„Apartheid made a fantastic liar out of everybody who was against it. You had to in order [survive], to your friends and others..., never mind yourself.“

Nadine Gordimer

INTRODUCTION

The story of one of the most remarkable female writers in South African history during the apartheid era begins in the small village of Springs, near Johannesburg in South Africa. Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 and, during her lifetime, published 15 novels as well as over 200 essays and short stories, in which she almost always drew on her own convictions, experiences and life events.[1] Although she never regarded herself as a resistance fighter, she was, as a white woman, actively involved throughout her life in the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Among many other honours, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for her literary life’s work.

THE STORY

Nadine Gordimer grew up in the small village of Springs, a mining settlement near Johannesburg.[2] She was the child of Jewish immigrants, but later said of herself that she had no religion.[3] Her father had come to South Africa from Lithuania as a teenager; her mother was from the UK.[4] Even as a little girl, she had a great urge to communicate, but she would often swallow her words or trip over her own speech, making it almost impossible to understand her. She developed a speech disorder characterised by a mixture of stammering and stuttering, which she eventually overcame as she grew older. At the age of 5 or 6, her parents sent her to the Dame School, a private school similar to a nursery or pre-school near her family home. Books were very important to her mother, Hannah, and so Gordimer was enrolled at the local library from an early age and became an avid reader. Although the Gordimer family were Jewish, they were not strictly religious. Consequently, they had no qualms about sending Nadine and her sister Betty to a Catholic convent school run by Dominican nuns. Nadine was not a poor pupil, but she showed little interest in lessons, which she often skipped, preferring to spend her time in the countryside and the surrounding area of her village.[5]

In December 1934, she suffered two episodes of weakness due to hyperthyroidism; her mother attributed this to alleged heart failure. As a result, she had to give up dancing, which she loved very much, was barely allowed to leave the house, and was unable to attend school for nine months, until she was taught at home by a retired teacher. Because of her illness, she had hardly any contact with children her own age and accompanied her mother to meetings with her mother’s friends, who were, of course, much older than her. Gordimer later said that she changed from an extroverted girl into an introverted, quiet one, and that her only solace was books and reading voraciously.[6]

Literary Beginnings

Her love of reading also led her to start writing stories. Her career aspiration and original dream of becoming a dancer gave way to a career as a journalist. In 1937, at the age of 14, Gordimer’s first short story appeared in the children’s section of a local newspaper; in 1938, three more of her stories were published in the same newspaper. Then, in November 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, her first short story for adults, Come Again Tomorrow, was published.[7]

It was during this time that Gordimer also developed an awareness of political events in South Africa. She was no longer interested in her mother’s get-togethers with her friends, as the conversations there often centred on what she considered trivial matters. The only things that held her interest at thaat time were the books she read. Her parents often met with their neighbours to play cards. Gordimer would pass the time in their home library. It was there that she discovered Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle. The book deals with the appalling working conditions, particularly for black workers in the US meat industry. Gordimer drew parallels with the situation of the miners in the coal mines of her home town. She realised that the division of roles between Black and white people was not a matter of nature, but a human construct. This realisation was to prove decisive for her own later political development, and her criticism of this division of roles was to have a significant influence on her literature and her style of writing.[8]

The development of political awareness

During the Second World War, when many professional nurses were called up for military service, Gordimer helped out with her mother at the Red Cross as an auxiliary nurse. Whilst doing this work, she realised that black and white people share the same physiology, something she had not been aware of until then. She also frequently visited The Vanguard bookshop, which had a left-wing political stance. There she met Philip Stein, with whom she had an intense but platonic relationship. Through him, she discovered the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose literature was to influence her own later writing.[9]

After a break of several years, two more of Gordimer’s short stories were published in 1943. In the years that followed, she published three to four short stories a year. In the 1944 short story No Luck Tonight, she publicly criticised the way white people treated the black population for the first time. The plot exposes the everyday racism of the white population and is based on a true experience the young Gordimer had as a child. One night, police officers turned up in the back garden of her parents’ house to search for beer that had been brewed illegally by their Black servants – just as in the later plot of Gordimer’s short story. Yet, as in the story, neither she nor her parents did anything to protect their servants. Experiences such as these shaped Gordimer’s writing throughout her life.[10]

