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

The whites put almost all blacks in one or the other ‘homeland’ whether they belonged to it or not. Only labourers required by the whites were allowed to stay in the cities. In 1967, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated in a circular: “It is accepted Government Policy that the Bantu are only temporarily resident in the European areas of the Republic for as long as they offer their labour there. As soon as they become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland” ( Thompson193).

To put it in effect, the government restricted the movement of Africans in the towns by implementing the Passes and Documents Act in 1952, which required the blacks to carry a reference book that recorded their employment history. No rural African was allowed for more than seventy two hours unless he had a special permit, and failure to do so entailed arrest and punishment. African squatters near the towns were removed and the employed laborers were either placed in segregated towns or sent to their homelands. The government also tried to remove ‘black spots’ - the land owned by the Blacks in white designated areas. With the mechanization of farming, demand for laborers decreased, hence the surplus labourers were removed from white farms. Since they could not enter the town due to Labour Preference Policy propagated by Verwoerd, they were forced to resettle in homelands. In fact, the Group Areas Act, 1950, divided the urban areas into zones and also specified them in terms of where the members of a particular race will work and stay. Most areas occupied by the blacks were declared white. The most notorious removal done under this Act was Sophiatown. Blacks had owned land and lived in Sophiatown even before Urban Areas Act of 1923, which put an end to Africans’ purchase of land, had been passed. Sophiatown became the target as it represented the black Johannesburg life. It was razed by the National Party Government in 1955 and a white town, Triomf (Triumph), was built in its place.

District Six near Cape Town centre, home to the coloureds, was razed to the ground and its inhabitants were moved to the windy and sandy Cape flats. Many Indians also suffered the loss of business and homes in areas zoned as whites’. The eviction was forced contrary to what the government officials stated. An African woman told an interviewer: “When they came to us, they came with guns and police….They did not say anything, they just threw our belongings in [the government trucks]….We did not know. We still do not know this place….And when we came here, they dumped our things, just dumped our things so that we are still here. What can we do now, we can do nothing. We can do nothing. What can we do?” (Thompson 194).

It resulted in high concentration of population in homelands and consequently blacks suffered from extreme levels of poverty, malnutrition, and disease, especially tuberculosis. The Government also had strict control over education. Before 1948 the responsibility of educating rested with the missionaries, which were miniscule in number. However, the number of Black children who could gain access to education was abysmally low due to lack of funds. Later the government, having found fault with it, stated that missionary education for blacks was not ethically correct, for it was inculcating in them a desire and hope to be treated equally which according to the government would never happen. In the words of Verwoerd: “Native education should be controlled in such a way that it should be in accord with the policy of the state….If the native in South Africa today in any kind of school in existence is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake….There is no place for him in the European Community above the level of certain forms of labour” (qtd. in Thompson196).

Thus, acting on its highly racist and prejudiced ideology the government introduced the Bantu Education Act in the year 1953. Thenceforth, the central government took over the responsibility of the black education from the Provincial Governments and went on to expand it, albeit under strict control. The education policy epitomized the apartheid thinking. Under the policy thus adopted, the number of black children in the schools increased rapidly but the government saw to it that it went on in accordance with the racial laws. There were indeed, separate schools for whites, coloureds and blacks, with white education being the superior most and the black education being the inferior most. A huge difference persisted in the quality of education. Whites had excellent school buildings, more qualified teachers and other amenities whereas black children had shabby schools with less qualified and low paid teachers who taught syllabus prescribed by the government which was laced with racial views. The government spent ten times as much per capita on white education than blacks even though the black classes were twice as much as whites. As Ross has mentioned: “….The school system was consciously used to spread the messages of apartheid. The ethos pervading… was that African education should be limited to those skills valuable for the maintenance of white run economy…” (121).

The government imposed segregation in higher education as well. Until 1948, there were four English-language universities, four Afrikaans universities, one bilingual university and one small South African Native College at Fort Hare. Except for Fort Hare College the number of blacks studying in other universities was negligible. The government then passed Extension of University Education Act (1959) which prohibited all the universities to admit any Black student, unless permission had been granted by the cabinet minister. The legislation made “segregation at previously ‘open’ universities complete” (Morlan 12). It founded three segregated colleges for coloured, Indian and Zulu students but under strict government control. By 1978 around 150,000 students were registered in various universities in South Africa, out of which 80 percent were white. Thus, through its “top-down bureaucracy” and a racially segregated education system, the government was able to maintain a rigid system of control and inequity designed to benefit the white population (Brook 208).

Apart from Education arena strict segregation was followed in almost all aspects of lives. Even the toilets were segregated. No interracial sport was allowed. No competition and no integrated representation of team was allowed. All possible steps were taken to prevent any kind of interracial interaction. A very rigid control was put on media too. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) enjoyed complete monopoly. The main objective was to prevent anything that opposed or criticized the government from being published. The other aim was to prevent liberal ideas from abroad to seep into the minds of Africans. The result was banning of around 1,246 publications, 41 periodicals and 44 films. The noteworthy aspect of Publication Control Board set up in 1963 was that it banned most of the radical opinion of ANC.

With the implementation of Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, the Minister of Justice was vested with the power to house-arrest or ban a person from joining any specified organization, without giving any reasons for it. The repressive legislations were passed to further the apartheid from the mid-1950s onwards: Riotous Assemblies Act (1956), the Unlawful Organizations Act (1960), the Sabotage Act (1962) the General Laws Amendment Act (1963, 64, 66), the Terrorism Act (1967) and the Internal Security Act (1976). These laws empowered the executive to ban various organizations and detain individuals posing a threat to the state (Penna 6). The police were given powers to keep control, to arrest, to torture and confine people. The government could ban any organization. The Bantu Laws Amendment Act (1964) empowered the government to outlaw any African from the towns to their homelands.

To implement the laws under apartheid, the government had a large force of officials and bureaucrats, all diehard supporters of apartheid. White men and women were allowed to carry firearms. Apartheid indeed made South Africa a unique country. When everywhere else decolonization was taking place South Africa was at its height of racism. The Whites prospered with best of public services and palatial houses whereas blacks remained in the abyss of poverty and misfortune. It was a boss and servant relationship indeed. The Whites continued to maintain their hegemony by favouring coloureds over Africans and promoting differences among various tribes. Some urban Africans were given support and security whereas farm labourers were tied to their masters and it was illegal for Africans to leave their homelands except as temporary migrant labourer. In accordance with the surveys conducted by some renowned institutions, South Africa had the most inequitable distribution of income. In the Homelands, the income of blacks was really low and most of them lived below Minimum Living Level (MLL).

