Nadine Gordimer: Writer and anti-apartheid activist

South African author and 'crusader for equality', Nadine Sylvia Gordimer passed away peacefully in her sleep on July 13, 2014, at her home in Johannesburg at 90 years of age. The country's ruling African National Congress (ANC) praised her as an author and an activist saying, "Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror."
Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991 for her novels that explored the complex relationships and human cost of racial conflict in apartheid-era South Africa. Prof Adam Habib, vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, described Gordimer as a "revered intellect."
Nadine Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town east of Johannesburg on Highveld, where gold was discovered in the 1880s. Her father emigrated from Lithuania as a teenager at the close of the 19th century. Her mother came from London in 1906. Gordimer's childhood was completely segregated from the black miners, whose labour fuelled the local economy. After she was diagnosed with a 'heart murmur' at age 11, her mother withdrew her from school and consigned her to bed, where a fondness for reading and writing grew into a great passion. Her first marriage, to Gerald Gavronsky, ended in divorce after three years. Her second marriage, to the art dealer and refugee from Nazi Germany Reinhold Cassirer, lasted until his death in 2002. They had a son, Hugo. Her survivors comprise two children, Hugo and Oriane.
Gordimer began writing as a child and, without revealing her age, sent her first short story to a magazine at the age of fifteen which got published. Books like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle first opened her eyes to the "rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society" around her.
Nadine Gordimer was first a writer of fictions and a defender of creativity and expression. But as a white South African who hated apartheid's dehumanisation of blacks, she was also a determined political activist in the struggle to end white minority rule in her country. In her fifteen novels and scores of short stories over seven decades, Ms. Gordimer wrote vividly about the destitute townships to which blacks were confined during South Africa's white-minority rule. Her books often focused on the tensions the apartheid government created between lovers, neighbours, employers and their employees. As a result, South Africa's apartheid government banned three of her books in 1948. Her works were published in 40 languages around the world. Nadine Gordimer published her first novel in 1953. Her reputation abroad grew with books like The Conservationist, which won the Man Booker Prize in 1974. It tells story of a white industrialist struggling to keep nature and his black tenants in line on a hobby farm outside Johannesburg. The Conservationist is a powerful allegory of the ultimate futility of the apartheid system. Gordimer's protagonist is at the pinnacle of South African wealth and eschews emotional attachment. Yet he can't control his world: his son and mistress leave him; a flood ravages his farm. The writer believed depicting apartheid's impact on private lives was more valuable than overt political activism. Still, she joined the ANC while it was officially banned and was a prominent booster for the party in the run-up to the 1994 elections. Later, her scathing criticism of the ANC-led government led some to say she had turned her back on the party. But Nadine Gordimer had always insisted that she held no political loyalties, only moral convictions.
Her novels Burger's Daughter, The Conservationist and July's People probed the lives of ordinary South Africans to convey the visible and hidden wounds of racial injustice, corruption and abuses of freedom. Gordimer condemned the racist system that for decades was imposed by a white minority on the black majority. She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its struggle to realise the fruits of its new democracy. Per Wastberg, an author and member of the Nobel Prize-awarding Swedish Academy, said Gordimer's descriptions of the different faces of racism told the world about South Africa during apartheid. "She concentrated on individuals, she portrayed humans of all kinds," said Wastberg. "Many South African authors and artists went into exile, but she felt she had to be a witness to what was going on and also lend her voice to the black, silenced authors," Wastberg added.
 Nadine Gordimer recalled blacks being barred from touching clothes before buying at shops in her hometown, and police searching the maids' quarters at the Gordimer home for alcohol, which blacks were not allowed to possess. Her first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953, and she acknowledged that it had autobiographical elements. A New York Times reviewer compared it to Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, saying Gordimer's work "is the longer, the richer, intellectually the more exciting." Among Gordimer's best-known novels is Burger's Daughter, which appeared in 1979, three years after the Soweto student uprising, and brought the brutality of apartheid to the world's attention. Her 1987 novel, A Sport of Nature, prophesised the end of apartheid and created a liberation leader based on Nelson Mandela.
"Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment," the Nobel Committee said on awarding the literature prize in 1991.
After the first all-race elections in 1994, Gordimer wrote about the efforts of South Africa's new democracy to grapple with its racist legacy. She remained politically engaged, praising South Africa for the progress it had made, but expressing concern about alleged backsliding on freedom of expression. "People died for our freedoms," Gordimer told The Associated Press in a 2010 interview. "People spent years and years in prison, from the great Nelson Mandela down through many others." That year, Times correspondent Scott Kraft wrote of how "this unassuming, strong-willed white woman has used her manual Hermes typewriter to give the world some of the most perceptive and uncompromising works of fiction ever written about her homeland, South Africa." But after apartheid, some black critics derided her as a white liberal, belittling her role in helping the world understand the barbarity of the apartheid system. In 1998, four years after the first free elections, her July's People was banned from study at schools by the ANC government of the country's most populous state, Gauteng. The authorities considered the book "deeply racist, superior and patronising."  In her novels, essays and other works, Nadine Gordimer was one of the leading voices against South Africa's apartheid system, which segregated black people from the white and led to decades of unrest. Her works will continue to be admired as source of inspiration for struggles against any kind of apartheid and racism in any corner of the globe.
The writer is Programme Manager, BRAC Education Programme, and vice-president, Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA).
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