After publishing five more short stories in 1943 and 1944, she began her studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1945. As she did not have a school-leaving certificate, she enrolled on the English Literature course, which could be attended even without one. Her time at university helped Gordimer to analyse the works of other authors more effectively and thoroughly, and to view her own writing style more critically. On a personal level, too, her time at university marked a period of personal growth for Gordimer, as she met fascinating people who shared her political interests and who also stimulated her intellectually. [11] For the first time in her life, Gordimer was also able to form friendships with black people who were not domestic workers but were pursuing academic careers. At that time, black people were also permitted to study at universities, depending on their academic qualifications. However, they were forbidden from living in student halls of residence and from taking part in sporting or cultural events. Even before the apartheid era, Black students did not enjoy the same freedoms as their white fellow students. These restrictions became increasingly severe a few years later with the onset of apartheid.[12]

One of the cornerstones of the apartheid policy was the 1948 general election, in which the Afrikaans National Party dominated and subsequently appointed Daniel François Malan as Prime Minister and, at the same time, as chairman of the party. The party held the conviction that there must be strict racial segregation between Blacks and Whites and pursued the aim of economically and socially marginalising and exploiting the Black population. In the years that followed, this policy became increasingly prevalent.[13] Political circumstances and issues such as (everyday) racism, exclusion and relations between different sections of South African society had a lasting influence on Gordimer’s literature. The extent of this political influence is particularly evident in her novels and short stories.

Quote from her speech Writing and Being, 1991: „I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses – the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.“ [14]

Writing career during the apartheid era

Nadine Gordimer’s first published book was a collection of short stories: Face to Face, which was published in 1949 and comprised sixteen short stories. She began writing her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1951 and it was published in the USA in 1953. The book is about a young woman who is born in a small village near Johannesburg and grows up in a privileged family. Over the course of the book, which consists of three parts, the character develops her own political consciousness, separate from her family home. Whilst at university, she meets black fellow students and begins to question the social and societal inequalities of the apartheid system, becoming increasingly estranged from her roots and her family’s political views. Gordimer describes this first novel as the only one that is autobiographical, as it draws some parallels with her own youth, yet differs significantly in the details. In an interview, she said that the first book one writes as an author is always a kind of rebellion against one’s own background.[15]

Her 1966 novel The Late Bourgeois World, in its approximately 100 pages, thematically addresses the wave of sabotage carried out by young white Africans against the apartheid system in 1963 and 1964, which the authorities attempted to suppress through mass arrests and tougher legislation.[16] At the start of the book, the protagonist, Elizabeth van de Sandt, learns that her ex-husband, Max, has taken his own life. He had been arrested for planning a bomb attack, but had been caught before he could carry it out. Elizabeth was herself active in the resistance, but does not become radicalised in the same way as her husband Max. She is under pressure to make a difficult decision: whether to use her grandmother’s money to help a fellow activist friend flee the country, as this could put her own life at risk should her support come to light. Through this theme, Gordimer takes a stronger political stance than in her previous novels [17].

Unlike her novel The Lying Days, which was still shaped by Gordimer’s conviction that political change in the country would unfold of its own accord, she wrote The Late Bourgeois World from a different perspective. This was prompted by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, during which black people demonstrated against apartheid and the discriminatory passport system. During the massacre, 249 people, including 29 children, were struck by a hail of police bullets; 69 people died. The massacre changed Gordimer’s attitude towards the idea of a natural evolution in politics.[18] Because of the content of the book, the novel was banned in South Africa for ten years.[19] This kind of censorship also occurred for other books by Gordimer.

In 1974, Gordimer published one of her best-known novels: The Conservationist. It centres on Mehring, a wealthy white businessman who owns a farm that provides him with tax benefits. At the beginning of the book, the body of a young black man is found on his property; although it is buried and the police take no further action on the case, Mehring finds himself thinking about him time and again. In interpretations of the book, the body is seen as a symbol that the black population will reclaim their own land [20]. In this novel, Gordimer’s writing style has changed significantly. Her writing is more complex, meaning that it is not always immediately clear who is speaking in the book. Gordimer prioritises descriptions and portrayals over the actual plot, as the latter mostly unfolds solely within Mehring’s thoughts. With this novel, Gordimer made her mark on the international stage and was awarded the British Booker Prize in 1974.

A few years later, Gordimer wrote two further novels, which earned her widespread acclaim in the literary world. With Burger’s Daughter, published in 1979, she wrote a highly political novel that was strongly based on a real person. The character of the father, Lionel Burger, was heavily modelled on Bram Fischer, a prominent anti-apartheid activist. The protagonist is Rosa, the daughter of Lionel Burger, and the book describes her life and how it is influenced by her father’s political activism. At times, Rosa Burger tries to distance herself from her father’s political stance, but she soon realises that, as a white African woman, she too bears a responsibility towards apartheid and must confront its consequences. The book was subject to censorship for a time, until several international authors joined forces and, by exerting pressure on the censorship authorities, had the ban lifted.[21]

The novel July’s People, published in 1981, however, offers less of a political critique of the apartheid system and more of a social one. The story is set in an undated future in which the apartheid system has been abolished by a brutal revolution led by the black population. A civil war breaks out and a white family – Bam and Maureen Smales and their three children – flee with their domestic servant, July, to his home village, far from their own home. As the book progresses, there is an increasing reversal of power in the relationship between July and his ‘masters’. They become dependent on him, and Bam and Maureen themselves also have various experiences that are unfamiliar to them. The inner lives of the characters are more important in this novel than the plot itself. The plot is confined, as a backdrop, to the small village where July comes from. In this novel, Gordimer shows how unequal the power relations are between the different population groups under the apartheid system, and how a potential revolution can have a major impact on the self-perception of individual characters.[22]

Nadine Gordimer’s works have been translated into 30 languages, and several of her novels have received widespread international acclaim.[23] All of Gordimer’s novels have one thing in common: without exception, they highlight injustices in South African society and politics. Themes such as (everyday) racism, social inequality, systematic oppression and discrimination feature in her books. In his biography of Nadine Gordimer, Jochen Petzold writes that she “never saw herself as a political author, and that is true insofar as her books do not advocate any political agenda, other than the consistent rejection of discrimination and racism.”[24] Gordimer herself insisted that she was not a politician, but an artist or writer.[25] That does not mean, however, that her writing was not highly political. Through her literature, Gordimer criticised the apartheid system in her home country and, through her fame and literary talent, supported the resistance against the system and its supporters in South Africa.

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for her literary life’s work. The citation states that, as a writer, she “has, through her magnificent epic poetry, rendered an immense service to humanity – to quote Alfred Nobel.”[26] Gordimer was the seventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[27]

Nadine Gordimer after receiving her Nobel Prize at the Stockholm Globe Arena on 10 December 1991. © Nobel Foundation. Photo: Lars Åström

Political engagement

Nadine Gordimer was not just a well-known writer. Through her writing, she succeeded in creating a tool of power with which she could draw international attention to the situation in South Africa. But it was not only through her writing that she campaigned against apartheid.

The 1948 elections paved the way for the apartheid system, under which the country was to suffer for more than 30 years. The elections were followed by a series of apartheid laws, which increasingly segregated the black population from the white population[28]. At that time, the African National Congress (ANC) was the largest and most significant organisation in the struggle against apartheid. It called on its supporters to go on strike, boycott goods and services, and engage in civil disobedience. From 1952 onwards, the ANC, together with a communist party, launched a campaign aimed at disrupting the judicial system through unnecessary arrests for minor offences. This raised the party’s profile and its membership numbers multiplied. Nadine Gordimer condemned the political events, but at that time she was not prepared to take part in the protests and risk arrest, particularly as she had recently become a single mother following her separation from her first husband, Gerald Gavronsky.[29]

Through her contact with Bettie du Toit, who was a member of the Communist Party, Gordimer’s political views continued to develop. During a bus boycott in 1957, when the black population undertook long marches to their workplaces in protest against increased fare prices, Gordimer helped the protesters by driving them back and forth between the city and their workplaces in her car, thereby at least shortening the journey for a few of them. Although this action had no major political impact, Gordimer sent a significant signal of support for the resistance against apartheid.[30]

Gordimer’s political activism increased significantly in the 1960s. Many black Africans felt that the ANC’s policies were not radical enough, and so a faction of the party split off and founded the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. The protest in Sharpeville – which would later be referred to as the Sharpeville Massacre – was the result of a call to action by the PAC. Following sustained strikes taking place across the country in protest against the events in Sharpeville, the government declared a state of emergency. The consequences of the apartheid government’s actions were the banning of the ANC and the PAC, as well as the expansion of police powers.

Although both parties were now banned, activism continued underground. Nelson Mandela, who was a member of the ANC, founded a paramilitary group called Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘The Spear of the Nation’) together with other activists. With this group, they shifted their approach from peaceful to more radical resistance in the form of acts of sabotage that began in 1961. The plot of the novel The Late Bourgeois World is inspired by this decision. As a result of these acts of sabotage, the organisation was classified as a terrorist group shortly afterwards, and Mandela was arrested in 1962.[31]

Gordimer attended many of the hearings in the Rivonia Trial, at which Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. Following the trial, many activists and writers fled South Africa and emigrated, but Gordimer and her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, decided to stay, as Gordimer drew inspiration for her novels from the day-to-day events in her country and was firmly convinced that she could do nothing to combat apartheid from outside South Africa. [32]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gordimer was invited to give lectures at various universities, including Harvard, the University of Michigan and Columbia University; she also gave lectures on black authors and their literature in Cape Town in 1972 [33]. In her home country, the Black Consciousness Movement emerged in the late 1970s. The movement was convinced that, as a result of years of oppression and predominantly white leadership, the black population had developed a sense of inferiority, even within resistance groups. The aim was to overcome this by having black members of the resistance movement break away from their white counterparts as a unified group. As early as 1968, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was founded, with the intention that its membership should consist solely of Black people. This was a very difficult time for Gordimer, as she had greatly enjoyed her contact with her Black friends and suffered from the lack of interaction with them.[34]

The 1976 Soweto uprisings against the repressive school system for the black population – triggered by yet another tightening of the law – led to a radical shift in the country’s political situation. The police forces were once again significantly expanded, and in 1977 the Black Consciousness Movement, which had, amongst other things, called for uprisings, was banned and its leaders arrested. They were subjected to sanctions such that they were no longer permitted to speak out publicly, nor could they be mentioned or quoted by others[35]. Gordimer largely refrained from making radical or public comments, as she did not wish to risk arrest or being barred from practising her profession. She later said that she had never been brave enough and had therefore not taken part in political uprisings [36]. In 1979, Gordimer attended a human rights conference in Toronto (Canada) [37].

The 1980s in South Africa were marked by political unrest. There was an increase in boycotts, uprisings and strikes. The paramilitary wing of the ANC, which continued to operate underground, also carried out attacks on power stations, railway stations and other infrastructure sites across the country. In many so-called townships – the districts where the black population was forced to live – public order broke down. For this reason, the apartheid government declared a state of emergency in June 1985, which remained in force until 1990. During this state of emergency, the government was able to censor the press and journalists and prohibit them from publishing unauthorised reports on the unrest in the country. Gordimer sought to use her influence to draw international attention to the censorship in her country. [38]

In July 1986, the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) was founded, with Gordimer playing a key role in its establishment. Anyone could join the association; membership was not restricted to any particular social class. Anyone who wanted to write could do so there. The aim of the association was to combat the systematic neglect of the black population caused by the poor education system through self-organised events. Gordimer herself organised creative writing workshops and supported aspiring writers in developing their work.[39]

Nadine Gordimer with her husband Reinhold Cassirer, Sweden 1991. ©Nobel Foundation. Photo: Lars Åström

On 2 February 1990, President Frederik Willem de Klerk announced the lifting of the ban on the ANC, the PAC, the Communist Party and 30 other banned organisations. In addition, the powers granted under the state of emergency were to be scaled back and political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela were to be released [40]. Nadine Gordimer was one of the first people who wanted to see Nelson Mandela after his release [41]. Immediately after the ban on the ANC was lifted, she officially joined the party, although she had already publicly declared her support for the party back in 1988 [42].

During this period of political upheaval in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for her literary life’s work.

In 1994, free parliamentary elections were held for the first time in decades, and Nelson Mandela became the new President of the Republic of South Africa. With his swearing-in and the ANC’s resounding victory in the South African parliamentary elections, apartheid in South Africa officially came to an end.[43]

The post-apartheid era

However, Gordimer’s political activism did not end with the end of apartheid. In 1998, she became a UN Goodwill Ambassador for the ‘UN Decade for the Eradication of Poverty’ programme [44]. In South Africa, she campaigned for a more effective response to the growing spread of HIV/AIDS. South Africa recorded its first cases of AIDS in 1982, and infection rates were set to rise in the years that followed. At that time, the then President Mbeki denied that HIV actually existed, and as a result, the government took no action to combat the virus. To draw attention to the situation in South Africa, Gordimer gave speeches and published opinion pieces. [45]

In 2003, Gordimer began contacting numerous writers, asking them to contribute short stories to an anthology, the entire proceeds of which were to be used to purchase medicines to combat AIDS. All the authors contacted took part without remuneration[46]. The short story collection Telling Tales, comprising 21 short stories by well-known authors, including four Nobel Prize winners in Literature, was published in twelve countries in 2004. She also continued to write novels dealing with the situation in post-apartheid South Africa, such as None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get a Life (2005) and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2008).

In her last novel from 2012, No Time Like the Present, she tackles issues such as corruption and xenophobia. In the plot of the book, she clearly criticises the growing wealth of the political elite and the fact that they have made no real improvements to the social situation of the lower classes and the black population.[47]

In October 2006, Gordimer herself fell victim to the consequences of the social and political system she had fought against for decades. Four young black men broke into her house, threatened her and her housekeeper, and took valuable items, including Gordimer’s wedding ring, which was particularly dear to her. Gordimer had not had an electric fence with barbed wire around her property, as others in her neighbourhood did, because her convictions prevented her from doing so. After the break-in, however, she did not blame the young men, but rather the system that had consistently neglected these young people, leaving them with little choice but to turn to crime.[48]

In an interview with Spiegel Kultur in 2013, a year after the publication of her latest novel, she said that her days as a writer were over and that she was “not prepared to write anything second-rate.” [49] However, she never gave up her political activism until the end of her life.

Nadine Gordimer passed away on 13 July 2014 at her home in Johannesburg, surrounded by her family.

Nadine Gordimer delivering her Nobel Prize acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1991. © Nobel Foundation. Photo: Lars Åström

Author: Luna Rosemann

Translation: Magdalena Köhler

Contact: info@fritz-bauer-forum.de

Sources:

• Gordimer, Nadine: Writing and Being, in: Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize Lecture, Dezember1991, URL: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/lecture/, last retrieved: 18.02.2026.
• Frieling, Simone: Die Stimme des weißen Südafrika. Zum Tod von Nadine Gordimer, in: literaturkritik.de, C.H.Beck, 2014-2016, URL: https://literaturkritik.de/id/19536 , last retrieved: 18.02.2026.
• Head, Dominic: Nadine Gordimer, Cambridge 1994.
• Hossli, Peter: Die Stimme Afrikas, in: Sonntagsblick Magazin, Mai 2010, URL: https://www.hossli.com/articles/2010/05/30/die-stimme-afrikas/ , last retrieved: 18.02.2026.
• Keller, Maren: Die Vehemenz der alten Dame. Besuch bei Nadine Gordimer, in: Spiegel Kultur, November 2013, URL: https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/nadine-gordimerliteraturnobelpreistraegerin-
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• O. N.: Südafrikanische Literatur-Nobelpreisträgerin gestorben, in: Die Zeit online, Juli 2014, URL: https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2014-07/nadine-gordimer-gestorben-literatur-nobelpreis , last retrieved: 18.02.2026.
• Petzold, Jochen: Nadine Gordimer. Eine starke Stimme gegen die Apartheid, Darmstadt 2023.
• Shain, Milton; Pimstone, Miriam; Lazar, Karen: “Nadine Gordimer.” In: Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, February 2009, URL: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gordimer-nadine , last retrieved: 19.02.2026.
• Stanford, Simon: Nadine Gordimer. Interview, in: Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize Interview, April 2005, URL: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/interview/ , last retrieved: 18.02.2026.
• Wästberg, Per: Nadine Gordimer. Article, in: Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize Article, April 2001, URL: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1991/gordimer/article/ , last retrieved: 18.02.2026.

Footnotes: