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 IV

Collapse of Apartheid: The Reversal of Roles

This chapter explores Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, The House Gun and The Pickup. These works mark a revolutionary stance in Gordimer’s writing as well as her engagement with the post-apartheid issues in South Africa. She deftly deals with the complexity of survival in a place where rulers for almost three hundred years became the ruled.

July’s People (1981) is Nadine Gordimer’s apocalyptic work. It is an expression of extreme futility of the efforts of a few good-minded whites opposing the untenable repression of the black majority under apartheid, against the ever increasing defense of this ungrounded policy by the regime. Similar to the revolutionary and radical structure of Burger’s Daughter, this novel is set in some imaginary but equally radical future. The setting of July’s People is an interregnum between the dying white rule and the yet to be born black rule as is clear from its epigraph that comes from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” The novel deals with the event of a fractured nation in open and total revolution; something feared and anticipated by most South Africans owing to the ever increasing repression under apartheid.

Gordimer, however uses the setting of revolution to analyze the white bourgeois South Africa, displaced and stripped of its context, that exposes the determining role economics plays in shaping and maintaining the stable identities. It is well known that economic considerations had been one of the strongest bases for the apartheid policy in South Africa. What happens if this very basis is removed and thus brings upon a change in the situation of the whites is what is explored by Nadine Gordimer in July’s People. According to Judie Newman, there is a “shift from psychological to economic determinants” in the present text. She further points out, quoting from Gordimer’s essay “Apprentices from Freedom” which sums up Gordimer’s own belief that “ ‘racial problems, both material and spiritual, can hope to be solved only in circumstances of equal opportunity’” (85). At this point Dominic Head echoes similar thoughts when he writes that the novel is “a brief and powerful condemnation of consumer capitalism and the identities it creates and sustains” (123). Head however focuses on the construction of identity in July’s People, in the wake of riot ridden city where all the previously held notions are dissolved. But more than that, it is a powerful critique by Gordimer, embodying all aspects of apartheid viz. historical, social, linguistic and economic.

July’s People is the story of Maureen and Bam Smales who escape the burning war-torn Johannesburg to the rural African village of their domestic servant July and end up becoming refugees in the residence of their own black servant. It is under such circumstances that the Smales, deprived of their previous luxuries they enjoyed in their white area, realize the truth of the emptiness that pervaded their so-called privileged lives in the white haven. This is brought to the fore by the central character Maureen, who by the end of the novel is shown running towards her uncertain future which in fact is symbolic of the uncertainty that will entail, once the majority rule is established in the country.

In her essay published in 1982 “Living in the Interregnum” Gordimer says: “I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of a demonic dance” (Essential Gesture 262). It goes without saying that the political situation in South Africa at the time, confirmed Gordimer’s statement. As stated by Stephen Clingman in his introduction to the above essay:

By the 1980s South African fiction began to be preoccupied with thoughts of revolution in South Africa; Gordimer’s eighth novel, July’s People (1981) was set at a future moment of revolution itself. There were perhaps good reasons for this overall concern. By this time South Africa’s neighbouring countries, Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe, had won their independence. Inside the country the Soweto Revolt had been quelled, but it had initiated a longer-term period of political upswing. By the 1980s an independent black trade- union movement was gathering in numbers and strength. There was also renewed organization against apartheid, both at the local level and on a broader national level basis: within a year of the essay…the United Democratic Front had been established, the first such mass movement, legal and active above ground since the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress in 1960 (261).

In order to explicate the above mentioned observations, it would not be incongruous to assert that it was in the aftermath of Soweto riots, that opposition to apartheid began to spin at a faster rate. The student protestors had ties with the labor union movements, therefore the wave of resentment spread quickly over the labor force of the country. Accompanied with the pressing need of training the unskilled black laborers (as recommended by Wiehahn Commission) the government passed the Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act (1979) which permitted Africans to form trade unions. It eventually resulted in the spurt of strikes with an increased number of participants; from 2,000 in 1960s to 100,000 in 1973 and “throughout the early 1980s nearly 90,000 Africans were out on strike each year”. These dissident laborers united with the growing students’ protest helped to bring about the political change in the 1980s (Clark and Worger 79). Besides this there was a series of violent unrest in almost 70 African townships throughout the country (85). It was clear by the early 80s that no amount of police control would stop the growing anger of the South Africans because the contradictions inherent in the system of apartheid had become glaringly visible. Further, there was growing condemnation from outside world as the neighboring states of Angola, Mozambique and Southern Rhodesia got rid of the colonial regime. In fact by 1978, the guerilla war covered 80 percent of “Rhodesian countryside and all whites lived in a state of military siege” (87).