The fact that apartheid as a law was totally against the blacks made the intense racism inherent in it intolerable on humanitarian grounds: there had always been groups opposed to it and tried to stimulate the conscience of whites against apartheid. The policy of Apartheid, as promulgated by the government, theoretically entailed ‘separate freedom’ but practically it was meant to further discrimination and inequality. Hence in 1968, C. F. Beyers Naude initiated a study project which sought to bring out radical responses against apartheid. In 1977 the Government banned Naude` but till then a critique of apartheid was published (1978). At Cape Town University and University of Witwatersrand students were vocal against apartheid. The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) founded in 1924, organized demonstrations in protest against the closure of Universities to black students. Women were also actively agitating against apartheid. Their adopted method was that of wearing a black sash on white dress and standing with bowed head at the place where any government official passed. Even authors and writers like Alan Paton Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee exposed in their writings the destructive effects of apartheid.

The totally powerless and helpless blacks continued to face the odds in the hands of their white tormentors. It was then that the African National Congress (ANC), which was formed in 1912, and was continuing in a diminutive way since then, started taking its hold by becoming more effective under the leadership of youths who thought it was high time they should be more active. They transcended all the ethnic, regional and class divisions. In 1949, at the annual conference, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, the three members of the Youth League, were elected to the national executive. These leaders belonged to Transkei and out of the three Nelson Mandela was the one who moved on to create history with his unflinching, undaunting fight and struggle for the freedom of South Africa from the clutches of the Europeans. Mandela and Oliver Tambo were rusticated from the University at Fort Hare but they went on to become lawyers through correspondence from University of South Africa. Nelson Mandela, belonging to the Thembu tribe in Transkei, was a man with commanding demeanor and intelligence along with deep commitment to the cause of South Africa. In 1952, Albert Lutuli was elected as the President- General of ANC. Lutuli was an elected chief of Zulu community in Natal. He taught at Adams College in Natal and knew English well.

In 1952 itself, the African National Congress (ANC) in alliance with the South African Indian Congress launched a Passive Resistance Campaign very much inspired by the father of our nation Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s involvement in the South African struggle for freedom of Indians cannot be negated. In fact, it paved the way and opened new avenues for each and every individual including blacks and coloureds to fight for their freedom. It was this weapon of Passive Resistance that has made Mahatma Gandhi stand out in the history of South Africa (Andrews 132). The Defiance Campaign launched by the ANC was similar to the policy of ‘Satyagrah’ launched by Mahatma Gandhi way back in 1906 to oppose the new Asiatic Registration Act, which compelled the registration of Indians in which he called upon people to defy the law in a non-violent and peaceful way. In 1950s again, it was thought to be the apt method to defy the discriminatory laws. The ANC activists were basically against five laws- Suppression of Communism Act, Group Areas Act, Separate Representation of Voters Act, Bantu Authorities Act, Pass Laws and Stock Limitation Law. Hundreds and thousands of black men and women participated in the nationwide campaign leading to arrests. In the words of Ross: “The influence of Gandhi’s ideas of self sacrifice as a way of political success was very evident” (123). In fact, Stephen Zunes regards non-violent actions as highly instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the apartheid regime (137). However, it can be pointed out that in the face of the violence and brutality that defined the ruling government, recourse to non- violent methods had proved futile.

These campaigns albeit in different forms and for different specific aims continued under the banner of ANC throughout the 1950s and in the 1980s. It can be observed that with the destruction of Sophiatown under Group Areas Act, ANC gathered massive support of native Africans. In June 1955, in order to give a concrete shape to freedom struggle and also to attract and garner support from other countries, ANC convened a congress of people joined by South African Indian Congress (SAIC), South African Coloured people’s Organization (SACPO) and Congress of Democrats (COD), and adopted a Freedom Charter for a free democratic South Africa which stated: “We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:-That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of people” (Mandela 1: 249). The Charter also gave directives about the basic rights and freedoms as: right to vote, right to govern, equality of gender, race and colour, and equal distribution of wealth and land. Unfortunately the congress of people was intervened by the government which then enacted further repressive legislation and charged 156 people including Nelson Mandela for treason. The trial went on from 1956 to 1961 and eventually they were all acquitted.

Amongst the members of African National Congress, some did not like the idea of an all inclusive policy. They regarded involvement of whites as a barrier to the struggle for freedom. They wanted a movement for the blacks by the blacks as they thought that whites would never be able to identify with the African cause. With such thoughts Robert Sobukwe emerged as the leader founder of Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) formed on 6 April 1959. As an organization it claimed to be more militant than ANC. PAC launched a nationwide anti-pass demonstration in 1960. Hundreds of Africans gathered in front of police stations to court arrest as they were not carrying any passes. At Sharpeville too, demonstrators gathered, infuriating thereby the police, which opened fire on the helpless unarmed people killing around 69 and wounding another 186. It was termed as a massacre and generated agitations throughout, which did lead to the suspension of pass laws, albeit for ten days only. After the agitations and protests government declared the State of Emergency and banned the ANC and PAC. And with that began the period of repression which continued for the next three decades.

African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress went underground but continued to work secretively. The repressive and violent measures used by the government forced ANC to rethink and reconsider its strategies for the struggle. For years, since its inception, ANC believed in non-violent ways of protests against the apartheid laws. But it was thought and realized that peaceful means of protests would no longer prove to be effective. Hence ‘Umkhonto We Sizwe’ (spear of the nation), a military wing of ANC, was born in 1961. An organization which would use organized violence as the way to protest against the government. As Nelson Mandela said while on trial for sabotage in 1964: “We of the ANC have always stood for a nonracial democracy….But the hard facts were that fifty years for nonviolence had brought the African people nothing but more repressive legislation and fewer and fewer rights…” (Mandela 2: 47-48).

Together with Poqo (pure), the militant wing of PAC, and African Resistance Movement (ARM), a multi-racial organization, Umkhonto we sizwe attacked and bombed many government agencies, the motive being to paralyze the government. However it couldn’t continue for long as the police conducted a coup and arrested major ANC leaders in 1963. To further break the bone of Umkhonto the government enacted Ninety Day Detention law in 1963 under which, those who were arrested could be detained without any charge, trial or access to a lawyer and it was extendable. The government dismantled the ANC and PAC and arrested the leaders. Mandela and Tambo fled abroad to garner outside support and Robert Sobukwe was arrested. Oliver Tambo remained in exile in Zambia for thirty years where as Mandela, as soon as he came back to South Africa was also arrested along with other leaders including Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. 1963 onwards Mandela served life imprisonment until 1990.

Since 1960s until early 70s the government, under the Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd of the National Party, had been able to crush each and every head that rose against it, thereby maintaining the Apartheid laws. Meanwhile, the quietness of the period did not mean the spirit of the freedom was dead. Some forces were at work during that period as well. Firstly, there were movements in arts despite the control of the government. Secondly, since the South African economy was growing at a very fast pace, its demand for skilled labour was growing which in turn made black labourers more conscious about their rights and made them more demanding which led them to organize strikes in 1973.Thirdly, and the most important was the change in the attitude of youth. Bantu Education, which was introduced to keep the black advancement low, actually served to intensify the bitterness against the government in the minds of the black youths.

Black Consciousness emerged as a major movement in the 1970s. Steve Biko, a product of the same education formed South African Students Organisation (SASO) in 1968. In 1971, Biko wrote: “Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their subjection….Blacks no longer seek to reform the system….Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish” (Thompson 212). Nelson Mandela echoed the same thought as Biko in his autobiography: “Black Consciousness was less a movement than a philosophy and grew out of the idea that blacks must first liberate themselves from the sense of psychological inferiority bred by three centuries of white rule…”(Mandela 2:227). The black resistance against Apartheid and white rule grew stronger with Soweto Uprising in 1976.On June 16 1976, hundreds of school children gathered in Soweto to protest against the ruling of the government that half of the subjects would be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor. The police fired at harmless innocent school children killing and wounding several of them .The incident sent shock waves to the entire nation at the brutality of the government and the rebellious youth reacted sharply against it. The rebellion was met with iron hand by the government (Clark and Worger 82-83). SASO was banned and several black leaders including Steve Biko were killed. By 1977, the black consciousness movement was crushed, leading many black youths to flee the country to Tanzania and Angola in order to receive military training before returning to wage guerilla war (Simon 189-90; Moller 28).

In the discussion of South Africa and Apartheid, it would be significant to draw a parallel with slavery and the United States of America (USA) because the African continent served as the reserve of slaves imported in the White controlled country. Native Americans had lived in North America for about thirty thousand years before the continent attracted attention of the Europeans (Polk 4). With the advent of the Europeans in the continent, the conditions changed drastically. They encroached upon the land, made settlements and enslaved the natives with the help of wars, contracts and treatises. The first racial strife was with Hernando de Soto on his expedition in 1540. Situation changed markedly with the coming of the British on the shores of North America. Although the English set foot in America in as early as sixteenth century, but it was more in the form of private enterprise with no interest in the land by the crown. In 1607, a private company took over and started a settlement. However, in 1624 the crown took direct control. Puritans came to North America to escape the rule of Charles I and founded New England Colony with their own religious and political institutions. They developed their own plantations and imported thousands of African slaves to work in their plantations. The reason why discrimination began can be attributed to the fact that Black Americans entered the U.S. shores quite unwillingly and exhibited totally different physical traits than their suppressers (Cable and Mix 185).

No matter what the reason might be the inhuman and immoral institution of slavery persisted in America. Although slavery existed in the whole of America but slowly and gradually the views of Northerners changed and due to the effort of abolitionists in the north. The conditions changed somewhat in the north of America but remained unchanged in the south. Under those conditions, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president in 1861. Lincoln’s presidency did not necessarily mean victory for the anti-slavery abolitionists. The Southern states warned that if the slavery was not protected, they would secede from the North. In February 1861, eleven slave states joined to form the Confederate States of America, whose very foundation was the institution of slavery. The Confederate constitution required that “the institution of [N]egro slavery, as it now exists in the confederate states, shall be recognized and protected by congress and by the Territorial Government in any territory the confederacy might acquire” (Horton and Horton 171).With the secession came one of the bloodiest wars fought in the history of the United States. The Civil War was fought from 1861-1865 and resulted in the abolition of slavery declared by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Though declared abolished, slavery was far from over in reality.

South African apartheid officially began in 1948, and many might think that at the time discrimination persisted in South Africa it ended in the rest of the world, but that was not the case. The emancipation after the Civil War was betrayed in the form of Jim Crow laws. Southern states thus empowered, enacted these laws between 1876 and 1965 which reduced the African- Americans to near slavery. They mandated “separate but equal” status for black Americans (Cable and Mix 187). It was similar to the policy of Afrikaner leaders to grant ‘separate but equal development’ for blacks in South Africa. And in both the cases it resulted in extreme discrimination between blacks and whites. In contrast to what had been stated, the policy led to the treatment and accommodation that were almost always inferior to those provided to the white Americans. This is similar to Bantustan Policy which resulted in displacement as well as poor homes for blacks in South Africa. Much in the manner of South African conditions, the Jim Crow laws also required that public schools, public places and public transportation like train and buses have separate facilities for blacks and whites.

Education, considered as one of the most important keys to liberation, was also affected to a great extent due to these discriminatory laws in both South Africa and The United States of America. There was a stark contrast in the quality of education received by the whites and blacks. The purpose of the education policy was to prepare blacks for second class, inferior service driven mindset like that of a labourer and a domestic worker (Cable and Mix 192). In South Africa also, the Bantu Education policy as explained by Verwoerd, the then Minister of Native Affairs, was to prepare natives to cater to certain forms of labour. Purpose of education was to teach and train natives “in accordance with their opportunities in life” (W. Johnson 219). There were laws which restricted the residential rights of the Blacks in areas of the white in both America and South Africa, so that interaction between Blacks and White could be curtailed, which in turn helped in the sustenance of racist ideologies.

But with the change in time and situations and with the spread of more liberal ideas throughout the world, Apartheid began to crumble. After the World War II, the face of the world changed dramatically. It lost its imperialist flavor. At the time when Apartheid was at its all time high in South Africa, the winds of change had swept through the rest of the Africa. In 1957, British in their wake of decolonization left Ghana, followed by Nigeria, Gambia and Sierra Leone. By 1960, French and Belgian government left West and Central Africa and Zaire respectively.

The United Nations also condemned the Apartheid policy in South Africa in its resolution continuously since 1952 because South Africa was the only country in the world where racial discrimination was practiced as a state doctrine (Malhotra 138-39). By 1967, the General Assembly created a special committee on Apartheid and a unit of Apartheid denouncing it and racial policies of the South African government. The United Nations also declared that South Africa’s control of Nambia (South-West Africa) was illegal. The growing changes outside South Africa and the attitude of the rest of the world towards South Africa and its policies indicated the need to suspend and discontinue Apartheid. Both inside and outside pressure forced the government to take necessary actions required to free the society of the evils of discrimination that plagued the country for years.

The Verwoerdian Government tried its best to convince the world that decolonization outside South Africa was analogous to the Bantustan Homeland Policy. But it was not enough. Post- World War II, many countries had business stake in South Africa, since it had vast reserves of minerals. Great Britain as well as United States of America including West Germany, France and Switzerland had business interest in South Africa, which they did not want to disturb because of Apartheid, but by 1978, South African economy had suffered recession. Moreover, around 1977 with the growing black population there was dearth of skilled labour which consequently increased labour costs. On the other hand, Verwoerd’s dream about South Africa had shattered. His plan of separate development remained ineffective as the foreign governments did not recognize the independent states of Transkei or Bophuthatswana. The attitude of black youths changed towards the government, they were angry and hateful and declared Apartheid as illegitimate.

