separatism of Duma’s generation. Ultimately, then, it remains deeply uncertain whether this younger generation will ever be convinced to join whites in the building of a “common culture”; and by extension, it remains unclear whether Gordimer can imagine white dissidents fighting for a future South Africa that will have no place for them.

Equality after apartheid in July’s People

If Rosa can retreat into a pre-existing “common culture”, albeit one that Zwelinzima’s generation rejects, in July’s People no such option exists for liberal white couple Maureen and Bam Smales, who prove unable to overcome the rift between themselves, their former household servant July, and his rural community. Following Soweto, the influence of Black Consciousness diminished sharply, through a combination of government crackdowns on SASO and its affiliate groups, and the rise of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the early 1980s. Throughout this decade, the prospect of violent revolution hung over South Africa, and supplanted black separatism as the major conundrum confronting white South Africans in Gordimer’s writings. ⁶ But the conundrum was in many ways the same: how to live in a country that had no place for whites. July’s People considers the worst-case scenario for white South Africans in light of the government’s efforts to contain the revolutionary forces unleashed by the Soweto uprisings. After years of political deadlock, black militants lose patience with the government’s stalling tactics, and rise up in armed rebellion. The ensuing civil war quickly engulfs the country’s urban centres and topples the apartheid state. Faced with almost certain death, Maureen, Bam, and their three children are guided by their household servant July to his village, deep in the countryside. There they follow the situation by picking up occasional radio broadcasts, and struggle “to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures” (Gordimer, 1988: 264). In this new life, the Smaleses have no authority or advantage over their hosts, nor the means to gain any such elevation, now that their wealth, possessions, and the state apparatuses underpinning white supremacy are gone. However, neither do the Smaleses enjoy much acceptance or fellow feeling from their hosts, from whom they are kept apart by a mixture of language barriers, wariness of whites in general, and resentment of inconveniences their presence causes.

If prison in Burger’s Daughter offers a microcosmic vision of a South Africa in which blacks and whites unite in a “common culture”, July’s community offers a similar vision of a South Africa that as yet lacks any such unity. For some critics, the transition in July’s People from apartheid to post-apartheid is left incomplete because no such unity emerges by the end (Bodenheimer, 1993: 110; Neill, 1990: 81; Temple-Thurston, 1988: 51, 57). Hence the novel’s Gramscian epigraph: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms” (Gordimer, 2005/1981: v). ⁷ Certainly, in July’s People “the new” cannot be said to have appeared if it must entail the abolition of both apartheid’s racialized social inequalities and its racialized social segregations. Still, insofar as it accords the Smaleses no exclusive privilege on account of being white, July’s community embodies a South Africa in which apartheid’s racialized social hierarchy has all but disappeared. As such, this community stands in favourable contrast to the Smales household. This, according to Bam and Maureen, had been a space in which blacks and whites were united in a liberal spirit of mutual respect among equals. Compared with other white families, the Smaleses paid their servants generously, afforded them uncommon, albeit meagre privileges, and took measures to respect their human dignity. In most other respects, they fully complied with apartheid law, signing their servants’ pass books, paying police fines for them, and paying them very little for their labour. Whatever respect Maureen and Bam showed their servants could hardly ever have made up for their active involvement in apartheid’s manifold injustices. Moreover, the servants’ economic dependence on the Smaleses prevented them from doing anything but reciprocate their employers’ insipid gestures of amicable respect between equals, which thus became a cruel charade of equality that further testified to the profound inequality between the two parties. As with South African liberalism in general, the liberal ethos of Maureen and Bam’s household was by no means a “common culture”, for even within this space of supposed racial equality, blacks were silenced and disenfranchised.

July eventually conveys this reality to Maureen by addressing her as “madam”, and referring to Bam as “the master”, and himself as their “good boy” (85). This deferential mode of address is often taken to indicate his own inability to adjust to this “new collective life”, whether due to his own social conditioning (Bailey, 1984: 217–18; Neill, 1990: 81; Temple-Thurston, 1988: 52) or his dependence on the Smaleses’ suburban affluence (Bailey, 1984: 217; Temple-Thurston, 1988: 55–56). The submissive terms he uses is at odds with the fact that he uses them not in deference to Maureen, but rather defiance, turning upon her a white supremacist idiom that she otherwise resolutely dissociates herself from, and which “was never used in her house; she priggishly shamed and exposed others who spoke it in her presence. She had challenged it in the mouths of white shopkeepers and even policemen” (85). In turn, Maureen bids July to “[s]top saying that”, asserting that “Bam’s not your master […] Nobody’s ever thought of you as anything but a grown man. My god, I can’t believe you can talk about me like that” (86–87). This mode of address is apt given the Smaleses’ direct involvement in their servants’ disenfranchisement; but it also establishes how July can now defy Maureen’s will with impunity, something he could not have done under apartheid. As he quickly realizes, without their wealth and apartheid’s state apparatuses, the Smaleses “can’t do anything. Nothing to us any more” (25). Maureen objects to being addressed as a white supremacist, but she has no way of preventing July from addressing her as such, and so their dispute indicates how they really are now equals. This deferential mode of address, then, belies, but also exerts and conveys this newfound equality. Indeed, even before he started using this mode of address, July has already demonstrated this by using Bam’s garish pick-up truck or “bakkie” without asking permission, since he need not fear any reprisal for doing so.

The Smaleses’ liberalism, then, is anything but a “common culture”, and July’s refusal to continue pretending it is, is a necessary step towards a more genuine alternative. However, no such alternative arises, at least not among the adults. One obstacle to this new unity is Maureen and Bam’s failure to embrace or even comprehend a way of life in which no one can claim exclusive ownership over anything, as they demonstrate whenever they object to July using the bakkie. In this respect, they resolutely fail “to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures”. Still, in other matters they appear readily to embrace their diminished status, albeit without much enthusiasm. They object when July continues seeing to their every need, insisting in turn on chopping their own wood, gathering their own food, and boiling their own drinking water. Maureen eventually joins the village women as they tend to the crops and harvest thatching grass. Meanwhile, Bam constructs a tank for collecting rainwater, so the villagers do not have to keep boiling river water and risk contracting bilharzia. On one occasion, he also goes hunting, and gives the villagers one of the two piglets he brings back — although tellingly, he saves the younger, tenderer one for his family. In almost all other respects, both Bam and Maureen remain estranged from their hosts.

The Smaleses’ predicament harks back to Gordimer’s claim in 1959 that “[t]he white man who wants to fit in in the new Africa must […] regard himself as an immigrant to a new country; somewhere he has never lived before, but to whose life he has committed himself” (Gordimer, 1988: 34). Central to this new way of life, of course, is the absence of white privilege and white authority. In their drive towards self-sufficiency, Maureen and Bam try to do without their former privileges, but they must also

forget the old impulses to leadership, and the temptation to give advice backed by the experience and culture of Western civilization — Africa is going through a stage when it passionately prefers its own mistakes to successes (or mistakes) that are not its own. (Gordimer, 1988: 34)

This imperative largely escapes Bam: by improving their access to clean water and hunting game for them, he puts “western” experience and knowledge at the community’s service, without having been asked to do so. Indeed, when he is asked to do so, he refuses to train the villagers in using his shotgun so that they can drive off any black rebels that might eventually arrive. Bam will gladly serve the community, but only on his terms. In contrast, in many respects Maureen does not presume to know better than the villagers. She is unfazed by the notion of using rags rather than sanitary towels during her period, and she casually drowns a litter of kittens, a pragmatic response to a situation that leaves little room for sentimentality.

By no means, though, does Maureen “forget the old impulses to leadership” entirely. On one occasion, she finds July struggling to repair the bakkie, noticing that he has attached the exhaust upside down. She urges him to “[g]et Bam to do it. Ask him”, remarking that “[y]ou’ve never been able to fix machines”. July ignores her, as if he “didn’t know ‘Bam’, a white man from whom he had taken the vehicle; like her, he knew someone left behind back there, the master who would put together the pieces of the lawn mower when he came home” (121). July would rather figure out for himself how to maintain the bakkie, rather than depend on Bam to do it for him or even let Bam teach him how to do it properly. Either way, Bam would gain a modicum of leverage or authority over July, and their white teacher/black student relationship would too closely resemble the white master/black servant relationship they had under apartheid. Better, then, for July to learn from his own mistakes than defer to Bam’s knowledge. Maureen, though, remains unconvinced of July’s ability to learn how to look after the bakkie. In a later confrontation, she mocks him for

want[ing] the bakkie, to drive around in like a gangster, imagining yourself a big man, important, until you don’t have any money for petrol, there isn’t any petrol to buy, and it’ll lie there, July, under the trees, in this place among the old huts, and it’ll fall to pieces while the children play in it. Useless. Another wreck like all the others. Another bit of rubbish. (187)

Maureen imputes that the village is steeped in “rubbish” because no one knows how to look after what little they have. As such, the bakkie will disintegrate because the villagers do not know how to maintain it, and refuse to be taught how to do so by those who do know. What Maureen fails to consider, though, is how the bakkie’s individual components can be used to fulfil needs other than those the bakkie was designed to serve. Gordimer continually demonstrates how July’s impoverished community must make the most of everything they own, including the Smaleses’ castoffs and other meagre possessions like oil drums, bits of rope, and plastic bags. If things fall apart in July’s community, they do so not because the villagers neglect them, but because they were designed to cater to needs other than those of the villagers. As such, things do not necessarily fall apart in July’s People: instead, they are repurposed, which often entails dismantling them into their components, which might then be used to create new things, with new purposes. ⁸ Maureen’s ignorance towards this repurposing conveys her ignorance towards the specific needs of July’s community. Moreover, it never occurs to Maureen that July might be using the bakkie to the benefit of the entire community, rather than as a mere status symbol, although we never find out for sure either way. What is certain is that the Smaleses’ claim to exclusive possession of the bakkie is radically at odds with the community’s conception of property, where possession is decided by use value alone. Everything belongs to everyone in July’s community, or rather anyone who has a use for it (Bodenheimer, 1993: 113). Neither Bam nor Maureen, though, ever manages to abandon their notion of inalienable private property, and so they never manage to fully commit themselves to “a new collective life within new structures”.

