Taking on the turmoil

Nadine Gordimer is now in her mid-eighties. For as long as I have been alive, she has been the towering figure of South African literature, a fact recognised in l991 by the Nobel committee. This is a collection of her non-fiction over 60 years, running to nearly 800 pages.

There is a belief, prevalent in South Africa, that she received the Nobel more for her politics than her literature. The distinction between politics and literature is to her absurd; she quotes with approval a maxim, ‘Once I am no more than a writer I will stop writing’.

No writer, she says, should be required to separate the inner life from a perception of the outer world. A writer, in her view, is someone who is deeply engaged with, and uniquely equipped to understand, the political and cultural life of his country, and of course in no country has the cultural and political life been more pressing or more present than in South Africa. These white matrons were advised to avoid ‘politics’ at all costs. Black people were from a world apart; no one even knew the full names of their servants and had no inkling of their real lives. Whites had a very comfortable life, but it came at a hidden cost; as the young Gordimer put it, ‘We do not suffer, but we are coarsened.’

From young adulthood, Gordimer was one of a very small band of whites who saw all too clearly the iniquity of apartheid and were active in their opposition. Most whites were perfectly happy to live with this iniquity. Apartheid laws anyway made it very difficult for whites to know black people intimately, but in the late Fifties, Gordimer became close to many of the leading black activists, including Chief Albert Luthuli, President of the ANC; she helped the ANC, which she joined, in potentially dangerous ways.