Obituary: Nadine Gordimer (1923−2014)

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 547979J CL0010.