In the context of this failure, the final image of July’s People seems discouraging regarding the prospect of ever achieving a genuinely “common culture” in a new, nonracial, majority-ruled South Africa. A helicopter appears in the village, landing somewhere across the river. No one can tell whether it belongs to the black rebels or the white government. Bam and Maureen have lived in fear of rebels finding them, but now Maureen runs straight at this potential threat to her life. Why she does so has long been “one of the standard debates of South African fiction” (Green, 1994: 16). Clingman sees in this act something like Rosa’s newfound “sense of historical engagement”, insofar as Maureen

is running from old structures and relationships […] but she is also running towards her revolutionary destiny […] In part it is a flight from, but also it is a flight towards: towards what she cannot quite properly see, but which she knows is drawing her on. (1986: 203)

Ali Erritouni reads this “audacious dash” with comparable optimism, as indicating “a desperate effort at seeking out a new identity, one that is different from the liberal identity she has cultivated under and in opposition to the political and social arrangements of apartheid” (2006: 76). But Maureen is not just running from this liberal identity: she is also running from the village and a way of life she has failed to embrace; from July, who will not ever think of her as one of “his people”; and from Bam, helpless without his bakkie and his shotgun, which goes missing from their hut, presumably stolen. Hence Nancy Bailey’s more pessimistic reading of Maureen’s run towards the helicopter, as “a return to the illusion of identity created by a world of privilege and possession. What she runs from is her failure to find any creative source for re-birth” (1984: 222).

At the very least, this inconclusive ending avoids foreclosing the possibility that it is optimistic regarding the prospect of complacent liberal whites committing themselves to a future without any guarantees, not even of survival. Still, that Maureen would rather chance death than stay on in July’s community is scarcely encouraging. The village hardly represents a South Africa that has moved entirely beyond apartheid, given how the prospect of a “common culture” uniting blacks and whites appears deferred indefinitely, not just by the Smaleses’ failure to fully embrace the village’s “collective life”, but also by July’s unremitting and entirely justified enmity towards them. As Erritouni notes, the Smaleses’ children promise a moment beyond this rift, somewhere in the future, given how quickly they learn the customs, habits, attitudes, and language of the village children (2006: 78). Unlike in Burger’s Daughter, in July’s People the younger generation offers reason to hope that the “distrust, resentment, fear and confusion” (Visel, 1988: 40) fomented by apartheid between black and white will subside. But for Bam and Maureen’s generation, this moment will not come unless they first confront their prior complicity in July’s oppression, abandon their hollow pretence of liberal decency, and embrace the prospect of living without either privilege or the black majority’s acceptance. In the immediate aftermath of apartheid’s downfall, truth, justice, and equality take precedence over cross-racial unity, and so the prospect of a “common culture” is deferred — perhaps momentarily, perhaps indefinitely.

Conclusion

For all that she welcomed it, black separatism during the 1970s posed a conundrum for Gordimer. In her non-fiction, she was unambiguous in her support for Black Consciousness, and pursued a way of reconciling white dissidents with its call for separate action, by reconceiving their struggle as being driven by a desire for self-liberation, rather than that of their black compatriots. As such, in Burger’s Daughter, the movement proves no obstacle to white radicalization: Rosa returns to South Africa out of a newfound, revitalized “sense of historical engagement”, and a need to certify her total, unconditional commitment to bringing down apartheid. Still, even as it optimistically affirms this possibility of self-directed white radicalism, Burger’s Daughter ends with a redemptive vision of Rosa reunited with her black comrades, in an effort to resolve that tension between Black Consciousness’s call for separate action with the imperative to abolish both racial inequality and racial separation. No such redemptive vision emerges in July’s People, at least for Maureen and Bam’s generation, for whom no such vision is possible as long as they remain oblivious towards their role in apartheid’s oppression of July and every other black South African. July’s submissive mode of address is not a symptom of his own inability to break out of apartheid’s racial hierarchy — quite the contrary, in fact, for it is instead a refusal to continue sustaining that obliviousness by acting as if he shares the Smaleses’ liberal sensibilities. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent this refusal or silence July’s accusations against Maureen of having played a key role in the daily routine of his oppression. As such, this refusal is an exertion and demonstration of the equality that exists between July and the Smaleses, in the wake of apartheid’s downfall. Over the next decade, Gordimer would once again envision the possibility of white radicals both gaining the camaraderie of blacks — such as by portraying the two parties working together on sabotage missions, in “Something Out There” (1984) — and contributing towards achieving a truly “common culture” in South Africa. Her 1986 novel A Sport of Nature (1988) would finish with a vision of this latter aspiration as embodied by Hillela Kgomani, dressed in African style, standing beneath the rising flag of a post-apartheid South Africa that she played a key role in achieving. July’s People, though, conveys a sense that at the end of the 1970s, that tension between ensuring equality and abolishing separation seemed to defer that aspiration by at least a generation.