Racism is one of the most pernicious problems of the human society. It sustained on the prejudices of the whites. Racial hierarchy has come to be maintained with the rise of the modern world system

Chapter II

Reading Against Apartheid: Capturing the Politics of the Place

This chapter deals with an intrinsic and extrinsic analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days, A World of Strangers and Occasion for Loving from the perspective of apartheid. The chapter also discusses the texts in the light of the historical context as the socio-political history forms an indispensable part of Gordimer’s writings. These novels, written between 1953 and 1963, provide a panoramic view of the apartheid in its early phase in South Africa. Gordimer, in these works, has attempted to capture not only the ethos of apartheid but also its repercussions on an individual’s life. The chapter thus relies on textual analysis as well as contextual analysis of these works in relation to apartheid. An attempt has also been made to establish the literary trajectory of Gordimer with each successive novel.

The Lying Days, published in the year 1953, is described by some critics as a bildungsroman, although it does not fully conform to the bildungsroman structure. It is autobiographical in nature but not an autobiography, though parallels can be drawn between the lives of Gordimer and Helen, the central character of the novel. It’s the story of Helen Shaw’s life from childhood to adulthood and through her life Gordimer has given the readers a raw picture of South African society. The novel is divided into three parts-the mine, the sea and the city and each title is relevant from the point of view that it marks the physical and mental progression of Helen Shaw the first person narrator of the novel. With the exploration and observation of the real world that surrounded her, she was able to form her own attitude and values. In other words, the novel traces the growing realization of the central character and her ultimate shedding of the cloak of the artificial world in which she lived as a child.

Robert Green, in his paper titled “From The Lying days to July’s People’: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer” has basically tried to explore the novel as a work dealing with public and private lives. He talks about Helen’s failed attempts to find a private life for herself in a society where relationships are inevitably social rather than personal. Alan Lomberg on the other hand has explored the novel from the point of view of romantic element in it and the imagery of water as used in the text.

This chapter however attempts to explore the novel as an anti-apartheid text. In The Lying Days Gordimer puts in words the life as seen across South Africa in the late forties. On the surface the novel seems to be presenting the “stages of Helen Shaw’s development ... through a series of personal relationships, each of which marks a stage of emotional and intellectual, cultural and political growth, a growth by which the heroine moves from complete dependence on her parents, through increasing conflict with them, to complete independence” (Lomberg 3).Observed closely the text presents a powerful critique of racism. Along with the growing experience of Helen, Gordimer reveals the divided society in South Africa, its consequences and also how individual choices are influenced by the same.

In her childhood, Helen Shaw lived in a mining town of Atherton. In the first few pages of the novel, Gordimer, through the eyes of the protagonist, depicts the grim and the pathetic condition of natives (blacks), their pitiable state of existence and their lowly life with their feet like bark and nails like thorn. With no school to go black kids were treated as ‘loafers and thieves’. The very first noticeable instance is when on refusing to go to the tea party, the young Helen is asked by her mother to remain indoors and not venture outside as there was fear of black boys. Her mother warns, “If something happens to her it’s her own fault…” (Gordimer, LD 5). Helen hardly could believe her mother’s words and thinks, “Was there something to be afraid of?”(8).Yes, there were blacks. Living in their (blacks’) country whites diminished them into nothing. Their color made them something to be scared of. Gordimer also tries to drive home the kind of relationship that existed between whites and blacks which never rose beyond a master- servant relationship. Helen thinks about the contradictory world that existed in the books she read and the world in which she actually lived. She says, “I had never read a book in which I myself was recognizable; in which there was a ‘girl’ like Anna who did the housework and the cooking and called the mother and father Missus and Baas…” (11).

Gordimer gives us a glimpse of white community living oblivious to the world around them, considering England as their ‘home’. They try to create England in South Africa with their tea parties. Helen who “was quite one of them” (16) was ready to break free and explore the world on her own. A non-conformist by nature she dislikes her mother’s attitude when she says, “I cannot stand…my mother’s attitude: making use of Anna as a friend and conveniently ignorant yes-woman, elevating her to the status of a confidante, and at the same time pushing her, along with her whole race, into categorical sloth-of moral, spiritual-everything-inferiority…” (120).Whites looked down upon blacks and considered them as harbingers of disease. According to them wherever natives went they brought with them filth and dirt.

In The Lying Days Gordimer also throws light on the hazardous life of blacks at the mine and the intense apathy of whites for them and their condition:

Natives were sometimes trapped by a fall of rock from a hanging, and had to be dug out, dead or alive,….When a white man was killed, the papers recorded the tragedy, giving his name and occupation and details of the family he left .If no white man was affected, there was an item headed: ‘FATAL FALL OF HANGING. There was a fall of hanging at the East Shaft of Basilton Levels, East Rand, at 2 P.M. yesterday. Two natives were killed, and three others escaped with minor injuries. (23)

Blacks or Natives as they were called were treated in the most inhuman way. They were not only abused and reprimanded but it was considered necessary to beat them in order to control them. Helen’s father had nothing much to do with black mineworkers except for giving them “a hiding now and then” with an intention to keep them under discipline (24).

Gordimer gives more glimpses of pitiable living conditions of blacks when Helen goes to Johannesburg and meets Mary Seswayo who lived in Mariastad a native township for blacks, one of the places designated for blacks in the white city, devoid of all facilities and a complete contrast to the living condition of the whites in the city. Gordimer provides a detailed description of native township, of its filth and squalor when Helen, while going with Charles, offers to drop Mary at her place. She observes that many “South Africans have never been inside a native location…where the houses looked like sections of outsize concrete pipe and smelled cold as tunnels. One native location is much like another….” The houses are the size of the garage in which the whites put their cars. These townships are shabby and without any basic amenities required for the survival of humans and where every “third or fourth house there was a communal tap from which everyone fetched his water…” (171,173).The deplorable condition of blacks is further deteriorated with widespread poverty and state negligence. Another glaring instance of the grim situation of blacks is found when Helen and Paul accidentally enter the dark alleys of the black township. This incident is in itself symbolic of Helen’s growing realization of the difference between Mary (a black) and her (a white):

The closeness of the place, the breath-to breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows….I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last ,and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth ,fraying in the fierce flicker flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross sticks to frighten birds. (174-75)

The Lying Days provides a more heartrending image of the black existence. Gordimer, while detailing about Paul’s profession, reveals to the reader how blacks were deliberately deprived of a better life. Paul handles ‘Poor Relief’. The author clarifies that poverty is a global phenomenon but in

South Africa there is one difference; a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed. The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was nowhere else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level. (240-41)

So Paul indulged in “palliative measures” for this “artificial pauperdom.” Later on Paul is depicted to be so frustrated with all the artificiality of his work that he says, “What’s the good of handing them out blankets when they need votes-?”(241).This statement brings to the fore the fact that blacks were not even given the right to vote which is one of the fundamental rights of a human being in a democracy.

Paul worked at Native Affairs Department and by introducing his character and the kind of work he did Gordimer gives a full view of what the crass reality was and how the handful of white minority not only dominated but also suppressed the black majority to the utmost extent. Several such descriptions are found throughout the text. In another instance after Paul receives the charge of Housing division in Native Affairs department he finds that there are just “1,100 houses for 20,000 families”. Owing to the dearth of residences, the black population has moved onto “the veld in squatters’ encampments of iron and mud” (298,299).

Gordimer also throws light on how apartheid marred personal relationship and social mixing in The Lying Days. Due to the discrimination between blacks and whites both found it extremely difficult to communicate even if they were on the same ground. It was like “…a meeting of inherited enemies in the dark in which they mistake one another for friends...” (123).This is very well brought out with the friendship of Helen and Mary:

And as I came through I saw on the other side of the washbasins an African girl drying her hands. She stood there in her nurse- girl’s beret and little dark dress looking at me quietly, half as if she expected a challenge of her right to be there, for the University was the one place in all Johannesburg and one of the few places in all South Africa where a black girl could wash her hands in the same place as a white girl…. (99)

Gordimer, probably, is hinting at the University of Witwatersrand where she herself studied for a year but like her heroine Helen Shaw left without getting the degree. Before the National Party elections in 1948, University of Witwatersrand was one of the educational institutions which admitted natives. After the institutionalization of Apartheid, the Extension of University Act (1959) restricted the admission of black students for most of the apartheid era.

Although Mary studies in the same university as Helen but the notion of being an inferior is ingrained in her mind and that refused to let Mary accept Helen as her equal, for instance when coming out of the cloakroom, “she stood back to let” Helen “go through the door first” (100).There are other instances in the text which force Helen to realize that she is different from Mary. She says:

Because I was white I continually forgot that Mary was not allowed here, could not use that entrance, must not sit on this bench….I remember once going into town with her to buy some textbooks, and when I wanted to go to a cloakroom, realizing for the first time in my life that because she was black she couldn’t even go to the lavatory if she wanted to. There simply was no public cloakroom for native men or women in the whole shopping center of Johannesburg. Now if she came to Welshs’ someone would have to take her home by car to the native township seven or eight miles out of town where she lived; …she could not travel on a European bus…. (167)

Despite being liberal in attitude Helen is unable to give Mary a place to study in her house at Atherton owing to the widespread discrimination. According to her mother, “… ‘Where will she wash? And where’s she going to have her meals? ....I don’t fancy her using my bath’” (188).

South African apartheid discriminated not only against blacks but anyone who was not a white. All non-whites were denied the privileges and position that whites enjoyed. This is vividly portrayed through a line John utters about Nathoo Ram visiting them: “‘D’ y ’know, Paul,’ he said… ‘we run the risk of getting kicked out of this building every time Nathoo Ram comes? There’s a clause in the lease that says no non-Europeans are allowed on the premises unless in the capacity of servants’” (246). It goes on to prove that relationship of the blacks with whites never rose above than that of master and the servant.

Another aspect which is explored in The Lying Days is the political reality. Gordimer has very intricately woven in her fiction the political reality of the forties which is the time period of the novel. The very first instance that is noticed is the mineworker’s strike described in the first few pages of the text (26-30). On a Sunday morning, with the bellowing of the hooters the strike occurs which brings black mine workers to the compound manager’s garden. It is a protest because the boys at the compound “didn’t like the food they were given” (30). It can be compared with the strike that actually occurred in South Africa in August 1946, in which around sixty to seventy thousand miners joined to form African Mine Workers Union. It was held to demand an increase in wages and better food. The strike was smashed with the help of the state which left twelve dead. The union also collapsed after some time. Although parallels can be drawn with the actual strike in 1946 but, it can hardly be called a strike due to various reasons. Firstly the mineworkers are protesting on Sunday which is a non working day and secondly the protest is not fiery enough as a strike ought to have been. The miners are sitting in the garden very quietly not even touching a single flower, with the tea and hot scones being served inside by Mrs. Ockert to the white officials which indicate a total oblivion of the whites towards the black needs. After sometime all the black mine workers are depicted to be going back without any fuss and happy that that their ration of beer has not been reduced by the manager for their seemingly ‘bad behavior’ as the whites term it. This incident has been described by Stephen Clingman thus: “….As the paternalistic pieties of the Mine world emerge unscathed it is evident that to some degree an extraordinary moral banality has sustained the practices of exploitation in South Africa” (29).

In The Lying Days, as it will be seen in other works also, Gordimer has explored quite vividly the immediate political events of the time around which it is set and its consequences on the general public. By making her characters interact, talk, discuss and participate in the politics she gives a clear portrayal which is no less than the facts themselves. The most important among them is the detailing of the most crucial elections, which changed the entire course of the nation and resulted in reeling under darkness of apartheid, i.e. the elections of 1948. The novel responds to this transition in strong terms. Helen Shaw, describing the victory of what she calls the ‘Fascist Nationalists’, notices its effect on the people. Around her “…the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected the most intimate conduct of their lives” (258).

Here the reader discovers in the text how private and social life in South Africa are intertwined with each other and there is no escape from it although later on the protagonist Helen will try to escape from just that because she needs a private life for herself. Helen’s use of the fascist tag was not without reason. In fact the fascist ideology was widespread at the time when the National Party came to power. Some Nationalist leaders were indeed seen as supporting the German cause in World War II. In fact one organization by the name of Ossenwabrandwag (Ox-Waggon Sentinels or OB) had its members following the fascist and Nazi models and one of its notable members was B. J. Vorster who later became the Prime Minister of South Africa representing the National Party (Ross 110). Just after the war the Nationalists tried to distance themselves from fascism, but on the contrary many believers of fascism secured their place in the party. Those who were opposed to Nationalist regime felt that they would have to fight fascism on a wider scale than they had witnessed in the World War II.

It was those fascist memories that were institutionalized by the political policies of the Nationalist Government under the Prime Minister ship of Dr. D. F. Malan. However, it is noteworthy that the changes introduced by the Malan Government were more like the continuation of what the structure was under the Smuts’ government. The “Africans had….themselves felt that they had had so little to hope for under the Smuts Government that all the change had done was to substitute a negative despair for a positive one: lack of hope, for fear….Now the velvet glove is off the iron hand, that’s all…”(Gordimer, LD 260).

