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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
None to Accompany Me
Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury £15.99
This is a novel about a journey – the personal journey of its principle character, Vera Stark – and the journey of South African society as it moves away from apartheid towards the future.
It is set in the period after February 1990, when opposition groups such as the ANC were decriminalised, and takes us up to the historic elections of last April.
It is a time of uncertainty which is focused through the experiences of two families with a common history of struggle against the racist state. Didymus and Sibongile Maqoma are ANC activists who were forced into exile. They have done heroic service in the fight against apartheid but return to South Africa changed by their experiences overseas. They arrive eager to assist in the process of change, but are no longer willing to share the poverty they see all about them.
Following the lead of a movement that has agreed to accept capitalism and all its structures, they use their political connections to procure a home and jobs. They go on to manoeuvre for high office and continue to distance themselves from the masses whose power brought apartheid to its knees. They also renew their friendship with Vera Stark.
Vera is a lawyer in a legal foundation fighting for the victims of apartheid. At the outset of the novel she is involved with a group of squatters who have occupied a white farm. It is the squatters’ new confidence and militancy, articulated through their representative Zeph Rapulana, that begins a process whereby Vera is forced to reassess her whole life. Under the fixed certainties of apartheid Vera was able to define herself in relation to her husband, her lovers, her children and grandchildren. The new period of transition shakes her faith in all these relationships. Just as South Africa must discard its past to go forward, Vera finds she must do the same with her own life.
But to go forward to what?
This is a beautifully written novel in which the fictional lives of its characters mesh with real events – white businessmen eat in expensive restaurants and nervously discuss the latest strikes, the fictional career of Didymus is regenerated by the actual murder of Chris Hani, and Vera is selected to help draft the impossible constitution.
Like all the major characters in this novel, Vera accepts that South Africa’s future is a capitalist one, ‘there’s no millennium, only the IMF and the World Bank.’
Even Rapulana, the squatter camp leader, becomes an advisor to big business, finds acceptance in those expensive restaurants and worries whether post-apartheid South Africa can compete on the world market. After all ‘what other solution was there to try for the present?’
Yet in the background of the novel we catch glimpses of an alternative in the black working class, a class which wonders why whites still sit behind the desks of power and why stolen land has yet to be restored. Nadine Gordimer calls the final section of this moving book ‘arrivals’, but you leave the novel certain that South Africa’s journey has just begun.
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