Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

She didn’t know how to tell me, me of all people, what she knew we knew. It will be there for everyone to read in the critical study of my father’s life — without giving away any useful information about how the struggle is being carried on in the present; of that I have been assured. There is nothing but failure, until the day the Future is achieved. It is the only success. Others — in specific campaigns with specific objectives, against the pass laws, against forced dispossession of land — would lead to piecemeal reforms. These actions fail one after another, they have failed since before we were born; failures were the events of our childhood, failures are the normal circumstances of our adulthood — her parents under house arrest, my father dead in jail, my courting done in the prison visiting room. In this experience of being crushed on individual issues the masses come, as they can in no other way, to understand that there is no other way: state power must be overthrown. Failure is the accumulated heritage of resistance without which there is no revolution. The chapter will be headed by a maxim from Marx which Lionel Burger spoke from the dock before he was sentenced. ‘World history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.’

Her words threshed about, clutched at indignation and slid into dismay. — But Rosa! They’ve had the worst of it. It’ll be different for us. Whatever happens, we’re lucky to be born later—

We were suddenly plunged, reckless in confession, pooling the forbidden facts of life.

— Exactly what your father says. — This kind of thing you’re doing, does it make sense to you?—

She looked the way I must have, for you, when you described to me watching your mother and her lover fucking in the spare bedroom. She would deal with what was put before her without allowing herself to see it, just as I did. — It’s part of the strategy of the struggle. In the present phase — still. That’s all there is to it. But you know.—

Of course I know. I could have quoted General Giap’s definition of the art of insurrection as knowing how to find forms of struggle appropriate to the political situation at each stage. The huge strikes of black workers in Natal with which her mother will have become involved even if they were spontaneous to begin with, these are an example of Lenin’s observation that the people sense sooner than the leaders the change in the objective conditions of struggle, yes. But the necessity for political propaganda remains. Someone must photocopy the open letter to Vorster. At the risk of encouraging adventurism, the necessity remains for the few white revolutionaries to be provided with a role. As long ago as 1962 it is documented that my father was one of those, at last mainly black, at the sixth underground conference of the South African Communist Party who achieved the final perspective, the ideological integration, the synthesis of twenty years’ dialectic: it is just as impossible to conceive of workers’ power separated from national liberation as it is to conceive of true national liberation separated from the destruction of capitalism. The future he was living for until the day he died can be achieved only by black people with the involvement of the small group of white revolutionaries who have solved the contradiction between black consciousness and class consciousness, and qualify to make unconditional common cause with the struggle for full liberation, e.g., a national and social revolution. It is necessary for these few to come into the country secretly or be recruited within it from among the bad risks, romantic journalists and students, as well as the good risks, the children, lovers and friends of the old guard, and for them to be pinched off between the fingers of the Special Branch one by one, in full possession of their invisible ink, their clandestine funds, their keys (provided by another sort of bad risk) to the offices of prominent financiers with photocopiers. Such things are ridiculous (like a child’s ‘rude’ drawing of the primal mystery of the mating act) — she could hardly believe the stupid daring, the lifting of my shoulders against shameful laughter forcing its way past suppression in my face — only if one steps aside out of one’s historically-determined role and cannot read their meaning. These are — we are — the instruments of struggle appropriate to this phase. I looked at her, inciting us. — What conformists: the children of our parents.—

— Dick and Ivy conformists! — Her face screwed towards me.

— Not them — us. Did you ever think of that? Other people break away. They live completely different lives. Parents and children don’t understand each other — there’s nothing to say, between them. Some sort of natural insurance against repetition… Not us. We live as they lived.—

— Oh, bourgeois freedoms. It’s not possible for us. We want something else. Christ, I don’t have to fight poor old Dick and Ivy for it — it doesn’t matter if they bug me in plenty of ways, my mother particularly. They want it too.—

— But were you given a choice? Just think.—

— Yes… I suppose if you want to look at it like that… But no! Rosa! What choice? Rosa? In this country, under this system, looking at the way blacks live — what has the choice to do with parents? What else could you choose? — She was excited now, had the gleam of someone who feels she is gaining influence, drew back the unfallen tears through her nose in ugly snorts. It’s axiomatic the faults you see in others are often your own; the critical are the self-despising. But this’s something different. Not a mote in the eye. That girl whom I pitied, at whom my curiosity was directed, so different from me in the ‘unimportant’ aspects — I watched her as if she were myself. I wanted something from the victim in her and perhaps I got it.

As for her, she mistook the heat of my determination for warmth between us — but that I feel only for her mother and father. She felt she had established fresh contact, other than the outgrown childhood one. Attracted by the possibility of friendship with me — she is graceless rather than shy, used to dodging the cuffs of rebuff — she forgot I had failed her — us — our way of life. As a clenched fist opens on its treasures, bits of stone in the eyes of a stranger, she told me about the man she was in love with, hesitating over his name and withholding it. Then I couldn’t stop her telling me that the girl and baby, her friend with a child, for whom she wanted a flat, was married to him although they weren’t living together. The girl was ‘a terrific person’, they ‘really get on’. She is the daughter of a professor, an associate of my father who fled long ago and teaches in a black country. The professor’s hostage to the future: Clare Terblanche will recruit her, if the remark that they ‘really get on’ doesn’t already mean she is coming up from the Cape because the strategy of the present phase requires this. The lover, the husband — he’s one of us, too. Jealousy and anguish between the three of them (perhaps the professor’s daughter is really coming to try to get back her man?) is something they will know they must not allow to interfere with what they have to do. Clare Terblanche will rub exasperatedly at the naked patches, like peeling paintwork, on her poor face and snap at her mother, Ivy, who (it comes out between girl-friends in confession) is working with the lover on his Wages Commission. But Clare Terblanche’s pride and guilt at sleeping with the other’s man, the temptation of being preferred, the pain of being rejected — who knows how it will resolve itself (it’s the sort of thing we like to leave to women’s magazines) — these will not interfere with the work to be done. It is only people who wallow in the present who submit. My mother didn’t, as Lily Letsile demanded, ‘fill up that hole’ where my brother drowned. The swimming-pool remained to give pleasure to other people, black children who had never been into a pool before could be taught to swim there by my father.