Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled — perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn’t I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn’t that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

In the few houses in Johannesburg where people of different colours met, you were likely to meet the same people time after time. Many of them had little in common but their indifference to the different colours of their skins; there was not room to seek your own kind in no man’s land: the space of a few rooms between the black encampment and the white.

I got asked to these houses because it was known that I had made black as well as white friends since I had come to Johannesburg. It was not easy for people who did not want to keep their lives and hospitality exclusive to one race, to find new blood; most of these people found that they had two sets of white friends and acquaintances, those who could be invited along with coloured people, and those, sometimes very close friends, who could not.

But of course it was natural that a particular phenomenon should arise, and this was just beginning to happen, while I was in Johannesburg that summer. On the one side, there was the great mass of whites for whom the colour bar was not a piece of man-devised legislation, but a real and eternal barrier; on the other, there were the people who, through social conscience, or (like myself) impatience with restrictive distinctions which they, personally, found meaningless, mixed with coloured people. It was inevitable, with all the books and newspaper reports being written about South Africa, that the forbidden fraternization should become, in a sense, fashionable, and attract certain white people who might never, otherwise, have overcome their prejudices against or indifference to the races on the periphery of their lives. They were often people who had failed to secure attention in other ways; by identifying themselves with Africans, they were able to feel the limelight on their faces for the first time, even if it was only a refraction of that brilliance which was falling on black faces. They ‘discovered* African painters, theatre groups, dancers and crafts; they collaborated with Africans in all sorts of arty ventures in which their own shaky talents were disguised by the novelty, the importance of the fact that their material was genuine African. It began to be fashionable (in a very small, avant-garde way, I may say; on a par, perhaps, with the personal exploration of the effects of mescalin, in other countries) to have at least one African friend. A pet-African, whose name you could drop casually: ‘Tom Kwaza was telling me at our house the other day. .’

Sam had been taken up by one of these people, an amateur composer, with whom he was ‘collaborating’ in the writing of a one-act ‘African’ opera, and, through him, I found myself at the composer’s house. There was a mixture of people, gathered for drinks; some of the old guard, who had always moved indiscriminately between black and white worlds — Dorothea Welz, a jolly priest in a dishevelled cassock — two young University lecturers who were married, the correspondent of an English newspaper, and an unidentified pretty girl, Sam, Steven, his friend Peter, and a young coloured man from the Cape. The hostess moved about in a state of suppressed high excitement, offering sausages and cold potato chips; she hung beggar-like at the edge of every conversation, with her plate and her entreating smile. The host raced from glass to glass, chivvying people to drink faster, filling up for those who had. Theirs was the desperate hospitality of people who are unsure of themselves. They communicated their ill-ease to the guests; at first it seemed that this was going to be an evening of stunted conversation: Dorothea Welz smoked, Sam sat on the edge of his chair, ready to raise himself a few inches, politely, every time the hostess approached with her plate, Steven sat back looking down under arched brows at his shoes, with the expression of a man who is thinking his own thoughts and doesn’t care who knows it. But if the hospitality was overdone, it was, literally, intoxicating. We all passed swiftly from sluggish reserve to the slightly theatrical confidential mood common to drinking parties. The newspaperman told the lecturer’s wife: ‘What enchanting feet you have. I noticed them the moment you came in. If I were your husband I would give you rings to wear on your toes. Perfectly beautiful little feet.’ And, in her fancy sandals, she curled her toes with pleasure: ‘Bells on my toes, don’t you mean?’

In a huddle with Dorothea and the host, the priest — on one beer — listened open-mouthed and laughing, protesting, ‘Lovely! lovely!’ to the young coloured from the Gape, who was giving an imitation of coloured speakers at a political meeting. Peter, the university lecturer, and I were part of an exchange that centred on the newspaperman’s pretty girl, Sam, and Steven. Her particular style was that while she looked and dressed like a conventionally fashionable young woman, and had the sophisticated, consciously charming and slightly deferential manner with men that such women practise, she carried this into situations where such women would never be found. She was the progressive young woman in disguise, like the poet in the clerk’s neat suit. The disguise was so successful that Steven was clearly taken in; she seemed to him to be the one kind of white woman whom he would never meet, the private ornament of the white man’s house which represented to the white man the purity of his race and the height of his privilege. She and Steven got on particularly well together, but there was an edge of haughtiness to Steven’s voice, an extra-careless twist to his banter that suggested that he could not really bring himself to believe that she regarded him, as she treated him, like any other man.

There was a general sort of disagreement about the respective merits of newspapers, which somehow became an exchange of personal spelling idiosyncrasies, and, in turn, became a discussion about languages, and accents. We had all (except the priest) had so much to drink that all our talk veered to the personal. As the discussion sub-divided into smaller conversations, I heard the girl say to Steven, ‘Now take the way you speak. You speak English much more like an Indian than an African.’

Sam giggled and said to Steven and the girl,’ It would be a good idea to have a competition, you know. Like they have competitions for the beauty queens with the best legs, and the rest of them is covered up. We should all stand behind a screen and talk and get someone to guess what we are.’

‘It’ll be interesting to see what kind of English comes out of Africa, eventually,’ the girl said, with her easy manner of deep interest. ‘Don’t you think it may be almost a new language, as it is in America?’

‘That may be,’ said Steven condescendingly. ‘That may very well be, eh, Sam? We are talking it already,’ and as the others laughed, added, ‘But seriously, in Sophiatown the tsotsis have got a language of their own, a mixture of English, Afrikaans, Zulu, anything. Perhaps we should all learn to talk it.’

The girl picked up her drink and leaned forward. ‘That must be a kind of local Cockney, eh?’

‘Perhaps we should all understand each other,’ persisted Steven, sniggering and drinking down the rest of his brandy.