Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

The sons of distinguished families also often move away from the traditional milieu and activities in discordance with whatever their particular level in frontier society has confined them to. Just as the successful Jewish or Indian country storekeeper’s son becomes a doctor or lawyer in the city, or the son of the shift-boss on the goldmine goes into business, Brandt Vermeulen left farm, church and party caucus and went to Leyden and Princeton to read politics, philosophy and economics, and to Paris and New York to see modern art. He did not come back, Europeanized, Americanized by foreign ideas of equality and liberty, to destroy what the great-great-grandfather died for at the hands of a kaffir and the Boer general fought the English for; he came back with a vocabulary and sophistry to transform the home-whittled destiny of white to rule over black in terms that the generation of late-twentieth-century orientated, Nationalist intellectuals would advance as the first true social evolution of the century, since nineteenth-century European liberalism showed itself spent in the failure of racial integration wherever this was tried, and Communism, accusing the Afrikaner of enslaving blacks under franchise of God’s will, itself enslaved whites and yellows along with blacks in denial of God’s existence. He and his kind were the first to be sophisticated enough to laugh at the sort of thing only denigrators of the Afrikaner volk were supposed to laugh at: the Dutch Reformed Churches’ denouncement of the wickedness of Sunday sport or cinema performances, the censorship board’s ruling that white breasts on a magazine cover were pornography while black ones were ethnic art. He did not shrink from open contact with blacks as his father’s generation did, and he regarded the Immorality Act as the relic of an antiquated libidinous backyard guilt about sex that ought to be scrapped, since in the new society of separate nations each flying the flag of its own skin, the misplacement of the white man’s semen in a black vagina would emerge, transformed out of all recognition of source, as the birth of yet another nation. He was a director of one of the first insurance companies that had broken into the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish domination of finance when he was a schoolboy, but his avocation was a small art publishing firm he indulged himself with at the sacrifice of losing in it his share of the profits of a wine farm inheritance from his mother’s family. At symposia, where he was the invariable choice of white liberals to contribute views fascinatingly awful to them, he was animated on the platform in the company of black delegates, and widely quoted in press reports. I don’t see you through spectacles of fear and guilt…my perceptions, like those of my fellow Afrikaner nationalists, are of positive and fruitful interaction between nation and nation, and not of racial rivalry. This will exclude political power-sharing within a single country. Frankly, Afrikaners will not accept that… I foresee a future in which the different nations could reach a peaceful co-existence through hard bargaining…

An English-language newspaper expose once named him a member of the Afrikaner political Mafia whose brethren rule the country from within parliament; and he was interviewed dealing with that, too, smilingly. Why only the Broederbond? Why not the Ku-Klux-Klan or the League of Empire Loyalists? So it was not revealed how high his influence in high places might go. He had close friendships in several ministries. An elegant photographic essay, very different from the usual sort of Come-to-sunny-South-Africa information publication, appeared under his imprint in all the country’s embassies; there were people in the Department of Information who found ‘dynamic’ his ideas about improving the country’s image without either deviating from principles or being so naive as to lie about them.

But his closest friendship was placed within the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry where passports are granted; so that was it. It was hardly credible to surveillance that Burger’s daughter could expect she might ever get one of those; what was of more interest was what should be making her try. During the April period of her visits to the friend of the departments of Information and the Interior, the Portuguese regime was overthrown in Lisbon, and the lever that had finally dislodged that came from the mutiny of Portuguese troops refusing to fight Frelimo in their final colonial war: it was possible she had lain low on instructions ever since her father’s imprisonment waiting to serve just such a situation as this — presenting herself ‘clean’, she wanted to get out of the country because it was necessary to set up new lines of increased contact to take full advantage of the bases Samora Machel would offer for infiltration from a Marxist Moçambique now established just over the border South Africans unlike her, with passports, used to cross to eat prawns and go spear-fishing. Certainly it was known her kind had had connections with Frelimo all along (that was why the Terblanche woman and her daughter were picked up and put in detention the first week of May, the old man left out to see who would come to him). The solidarity-with-Frelimo ‘Freedom’ meeting of thousands of blacks, Africans and Indians at Currie’s Fountain in Durban brought this connection into the open; interrogation of people arrested there could be relied upon to provide new leads, and no doubt these would double back to the old sources. There was her half-brother in Tanzania; he was surveyed there, too; some of those secretly recruited for military training as Freedom Fighters already have been recruited and receive their little stipend wherever they are. The fact that there was no information she had contact with the brother beyond the two letters after the father died, that indeed it was known he did not have her address after she moved to a flat in the city, did not mean he was not prepared, through a third person, for contact with her wherever she might go abroad, or a welcome for her under another identity in Dar es Salaam. Her father’s daughter; she might try anything, that one. But activity within the country suggested by the fact that she should attempt to pass out and in again was what was of concern; there was no hope at all for her that she would get what she had never had, what had been refused her once and for all when she tried to run away from her mother and father after the boy she wanted.

The freeway had been completed since she drove there last; sections, including that which had bulldozed the corrugated-iron cottage and incorporated old loquat trees into landscaping, were linked and distance shortened. The loops hovered at a. smooth remove from the milky-coffee river that became a stony ditch in winter, and drowned animals in summer; past country estates where horse-jumps were laid out; cut tracks where an old black man was hauling what was left of a car chassis to a community of Ndebele houses like a mud fort on a horizon of deep veld grasses. Rosa Burger was able to see all these seasons and incidents from then and now; on those other journeys there was room in her for nothing between a point of departure and arrival. The road set her gliding down towards the town between hills softly brilliant with the green of thorn scrub. The monumental shrine to the myth of the volk, shape of a giant’s musical-box away on the left somewhere; a signpost for the pleasure grounds of the wild kloof on the right. And then in past the official’s house in the fine old garden, the trunk of the huge palm-tree holding up its nave of shade, the warders’ houses in sunny domestic order, the ox-blood brick prison with the blind façade on the street — the narrow apertures darkened with bars and heavy diamond-mesh wire, impossible to decide, ever, which corresponded with which category of room for which purpose, and along which corridor in there, to left or right, there was waiting a particular setting of table and two chairs; the police car and van parked outside, a warder come off duty flirting with a girl with yolk-coloured hair and a fox terrier in her arms; the door; the huge worn door with its missing studs and grooves exactly placed for ever. The door was soon passed, and the military headquarters that came next, set back in a gravelled garden with another great palm-tree from the era of the old Republic like the building beside it, a charming example (her father, who had been to Holland, had told her) of Boer colonial adaptation of the seventeenth-century town mansions along the Heerengracht in Amsterdam, built of doll’s house bricks and picked out in white along the bungled proportion of gables too small for its height. The suburban post office, where prisoners’ visitors and warders made up the queues… the Potgieter Street franking enough to convey on an envelope the impress of prison itself.