By 1978, the Civil Rights movement in United States of America eliminated racism from its laws and the black Americans espoused the cause of black South Africans. Under all these circumstances, P. W. Botha became the Prime Minister in 1978. He, too, tried to establish and continue the apartheid policy by resorting to various means and ways. With Magnus Malan, the then Minister of Defence, he adopted and propagated a programme known as “Total Strategy” (Ross 164). It was clear by that time that apartheid in South Africa needed to be changed due to increased pressure from outside, in the form of various economic sanctions, which affected the South African economy adversely. In 1985, Chase Manhattan stopped risking money in loans to South African debtors which aggravated the economic crisis. Coupled with this, as stated earlier, South African Industries had to adapt from labour intensive exploitation, which consisted of mass black unskilled labourer to capital intensive requirement of twentieth century. For this, Wiehahn Commission recommended recognition of Black Trade Unions, which led to the foundation of Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA). Riekert Commission and J.P. Delange Commission recommended to improve the quality of education and also to utilize manpower efficiently, which resulted in increasing the privileges of the blacks, though only urban blacks, which further widened the gap between urban and rural blacks much to the ire of the majority population.

The Botha government was also burdened with political settlements. They had to present their legitimacy to the world. The aim, then, was of sharing power while retaining control as it was becoming increasingly difficult to survive with all the internal protests and external censures. To pacify them, the government proposed a tricameral parliament in 1984, which included coloureds and Indians, but who in reality remained puppets in the hands of the majority party i.e. the National Party (Grundy 44). This led to vehement protest by the anti-apartheid crusaders and resulted in the formation of United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. UDF worked on the principles of ANC and had many small organizations which answered to the call of ANC in Lusaka to make the country ungovernable by organizing revolts in almost whole of South Africa. There were many clergies committed to the anti-apartheid movement including Beyers Naude and Desmond Tutu, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

By June 1986, the government repealed many segregation laws like interracial marriage and sex law. “Pass laws were repealed in July 1986” (Murray 232); business centers were opened to the blacks. The government also desegregated some classes of restaurants, hotels, public facilities and also allowed sports contests. Fund for black education was also increased gradually, though they never equaled the white education. Despite all the piecemeal reforms the basic disparity remained could not remain hidden from the infuriated and agitating Africans. The protests intensified in the form of boycotts and strikes, which often took the shape of violence and bloodshed, as the government continued to control the blacks with the police force. In the face of it, all joined together to fight for a common cause, be it blacks, Asians or coloureds, urban ‘insiders’ or rural ‘outsiders’.

The government, in the mid-1980s tried to control the threat outside its boundaries, viz. Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. These countries were dependent in some or the other way on South Africa. It also used its military forces to conduct raids in order to uproot any anti-apartheid forces outside South Africa. The government tried its best but eventually could not control the spreading anti-apartheid sentiment as the political poles were shifting. A few whites themselves were against apartheid and caused an erosion of vote bank. In fact, the country had got on the brink of a civil war with all the violence and killing pervading the South African society. The Blacks could not take anything but freedom from the white domination at any cost. By 1989, it became evident that the policies of Botha Government were exhausted and negotiation seemed to be the only way out. The condition in South Africa began to change dramatically with reductions in white population. In fact, according to an official estimate in 1988, the white population was predicted to be just be “10 percent of the total population in 2005” (Thompson 242). Coupled with this, the economy was at its worst because of the sanctions, and inefficient use of its human resources. Most of the high jobs were occupied by whites, disregarding the fact whether they suited that position or not. Moreover, South African products could no longer compete with those of Canada, Japan, and USA because of their low productivity and poor quality. Furthermore, the whites and blacks were interdependent despite separate homeland policy. By the end of 1980, serious changes in the outside world called for the demise of apartheid. With the fall of Berlin Wall and disintegration of Soviet Union, Namibia too, got its freedom from South African control in 1990.

White supremacy was, therefore, no longer possible. Many white intellectuals and businessmen initiated talks with ANC leaders in prison and in exile. Botha government tried to persuade Mandela to accept freedom on the condition that he should abstain from politics and retire to his homeland. Moreover, as a precondition to negotiations he was asked to abandon the armed struggle and renounce the demand for majority rule. Mandela rejected the offer and declared that he would never accept moderate stance in front of the repressive and violent government. In a memorandum addressed to P.W. Botha in March 1989, Mandela affirmed his “demand for majority rule” in the state…” (Mandela 2:319).

Botha could not bring himself to talk with Mandela effectively. In 1989, Botha suffered heart attack and resigned from the presidency. He was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk’s presidency brought about the long awaited freedom for blacks. On ascending the throne he reviewed the situation and brought about radical political changes. On 2 February 1990 he lifted the ban from ANC and PAC and also South African Communist Party along with other banned organizations (Blumenfeld 3). He also ordered the release of Nelson Mandela, who was then putting up at Victor Verster Prison. The momentous event of Nelson Mandela walking out of the gates of the prison on 11 February1990, after twenty seven years of imprisonment, was captured by the media converged at the prison from throughout the world.

De Klerk’s government also repealed apartheid laws and cancelled the State of Emergency, paving the way for negotiations. After thirty years, African National Congress (ANC) held its conference in South Africa in 1991, in which Mandela was elected the president. ANC was by then a large political party with democratic management. Nelson Mandela continued to meet De Klerk in order to discuss ways and means to achieve the objective of democratic South Africa. Hence, a Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) was opened on 20 December1991, but it was not very successful as the interest of whites and blacks conflicted. Whites had begun to fear the black domination. Finally De Klerk gave in to Mandela’s demand. The new set up in the country would get white support necessary for the transition. Thus Nelson Mandela’s conviction, that negotiations and peaceful discussion to reach a consensus was the only way to achieve victory sans any bloodshed, finally won.

In the general election of April 1994, the blacks were able to exercise their franchise for the first time in the history of South Africa. As expected, ANC emerged the winner and Mandela was elected as the president. On 10 May 1994, after three hundred and forty two years of white domination, Nelson Mandela took oath as the President of the new South Africa and declared: “Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another….Let Freedom reign…”(Mandela 2:432).

