Writing from Johannesburg: Nadine Gordimer in the global anti-apartheid movement

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Nadine Gordimer navigated the political exigencies of being an anti-apartheid writer in Johannesburg as the multiracial literary world of the 1950s was destroyed. In the 1950s, her fiction introduced Johannesburg’s counterculture to a global audience, leading to invitations to provide an inside perspective on apartheid. The global witness role that she assumed grew more awkward as she grew more isolated at home, pushing her toward the central commitment of her political life: advancing the freedom of South African writers and readers, by speaking out against censorship and advocating for a national literature that transcended apartheid’s constraints. Drawing upon her archives at the University of the Witwatersrand and Indiana University, this article examines how Gordimer’s life in Johannesburg in an era of exile both made her career possible and made her politics awkward to enact and to write about, as her position made political purity impossible.

KEYWORDS:

• Nadine Gordimer
• Johannesburg
• apartheid
• censorship
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Center for Advancement of Research and Scholarship at Bridgewater State University for their support for this research. Thanks to Andrew Bank, Nancy Jacobs, Jill Kelly, T.J. Tallie, and the participants in the 2017 meetings of the Southern African Historical Society and the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Note on contributor

Meghan Healy-Clancy is an assistant professor of History at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and a non-resident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She is the author of A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (University of Virginia Press 2014; UKZN Press 2013), as well as numerous articles on gender, politics, and culture in South Africa.

Notes

1 Bailey’s African History Archive, Johannesburg, Drum Social Histories Series, Photograph by A Kumalo.

2 Harvard University, Houghton Library, Harry Levin Papers, Series 1, Volume 370, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to H Levin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22 April 1971.

3 Indiana University, Lilly Library, Nadine Gordimer Papers (IU, NG), Box 4 Folder 21, ‘Books Read in 1938’.

4 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 11, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to M Blumberg, London, 16 January 1963.

5 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 1, Letter from E Mphahlele, Johannesburg, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 19 March 1953.

6 IU, NG, Box 4 Folder 1, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to H Rubinstein, London, 11 August 1953.

7 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 1, Letter from A Paton, South Coast, Natal, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 10 April 1950.

8 IU, NG, Box 4 Folder 1, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to H Rubinstein, London, 11 August 1953.

9 IU, NG, Box 4 Folder 1, Letter from M Best, Viking Press, New York, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 22 August 1958.

10 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 11, Letter from Gordimer to Blumberg, 16 January 1963.

11 University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers, Nadine Gordimer Papers (UW, NG), File A1.1, Letter from R Angell, Holiday, New York, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 13 April 1954; UW, NG, File A1.2, Letter from H Sions, Holiday, New York, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 1 August 1958.

12 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 6, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to D Jones, Nashville, 20 May 1959.

13 Ibid.

14 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 4, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to S Lawrence, Atlantic Monthly, New York, 28 October 1957.

15 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 11, Letter from Gordimer to Blumberg, 16 January 1963.

16 UW, NG, File A4.14, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to RS Roberts, Johannesburg, 5 March 2003.

17 UW, NG, File A4.14, Letter from RS Roberts, Johannesburg, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 27 February 2003.

18 UW, NG, File A4.14, Letter from Gordimer to Roberts, 5 March 2003.

19 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 18, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to M Davidson, London, 2 April 1967.

20 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 17, Letter from N Gordimer to Christian Action, London, 23 November 1966.

21 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 23, Letter from P Wensberg, Polaroid, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 10 November 1970.

22 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 19, Box 1, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to G Lanning, The Kenyon Review, Ohio, 11 January 1968; IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 18, Letter from Gordimer to Lanning, 10 October 1967.

23 UW, NG, File H4, N Gordimer, ‘W.H. Smith & Son Annual Literary Award Speech’, 17 October 1961.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 11, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to J Patten, The Star, Johannesburg, 1 February 1963.

28 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 13, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to The Editor, Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, 22 September 1964.

29 IU, NG, Box 1 Folder 16, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to R Seaver, Grove Press, New York, 22 April 1966.

30 National Archives of South Africa, Cape Town Records Centre, Directorate of Publications Papers (CPT, IDP), 1/8, P76/2/103, Etienne Malan, Report on The Late Bourgeois World, 19 March 1976.

31 UW, NG, File F3, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to Interior Minister, Pretoria, 23 January 1973.

32 UW, NG, File F5, ‘Lecture on Censorship in South Africa’, n.d. (circa mid- to late-1970s).

33 CPT, IDP, 3/73, P79/6/73, JCW van Rooyen, Acting Chairman, Publications Appeal Board, Case No 64/79, Regarding the Publication ‘Burger’s Daughter’ by Nadine Gordimer, 3 October 1979.

34 CPT, IDP, 3/203 P87/5/122, MG Scholtz, Report on Sport of Nature, 13 July 1987.

35 UW, NG, File F.1, ‘98 Kinds of Censorship’, for PEN America, New York, 1973.

36 IU, NG, Box 2 Folder 4, Letter from D Brutus, Austin, Texas, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 31 January 1975.

37 IU, NG, Box 2 Folder 4, Letter from N Gordimer, Johannesburg, to D Brutus, Austin, Texas, 21 February 1975.

38 UW, NG, File H6, Letter from G Mbeki ANC, Eastern Cape, to N Gordimer, Johannesburg, 19 November 1990.

39 UW, Historical Papers, Delmas Treason Trial Papers, File M1.1, ‘Defense Witness Nadine Gordimer, Author’.

40 UW, NG, File N1, ‘COSAW Pledge’.

41 UW, NG, File 3, ‘COSAW Minutes’, 1–2 July 1988.