D.C.S. Oosthuizen Memorial Lecture 1983

"Our time" is the last years of the colonial era in Africa. We are at once the most advanced country on the continent, and a relic of the past. It’s inevitable that 19th century colonialism should finally come to its end here, because here it surely reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalised land- and mineral-grabbing, open in the constitutionalized, institutionalized racism that was concealed by the British under the sly notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. Our extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, British, French as the South African white population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone’s refined white racism: • the flags of European civilization dropped, and there it was, unashamedly, the ugliest creation of man, and they baptized the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining, to outlast Nazi terminology, the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country on earth could see its semblances here: and most peoples. The sun that never set over one or other of the 19th century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa

Nadine Gordimer: 01-24-1986

Gordimer calls herself a natural writer and speaks about the influence that growing up in a South African mining town had on her writing. She responds to questions about voice, rhythm, audience, narrative techniques, and her composition process for the short story and the novel. Gordimer says that the short story taught her how important getting to the essence of things is to her writing. She also considers the effect of gender on her writing. The language of politics vs. the language of art is discussed as the distinction between nonfiction and fiction. The theme of betrayal in her latest collection is examined, as well as the political efficacy of literature to effect change in human rights issues, including apartheid. Gordimer calls her essays the one thing I can do for my nation.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/writers_videos/1034/thumbnail.jp

Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe

Razglobljeno vrijeme: vrijeme Drugoga – J. M. Coetzee: Čekajući barbare (1980)

In this article we analyze the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, by the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee. We read the novel from the perspective of some ethical insights of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, associating them with the emphasized domination of the political in the novel. In this unequal relationship, however, political domination gradually cedes place to the ethical doing, the beginning of which is marked by aporia, that is, by an attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable perspectives: that of loyalty to political authority and that of individual responsibility for the other human being. When the latter takes place, the main character – the unnamed Magistrate – becomes an ethical subject. But this is not an easy process, and in order for this to happen, he must experience physical pain and risk his own life. In doing so, he undergoes the journey from a position of political power to complete disempowering. However, taking responsibility for the other is a much more complex and precarious process than Levinas would have it. As the Magistrate finds out from his own experience, physical suffering and the recognition of immediate death deprive the human being from the possibility of apprehending the world because the body is completely focused on the pain it suffers. Bodily integrity is a precondition of any moral concepts, and identification with the other through pain therefore rarely happens at the subject’s own will and much more often is a result of circumstances. In this particular novel, those circumstances are defined and imposed by politics

Interview with Nadime Gordimer

Johannes Riis interviewed Nadine Gordimer when she was in Copenhagen in October 1979. Burger\u27s Daughter seems to be a further culmination of the disillusion, not only with the South African white liberal movement, which is to be found in your writing from around 1960, but also with the efforts made by more radical whites for the liberation of South Africa

What were you dreaming?

I\u27m standing here by the road long time, yesterday, day before, today. Not the same road but it\u27s the same — hot, hot hke today. When they turn off to where they\u27re going, I must get out again, wait again. Some of them they just pretend there\u27s nobody there, they don\u27t want to see nobody. Even go a bit faster, ja. Then they past, and I\u27m waiting. I combed my hair; I don\u27t want to look like a skolly. Don\u27t smile because they think you being too friendly, you think you good as them. They go and they go. Some\u27s got the baby\u27s napkin hanging over the back window to keep out this sun. Some\u27s not going on holiday with their kids but is alone; all alone in a big car. But they\u27ll never stop, the whites, if they alone. Never. Because these skollies and that kind\u27ve spoilt it all for us, sticking a gun in the driver\u27s neck, stealing his money, beating him up and taking the car. Even killing him. So it\u27s buggered up for us. No white wants some guy sitting behind his head. And the blacks — when they stop for you, they ask for money. They want you must pay, like for a taxi! The blacks

Interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH NADINE GORDIMER ABOUT BURGER\u27S DAUGHTE