The image that always comes to mind when I think
of a plectide South Africa is noise. It's a history
of a volume. You hear the shouting of protests,
the barking of police dogs, the chanting of crowds,
the crack of gunfire. It's a chaotic, deafening,
sonic landscape. But today we are looking at
a figure who operated in the quiet. Someone whose
power didn't come from shouting into a megaphone,
but from sitting in a room alone staring at a
blank page. And yet that silence was arguably
louder than the gunfire. We are talking, of course,
about Nadine Gordimer. The first South African
and the first African woman to win the Nobel
Prize in Literature. That happened in 1991. But
to treat her just as a writer feels like a category
error. Well, it feels too small. It does. Based
on the biography and the stack of literary analysis
we've gone through for this deep dive, she seems
more like a spy or maybe a witness of the prosecution
in the trial of her own country. That is a very,
very accurate framing. The sources we have today,
including a comprehensive biography and several
critical essays, paint a picture of a woman who
is effectively living a double life. Right. On
the surface, she is this petite. bourgeois white
woman living in the suburbs of Johannesburg.
She's attending dinner parties. She's wearing
elegant clothes. But beneath that veneer, she
is editing Nelson Mandela's defense speeches
and hiding fugitives in her guest room. It's
the intersection of high art and high treason.
And that's our mission for this deep dive. We
want to understand the mechanics of that life.
How does a girl born in a dusty mining town with
a so -called weak heart and a repressive mother
become the moral conscience of a nation? Yeah.
How does that happen? How do you go from a colonial
backwater to the Nobel Prize? It's a remarkable
trajectory. And to understand it, we have to
look at the key themes that emerge from her life
and from her work. We're going to look at the
intersection of art and politics. Can you ever
really separate them? I don't think she thought
you could. No. We're also going to talk about
the concept of the white witness. What it means
to document a struggle that is in many ways not
your own. It's a very complicated position to
be in. And censorship. We have to talk about
censorship. The power of the written word and
why the government was so terrified of her books.
Absolutely. And finally, the tension of identity.
Gordimer was Jewish. She was white. She was African.
She was English speaking. She was a Venn diagram
of conflicting identities. And she lived right
in the messy middle of it all. So let's start
at the beginning. You have to understand the
geography to understand the woman. She wasn't
born in the cosmopolitan circles of Cape Town
or, you know, the political heat of Soweto. She
was born in 1923 in a place called Springs. Springs.
The name sounds so pastoral, doesn't it? Like
a spa town or something out of a Jane Austen
novel? It really does. I picture green hills
and, well, springs. But the reality described
in the notes is anything but. Springs was a mining
town on the East Rand, just outside Johannesburg.
In the 1920s and 30s, this was a place defined
entirely by extraction, by what was under the
ground. Gold. Gold. So you have these massive
gold mines, these huge white slag heaps that
look like snow from a distance, but were actually
toxic waste. The whole landscape was industrial,
scarred. And the social structure was just as
rigid, just as mechanical. perfectly. It was
a colonial machine designed to pull wealth out
of the ground. And the social structure, the
racial hierarchy, reflected that perfectly. There
were the white mine managers, the white shop
owners, and then at the bottom, the massive population
of black laborers living in townships. And inside
this machine, you have the Gordimer household.
And looking at the profile of her parents, this
seems to be a study in contradictions from the
very beginning. A huge study in contradictions.
We talk about her identity as a white African,
but her roots are actually quite complicated.
She is a product of immigration. Which puts her
slightly outside the main power structures, right?
She's not Afrikaner. She's not really part of
the British colonial establishment. Exactly.
She's in that other category. Her father, Isidore
Gordimer, was a Jewish watchmaker. And he wasn't
just an immigrant. He was a refugee. A refugee
from where? He had fled Tsarist Russia. specifically
from a town called Igorai in what is now Lithuania,
I believe. It was part of the Russian Empire
then. And he fled young. He left at the age of
13 to escape the pogroms and the rampant anti
-Semitism. Thirteen? That's a child. A child
on his own. It's an incredible story of survival.
And this is one of those psychological puzzles
I found most fascinating in the reading. You
have a man who fled state -sanctioned persecution.
He knows what it's like to be the underdog. He
knows what it's like to be hated for your ethnicity.
You would think, logically, that he would look
at the racial oppression in South Africa and
see a mirror of his own trauma. You'd think he'd
be the first one to say, this is wrong. I've
seen this before. You would think so. Yeah. It
seems like the natural empathetic bridge to make.
But the biography highlights a stark... Somewhat
tragic irony here. Isidore Gordimer had almost
no sympathy for the plight of black South Africans.
Not at all. The sources describe him as being
completely apolitical, even conservative. He
wasn't an activist. He was a survivor. His focus
was entirely on assimilation, on safety, on his
trade as a watchmaker. His goal was to not make
ways. It's almost as if the trauma made him close
ranks rather than open up, build a wall around
himself and his family. Precisely. It's a common,
if uncomfortable, psychological phenomenon. The
oppressed becoming indifferent to other oppressions
in their quest for security. He wanted to be
a good South African, which in that context meant
adhering to the racial hierarchy. He built a
little fortress around his family. So the father
keeps his head down, but the mother, Hannah...
Everyone called her Nan. She is the complete
opposite energy in the house. Completely different.
Nan Myers was British, also Jewish, but from
a comfortable, assimilated background in London.
And she was the one looking out the window of
that fortress Isidore had built. And what did
she see? She saw the poverty. She saw the systemic
cruelty of the past laws and the segregation.
And unlike her husband, she felt compelled to
do something. She actually founded a Crescia
daycare for black children in their area. So
she was an activist in her own right. In a limited
charitable sort of bourgeois way, yes. It wasn't
radical political action, but it was engagement.
It was a recognition of the humanity of the people
her husband was trying to ignore. So inside young
Nadine's living room, you have a dialectic playing
out every single day. Indifference versus action.
Survival versus compassion. Keep your head down
versus reach your hand out. And watching all
of this is Nadine. But she's not just watching
because she's naturally curious. She's watching
because she's trapped. And we have to talk about
the weak heart. This part of her story feels
like something out of a Tennessee Williams play
or a Victorian novel. It does have a gothic quality
to it. It's so strange. I mean, what actually
happened? When Nadine was a child, she was attending
a Catholic convent school. But then when she
was around 10 or 11, her mother abruptly pulled
her out. Just like that. Just like that. Nan
claimed Nadine had a weak heart. Specifically,
a thyroid condition that made physical exertion
dangerous. She basically said, you are too sick
to go to school. You are too sick to run and
play with other children. You must stay home.
But was it true? Or was this, I don't know, Munchausen
by proxy? Was the mother projecting her own anxieties?
The sources leaned very heavily toward the latter,
or at least a severe, severe exaggeration. Nan
had her own anxieties. She was in a very unhappy
marriage to Isidore, and it seems she projected
that need for control onto Nadine. She effectively
placed her daughter under house arrest for the
most crucial years of her adolescence. So from
age 11 to 16, roughly. Yes. She was cut off from
her peers, cut off from the world. That is a
lifetime for a teenager. Those are the formative
social years. No dances, no sports, no passing
notes in class, just home. Just home. And her
mother. But think about the unintended consequence
of that, well, that totalitarian maternal control.
What does a brilliant, lonely child do when she
is locked in a house in a dusty mining town?
She reads. She devours books. She lives in other
worlds. She reads everything in the local library.
And more importantly, she dissects the people
around her. That isolation was the crucible.
It forced her to develop a capacity for observation
that was almost forensic. She couldn't be a participant,
so she became a spectator. A professional spectator.
She wasn't alone in life. She was watching it.
She was looking at the adults at her parents'
dinner parties, looking at the servants, looking
at the dynamics of power in her own kitchen.
She was studying the human animal in its cage.
So the mother in trying to keep her weak and
dependent and close actually sharpened her mind
into a weapon exactly the weak heart didn't kill
her it made her a writer and a fiercely independent
one eventually She published her first story,
The Quest for Seeing Gold, at age 13 in the Children's
Sunday Express. Thirteen. By 16, she was publishing
adult fiction in national magazines. She basically
skipped childhood and went straight to being
an observer of the human condition. And there's
another layer to this early exposure to repression.