Inside South Africa, the ever increasing control of the state by resorting to all possible means was countered by the increased guerilla attacks. Thousands of young people, who were trained outside South African borders under ANC and PAC began to re-enter and carried out sabotage attacks on the government buildings supposedly the very symbols of apartheid. The most conspicuous of these was the bomb attack on South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation (SASOL) in 1980. It seemed that the “Total Strategy” of the government to control the agitation backfired in the form of total “onslaught” (90).

It was not surprising then, that Gordimer created a full-scale civil war in July’s People. At the very outset of the novel the background to it is stated:

It began prosaically weirdly. The strikes of 1980 had dragged on, one inspired or brought about by solidarity with another until the walkout and the shut-down were lived with as contiguous and continuous phenomena rather than industrial chaos. While the government continued to compose concessions to the black trade unions exquisitely worded to conceal exactly concomitant restrictions, the black workers concerned went hungry, angry, and workless anyway, and the shop-floor was often all that was left of burned-out factories. For a long time, no one had really known what was happening outside the area to which his own eyes were witness. Riots, arson, occupation of the headquarters of international corporations, bombs in public buildings- the censorship of newspapers, radio and television left rumour and word-of-mouth as the only sources of information about the chronic state of uprising all over the country….(6-7)

After referring to the ‘chronic state of uprising’ Gordimer proceeds to describe the futuristic setting of the novel when the state of apartheid has already crumbled. Government forces with the help of white mercenaries are shown to be engaged in the fight with black insurgents. Whites in the cities have either fled the country or have become refugees just like the Smales’ for whom their servant July is their “saviour” (9). With the background of raging conflict in the city of Johannesburg, Gordimer focuses on the relationship of the Smales with their servant of fifteen years, July. As the story unfolds, she portrays symbolically the demise of white supremacy in the fundamental ideology of the system of apartheid. Maureen Smales, “from Western Areas Gold Mines” who has been a winner of “Under 10s Silver Cup for Classical and Mime at the Johannesburg Eisteddfod” (2) wakes up in an ironic scene with a “knock on the door” and then suddenly realizes that there is no door but “an aperture in thick mud walls, and the sack that hung over it” (1). July is shown to be carrying on with his duties as usual “bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk…specially for them” trying to maintain their masters’ erstwhile privileged life (1). But very soon she realizes that the she can longer enjoy her previously held position of a white bourgeois, the values of which are continuously in conflict with her present situation. The author puts it as follows: “People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place…” (3).

By transporting the Smales’ family to the village of July, Gordimer takes the reader to the world of black rural life which is known to be the basis of African culture. In fact July’s People is Gordimer’s first attempt to describe South African rural life so poignantly. Considering her statement in 1980, that owing to apartheid “there are areas of black experience that no white writer can write about”, it can be argued that she has captured the sheer poverty and depletion of black suburban life (Bazin and Seymour168). When Maureen wakes up she finds herself in a hut with “…a stamped mud and dung floor, above her, cobwebs stringy with dirt dangling from the rough wattle steeple that supported the frayed grey thatch”(Gordimer, JP 2). Elsewhere an equally deprived condition is portrayed: “That was how people lived, here, rearranging their meager resources around the bases of nature, letting the walls of mud sink back to mud and then using that mud for new walls, in another clearing among other convenient rocks” (26). Maureen has seen such a life only in “a natural history museum…tableaux” (23). The condition of blacks in apartheid society was such that they had to recycle in order to keep themselves fed and sheltered. That is why an old orange sack which apparently is rubbish and something that “nobody wants” is a useful thing to make a rope (86). By giving the reader an insight into the poverty and squalor of the blacks, the author seems to hint at the policy of separate and independent homelands or Bantustans for blacks under the apartheid regime.

The policy of creating separate homelands for blacks was implemented in 1958 with the Promotion of Black Self-Government Act. Theoretically it was meant to promote separate development on ethnical lines. In Verwoerds own words: “Separate development means the growth of something for oneself and one’s nation, due to one’s own endeavours….” (qtd. in Clark and Worger 65). Practically, however, these homelands occupied the least arable fragmented pieces of land accounting for 15 percent of total land for 85 percent black population. It meant that 15 percent of the white population held control over 85 percent of land in South Africa (Nicholls 17-18). As a result, the homelands became overcrowded and accompanied with the problem of soil erosion and deforestation these areas became unsuitable for any agricultural cultivation. According to an estimate by the South African government itself: “80 percent of the population in the homelands was living in poverty by 1983” (Clark and Worger 72).