The three centuries of white domination ended, thereby paving the way for more equitable society based on multiracialism. The path to achieve that equality was not an easy one. Nelson Mandela had known it quite well. The transition period was full of violence and intolerance because of widespread poverty, illiteracy unemployment and a weak economy. The needs of the victims of apartheid had to be looked after. Mandela government tried its best to fulfill the priorities, although it was difficult to achieve the welfare motive in the face of the collapsing economy. The democratic set up for which the government had undertaken the responsibility was easier said than done. It very well knew that the democratic society it had visualized might or might not be achieved. White men dominated each and every institution- from judiciary, bureaucracy to army, police force and municipal administration. They were conditioned to serve the apartheid state and had racism ingrained in them. Moreover, South Africa had one of the greatest gaps between rich and the poor and that gap was race based. The education system that Mandela government inherited was full of disparities, both in secondary and higher education. It would require a huge sum of money to bring black education anywhere near the level of the white education. Moreover, the entire syllabus would have had to be changed in order to give it a multiracial perspective. South Africa was also reeling under excessive violence which continued under Mandela’s regime also. The incidents of rape, murder and robbery increased even more.

To tackle all the problems Mandela needed a robust economy but even that front was weak. The economy too, was struggling under recession. The Gross Domestic Product was low and the Inflation rate was high. South Africa did possess manpower and mineral resources to develop into a growing economy but apartheid had been the curse. In the face of economic sanctions, the country had been cut off from the world. Everything was in the hands of the whites and blacks lacked education and managerial skills. The government also faced the apathy of the white bureaucrats, accustomed to white domination, who refused to cooperate with the goals of the new regime. To tackle it, the government dissolved many useless departments. In December 1994, ANC noted that state machinery had to be made into a loyal instrument of democracy. The government also placed a few well educated blacks and other supporters on senior posts.

The defense forces were also restructured. Army, Navy and Air force underwent many changes. A new South African National Defense Force (SANDF) was formed out of the existing members, the members of Umkhonto We Sizwe and other organizations including PAC and forces from independent Homelands. The defense was unified and in May 1997 there were around 77,882 members, though racial tensions persisted. Besides this, with two-third blacks a single South African Police Service was also formed (Thompson 273).

Nelson Mandela undertook the responsibility of conciliating with the minorities and safeguarding the majority. He initiated an attempt to make South Africans come to terms with their past and also to deal with the crimes of apartheid. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, therefore created as a means of “working through the past” (Rothberg 275). The objective was to look into the gross human rights violation acts committed since 1960 (283). The commission, under the chairmanship of Desmond Tutu, worked for more than two years dealing with amnesties and reparations. Besides reconciliation, Mandela government also worked to improve the quality of life and achieve economic growth. Nelson Mandela launched a campaign to attract investment capital from foreign business, governments and international agencies. He also allotted funds for the development of the poor masses, to procure and make available potable water, electricity and houses to them.

However, it was well known that no quick solutions were there to alleviate the sufferings of the teeming millions. The government did make an effort by devising a new policy Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). By the time the Mandela Presidency came to an end on 5 February 1999, it had laid a solid foundation for the future. He was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki and the government continued to work for the same goal. The long and arduous task of attaining complete democracy was not to be achieved overnight. It would take years to heal the wounds of the millions. The South African democracy is still in its infancy. It will take some time to gain expertise to govern because it should not be forgotten that before 1994, the Africans had almost no place in the authoritative political system. No African was a member of parliament or was allowed to vote. Under such conditions, the achievements of the new regime cannot be underestimated. It regerminated the dignity of blacks and saved the country from the potential threat of civil war, while ensuring that it provided for the millions of people who had never had access to drinking water, electricity, telephones and housing before. Nothing is preordained and it is conceivable that South Africa will be victorious in its dreams and endeavors.

It would only be apt and not incongruous to work the premise that literature and society are inseparable. In fact, the socio-political situation in any country gives shape to its literature. In South Africa, there has been a vehement opposition to apartheid on the literary front as well. The country has produced many writers who have taken a tough stand against the policy of racial discrimination and exposed to the world the abuses of racism inherent in the South African society of their time.

The canon of South African literature stands on the contribution of some remarkable writers, who concerned themselves with the socio-political condition of their land, among them, J. M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Alan Paton, Njabulo Ndebele, Alex la Guma and Nadine Gordimer have a special place. These writers have long established themselves as protestors and agitators against apartheid. Andre Brink, writing both in English and Afrikaans, has espoused the cause of apartheid in his works. Set up during the apartheid years, Rumours of Rain (1978) explores the life of Martin Mynhardt, a pro-apartheid Afrikaner businessman, who refuses to bend and remains unscathed by the violence that surrounds him. With Angolan war in the backdrop, the novel charts the downfall of the protagonist whose adherence to the values and beliefs he has been raised with, eventually results in his fall from grace at a time when South Africa is swept by a movement that ultimately brings an end to apartheid. Andre Brink continued to scrutinize and report the harshest aspects of the South African society. This urge generated A Dry White Season (1979), a politically committed novel espousing the cause against the apartheid regime. The novel is introduced by an anonymous narrator who reconstructs the life of his friend and central character Ben Du Toit (a white middle class teacher), from the papers, notes and legal documents sent by him before being killed. Going through the papers, the narrator as well as the reader is involved in the teacher’s quest for truth and his transition from ignorance to political awareness. In fact, the title itself refers to the state of apathy of the narrator which further symbolizes the apathy of the nation as a whole. These works, therefore, are deeply rooted in the history of South Africa and explicitly condemn the racist regime.

J. M. Coetzee too deserves to be mentioned for the same. Though a citizen of Australia now, he made an excellent observation from outside. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), is a powerful political allegory that depicts the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. Set up in a hamlet bordering a vast nameless empire, the novel can suitably be termed as a critique of imperialism. Observed closely, it undoubtedly portrays the political situation and racial injustice in South Africa. The unnamed character of the novel known only as the Magistrate meets colonel Joll, head of a secret service sent to the town to defend the empire against the attack of the barbarians living on the other side of the empire. What unfolds is a dreadful tale of torture of the barbarians at the hands of the representatives of the empire. The novel is thus recognizable as a universalized version of South Africa, wherein the unspecified time and place allowed Coetzee to distance himself from his subject, yet remaining locked with the history of the moment. Through Life and Times of Michael K (1983) Coetzee explores the hardships and struggles of the underprivileged in the South African society. Michael K, a simple minded son of Anna K, quits his job as a gardener in Cape Town to take his dying mother to her birthplace. He undergoes innumerable difficulties at the hands of the people in power. Coetzee, with his keen eyes of observation, reveals the day to day tortures the oppressed are subjected to and excellently portrays the South Africa in the eighties. Disgrace (1999) explores the post-apartheid South Africa and offers a bleak perspective of the country. The plot traces David Lurie, a twice divorced academic as he wrestles with the impediments that social standards play on the fulfillment of the sexual desire. Dismissed from his position for an alleged misconduct with a student, he goes to stay with his daughter Lucy Lurie in the suburbs of South Africa. As he is trying to create some balance in his discordant life, some miscreants attack the farm and rape his daughter. He once again is forced to come to terms with the aftermath of the attack. Set against the backdrop of the post-apartheid South Africa, the novel portrays the images of violence and crime ridden society.

Alan Paton’s seminal novel Cry, the Beloved Country published in 1948, the very year the Nationalist Party had taken over and turned its beliefs of segregation and discrimination into law, is a tale of racial injustice managing to grab international attention to the problem of apartheid. The novel relates the story of the search of a black South African Stephen Kumalo, of his son Absalom who, he finally discovers, has murdered a white man Arthur Jarvis. Through the journey of Stephen Kumalo, Paton depicts the horrid side of racial injustice in South Africa. The story unearths the vicious cycle of inequality and injustice prevalent in the country. Due to the acute shortage of land, blacks are compelled to emigrate from their native place. Both Gertrude and Absalom are caught in this wave of emigration, but the economic lure of Johannesburg is dangerous, for it results in their taking to crime in the face of widespread discrimination and lack of opportunities for people like them. The novel strives to examine aspects of guilt- both personal guilt and the collective guilt of a society that create such disparity in living conditions.

Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2004) is a critically acclaimed novel that digs into the apartheid past. Four women and their endless wait for their husbands in the country of South Africa is depicted in the novel. These women are presented as descendents of Penelope who waited for Odysseus. The separation occurred as a consequence of apartheid. The lives of these women are linked with Winnie Mandela, a woman who waited for twenty seven years for her husband. Ndebele has interwoven fact and fiction by portraying Winnie Mandela as one of the characters in the novel. Besides revealing the tragedies of apartheid, the novel also brings forth the costs of the same to the individuals and society at large. The author, through his characters, wonder at the role of apartheid in shaping the confused and violent situation in post- apartheid South Africa.

Alex La Guma, a victim of the policy of racial segregation who was banned, house arrested and forced into exile, nevertheless, remained one of the major writers in South Africa. His experiences served as a basis for his writings. And a Threefold Cord (1964) recreates the Cape Town slum in all its squalor with prostitution, alcoholism, violence, famine, unemployment and illness accepted as part of the daily life for the inhabitants. The Stone Country (1967) explores the conditions in the South African prison system. It brings out quite vividly the dehumanization and exploitation of blacks and explicitly captures the life in the prison. The hierarchical social system, racial segregation and acceptance of brutality towards blacks make the prison a microcosm of South Africa. La Guma’s most politically overt work In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972) is a story of those people who daily risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid, focusing on the activities of Elias Tekwane Beukes and Isaac. The novel implores that collective action is essential to achieve the political goals as well as to overcome the problems plaguing South Africa. Simultaneously, one gets a glimpse of poverty, squalor and hopelessness in the form of flashback which in fact serves as the basis for the political movement against apartheid. These are some of his works that depict the devastating effect of apartheid on blacks.

Of the writers listed above Nadine Gordimer turned out to be a true champion for the cause against apartheid for she refused to leave South Africa, her homeland, despite the fact that several of her works were banned by the government. Though not a victim of apartheid in true sense, she nevertheless became a true voice of the voiceless.

Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in a small mining town of Springs in the Transvaal region of South Africa. Her mother Nan Myers was from England and her father Isidore Gordimer was a Jew who migrated from Latvia at the age of thirteen. He was a jeweler by profession. In Gordimer’s view her father did not have a strong personality whereas her mother was dominating. Gordimer went to ‘Our lady of Mercy’ a convent school in Springs. At the age of ten, a sudden faint on Gordimer’s part led to the diagnosis of a heart trouble. Her mother immediately prohibited all her physical activities which included dancing, Gordimer’s passion as a young girl, and also took her out of school. Consequently, Gordimer spent some five years, from the age eleven to fifteen, in isolation, cut off from the outside world and was left to survive in her own inner world of loneliness, sans any contact with the children of her age.

Eventually, after some time she discovered that the so-called heart problem was false, in fact there was no need for her to stop her activities and normal life and her condition was exaggerated by her mother. She used Gordimer’s illness as an emotional escape from her unhappy marriage. She was taught by a private tutor for sometime but there was never any formal schooling after that. It is argued that the time Gordimer spent in isolation resulted in her becoming a writer. In her opinion, to become a writer one has to read a lot and that is what she did in that period. Initially, her mother read to her and later she accessed a library where she read anything and everything she could lay her hands on. As she grew up she realized the need to educate herself further. She took admission in the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, but she could study only a few courses as she had lacked the basic degrees to qualify as a regular student. She studied there only for a year and without completing her studies, moved to Johannesburg in 1948 where she has lived ever since. She married Dr. Gerald Gavron on 6 March 1949 and her daughter Oriane was born in 1950. Unfortunately, her marriage was short-lived and she divorced him in 1952. Her second marriage with Reinhold Cassirer, a businessman, in 1953 proved to be a happy and everlasting one. She gave birth to her son Hugo in 1954. Her daughter Oriane lives in France and her son is a filmmaker settled in New York, USA. Her husband died in 2001.

Nadine Gordimer is not just a Nobel laureate; she is also a political activist, an African National Congress member, a public figure and above all an anti- apartheid activist. Gordimer began writing from an early age of nine, when her first poem eulogizing Paul Kruger came out in 1937. At the age of fifteen she published short stories for children. Her first adult story was accepted by The Forum, a South African magazine. With the help of Uys Krige, an Afrikaans poet, American Journals (the New Yorker and Yale Review) came her way and she published a short story collection in 1949 and her first novel came out in 1953. With that, Gordimer began her full-fledged literary career and has never looked back since then. Gordimer’s literary career formally began with the publishing of her first book Face to Face, a collection of short stories. Her first novel The Lying Days was published in 1953. She has also written several critical studies, but she asserts that facts she has dealt with cannot be truer than her fiction (Gordimer, Living 199).

Her writing career began taking shape since her childhood as she was quite observant in nature. She asked herself as a child repeatedly why the school which she attended had only white kids? Why only the whites were seen in cinemas? Why were blacks not seen in the library? And she realized early that it was not natural. In an interview with Dwight Garner, she says, “I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, And the way that people in Chicago’s stockyards were living, this was like the black mine workers at home. So I began to say, ‘Well why?’” Gordimer knew quite well that the world in which she lived was quite different from the utopian world presented in the books which she read in the library. She saw, “black people, victims of a much greater defeat, the theft of their land and loss of all rights over the conduct of their lives, sent back to their ghetto after the day’s work serving the town (Gordimer, Writing and Being 118).

