Nadine Gordimer and Apartheid

At first, Nadine Gordimer was not interested in politics at all, and had she lived in another country the subjects of her books would have been totally different. But when the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948 she knew she had to denounce what was happening in South Africa then and let the world know about the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies which were based on racial divisions and segregation. The Blacks were considered as underdogs and the Whites were allowed to commit all kinds of atrocities against them.

As a consequence, the notions of the color bar, punishing laws, fear of the security forces or impossible freedom were systematically developed in her writings which constituted a sort of social history if we refer to the portraits of the characters that filled them.
Nadine Gordimer could not stand the situation and her pen became a weapon against apartheid, ridiculing the segregation and institutionalized discrimination that condemned the black majority to silence.

No wonder she was a supporter of Nelson Mandela whom she met in 1964 during the infamous Rivonia trial and which sent Mandela to jail. As a friend of the ANC (African National Congress) leader her views on the conditions of the black population in South Africa were of course esteemed.
It is worth noting that her involvement for the anti-apartheid movement was not limited to her writings, indeed she sometimes passed secret messages, hid friends and secretly drove others to the border.

In 1963 Mandela and seven other activists were charged with acts of sabotage. Mandela admitted the facts and explained why he had turned to violence:

On June 11 1964, Mandela and the seven other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

As we can easily understand the books she wrote during the Apartheid era (1948 to 1994) and which dealt with politics were banned. A world of Strangers (1958), The Late Bourgeois World (1966) and Burger’s Daughter (1979) were unavailable for up to twelve years. But though what she did was risky she was never arrested or persecuted for her work.

And in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize by the committee who took note of her political activism. That day, she declared:

Three years later her long time friend Nelson Mandela, who had been released after spending 27 years in jail, was the first black president of the country in the first fully democratic vote of South Africa.

Nadine Gordimer was an involved author who wrote about her native country during and after apartheid, because as she used to say:

Though deeply involved in the political intricacies of her country during the apartheid period she did not stop fighting against unfair causes in 1994, finding other causes to embrace such as the spread of AIDS in South Africa. People never change.