Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

‘…The Marxist solution is based on the elimination of contradiction between the form of social control and the economy: my Boer ancestors who trekked to found their agrarian republics, subjecting the indigenous peoples of tribal societies by the force of the musket against the assegai, were now in their turn resisting the economic forces that made their feudalistic form of social control obsolete. The white man had built a society that tried to contain and justify the contradictions of capitalist means of production and feudalist social forms. The resulting devastation I, a privileged young white, had had before my eyes since my birth. Black men, women and children living in the miseries of insecurity, poverty and degradation on the farms where I grew up, and in the “dark Satanic mills” of the industry that bought their labour cheap and disqualified them by colour from organizing themselves or taking part in the successive governments that decreed their lot as eternal inferiors, if not slaves….A change of social control in compatibility with the change in methods of production — known in Marxist language as “revolution”—in this I saw the answer to the racialism that was destroying our country then and — believe me! believe me! — is destroying it even more surely and systematically now. I could not turn away from that tragedy. I cannot now. I took up then the pursuit of the end to racialism and injustice that I have continued and shall continue as long as I live. I say with Luther: Here I stand. Ich kann nicht anders.’

An hour and a half. Nobody would dare stop him.

‘…stand before this court accused of acts calculated to overthrow the State and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in this country. But what we as Communists black and white working in harmony with others who do not share our political philosophy have set our sights on is the national liberation of the African people, and thus the abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all the peoples of this country… That alone has been our aim….beyond…there are matters the future will settle.

‘…For nearly thirty years the Communist Party allied itself as a legal organization with the African struggle for black rights and the extension of the franchise to the black majority. When the Communist Party was declared a banned organization, and later formed itself as an underground organization to which I belonged, it continued for more than a decade to take part in the struggle for black advancement by peaceful and non-violent means….At the end of that long, long haul, when the great mass movement of the African National Congress, and other movements, were outlawed; the ears of the government stopped finally against all pleas and demands — what advancement had been granted? What legitimate rights had been recognized, according to the “standards of Western civilization” our white governments have declared themselves dedicated to preserve and perpetuate? Where had so much effort and patience beyond normal endurance found any sign of reasonable recognition of reasonable aspirations?…and to this day, the black men who stand trial in this court as I do must ask themselves: why is it no black man has ever had the right of answering, before a black prosecutor, a black judge, to laws in whose drafting and promulgation his own people, the blacks, have had a say?’

Not the squat stern pantomime dame in a curly grey wig up on the bench: nobody dared silence him. Not the policemen who had brought him in, between them, not the plain-clothes men as familiar as tradesmen coming to the house since she was a child.

‘That is my answer to the question this court has asked, and my fellow citizens may be asking of me: how could I, a doctor, sworn to save lives, approve the even accidental risk to human life contained in the sabotage of selected, symbolic targets calculated not to harm people — the tactic to which the banned Congress leaders turned in the creation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation — turned to after three hundred years of repression by white guns and laws, after half a century of white indifference to blacks’ reasonably formulated, legitimate aspirations… the last resort short of certain bloodshed to which a desperate people turned as a means of drawing attention after everything else had been ignored—’

One hour and forty-seven minutes.

‘My covenant is with the victims of apartheid. The situation in which I find myself changes nothing…there will always be those who cannot live with themselves at the expense of fullness of life for others. They know “world history would be very easy to make if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances.”

‘…this court has found me guilty on all counts. If I have ever been certain of anything in my life, it is that I acted according to my conscience on all counts. I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.’

They heard him out: the words of the condemned man, and the last judgment on those who had condemned him, the judge learnedly and scrupulously impartial within the white man’s laws, the secret police and the uniformed police who enforced them, the white people, his own people, who made the laws. The sentence was what her father knew was coming to him; and she, and the lawyers and everyone around them throughout the trial knew was coming. The newspapers reported a ‘gasp through the court’ when the judge pronounced sentence of imprisonment for life. She did not hear any gasp. There was a split second when everything stopped; no breath, no heartbeat, no saliva, no flow of blood except her father’s. Everything rushed away from him, drew back, eclipsed. He alone, in his short big-headed body and his neat grey best suit, gave off the heat of life. He held them all at bay, blinded, possessed. Then his eyes lowered, she distinctly noticed his eyelids drop in an almost feminine gesture of selfconscious acknowledgment.

She looked straight ahead because she was afraid someone would speak to her or lay a hand on her.

At the back of the court where the blacks were crushed in, standing, so that when the seated whites turned to look up, they were overhung, the shouts flung out: Amandhla!

And the burst of response: Awethu!

Amandhla! Awethu! Amandhla! Awethu!

They fell upon her father: his flowers, laurels, embraces. He grinned blazingly and raised his white fist to theirs.

Then it was over. A thin back went down to the cells between many policemen. It was finished. The groupings dropped apart, lawyers, police, clerks moving across each other. The plump, desperately calm face of her father’s counsel, prematurely aged by jowls of tension round his gentle, rosy mouth, looked for her and she struggled to get to him. He kissed her and she sank for a moment into the cushion of that cheek, smelled something he put on when he shaved. A foreigner’s British voice was saying past her ear — And here life means life.

I know those hours afterwards. After someone has been taken away.

After my brother drowned. After arrests. After my mother died at ten past five in the afternoon at the hospital and when we got home the sprinkler was on in the garden and the washwoman’s baby was trying to catch the spray in his hands.

I think that while my mother was alive and my brother was a baby my parents arranged their activities so that one of them was in the clear, always, one would always have a good chance of being left behind to carry on the household if the other were arrested. Of course they also calculated on the Special Branch preferring to leave one of them apparently at large, in the hope of being led to others who were working underground. Nobody told me this, nobody discussed it at home — I just knew, as children know about things their mothers and fathers discuss in bed at night. Then when my brother and mother were gone, there was me. If my father were to be arrested, there would always be me.