Beneath the town of Springs, near Johannesburg, where Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923, runs the richest vein of gold in the world. Since 1886, prospectors had flocked to the Witwatersrand, and British colonial power would later secure the resource for the metropole. After 1948, the Afrikaner nationalist party took power and established the system of apartheid, largely to supply these mines with a black workforce subjected to surveillance and brutality.
The fate of the mining industry later became a central issue for the negotiations to end racist minority rule in South Africa, during which the incoming African National Congress (ANC) abandoned its plan for redistribution of mining capital in return for achieving full democracy. The process of extraction that would make South Africa simultaneously one of the richest and one of the poorest countries in the world made the ground beneath Gordimer’s feet unstable from the very beginning of her life.
Gordimer, who died in 2014, is the author of fifteen novels and dozens more short stories and essays written over a seventy-year period. Her earliest short stories were well-reviewed in both the South African and US press, and by 1951, she had a contract with the New Yorker. After publishing three books that strained against the liberal conventions of the South African novel, Gordimer’s work became increasingly radical. The South African authorities banned her 1976 novel, Burger’s Daughter.
The abiding concern of Gordimer’s fiction, during and after apartheid, is a critique of liberalism.
The award of…
Auteur: Josh Jewell