In this regard it is worth mentioning that the new government implemented all its legislations brutally and callously. The Afrikaner nationalist ideology was based on baasskap (boss-ship) rather than trusteeship i.e. acting as guardian to the so called uncivilized barbarians. Afrikaners believed in maintaining the purity of white race and superiority of whites as God ordained. The anti-black sentiment of the ruling party manifested itself in the form of numerous legislations that were passed as soon as it came to power. Thus first and foremost the right to vote was taken away from the coloureds in the Cape region (provided to them under United Party) .The notorious Group Areas Act of 1950 demarcated residential areas on the basis of ethnicity. Thenceforth, the cities were declared as white zones and blacks were forcibly moved to other places outside the cities, far from their workplace. Further, in order to control white interaction with blacks the Native Laws Amendment Act (1952) was passed which regulated the flow of black labour to urban areas. To top it all the cynically entitled Abolition of Passes and Documents Act(1952) which made all blacks carry a reference book(‘pass’ in other words) recording their employment history and residential rights was passed. It was a kind of extension of the pass system. Gordimer writes:

They [whites] went about their own affairs, in a white world, vaguely intruded upon by the knowledge that beyond the city where they had their offices and the tree- hidden suburbs where they lived, there was a scattered outcast city from which the emissaries came-cleaned up to approximate to the white man’s standards of decency-and disappeared into it again…. (LD 259)

To add to the already worse condition of education for blacks Bantu Education Act, a mastermind of the then Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd, was passed in 1953 which brought all education under state control. It segregated education and the education imparting institutions. Separate schools were established for Afrikaans and English speaking population. But the worst sufferers were blacks whose education according to Verwoerd should be such so as to train them for a particular form of labour. He believed that “By blindly producing pupils trained on a European model, the vain hope was created among Natives that they could occupy posts within the European community despite the country’s policy of ‘apartheid’…”(Clark and Worger 55)

The Act that blatantly encompassed the National Party’s policy of segregation was The Population Registration Act (1950) which required every South African to register under one of the official racial groups. Teemed with this was the Mixed marriages Act (1949) which made marriage of whites with non whites illegal and the Immorality Act (1950) which made sexual relations between whites and non-whites illegal. Gordimer relates the mental torture and humiliation caused by such acts in the text:

At this stage, when all that was done to implement the plans for apartheid-a carrying to the extremes of total segregation the division of the ordinary lives of white and black that had always existed, socially and economically-was a little more than a tightening-up of discriminatory devices, it was often the way in which things were done rather than the things themselves which was so offensive. When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old colored woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.

The atrocities that were unleashed by the Nationalist regime in the garb of apartheid on blacks were innumerable which undoubtedly tortured them mentally. As Helen puts it, “Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home-a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it-and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood…”(LD 261).

In order to prevent the growing resentment against the apartheid policies the government passed Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 which also gets a place in the text. The Act was passed to disband the growing communist activities in South Africa, which could have proved dangerous to the regime. The Act however was used not only to ban communists but also many people who were not affiliated to it at all. All these extremely repressive measures were taken in order to prove the Afrikaans slogan “Die wit man bo en die kaffer op sy plek (‘The white man on top and the kaffir in his place’)” (Clingman 35). Gordimer not only depicts the condition as it was but also gives the hint of what was to happen eventually, i.e. the end of domination of the white minority over the black majority. She reveals the growing indignancy of the blacks through this line in the text: “We don’t want kindness we want freedom” (LD 282).The boycott of the field by the blacks given to them as an act of charity by whites proves it.

In fact, the time during which the novel is set saw a rise in the black resentment against the apartheid policy of the regime. Going by the situation, an upheaval among blacks was not far off and the seeds of it are shown to be sowed in The Lying Days. African National Congress (ANC) founded in 1912 became very active in the forties. The young members which included Nelson Mandela joined together to form Youth league in 1943 which was an extremist form of the moderate parent organization. Another factor responsible for black protest was growing industrialization in South Africa before and after the war which made black labourers more demanding. Hence, it led to various strikes and the strike of 1946 was one such instance. This in turn galvanized the African National Congress and it seemed that their policy of pleading to the white government for improvement by peaceful methods was futile. ANC decided to agitate against the unjust laws by boycott, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. A massive Defiance Campaign was launched in 1952. Gordimer might have finished writing The Lying Days before the Defence Campaign in 1952-53 as there is no direct mention of it in the novel. But she nonetheless has given the hint of the policy of boycotting in the text where Paul is depicted to be participating and studying about passive resistance and non-cooperation.