As a child she had been asked by her mother not to pass the area where the black miners lived but was never told the reason. Whenever she passed by the row of concession stores she observed how the black customers were treated by the white shopkeepers. They were not only abused but also couldn’t exercise their right to buy the product of their own choice, which was quite contradictory to what she experienced as a white in the town. The “….images had fermented below the surface impressions of childhood as I developed the writer’s questioning concentration,” she says in one of the lectures at Harvard (Writing and Being 123). She realized that she was white, a privileged race in the country where she lived. She could call it as her country by virtue of being born there but she could not call the people living in it as her people as long as this discrimination existed, until each and every human living in her country could pursue and live a life of their own choice. She took to writing as a means to achieve that sense of belongingness. Since she was a writer, her principle means to ‘make herself’ was her writing. Only by being committed to her writing that she could remain attached to the truth- the truth that was to be in the fiction. She firmly believed in the maxim that the expression in art, of what really exists beneath the surface, is part of the transformation of society.

After publishing The Lying Days she published another novel A World of Strangers in 1958 followed by Occasion for Loving in 1963. Continuing with her endeavor to expose reality in her fiction she wrote The Late Bourgeois World in 1966 followed by The Guest of Honour in 1970. Keeping up with her struggle against apartheid through her writing she came out with The Conservationist in 1974. She wrote Burger’s Daughter in 1979 and then July’s People in 1981 followed by A Sport of Nature in 1987. In the year 1990, she came out with My Son’s Story and in 1994 was published None To Accompany Me. She wrote The House Gun in 1998, The Pickup in 2001 and Get a Life in 2005. Her most recent work of fiction is No Time Like the Present published in 2012.

Gordimer not only wrote novels but also short story collections, essays and some nonfiction. Some of her major short story collections are as follows-Face to Face (1949), The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952), Six Feet of the Country (1956), Friday’s Footprint (1960), Something Out There (1984), Jump: and Other Stories (1991), Loot: And Other Stories (2003), Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black (2007). Her nonfiction also needs a mention-The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988) and The Black Interpreters (1973).

The arrest of her best friend Bettie du Toit in 1960, accompanied with the incident of Sharpeville Massacre, led Gordimer to join African National Congress in order to participate actively in the anti-apartheid movement. She became close friend of Bram Fischer and George Bizos, Nelson Mandela’s defense attorneys during his trial in 1962. She continued to live in Johannesburg, leaving occasionally for United States to teach at different universities. Through her writing and activism she continued to demand the replacement of apartheid in South Africa with a more egalitarian society. As a result, she saw many of her works banned by the South African government. Being a white and a writer she defied the norms of White society and a refusal to conform to the set rules resulted in censorship of her books. The Late Bourgeois World was banned in 1976 for ten years and A World of Strangers for the period of twelve years. Her other books were also banned but for a lesser period of time. July’s People was banned after its publication, and Burger’s Daughter was banned and then unbanned six months later. However, she responded to this decision in her nonfiction book The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places published in 1988 in which she has brought forth the point that while her book was unbanned, the books written by two black authors continued to be under banned category which again was a gesture of discrimination.

As a member of African National Congress, when it was still an illegal organization, she saw it as the only hope that could procure blacks their share of freedom. She also hid some ANC leaders in her house in order to help them escape from arrest. Not only that, she also testified at Delmas trial in 1986 on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists. Gordimer also took active part in demonstrations in South Africa and has censured it globally. Gordimer did not confine herself to just anti-apartheid movements, she actively took part and resisted state control of information and censorship. She also founded Congress of South African writers. She has also been active in International PEN in the capacity of Vice-president. Gordimer has also been actively involved in the HIV/AIDS movement in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. In 2004 she came out with a short story collection having a contribution of about twenty authors in order to raise funds for HIV/AIDS Treatment Action Campaign. In her lecture tours she has spoken against discrimination in South Africa. The extent of her stance can be gauged from the fact that she refused to accept the Orange Prize in 1998 because it recognizes only women writers.

She became quite a literary icon as recognition approached her soon. In the year 1961 she won her first award W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award for her work Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories, a short story collection. It was followed by James Tait Memorial Prize (England) for her novel A Guest of Honour. She became the first South African to get this award which has in its list of awardees, writers like Virginia Woolf. She also won the prestigious and very much coveted Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist in 1974. She won the CNA (Central News Agency Literary Award) Prize in South Africa for the years 1974, 1975 and 1980 for A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist and Burger’s Daughter respectively. Adding to the list of awards France bestowed on her the grand Aigle d`Or Prize in 1975 followed by Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature (England) in 1981. In 1982 she bagged Modern Language Association Award of United States of America. She also won Premio Malaparte, the Italian literary award in 1985 along with Nelly Sachs Prize of West Germany in 1986. In the same year she was honored with Officier de l`Ordre des Arts et des letters of France.

In the year 1996 she became the Laureate of the International Botev Prize followed by the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best book from Africa in 2002 for The Pickup and in the year 2007 she was awarded Legion of Honour by France. The culmination and summit of her achievements was reached in the year 1991 when she was awarded the most prestigious and valued, Nobel Prize for Literature for her commitment and valuable contribution to the world of literature that has benefitted the entire mankind. She has been able to sensitize the world against racism. Besides all the awards in the world of literature, she has been awarded fellowships out of which Scottish Arts Council Neil. M. Gunn Fellowship in 1981 needs a mention and also many honorary degrees from many a university of USA and Europe. She has been an Honorary Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has been a fellow of Royal Society of literature, Britain and a patron of Congress of South African Writers (COSAW).

Gordimer has been described as South Africa’s “unchallenged First Lady of letters” by John Barkham (Bazin and Seymour 9). The above statement is quite true as she is the first South African to be awarded the Nobel Prize. While being presented with the award in 1991, her literary achievement was described as of being a “benefit on mankind”. In the presentation speech during the award ceremony, the presenter Professor Sture Allen, while eulogizing Gordimer, had read that she wrote during the times when her books were banned but she continued as if “censorship did not exist.”

Gordimer ascribes her development as a writer to the library which she accessed quite early, at an age when other children generally eat and play. She developed a sense of racial segregation and discrimination through ‘experience’; experience that she had while going to and coming from her school when she was warned not to go anywhere near the black boys. Her keen eyes captured the torturing reality she witnessed while passing by the concession stores meant for blackminers where the counter had a thick wire between the customer and the shopkeeper so that blacks could only point out the items they wished to buy, unable to touch and test them until they paid for it. Gordimer, though young, could not remain untouched by the spectacle, as she could touch and try on the things she wanted to buy.

