Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

Flora didn’t say it was going to be a lunch party. She’d implied wistfully she and William and I had not had a quiet talk and a meal together, just us, for too long. There were three other people; a handsome, semitic-looking Indian lawyer from Durban (for me? — he was allotted to my right at table), a white woman lawyer so perfectly groomed she appeared to be under glaze; and Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, a vast expanse of navy blue crimplene, patent shoes, gilt costume jewellery, like an Afrikaans cabinet minister’s wife at the opening of Parliament. Flora still manages to have these 1960s mixed lunch parties although it must be difficult to find blacks, now, who will come to them.

Mrs Mkhonza is often ‘featured’ in the women’s pages of white newspapers as an example of what black people can achieve despite their disadvantages. She is one of the rare black petty capitalists — what Marisa’s cousin Fats would call a tycoon, who somehow manages to circumvent some of the laws that prevent blacks from trading on a scale that makes white tycoons. She has petrol service station concessions all over the Transvaal black areas, general stores and — Marisa adds to the story of success and enterprise — is a rent racketeer, obtaining leasehold over township housing by bribing officials, and then profitably letting out rooms in her slum yards to people for whom influx control makes it hopeless to expect to find somewhere to live legitimately. Marisa herself sometimes uses Mama Mkhonza, when it is urgent to find ‘somewhere to stay’ for one whose presence in Soweto is not open; Mrs Daphne Mkhonza may be an exploiter of blacks, following the example of the whites who admire her self-improvement initiative, but she’s also a black woman: she’s accepted, like the black policemen.

When we sat down to lunch the white woman lawyer was emphasizing the sociological aspects of legal cases referred to her — she is consultant to an advice bureau dealing mainly with coloured women, squatters, indigents — the prosecutions for incest, rape and desertion as an indictment of living conditions rather than individual criminal tendencies. Whom to punish, how to redress? What she said was concisely analysed, true; her napkin-touched lips shaped and her hands with their pushed-back cuticles outlined human destruction. The smugness of her appearance was perhaps a defence against the self-defeating nature of the good work she did. In such company no one has the bad taste to point out this common characteristic of ‘working within the system’. We all listened respectfully under Flora’s eye; William with politeness that hopes it will do for admiration or whatever else is called for. The Indian lawyer exchanged a few professional anecdotes in the same context, with a slight change of emphasis — there were laws — did we know? — laws still in force in Natal, whereby an Indian husband could have his wife imprisoned for adultery. A relic of the days when labourers imported from Gujerat were indentured to work in the sugar-cane fields, a perpetuation of the image of the South African Indian as eternally a foreigner in the country of his birth, living by mores that set his behaviour patterns apart. The general theme of conversation and the current preoccupation of Flora were the same. Mrs Eunice Harwood wanted to make black and white women aware of such rights as they had, over their children, their property and their person, for a start; Mrs Daphne Mhkonza was not only an economically-emancipated black, she was a black woman beating white businessmen with their own marked cards. In her mood of political ecumenism, Flora no doubt saw engagement in a struggle for black rights as a natural extension of the limits of the woman lawyer’s scrupulously constitutional commitment, and Mama Mkhonza’s recruitment to the system — Orde Greer would expect me to phrase it that way — as a raid upon it. The current ground of common cause was women’s liberation, the roast lamb was victualling Flora’s little caucus for a meeting that was going to take place that afternoon.

— Where? — If it’s true William has decreed Flora must stick to harmless liberal activities these days, he felt obliged to show some interest in them.

She put down her knife and fork and opened her eyes at him, smiling round to draw everyone into the spectacle — Here, my darling, here. In your house. — The coquettish wifely frankness was that of a woman who no longer has adultery to conceal and enjoys displaying an innocent flirtation. Let him be grateful it was only to be a meeting that was to be there, in his house, quite harmless, too innocuous, maybe, to provide anything much of interest to BOSS, whose man — or rather woman, on this occasion — certainly would be present as a matter of routine observation of any assertion of common purpose between whites and blacks.

And of course I was to be drawn in, too — that was why I had been produced at lunch, although Flora knows quite well that as a named person my position at meetings is a delicate one. Someone like me may attend, so long as the purpose of the meeting is not to be construed as in any way political. One may take part in discussion, yes; but the contribution can’t be recorded in the minutes or reported in the press. Meanwhile surveillance has taken down what one has said. And if the subject touches upon political rights, for example the rights of women as our kind (the faithful and their faithful hangers-on, the Floras) see these: the oppression of black women primarily by race and only secondarily by sex discrimination… My attendance could bring me into court as a contravention; Flora offered her statement, prepared for this — You’re William’s visitor, not mine. Mnh? Isn’t that so? Why shouldn’t she be? You simply happened to turn up to see him while I was having a meeting in our livingroom.—

It is true that her friends — of our kind — are old hands at breaking the minor hobbles of the restrictions on their lives. I should know as well as anyone how to make a nuisance of myself, using the courts as the only political platform I could get at, getting my name in the papers, starkly eloquent of the gag on my mouth I’ve inherited in the family tradition, since only my name — Lionel Burger’s daughter, last of that line — can be reported, not my ‘utterances’. That’s how they perceive her, people who read the name. I am a presence. In this country, among them. I do not speak. Except to you, out of a habit, formed in the dark in your cottage, that came late.

William made objections, naturally. Rosa was not going to run any risk of being picked up just because of some damn meeting. I laughed to stop them bickering about me. Mrs Eunice Whatnot, her face worked-over as if it were a portrait rather than a face, looked at what a named person was like. Mama Mkhonza majestically bridled on my behalf. — Ter-rible. Honestly! These people! Really terrible. What do they want with a young girl? Why can’t they leave you alone just to live!—

— Like anyone else: I had undertaken to Brandt Vermeulen. And I could see, I alone, as I did the passport in the wardrobe, Flora’s meeting as what could stop me. I had only to jeer kindly at William’s fussing, come up to Flora’s expectations and sit in quietly among the women listening to the proceedings; stand up and have my say. I have faith in BOSS; one of the faces, not so easy to pick out as the men’s usually are, but surely there, would make a note of the presence — my presence. Unknown to anyone the passport in the wardrobe nobody knew about would be listed invalid by the Department of the Interior. The police would demand its surrender forthwith. I could give it back without having used it. Maybe there wouldn’t be any charge or court appearance; simply the demand for the passport, their side of the bargain withdrawn.