Under such circumstances, like July in July’s People, the blacks were forced to leave their homes and work as labourers in the cities away from their family. It became a natural cycle for them as the following lines in the text indicate: “…Most of the women of child- bearing age had husbands who spent their lives in those cities the women had never seen….The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go” (83). These lines also indicate that even human relationships are subjected to economic needs, besides hinting at the gender discrimination inherent in the society at all levels. In fact it is these harsh realities of poverty stricken blacks that Gordimer has contrasted with the relatively luxurious lives led by whites in their cozy and comfortable “seven- roomed house and swimming pool”(25).

It is Maureen who realizes that she is no longer able to exert her previous position as defined by the society which is that of the master-servant relationship between her and July. It is she who discovers “…an explosion of roles, that’s what the blowing of the Union Buildings and the burning of the master bedroom is” (117). This brings about the reversal of roles, for Maureen and her family become dependent on July for their small needs. Barbara Temple-Thurston in her book Nadine Gordimer Revisited has brought to the notice the point as to why Gordimer has chosen July, a male to be a domestic servant in a country where “domestic servants are overwhelmingly female”. That is done “deliberately” by the author, she says, in order to intensify the “cultural collision” for July also represents a “patriarchal system in which women do not openly challenge their husband’s decisions” (96). It is observed that “….Both women [July’s wife and mother] had moved about under his bidding without argument…” (Gordimer, JP 18). So when his wife Martha, expresses her unease at the white family’s presence, July- feeling his new power- replies,“-If I say go, they must go. If I say they can stay…so they stay” (82). Maureen, on the other hand, belongs to a class where females exercise independence while remaining supported by the white male economic structure. She cannot even comprehend to play subservient role to men- especially black men. When July orders them to pay a visit to the chief, even after Maureen’s insistence that only Bam should go, the reader is told: “She was unsteady with something that was not anger but a struggle: her inability to enter into relation of subservience with him that she had never had with Bam…”(101).

Unlike Rosa in Burger’s Daughter who inherited a revolutionary heritage from her parents, Maureen and Bam Smales are depicted as ordinary white liberals trying to be sympathetic to blacks and dissociating themselves from the racist attitude. They apparently treat their black servants well who are “decently paid and contented”, properly clothed, “given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room” ( JP 9). This humane attitude of whites is undermined by the fact that for all their generosity they never considered blacks better than to be the receivers of discarded objects. When Maureen “…handed some new object on to [July] it was because it was shoddy or ugly, to her, and if it were some old object, it was because she no longer valued it…” (67). Smales even tried, though unsuccessfully, to join “political parties and ‘contact’ groups in willingness to slough privilege it was supposed to be their white dog nature to guard with Mirages and tanks” (8). But it is well known, through the discussion of apartheid in earlier chapters, that the economic and social privilege enjoyed by whites was largely based upon the racial policies followed by the state. The liberal attitudes of the whites turn out to be a sham as they themselves are complicit with the racism in South Africa. Thus it can be argued that there is an extended criticism of liberalism by Gordimer who has been resorting to it in her earlier novels as well, for she finds it ineffective in bringing about any change in the country (Erritouni 70).

The Smales’ liberal attitude then does not correspond well with their desire to cling on to their wealth and material possessions. When Bam and Maureen lose control over their bakkie (a pick up vehicle) and gun, the symbols of white authority and power to July and Daniel (another black boy in the village) their entire world comes crumbling down. They are unable to relate to their present status. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer puts it: “Struggling unsuccessfully to maintain the rights of possession, the Smales couple manifest the ‘morbid symptoms’ of dying consumerist culture in which identity is created by ownership and relationships are mediated by objects” (qtd. in Erritouni 71). This observation is also made by Dominic Head in his study of the July’s People. He points out that material dispossession leaves the couple with “no meaningful sense of their own identity” (123).When July takes the bakkie to the town without taking Smales’ permission they accuse him of stealing it. Elsewhere they find it hard to face his claim on the bakkie, as he masters the art of driving it. Bam complains: “I would never have thought he would do something like that. He’s always been so correct…” (JP 58). As long as July acts subservient he is ‘correct’ in all respects but his material equality is deemed as incorrect by Bam. July’s reluctance to ask for the keys, his gradual mastering of the driving and his claim that the “bakkie is mine” however clearly reveals the transfer of power from the whites to the blacks (59).

Bam’s gun which is used to hunt animals for fun and later for food symbolizes masculine power and authority. It is supposedly stolen by Daniel who runs away from the village in order to join the fighters. This incident brings in its wake a complete breakdown in the white hegemony. It eventually breaks Maureen’s dependence on Bam as the provider and protector in a typical patriarchal bourgeois setting. Bam, in turn becomes a man “…who had nothing, now” (145).

This incident also brings a downfall in Bam and Maureen’s personal relationship as husband and wife. At this point, Maureen who always placed ultimate value on the inviolate status and rights of personal relationships, realizes how relative all the old absolutes had been. Yet who decided what those rights and status were? “‘We’ ” ponders Maureen:

understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register. Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife’s hut, and a backyard room in a city. The balance between desire and duty is-has to be-maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers’ place in the economy. These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so experience itself. The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff. (65)

Hence it is clear that each relationship depends on the situation in which it is in, which definitely brings in the aspect of sexuality as depicted in July’s People. It also portrays how sexual roles are interconnected with the overall social structure and marks the event of political revolution with that of sexual revolution as well. Bam Smales, an architect by profession, enjoys the typical white male bourgeois authority as defined by patriarchy in all the societies. Deprived of their master bedroom, the Smales couple suffers lack of desire. It is only after getting excited by eating the pork that they make love which eventually turns out to be the last time they are shown sharing such intimate moment. For in the morning Bam suffers a “moment of hallucinatory horror” (80) when he sees blood on his penis. He thinks that it is the blood of the pig he killed the day before which actually is the menstruation blood of Maureen. Sexuality has become horror and at the same time Bam is desexualized (Newman 87). Stephen Clingman has used this scene to expose the violence in his prior sexual role (the killing of the pig). He also points out that the scene marks his fall from the earlier status held by him in the bourgeois society, for in the rest of the novel he becomes passive. (“July’s People” 110). However, this incident is also indicative of violence which formed the basis of white South African bourgeois life. Hence the relationship enjoyed in the comforts of master bedroom tumbles, making Bam and Maureen stranger to each other where “…baring of breasts was not an intimacy but a castration of his sexuality and hers…” (Gordimer, JP 90). In the wake of this drifting apart due to change in the circumstances, Maureen and Bam fail to realize who they are for each other. Bam does not know how and who to speak to for Maureen is no longer “his wife” whom he knew earlier in their luxurious suburban setting. She simply becomes “her” to him (104-05).

The change in the mode of address from proper to common brings in the aspect of language and communication in July’s People. Gordimer has exposed the complicity of language with the oppressors. In the era of revolution, there also occurs the revolution of language. Besides between Bam and Maureen, this revolution is also explored between Maureen and July. The aspect of language and communication becomes a major component of the social reversal. Maureen believes that “she was the one who understood him, the way he expressed himself” (61). However, she gradually realizes that it is her “desire to translate July into her own cultural terms, to interpret their relationship in ways flattering to her own central image” (Newman 90). That is why when July refers himself as her boy for fifteen years, she is aghast because she never used this derogatory word for July ever before. In her effort to show her liberal attitude, she forgets that a servant by any other name remains a servant and never gets an equal treatment as whites. But July is aware of this difference.

July and Maureen converse in “Kitchen or mine English” which is “a simplified discourse of commands, lacking any grace and any means to express feelings or ideas” (Lovesay 141). This obviously is due to the fact that for whites the only language a black should understand is the language of command. July realizing this, says to Maureen “Always you are telling me even last minute when I’m carry your suitcase…Look after everything, July. And…when you come back. You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s all right. Myself, I’m not say you’re not a good madam-but you don’t say you trust for me.-It was a command.-You walk behind. You looking….You frightened I’m not working enough for you?” (JP 70). Maureen tries to explain her views to July but falls short not because July is unable to understand things but because any word other than the “concrete, simple vocabulary” would definitely be “beyond his grasp of the language” (72). It can be clearly observed that it is not July but Maureen who is not able to recognize the basis of their relationship. This relationship is not based on friendliness but that of the master and servant, a bitter truth of the apartheid society. Maureen chooses to ignore this bitter truth as she did in her childhood when Lydia, her black servant, carried her school bag. She never bothered to ask “Why had Lydia carried her case?”(33) and continued to think that it was so because of the intimate relationship she and Lydia shared. She projects the same complacent attitude on July as well.

After her confrontation with July she realizes that the language she used as a means of conciliation was for July nothing more than the medium of his everyday oppression. Gordimer writes: