Unknown quantities
Paul Ableman
July's People Nadine Gordimer (Cape pp. 160, £5.95) This is a short, dense, distinguished and ultimately unsatisfying novel. Most readers expect fiction to provide clarification of issues and definition of character. Nadine Gordimer's work, and never so much as in the present book, offers us rather a fragile assembly of interlocking ambiguities. In this, as in her elliptical style, she resembles William Faulkner and it is no accident that the American's dominant theme was also the relationship between a master white race and a disinherited black one. In any society governed by the inescapable tensions of such a situation, reality becomes not only too appalling but too complex to form the basis for stable attitudes. Oppressed and oppressors alike must continually adapt to new options and challenges. This pervasive instability is superbly embodied in one passage of the present work.
Maureen Smales, now married and with adolescent children, recalls an incident from her youth. She was walking home from school with her friend Lydia, a young black woman, when a photographer asked if he might photograph them. They agreed, and the man promised to send them a print of the picture. He failed to do so, but years later someone showed Maureen a reproduction of it in a book where it had there been used as an illustration of 'white herrenvolk attitudes and life-style; the marvellous Photograph of the white schoolgirl and the black woman with the girl's school case on her head'. Warmth and affection between the races has mysteriously metamorphosed into a symbol of exploitation. At first Maureen was indignant, but then she reflected: 'Did the book, placing the pair in its context give the reason she and Lydia, in their affection and ignorance, didn't know?' The truth in an unjust society is an indefinite regress and the bottom line, if there were one, would always show the governing constant: injustice.
July's People, according to the blurb, is about 'South Africa to-day, yesterday — and perhaps tomorrow'. This is an odd claim since it seems to be, insofar as the ruling ambiguity permits any objective assessment, to be exclusively about 'tomorrow'. Smouldering black anger has finally flared into armed rebellion. Johannesberg is a battlefield. Maureen and Bamford Smales, and their three children, are smuggled out of the war-torn city by July, who has been their house-boy for 15 years. Superficially, the situation is clear. Maureen and 'Barn' have always been good employers, white liberals perpetually on the point of abandoning South Africa for some more morally salubrious part of the world. They have been, by prevailing standards, indulgent to July, giving him decent quarters, allowing him to have his mistress and friends to visit and striving to dissuade him from his ingrained habit of addressing Barn as 'master'. Now they are apparently reaping the rewards of their benevolence.
Their former servant escorts them, in their own `bakkie' or bush-car, 500 kilometers north to his native village where they are largely left to fend for themselves in a native hut. Temporarily safe from black vengeance, receiving garbled and inconclusive reports on their transistor radio, they await developments. If the whites win, presumably they will be able to go home. If the blacks triumph, they will have to make a further break for coast or frontier. Meanwhile, they learn what all oppressors, even reluctant ones, strive to avoid learning: the truth about how their victims live. The thatched hut is alive with insects and rodents. It is either too hot, from the fire which their neighbours maintain and recommend, or too cold. The nearby river is polluted. The garbage of their former lives — bits of string and plastic — is now a prized possession. Green vegetables are found not in shops but clinging stubbornly to the ground amongst other, and sometimes poisonous, plants. Under the harsh conditions, the very fabric of their former suburban family life begins to fall apart.
More significantly, they begin to perceive that their loyal servant is really a stranger. They knew nothing of his tribal life. They did not even know his real name: Mwawate. Mwawate, or July as they still address him, by degrees assumes control of their `bakkie' and learns to drive it. He keeps the car's keys. This is logical since he needs the vehicle to fetch things for the whites but the suspicion grows in their minds that July might have brought them to his village in order to humiliate them and appropriate their property. But it remains merely one possible interpretation out of many. Gradually Maureen perceives that the former relationship, based on what she always considered mutual respect, simply didn't exist. The two races may share the same Euclidian space but they live in different dimensions. July is revealed as an unknown being with almost completely enigmatic motives.
As liberals, the Smales, however disconsolately, are compelled to welcome the revolution. Then the final blow to their reeling value-system is inflicted when July presents them to the supreme chief of the district. The ruler tries to win Bamford's support for the impending struggle against the blacks. The rural natives want no part of the urban insurrection. The book ends with the arrival of a helicopter, but we never learn whether it is bringing friends or foes. Just as there are no certainties in racerotted South Africa, so Nadine Gordimer will grant us none in her narrative. July's People is a serious contribution to the heroic and impressive body of literature that South African novelists have amassed about their unhappy country but, because of its impressionistic style and fluctuating ambiguities, it is an elusive and depressing book.
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