Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

However, when a country has come through long conflict and its resolution, its writers are assumed to have lost their ‘subject’. We in South Africa are challenged — top of the list in journalists’ interviews — ‘So what are you going to write about now that apartheid has gone?’

Apartheid was a plan of social engineering and its laws; novels, stories, poetry and plays were an exploration of how people thought and lived, their ultimate humanity out of reach of extinction. Life did not end with apartheid. ‘The new situation must bring new subjects’ — Czech writer Ivan Klíma wrote this, in exile, and out of the breakup of his country. In South Africa there is not breakup and its violent consequences, but a difficult and extraordinary bringing-together of what was divided. The new subjects, some wonderful, some dismaying, have scarcely had time to choose us.

‘What do we know / But that we face / One another in this place’ — William Butler Yeats. That is surely the subject that in the dwelling place of words, everywhere, chooses the writer.

2001

Governance’: ‘the action or manner of governing’, ‘the state of being governed’. In the past this dictionary definition was taken as referring specifically to national governments and their people. But in our age of globalisation, of global resources and certainly global problems, the concept of governance in relation to tackling world poverty starts at a much higher level, the Everest of international finance. Governance in individual countries is influenced by and in many instances prescribed by these. So we have to begin by facing the opposing conceptions most widely held about the devolution from the heights, down to earth.

Recipient countries of loan funds through the IMF and World Bank resent conditions imposed by the agencies of the financial Everest as to the ways in which the money is to be used. They even assert that development — the object — is hampered by such conditions.

The agencies cite stringent necessity for conditions in order to counter their experience of corruption as a government conduit through which the funds disappear without any development reaching a country’s population.

So governance begins above a country’s own laws and administration. Whether debt owed to the Everest should be written off, in view of crippling interest payments required even from countries which do use the money for sustainable development, is another question — should Everest be a usurer, or should it be the real agent of redistribution of wealth?

There are encouraging signs of a change in conception on the part of donors and recipients. Mamphele Ramphele, speaking as Managing Director of the Human Development Unit of the World Bank, says that the approach now needed is for ‘countries to take ownership’ of development rather than ‘receive prescribed programmes of action … to leverage their own destiny and build capacity for themselves’. 105Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade says of Africans who have been ‘financing debt by loans and aid for years’, ‘Those instruments don’t take us far … we must first understand how we got into debt in the first place.’ 106This facing of reality by both donor and debtor gives credence to the claim by ten African leaders conferring with the IMF and World Bank this year, of a ‘major step forward to define a new approach to fight poverty in Africa’.

What principal areas of national life depend on good national governance if poverty is to be tackled on the ground, within each country? Foremost, surely: unemployment, post-colonial land redistribution, use and exploitation of natural resources, health care with emphasis on the Aids epidemic, education; and not least, corruption. There is a determining condition if these are to be addressed: press and media freedom. There is no good governance without a population free to participate in open debate on government policy and practice, to effect for themselves progress in the condition of their lives.

‘Entitlement relations’ 107— Amartya Sen’s phrase defines for me what global governance through international finance and national governance on the ground need to have with a population on the premise that they are to tackle poverty the only effective way — together. And here UNDP, with partnership stressed as its mode of operation in the twenty-first century, provides a model in its proven dedication to be, itself, a partner in enterprises of and for good governance. Experience in project innovation has taught the lesson that success is dependent on making sure governance of a country has the minimum means, and the will, to cooperate — the capacity . This implies that capacity training is, in itself, a project in the partnership of governance with poverty elimination. A project cannot succeed where the capacity to implement it — whether through lack of trained personnel, communication facilities — is not at least in a parallel state of development. To reach the end, there must be the minimal means. Then the energy and determination of the population can, and does, take off for success.

The developing world, the peoples of that world, have entitlement; entitlement to the redistribution of the world’s wealth rather than the euphemistic ‘aid’, entitlement to just, incorruptible governance. The right to recognition of, and action within, the interdependence of governance and the millennial, global problem, poverty.

2001

The Fifth Avenue Hotel. Easter 1954. Dim purple lighting on toy bunny rabbits perched over our heads all around a ledge beneath the restaurant ceiling. I am thirty years old, I have published two books of stories and a first novel; I am in the USA for the first time and I’m seated at table with a famous American writer — a Southerner, like myself, although my South is Africa — whose work I greatly admire. She is Carson McCullers. We have been brought together, in my neophyte’s privileged anticipation, by the kindness of her sister, Margaret Smith, and Cyrilly Abels, editors of Mademoiselle , then a literary-innovative women’s magazine that, along with The New Yorker , had published some of my stories. There before me is that life-questioning image, the wonderful face of a wise child who was born devastatingly knowing too much — the face of the being who wrote The Ballad of the Sad Café .

What I didn’t know was that Carson had just come out of long weeks of detoxification, shut away somewhere. What I also didn’t know was what that experience could do to the victim; how dazed was the return to the world. What followed was surely a scene written by her friend Tennessee Williams. Carson kept saying to Margaret, ‘Sister, I think we need a a new beau.’ It wasn’t ironic or in lunch-table jest; it was a grave and determined conclusion. With me was my new husband (of one month). All through the meal Carson leaned a hand with a delicate fork, taking morsels from his plate. The questions I had ready to ask the writer who had meant much to me fled my mind. I managed somehow to tell her of my admiration for her work; don’t remember that brought any response.

Bunny rabbits sister we need a new beau .

So America was a purple-lit fantasy with a foreboding message. If this was what fame could mean for a writer, I didn’t think I wanted it ever to come to me. My husband (my new beau) was more compassionately moved, less judgemental; less frightened, although he himself had just taken on that risky mate, a writer.

Meeting those emissaries of American culture, the writers, has been mostly good and reassuring since that sad ballad of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Soon there was Eudora Welty, American Chekhov, whose stories had early influenced me: Eudora in Jackson, Mississippi, as wonderful in person as she is as a writer. An American original of a special kind.