Gordimer: liberalism to radicalism
At the same time as the Drum generation was creating the first urban black voice, one of South Africa's most important white writers was beginning her long, distinguished career. Nadine Gordimer published her first short stories in the early 1950s; in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Between those two dates, her many novels and short stories articulated key issues for white South Africans sympathetic to the plight of disenfranchised blacks, as well as providing for the outside world a devastating picture of what it was like to live under apartheid.In her fiction, Gordimer moves from the position of a white liberal with a perhaps mildly or unconsciously paternalistic attitude towards her black compatriots, into a much more radical position that attempts to give voice to the black liberation movement, while at the same time articulating the contradictions in which white liberals and radicals were often caught.
Her second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), shows the first fruitful but often frightening encounters between white and black people in the heady days of Sophiatown. By the time of The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Gordimer is dealing directly with the effects of the black liberation movement on white South Africans, showing the divided soul of the white liberal in a morally ambivalent situation. The Conservationist (1974) pits Afrikaner land hunger against the indigenous population in an often phantasmagoric narrative. Burger's Daughter (1979) depicts the involvement of radical white activists in the liberation struggle. July's People (1981), perhaps Gordimer's most powerful novel, projects into the future the final collapse of white supremacy and what that might mean for white and black people on an intimate level. Her other works (and her short stories are regarded as among her finest work) deal with issues such as love across the colour line and, more recently, the emergence of South Africa into a democracy after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 - a society still dealing with a myriad contradictions. For comprehensive information on Gordimer's life and work, visit the Nobel Prize Internet Archive
For biographical details on Gordimer, go to Books and Writers
For further details on Gordimer and her publications, access African Literature by Women or Nadine Gordimer.
