Life & Background
Gordimer was born in 1923 in a mining town east of Johannesburg to Jewish immigrant parents, her father a Lithuanian watchmaker and her mother English. Her mother, on a dubious diagnosis, withdrew her from school for years, and she read alone. She published her first story at fifteen. She joined the ANC when it was still an illegal organisation and was close to Nelson Mandela's defence team during the Rivonia Trial, helping edit his statement from the dock. Three of her novels were banned by the apartheid censors. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 and the Nobel in 1991, and after 1994 turned to writing about the new South Africa and about HIV/AIDS, criticising the government's response. She died in Johannesburg in 2014.
July's People
Set in an imagined near future in which a Black revolution has begun and white rule is collapsing. Bam and Maureen Smales, liberal white Johannesburg professionals with three children, flee the city as it burns and are taken by July, their servant of fifteen years, to his home village. There they live in a mud hut in a settlement where they are entirely dependent on him. The relationship inverts by degrees: July takes the keys of their vehicle, then drives it; his knowledge and his language are what count; Maureen realises she has never known his real name, or that he has a wife and a town woman. The novel ends with Maureen running toward the sound of an unidentified helicopter, without knowing whose it is or what she is running to.
Gordimer's method is to write from inside white liberal consciousness and expose its limits without letting it off — the Smaleses are decent people whose decency turns out to have been a function of power. The epigraph from Gramsci gives the frame: the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. The novel was banned in South Africa. The refusal to resolve the ending is deliberate: Gordimer declines to predict what the country becomes, and the ambiguity has been read both as honesty and as an inability to imagine a Black future in concrete terms.
Why Gordimer Matters
Gordimer is the principal white South African novelist of apartheid and one of the few Nobel laureates whose political activity was as consequential as the writing. Her work is standard on syllabi for African literature, for the literature of apartheid alongside Coetzee, Fugard, and Alan Paton, and for questions about the writer's position and complicity when writing from the beneficiary side of an unjust system.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Lying Days1953
- A World of Strangers1958
- The Conservationist1974
- Burger's Daughter1979
- July's People1981
- My Son's Story1990
- The Pickup2001