She began to ask “Why hadn’t we any black friends? Why are these people different? Why are black children called pickannins, whereas we were always called children? Where does this whole division come about?...once you start to doubt, then your world begins to collapse. And you have to build a new one for yourself…” (Bazin and Seymour 16-17). She indeed built a new identity for herself wherein despite being a white she struggled and voiced against apartheid. In fact she could do that because she was a white. If she would have been born a black she would never have been able to do what she did. She said in an interview with Andrew Salkey in 1969, “If I were a black South African writer, I would leave. It’s really impossible for any black intellectual to stay…”(45).The most remarkable thing that happened in her life was that she was able to break the mould of mythical white supremacy and look beyond and beneath the surface. Gordimer has often reiterated this fact which quite proves the above statement. “I’ll repeat it to you, I think that people like myself have two births, and the second one comes when you break out of the color bar. It’s a real rebirth when you break out of your background… and you realize that the color bar is not valid, and is meaningless to you”(16).

Gordimer has been inspired by writers like Ernst Hemingway and E.M. Forster from whom she has learnt to handle “human relationships” and its very “conception”. Besides, she has also been influenced by Yeats, Auden, Rilke, Donne, Virginia Woolf, Andre `Gide, Proust and Eudora Welty. Conrad and Camus influenced her attitude. She also admires Milan Kundera, Joseph Roth and Czeslaw Milosz (37). It is however due only to her experience and her strong character and firm determination that she chose to write against apartheid; read or influenced though she might have been by many a writer. She is totally opposed to apartheid and has made racism a central theme in her works. She can doubt anything but is firm in her conviction that racism or the color-bar is wrong and indefensible. She has never claimed herself to be political writer or a politically minded person. She writes as she sees life around her. She captures the private lives of the people, but “even in the most private situations, they are what they are because their lives are regulated and their mores formed by the political situation….politics is the character in SA” (35). She further adds: “Politics, the effects of politics, permeate even the most private sector of people’s lives, and this comes into your writing if you’re an honest writer….There is protest there,…”(43). She, thus, tries to write the truth honestly which is an absolute essential according to her.

She might not have been engaged in the actual political struggle against apartheid but her writing has become “the essential gesture” towards the society in which she lives. It was with her stories and novels that she entered the “commonality” of her country (Gordimer, Writing and Being 132). She grew into a radical from a liberal. She told Pat Schwartz in an interview once, that the novels she writes are anti-apartheid in nature because “If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself” (Bazin and Seymour 83).

When Gordimer began her career in 1950s she had a little glimpse of multiracialism, described by Judie Newman as a “brief golden age” (15). At that time she was involved with Drum magazine which brought her in contact with many black writers. In fact, Gordimer described the period of 50s as “the period of Toy Telephone” (Bazin and Seymour 92). It was so described because various committees and groups were talking and discussing about what was to be done to improve the condition of blacks but no one was listening on the other side. The group of black writers like Peter Abrahams, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Llewis Nkosi Bloke Modisane, Todd Matshikiza and Can Themba tried to write about South Africa but they were picked off one by one. Their work was banned by the South African government. They fled the country and some like Alex La Guma were politically exiled. An entire generation of black writers was silenced. Gordimer took the responsibility to react against it and began a campaign against censorship. Censorship was used as machinery by the State to control the thoughts of writers who might have posed a threat to its racist ideology. But Gordimer, defying the rule, went on to publish The Black Interpreters (1973), a study of indigenous African writing. Apartheid, according to her, could not function without censorship, as it did not let the truth permeate the society; truth, which would have enlightened them about the system prevailing in South Africa.

For Gordimer fiction holds a greater importance than history. In an Interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1976 she says, “…It’s fiction that bears the primary impact. The facts are always less than what really happens. I mean the facts are just on the surface-it’s what makes the fact. If you get a law, like group areas, under which various population groups are moved from one part of the country to another, uprooted from their homes and so on, well, somebody may give you the figures, how many people are moved, how many jobs were lost. But, to me, it doesn’t tell you nearly as much as the story of one individual who lived through that” (Bazin and Seymour 76). Gordimer continued to historicize her fiction and despite all odds continued to live in South Africa refusing to become an exile to give shape to her desire as a true South Afrcian writer to bring the two communities together and write by living and experiencing everything.

Gordimer’s works have received international recognition. Most of them have dealt with political issues and also the moral and psychological tensions of the racially divided country. Almost all of Gordimer’s works have love and politics as their theme. She, very skillfully, captures the lives of ordinary people with all its moral ambiguities and choices. In doing so, she reflects the psychic vibrations within her country, the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul and the underground networks. She wrote as if censorship had not existed. With characters very subtle and nuanced, she has deftly created interaction of the private and public. Her characters are portrayed living in the shadow of violence, always under the fear of unpredictable brutality. It is through her language and fearless characterization that Gordimer became a counterweight to the regime’s propaganda. Unsentimental and diagnostic as she was in her writing, she reported from the “heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad 95).

Sometimes criticized for her lack of narrative skill, she can never be doubted about the motive of her writing. All through her life and through her numerous works she has proved to be a champion against apartheid in South Africa. And yet, she cannot be called a propagandist and her works do not emanate negativity. They are not subversive in nature. She has been successful in presenting a free zone and imagining how life beyond apartheid might be. She was able to provide with an insight into the nuances of struggle and mechanism of change much in the manner that no historian could have done. Despite her lifelong engagements with the politic of the menace, Gordimer’s literary life did not end with the end of apartheid in South Africa. New life began for her as she started to write about the post-apartheid South Africa and she came out with fiction dealing with the aftermath of apartheid.

Gordimer is a prolific writer and a very talented phenomenon in a country in which few writers have reached international renown. In a place where freedom of expression was suppressed for so long, and new thoughts were feared, Gordimer managed to remove the layers of prejudice and egoism to reach the core of the South African world and offer us a peek into the brilliant colors of an apartheid free world. Gordimer, through her imaginings, has alerted the reader about the crass reality of the life and relations undermined by apartheid in South Africa, a task very few writers have been able to accomplish. Undaunted, she has reported how the pernicious system turned innocents into criminals.

In her Nobel lecture in 1991, Nadine Gordimer warned that an author risks both the state’s condemnation as a traitor and the liberation forces’ complaint that he or she fails to demonstrate blind loyalties. But, she explained: “the author serves humanity only as a long as he utilizes the work against his own loyalties too.” Thus, a key paragraph in her book of Harvard Lectures, Writing and Being is this:

Only through the writer’s explorations could I have begun to discover the human dynamism of the place I was born to and the time in which it was to be enacted. Only in the prescient dimension of the imagination could I bring together what had been deliberately broken and fragmented; fit together the shapes of living experience, my own and that of others, without which a whole consciousness is unattainable. I had to be part of the transformation of my place in order for it to know me. (130)

After four decades of relentless and indefatigable struggle, Gordimer has been finally able to claim South Africans as her people. The successive chapters highlight Nadine Gordimer’s contribution to the literary world as a true artist, portraying the reality of her home country. She has sensitized the world with the problem South Africa had been reeling under for centuries. She explores the injustices of the white regime in her fiction which in fact, turned out to be more than reality that a historian could capture in his annals.