It wasn't just her mother repressing her. She
saw the state doing it, too, in a very direct
way. There's a mention of a police raid on her
home. Yes, this is a pivotal memory she talks
about. As a teenager, she witnessed a police
raid on her family home. But again, the police
weren't there for the White family. They weren't
there for Isidore or Nan. They were there for
the servants. They were raiding the servants'
quarters in the backyard. Under the past laws
and liquor laws, they could basically invade
those spaces at will. They were looking for illicitly
brewed alcohol or seditious documents. And they
confiscated letters and diaries from a servant's
room. That must have been a violation that stuck
with her. The idea that your private words, your
thoughts on a page could be seized by the state.
It was a profound early lesson in the total reach
of the apartheid state. It showed her that privacy
was a privilege of whiteness. And even that was
fragile. It's not a huge leap from seizing a
servant's diary to banning a novelist's book.
So, she's the girl in the bubble, but the bubble
is made of colonial anxiety and maternal control.
Eventually, though, the bubble has to pop. For
Gordimer, that pop seems to be university. Yes,
she spends a year at the University of the Witwatersrand,
or WITS, as it's known in South Africa. And for
a white girl from Springs who has been homeschooled
and isolated for years, this was like stepping
onto another planet. Because Springs was a white
silo, the interactions with black people were
purely on a master -servant basis. Completely.
But at WITS, for the very first time, the color
bar wasn't just a law. It was something people
were actively intellectually challenging and
crossing. She met black intellectuals, artists,
writers, lawyers, people on her own level. And
she drifted into the orbit of Sophia Town. She
did. Sophia Town is legendary. We should probably
explain what that was for listeners who might
not know. It was sort of the Harlem Renaissance
of South Africa, right? Exactly. Before the nationalist
government bulldozed it in the 1950s, specifically
to crush black urban culture, Sophia Town was
this vibrant, jazz -soaked, intellectually rigorous
Johannesburg suburb. It was a place where black
and white bohemians mixed. You had writers like
Ezekiel and Philele, artists, musicians. For
Gortimer, this dismantled the lie she had been
raised with. The lie that black people were inherently
inferior or different. She was in rooms with
people who were smarter, funnier, and more talented
than anyone she knew from Springs. She realized
that the barriers she saw every day were political
constructs, not natural laws. This is the awakening
phase of the hero's journey. And it coincides
with her professional ascent. It's actually surprising
how early she broke into the American market.
In 1951, The New Yorker accepted her story, A
Watcher of the Dead. That cannot be overstated.
In 1951, for a young writer in Johannesburg to
get into The New Yorker? That is a golden ticket.
It's like being an indie band and getting a call
from the Rolling Stones. It changed everything.
It gave her financial independence, which is
crucial for a female writer in the 50s. But maybe
more importantly, it gave her a kind of international
immunity. A shield. A shield. When you are a
New Yorker contributor, when you are famous in
London and New York, the South African police
have to think twice before dragging you away
in the middle of the night. It gave her a platform
from which she could be. The White Witness. She
had a very specific philosophy about short stories,
didn't she? The sources say she called the short
story the literary form for our age. Why do you
think she felt that way? Well, think about the
nature of life under apartheid. It was fragmented.
It was tense. People were living in moments of
collision, not long flowing narratives. So a
novel implies a certain stability of society
that just didn't exist. I think so. A novel implies
a long, coherent history, but a short story.
That captures the flash of lightning. It captures
the specific fleeting interaction between a white
mistress and a black servant in a kitchen or
a moment of police violence on a street corner.
She felt it was the most honest way to document
a fractured society. That makes a lot of sense.
It's like a snapshot of a car crash rather than
a long history of the road. But she did write
novels, of course. Her first one, The Lying Days,
came out in 1953. The Lying Days. A very telling
title, isn't it? This book really acts as a bridge
between her early life and her mature political
work. It's a buildings Roman, a coming -of -age
story set in a mining town suspiciously like
Springs. So it's semi -autobiographical. Deeply.
The protagonist, Helen, wakes up to the reality
of racism around her. It's essentially Gordimer
documenting her own shedding of innocence. She
realizes that her comfortable white life, her
lying days of childhood, are built on a foundation
of lies and exploitation. But realizing it is
one thing, doing something about it is another.
Usually in these repressive regimes, intellectuals
have, what, three choices. You leave, you go
into exile, you shut up internal exile, or you
get involved and go to jail. But Gortimer found
a fourth way. The Activist in the Shadows. This
is where the biography reads less like a literary
review and more like a spy thriller. Because
I think people today might assume she was just
a writer -activist, you know, signing petitions,
writing stern letters to the editor. Right, the
champagne socialist idea. Attending fundraisers
in fancy clothes. Exactly. But she was in the
trenches. The big shift seems to happen around
1960. Two things happen. First, the arrest of
her best friend, Betty Dutois, who was a trade
unionist. And that made it personal. It wasn't
an abstract injustice anymore. It was her friend
being taken away. And then the Sharpeville Massacre.
Sharpeville. March 21st, 1960. That was the turning
point for the whole country. Police opening fire
on peaceful protesters who were burning their
passbooks. Sixty -nine people killed. Most of
them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
It was the moment the gloves came off. The state
showed its true face. And that spurred Gordimer
into direct action. She joined the African National
Congress, the ANC. And we absolutely need to
remind the listener, at this time, the ANC was
not the ruling party. It was a banned organization.
The government had declared it a terrorist group.
It was illegal. Being a member was a criminal
act. She was risking years in prison, possibly
worse. This wasn't like joining a political party
today. This was joining the resistance. And she
wasn't just a card -carrying member, was she?
She was using her house, her middle class white
suburban house, as a safe house. Yes. This is
incredible. She hid ANC leaders who were on the
run in her own home to help them escape arrest.
Can you imagine the tension? The police had already
raided her home once as a child for a servant's
letters. Now she is hiding fugitives of the state
in her guest room. While her neighbors are what?
Having barbecues and complaining about their
gardeners? The sheer nerve of it. She was also
driving people to the border, to Swaziland or
Botswana to get them out of the country. She
was effectively trafficking revolutionaries.
under the nose of one of the most efficient police
states in the world. And she wasn't blindly loyal
either. The sources say she joined in part to
address the organization's flaws from the inside.
That is so characteristic of her intellectual
rigor. She didn't do blind faith. She supported
the goal freedom, a non -racial democracy. But
she wasn't afraid to critique the methods or
the internal politics of the ANC. She was a critical
supporter, not a follower. But the most stunning
connection, the one that really cements her place
in history, is her relationship with Nelson Mandela.
This just blew my mind. I knew they were friends
later in life, but I didn't realize how deep
and how far back the connection went. It went
all the way to the heart of the struggle. She
became very close friends with his defense attorneys,
particularly Bram Fisher and George Bezos. These
were legendary figures in the anti -apartheid
legal fight. And through them, she gets involved
in the 1964 Rivonia trial. This is the trial
where Mandela and the other ANSI leaders were
facing the death penalty for sabotage. They were
expected to be executed. And it's during this
trial that Gordimer played a clandestine role.
This is the major reveal from the biography.
She helped to edit Mandela's speech from the
doc. The I am prepared to die speech. One of
the most famous, most powerful political speeches
of the 20th century. And Nadine Gordimer, the
novelist. offered advice and edits on that text.
She helped him shape the language to have the
maximum impact, not just in the courtroom, but
for the entire world. Imagine holding that draft
in your hands, knowing that if the police walk
in and find it, you're done for treason, and
knowing that the man who will read it might be
hanged the next day. The weight of that must
have been immense. It speaks to the incredible
trust Mandela and his team placed in her. Her
literary skill was seen as a weapon in the struggle.
And that trust endured. When Mandela was finally
released from prison in 1990 after 27 years,
she was one of the very first people he wanted
to see. That image of them together after his
release is so powerful. It's the culmination
of decades of secret collaboration. I love that.
But despite all the shadow work, all this secret
activism, she did step into the light eventually.
The Delmas treason trial in 1986. Yes. This was
late in the apartheid era. The regime was starting
to crumble but was lashing out violently. She
testified on behalf of 22 anti -apartheid activists.
She went to court, got on the stand, and publicly
aligned herself with them. What'd she say? She
basically gave a lecture on the morality of resistance
literature and why these activists, who were
accused of treason, were acting out of conscience.
She used her status as a literary icon to defend
them. She later called it the proudest day of
her life. Prouder than winning the Nobel Prize.
It seems so. Because that was action. That was
putting her body and her reputation on the line
for justice in a very direct way. The Nobel is
an award for past work. This was about saving
people's lives in the present. It wasn't about
literature. It was about solidarity. But her
primary weapon was still the typewriter. And
the government knew it. This leads us to the
war on words. Because the South African government
didn't just arrest people. They arrested books.
Oh, the censorship was a massive bureaucratic
apparatus in apartheid South Africa. It was whole
government department dedicated to silence. And
Gordimer was a frequent target. They saw her
as incredibly dangerous. Let's look at the list
from our notes. The late bourgeois world banned
for a decade. A world of strangers ban for 12
years. And Burger's Daughter, published in June
1979, was banned just one month later. They moved
fast on that one. But then something very strange
happened with Burger's Daughter, right? The censorship
board changed its mind. This is a fascinating
glimpse into the twisted, cynical logic of the
late apartheid regime. Three months after banning
it, the publication's appeal board unbanned Burger's
Daughter. Why? Did they suddenly develop a taste
for literary fiction? No. Their reasoning is
one of the most twisted insults in literary history.
They claimed the book was, and I'm quoting the
sentiment here, too one -sided to be subversive.
Too one -sided to be subversive? What does that
even mean? It sounds like nonsense. It was a
very cynical, tactical pivot. They were essentially
saying, this book is so biased against us, so
filled with leftist propaganda, that no thinking
person would take it seriously. It's not a real
threat. Therefore, we can afford to allow it.
They tried to frame their censorship reversal
as a literary critique. They were gaslighting
her. They were trying to dismiss her work as
unserious polemic. Precisely. It's not dangerous.
It's just shrill. Wow. How did Gordimer react
to that? I imagine I'd be furious. It's more
insulting than just banning it. She saw right
through it. In her book of essays, Essential
Gesture, she called them out. She noted that
they unbanned her, a white writer with a huge
international reputation, while at the exact
same time, they were still banning books by black
authors left and right. So it was a PR move.
It was pure public relations. They were trying
to use her to show the world how liberal and
tolerant they were becoming. She refused to be
used as a token of the regime's fake tolerance.
That is integrity. But here's where the story
gets really complicated and I think very painful.
Fast forward to 2001. Apartheid is over. The
ANC is in power. The revolution she fought for
has been won. And suddenly, Nadine Gordimer is
being accused of racism. Yes, this is a deeply
painful episode for her. The Gauteng Provincial
Education Department temporarily removed her
novel, July's People, from the school curriculum.
They called it deeply racist, superior, and patronizing.
The very people she fought for. the new Democratic
government were now censoring her. Yes, and Gortimer's
took this as a grave, grave insult. But it highlights
the complexity of her position. For decades,
she was a white woman writing about black lives
under apartheid, and she was celebrated for it.
But in a post -apartheid world, that voice, that
perspective, began to be scrutinized in a completely
different way. It's the white witness dilemma
again. Can you ever truly step outside your own
privilege to tell someone else's story? And who
gets to decide? And that is exactly the question
her books grapple with. So shall we dive into
the books themselves? Because to understand the
controversies, you have to understand the stories.
Her books are not simple morality plays. They
are messy, ambiguous, and deeply unsettling.
Let's do it. We've got five key works to cover.
First up, the one that won the Booker Prize in
1974, The Conservationist. This is a dense, poetic...
difficult novel. It follows a character named
Maring, a wealthy white industrialist, and he's
very much an antihero. He buys a farm outside
the city, not to farm it, but to conserve nature.
Conserve. I feel like that word is doing a lot
of heavy lifting there. It is. It's the central
metaphor. He wants to keep things as they are.
He wants to preserve his piece of pristine African
landscape. Just like he wants to keep apartheid
South Africa as it is, he wants to conserve his
white paradise. But there's a problem on his
farm. A body. An unidentified black corpse is
found on the land. A man who is likely a migrant
worker, nobody knows. Merring does the decent
thing. He arranges for the police to take it
away, gets a pauper's burial. He tries to smooth
it over. But the dead body haunts the work, as
critics say. It refuses to stay buried. Metaphorically.
That is such a powerful symbol, the black body
that white privilege is built on top of. You
can try to bury it. You can try to look at the
pretty landscape and the wildlife, but the body
is always there under the soil. Exactly. It undermines
his sense of ownership. It says this land is
not yours. It belongs to the people who have
died here, the people who are buried in it. It
challenges the very concept of white ownership
in Africa. It's a brilliant haunting book. OK,
next one. Berger's daughter. This is the one
that got banned and then unbanned, published
in 1979. Yes. The story follows Rosa Berger.
And she is the daughter of a famous white anti
-apartheid martyr, Lionel Berger, who died in
prison. Which sounds a lot like the family of
Bram Fisher, the lawyer we mentioned earlier,
who defended Mandela. It was widely seen as a
coded homage to Bram Fisher and his daughter.
The novel explores the immense burden of that
legacy. Rosa is trying to figure out who she
is. Separate from her father's heroic martyrdom.
It's asking the question, do I have to be a revolutionary
just because my parents were? And can I have
a private life when the public struggle is so
demanding? Am I allowed to just be a person?
It was written right after the Soweto uprising
of 1976. So the tension in the book is palpable.
It captures that feeling of being swept up by
history, whether you want to be or not. Then
we have July's People from 1981. This is the
one that got called racist later on. So what's
the plot here? This one is a speculative novel.
It imagines a future, which was a terrifyingly
real possibility at the time of the full -blown
Civil War, a bloody revolution where whites are
being hunted in the cities. Okay, so it's dystopian.
It's dystopian, but it felt like prophecy to
many readers in 1981. The story follows a liberal
white couple, the Smales, as they are forced
to flee the city, and they go to hide in the
rural village of their former servant, July.
So it's a total role reversal. The master becomes
the dependent. The servant holds all the power,
all the knowledge of how to survive. Exactly.
They're living in July's mother's hut, completely
dependent on him for food, for safety, for information.
And the novel just strips away the veneer of
their white liberalism. It exposes the deep,
unspoken dependency that actually existed under
apartheid. Whites were always dependent on black
labor, but they pretended they weren't. In this
book, the pretense is gone. So why the accusation
of racism in 2001? Well, from a post -apartheid
perspective, some critics felt that the way July
and the other black characters were depicted
still centered the white gaze. That July was
seen as this inscrutable, mysterious figure and
that the story never truly enters his consciousness.
The argument was that it was still a story about
whiteness and crisis. I see. It's a book about
terrible choices forced by hate. It sounds deeply
uncomfortable. It is meant to be uncomfortable.
She wasn't writing a roadmap for racial harmony.
She was holding up a mirror to the fear and the
prejudice that lurked even within the most well
-meaning white liberals. Moving to the post -apartheid
era, The House Gun from 1998. This is a fascinating
shift. Apartheid is gone, but the dream of a
peaceful rainbow nation hasn't quite arrived.
The story is about an educated liberal couple,
an architect, and a doctor whose son murders
his housemate. So it's about crime. It's about
crime, but it's also about the legacy of violence.
It deals with the rising crime rates in the New
South Africa and the ubiquity of guns in people's
homes for protection. The house gun of the title.
It's interesting that she didn't just stop writing
or write celebratory novels when the ANC won.
A lot of struggle writers ran out of steam when
the struggle ended. But she turned her unflinching
eye to the new problems. She was a realist. She
understood that the violence of the past doesn't
just evaporate. It morphs. It moves from political
violence to criminal violence. But the roots
are the same. And finally, the pickup from 2001.
This one feels more global in its scope. It is.
It's a romance of a sort between a wealthy white
South African woman, Julie, and an illegal Arab
immigrant, Abdu. He's a car mechanic. He's undocumented.
Another story about crossing boundaries. Always.
And another reversal. When Abdu is inevitably
caught and deported, Julie decides to go with
him to his unnamed homeland. presumably a poor,
religiously conservative North African or Middle
Eastern country. And suddenly, she is the alien.
She is the one who doesn't speak the language,
doesn't understand the customs, has no status.
She becomes the immigrant. Yes. It explores displacement,
globalism, and again, the profound difficulty
of truly understanding the other. even when you
love them. It seems like she was obsessed with
that idea, what it means to be an outsider, even
in your own life. Which brings us back to her
own identity. We mentioned her parents were Jewish,
but we haven't really dug into how that shaped
her because the critics have some thoughts on
this. Yeah, let's talk about what the sources
call her repressed identity. Many critics noted
that her Jewishness was often absent or repressed
in her work. She didn't write Jewish novels in
the way, say, Phil Broth in America or Sol Bello
did. It wasn't the central theme. Was she trying
to hide it or was she just not interested in
it? It's complex. Not hide it, perhaps, but she
certainly didn't center it. Gordimer identified
as an atheist. However, in interviews, she admitted
to having a religious temperament. That's a great
phrase. Atheist with a religious temperament.
What does that mean in her context? It means
she felt her moral values, her intense sense
of justice, her drive to distinguish right from
wrong, came directly from the Judeo -Christian
ethical tradition she was raised in. She said
she couldn't take the leap of faith into belief
in God, but the ethical structure was deeply
embedded in her. So did she use Jewish characters
in her books? She did, but they often functioned
as mirrors or moral compasses for her white,
Gentile protagonists. In The Lying Days, her
first novel, there's a character named Joel Aaron.
He's Jewish, and he acts as the voice of conscience
for the protagonist, Helen. He's the one who
helps awaken her to the political realities.
And what about in A Sport of Nature? There's
a character named Hillela. Yes, Hillela. A very
significant name. Her name directly represents
the Jewish moral tradition. Think of the great
rabbinical sage Hillel. Yet the character is
described in the novel as the Jew that went away.
She abandons her tribe, her specific identity,
to join the broader African liberation struggle.
So for Gordimer, it seems like the particularism
of Jewish identity had to be shed for the universalism
of the human struggle. That seems to be the message.
There's also a fascinating note in the sources
about her father. Remember, we said he wasn't
sympathetic to black South Africans, despite
being a refugee himself. Yes, the great contradiction.
Well, in one of her short stories, My Father
Leaves Home, she directly connects. European
anti -Semitism to South African racism. She writes
about how her father's experience as a refugee
should have made him more sensitive to the suffering
of black people, but instead it perhaps made
him more fearful, more insular. He was dissecting
her own father's moral failure on the page. But
she refused to claim victimhood for herself,
though. That's the absolute key to her mindset.
She got very annoyed when people suggested her
activism came from her being Jewish, from a history
of oppression. She famously said, to be opposed
to it. That is a powerful and very demanding
moral stance. She believed you fight evil because
you're a decent human being, not because you're
a member of a specific tribe that has also suffered.
Precisely. For her, it was about universal morality
over tribal loyalty. She didn't want her anti
-apartheid stance to be seen as just Jews helping
the oppressed. She wanted it to be seen as humans
helping humans. So we've covered the writer,
the activist, the witness. What about the woman
at home? We know about the Weakheart childhood,
but what about her adult life, her relationships?
Well, she was married twice. Her first marriage
was to a local dentist named Gerald Gavron. It
was very brief and ended in divorce after only
a few years. But then in 1954, she married Reinhold
Kessler. And this was the big one. This was the
defining relationship of her life. Who was he?
Reinhold was another refugee, but from a very
different world than her father. He was a refugee
from Nazi Germany, a member of the famous Kasserer
family in Berlin who were major art dealers and
publishers. He was highly cultured, sophisticated.
He actually established the South African branch
of Sotheby's. So he brought a world of European
high culture to her. He did. Gordimer described
it as a wonderful marriage. It was a true partnership
of equals that lasted until his death in 2001.
It seems he provided the stable, supportive home
life she needed to do her dangerous political
work and her demanding creative work. It sounds
like he provided the stability she needed to
do her dangerous work. He brought a European
cosmopolitanism into her life that balanced the
gritty South African reality. Absolutely. A true
partnership. But her personal life wasn't without
drama. We have to talk about the unauthorized
biography. Ah, yes. The Ronald Suresh Roberts
Affair. This is a literary scandal that really
shows her fiercely protective, maybe even controlling
side. It does. Gordimer authorized Roberts to
write her biography. She gave him hundreds of
hours of interviews, gave him exclusive access
to her papers and letters. It was supposed to
be the definitive official account of her life.
So she authorizes him, gives him access, and
then... And then she reads the manuscript and
hates it. Absolutely hates it. She completely
disowned the book, which was called No Cold Kitchen.
She even tried to block him from quoting her
letters. It got very messy in public. Why? What
was in it that she objected to so strongly? She
felt he had breached her trust on a number of
very personal points. He wrote in detail about
her husband Reinhold's final illness and death,
which she felt was an invasion of privacy. He
wrote about an affair she allegedly had in the
1950s, and he delved into her evolving and sometimes
critical views on the Israel -Palestine conflict.
It's the classic battle, isn't it? A public figure
wanting to control their narrative and the biographer
wanting to expose the unvarnished truth. And
for a woman who spent her entire life exposing
the uncomfortable truths about her society, she
was fearfully, fiercely protective of the truth
about herself. She wanted to be the observer,
not the one being observed under a microscope.
She lived in the same house in Parktown, Johannesburg
for over 50 years. That famous Herbert Baker
designed house. But the harsh reality of the
new South Africa eventually came right through
her front door. The 2006 attack. It's a shocking
story. She was 82 years old at home. Three men
broke in. They robbed her of cash in her car.
They locked her in a dressing room. This is just
heartbreaking. The woman who fought for the rights
of the disenfranchised her whole life. And then
she becomes a victim of the violent crime that
plagued the new nation. Many of her white friends
had already emigrated because of the crime rates.
They had. They'd moved to safer countries like
Australia or the UK. Or at the very least, they'd
moved into gated communities, these fortresses
with high walls and electric fences. But Gordimer
refused. She wouldn't move even after being attacked.
She refused to move to a gated complex. And she
absolutely refused to leave South Africa. She
gave an interview where she said, it's always
been a nightmare in my mind to be cut off. That
goes right back to her childhood, doesn't it?
The weak heart, isolation. Her mother put her
in a box. Exactly. She spent her whole adult
life trying to break out of isolation, to connect
across barriers. She wasn't going to let fear
put her back in a box at the end of her life.
Even when the reality was harsh and dangerous,
she wanted to be in it. She accepted the risk
of living in the real South Africa rather than
the safety of a self -imposed prison. And she
didn't stop critiquing the government either.
Her loyalty to the ANC didn't mean she went silent
once they took power. Not at all. She was very
publicly critical of the protection of state
information bill, which critics called the secrecy
bill. She saw it as a dangerous return to the
censorship and state control of information that
she had fought against her whole life. And the
HIV AIDS crisis. She was absolutely fierce on
this. She directly criticized President Thabo
Mbeki for his denialist stance on AIDS. You remember
that tragic era when the government was questioning
whether HIV even caused AIDS? It was a catastrophe.
It cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Gordimer
organized writers from around the world to contribute
to Telling Tales, a fundraising book for AIDS.
treatment. She said she approved of everything
Mbeki did except his stance on AIDS. But that
one exception was a matter of life and death
for millions. She proved that loyalty to the
cause did not mean silence in the face of failure.
She really was a thorn in the side of anyone
in power, wasn't she? Whether it was the apartheid
government or the liberation heroes who had become
the new establishment. That is the true role
of the intellectual, isn't it? To speak truth
to power, regardless of who holds the power.
So she passed away in 2014 at the age of 90.
A long life. A full life. A monumental life.
When you look back at it all, from the little
girl with the weak heart peering out the window
in springs to the Nobel Prize winner being celebrated
on the world stage, what is the central takeaway?
I think the takeaway is right there in that concept
of the weak heart. She was told she was too weak,
too fragile to participate in the world. So she
developed a different kind of strength, a strength
of observation, a moral clarity, a laser focus
on the ambiguities of life. She didn't just see
black and white, good and evil. She saw the gray.
She saw the terrible choices that people are
forced to make. She documented the psychology
of racism, not just the laws and the protests,
but what those laws did to the human soul, both
the oppressor and the oppressed. She looked at
the corrosion within. 15 honorary degrees. The
Nobel Prize. A legacy that is complicated, sure,
but absolutely undeniable. She was a witness
who refused ever to look away. You know, Gordimer
once said something in an interview that really
stuck with me. The interviewer suggested her
books made people uncomfortable. And she said
she resented that because they should be uncomfortable.
Yes. She believed that comfort was a state of
ignorance. If you're comfortable, you're not
paying attention. And that's the provocative
thought I want to leave our listeners with today.
We live in a world of algorithms that are designed
to feed us what we already like. We live in social
media bubbles of confirmation bias. Gordimer's
entire body of work was designed to pop the bubble.
It raises the question, in a world of increasing
polarization and self -sorting, do we need more
literature, more art that actively makes us uncomfortable?
Is comfort the enemy of truth? I think Nadine
Gordimer would say yes, absolutely. I think she
would. If you are comfortable, you probably aren't
paying close enough attention. That's it for
this deep dive. Thanks for listening.