Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The trance of a common resentment fell momentarily upon those who had been bitterly opposing each other and would do so again in the next breath. Dhladhla, James, the schoolmaster, Fats’s satellites, celebrated that romance of humiliation by which and from which each in his different way draws strength and anger to revenge it.

— treated like nothings, living worse than dogs, eating dry mealie-meal, not even shoes for your feet in winter-time… today they’ve got everything they want, man. Businesses, big cars—

— You’ve got the nucleus of a black bourgeoisie ready and willing to be co-opted to the white ruling class? — Orde Greer had the air of leading towards answers he wanted to be given.

Dhladhla stated and accused impersonally and passionately. — The chance — you know what your chance is? You know what you’re talking about? Race exploitation with the collaboration of blacks themselves. That is why we don’t work with whites. All collaboration with whites has always ended in exploitation of blacks.—

— Do you believe that was always the whites’ object? All whites?—

I spoke to Dhladhla for the first time. My voice sounded to me in a tone of quiet enquiry; Orde Greer’s face dramatized it, to me, as tight-lipped.

— Even if they didn’t know it. Yes, it was! It is! We must liberate ourselves as blacks, what has a white got to do with that?—

Orde Greer was pressing. — Whatever his political ideas?—

— It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t live black, what does he know what a black man needs? He’s only going to tell him—

— You don’t believe there is any political ideology, any system where the beliefs of a white man have nothing to do with his being white?—

— I don’t say that. I’m talking about here. This place. Where Vorster sits. Some other country perhaps the white man’s political ideas can have nothing to do with white. But here, he lives with Vorster. You understand?—

— And if he goes to jail? — Orde Greer was possessed, inspired.

So it was all for my benefit, this interrogation.

— To jail with you?—

— In jail! — A splutter of accusing laughter. — He goes for his ideas about me, I go for my ideas about myself — Dhladhla stabbed at his bare chest, a medallion on a leather thong jumping there.

Orde Greer produced me. — He died in jail. This girl’s father. You know that? — It was irresistible, inevitable.

I don’t know how I look when I’m being used, an object of inquiry, regarded respectfully, notebook in hand, or stripped by you and my Swede to assess my strength like a female up for auction in a slave market. Perhaps I smiled ‘offensively’ before Duma and Orde Greer; you complained of that in the cottage — I produce a privacy so insulting that those well-disposed towards me don’t feel themselves considered worthy of rebuff; even the slap of the ‘cold fish’ is withheld.

Orde Greer had his drink held in the curve of his hand, away from him, for emphasis or balance. Dhladhla didn’t look at me but spoke for me to hear. He was aware I had been watching his face all the time, when he talked and while he was preparing to talk again, his replies flickering over it in soft flashes of energy. It was a face of such plastic beauty, one would think of such a head as ‘made of’—that is, solid, cast of a single perfect material all through, smooth and dark, formed alluvially under the pressure of time and race. — He knows what he was doing in jail. A white knows what he must do if he doesn’t like what he is. That’s his business. We only know what we must do ourselves.—

The schoolmaster blinked with impatience and distress. — How many people believe you can turn your back on white people? It’s rubbish! They won’t disappear. They’ll turn around with guns… and how many blacks want to fight…we don’t want killing, we know it’s our blood it’s going to be. People would rather see some leaders — (he fended off objections) I’m not talking about the political leaders in jail, I mean just people in the community who’ve come up, even businessmen, big shots in Soweto, people who can meet whites on their own level in commerce and so on — they’d rather see these people get a footing from where they can push. Then others feel they will be able to follow. — They want to be alive.—

James Nyaluza smiled at what he could have expected to hear. — Of course. But they don’t realize the racial exclusiveness of the white ruling class’s economic and political power is a primary feature of the set-up. If whites are frightened into taking in some members of the black middle class, this is only going to be in an auxiliary and dependent capacity. There wouldn’t even be the perks of political office. Not even a puppet ministry. Not even the token power you get if you’re a Matanzima or a Buthelezi in your Bantustan ‘homeland’.—

— You mean they’d be like the black police are already. As Dhladhla said — just collaborators in a continued system of race repression?—

But nobody took up Orde Greer’s analogy; he doesn’t have the curious tactfulness necessary towards the question of the black police who, although they have never yet refused to act against their own people, are still regarded as fellow victims, bullying and raiding under the orders of a common oppressor. Whites, not blacks, are ultimately responsible for everything blacks suffer and hate, even at the hands of their own people; a white must accept this if he concedes any responsibility at all. If he feels guilty, he is a liberal; in that house where I grew up there was no guilt because it was believed it was as a ruling class and not a colour that whites assumed responsibility. It wasn’t something bleached into the flesh.

I was carried into the talk as one’s feet carry one into some pattern of movement — a boxer’s footwork, a runner’s crouch — for which they have been trained. My voice crossed against and raised itself with others. — But is that so, James? In the last ditch, mightn’t the whites be prepared to bring in enough black capitalists to create a class-across-colour identity and solidarity — and consequently a common interest in holding down the black masses?—

Marisa spoke with the authority of the Island. — I know that’s what Joe’s afraid of — he thinks it would link up with the ‘homeland’ leaders, a way of keeping cheap labour, migrant labour, with a payoff for the ‘homeland’ crowd and the favoured blacks in the white areas.—

— That’s what I mean. The sort of thing the liberal opposition discuss when they try to get together. And the white Progressives are even talking about ‘shared power’: they actually do have in mind something in the nature of political office — for the ‘right’ black people, of course. That could have tremendous appeal for middle-class blacks. It goes further than offering Fats a voice on the national Boxing Board, or a black businessman a seat among the directors of Anglo-American.—

Orde put a palm out in a staying gesture to James on one side, me on the other. — D’you think a black group like that can have a place in the national movement?—

James answered as I knew, marking off each word in my mind, he could be counted to. — Never. Its interests would stand in complete contradiction to those of the people as a whole, even in the context of national aims.—

— So what you want me to do? — not let my boy fight overseas until you decide how we’re going to smash apartheid? — Fats turned in almost comic dismay to Marisa. — Will it really help Joe and Nelson get out? — He slopped a gout of whisky into James’s glass, stopped with a grin before Dhladhla, who did not drink and whose abstinence was eloquent disapproval of the corrupting effect of white men’s indulgences on others. — Wait for him to raise black consciousness so high Vorster and Kruger are going to see this big thing falling on them?—