Nadine Gordimer

Fiction that showed apartheid from the inside

• Her work was translated into more than 30 languages. In 1986 Susan Sontag called her the most important writer working in the world.^[5],[6],[14]
• She helped found the Congress of South African Writers, which worked to develop young black writers, and gave part of her Nobel prize money to it.^[5],[6]
• When Burger's Daughter was banned in 1979, she obtained the censors' reasons and published them in 1980. She said no one had ever been able to read the reasons for a banning before.^[6],[7],[15]
• She persuaded about 20 leading writers, including several fellow Nobel laureates, to give stories royalty-free to Telling Tales, published in 2004. Proceeds went to the Treatment Action Campaign, which fought for HIV/AIDS treatment.^{[6],[18],[19]}
• After apartheid she criticized President Thabo Mbeki's stance on AIDS and, in 2012, attacked a secrecy bill she said would shield corruption and punish whistle-blowers.^[18],[22]

Gordimer's impact lies in understanding and conscience, and it cannot honestly be counted. Her fiction gave readers around the world a close, human view of how apartheid bent love, work and friendship out of shape, and helped build international opinion against it. She believed writers gave the struggle a human dimension that news reports could not. She also acted directly: sheltering activists, testifying in court, fighting censorship, building a writers' organization that supported black authors, and raising money for AIDS treatment. We make no quantified impact claims. There is no credible way to count minds changed by a novel, and her part in ending apartheid cannot be separated from the far larger sacrifices of the black South Africans who led and fought that struggle.

CultureHuman rights

No number is given here on purpose. Some contributions cannot be counted honestly, and we would rather describe them than invent a figure.

• Moderate

  Open support for the ANC's armed struggle

  Testifying at the Delmas treason trial in the late 1980s, she told the court she fully backed the ANC and approved of its violent methods, though she said she opposed violence in principle. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found that the ANC's armed wing committed gross human rights violations: its urban bombs killed more civilians than security personnel, and a 1983 car bomb in Pretoria killed 19 people and injured 217.^{[9],[10],[24]}

• Minor

  Socialism and Cuba

  She remained a committed socialist after the fall of Soviet communism and accepted Cuba's Order of Friendship. In 2006 she joined six other Nobel laureates in warning the United States not to meddle in Cuba. She said friends such as Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, who had lived under communism, considered her naive.^[2],[9],[19]

• Minor

  July's People branded racist (2001)

  In 2001 a panel of evaluators for Gauteng's education department recommended dropping July's People from school reading lists, calling it racist and patronizing. Gordimer called the charge insulting. The national education minister, Kader Asmal, called the evaluators ill-informed, and the province kept the book.^{[9],[16],[17]}

• Minor

  Jerusalem festival and Israel

  In 2008 the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel condemned her for taking part in the International Writers' Festival in Jerusalem during Israel's 60th-anniversary year, and dismissed her plan to also visit a Palestinian venue. She could be critical of Israel but rejected comparisons between its policies and apartheid.^[12],[23]

• Minor

  A disowned biography

  She gave Ronald Suresh Roberts interviews and access to her papers for an authorized biography, then disowned the book, No Cold Kitchen (2005), after they fell out. JTA reported that her refusal to equate Israel's policies with apartheid was one cause of the bitter dispute. Her Guardian obituary still judges the book useful, though it advises caution.^[8],[12]

• —

  Persecution

  Her father, Isidore Gordimer, grew up with an Orthodox education in a shtetl in the Baltic region of the Russian Empire, where he faced anti-Jewish discrimination. He left for South Africa at 13 to escape pogroms and poverty, years before Nadine was born.^{[5],[7],[8],[10]}

• 1930

  Quota

  South Africa's 1930 Quota Act restricted immigration from Eastern Europe, the main source of Jewish immigrants. A 1937 Aliens Act set up a selection board that made Jewish immigration extremely difficult.^[10],[25]

• 1936

  Discrimination

  When a ship chartered to bring German Jewish refugees reached Cape Town in 1936, protesters staged an antisemitic demonstration on the quay, part of a campaign against Jewish immigration led by the Greyshirt movement.^[10]

• 1935

  Other

  After she fainted twice, her mother decided she had a bad heart and took her out of her convent school. From about 11 to 16 she was taught at home and cut off from other teenagers. She later called the diagnosis a mistake.^[6],[7],[9]

• 1966

  Censorship

  Apartheid censors banned three of her novels: A World of Strangers (1958) for 12 years, The Late Bourgeois World (1966) for a decade, and Burger's Daughter (1979) for several months. She also compiled an anthology of black poets that was banned.^{[7],[9],[13],[15],[22]}

• 1988

  Other

  Testifying in mitigation of sentence for anti-apartheid activists convicted at the Delmas treason trial, she told the court she approved of the ANC's armed struggle. Her husband feared she would be arrested, and Mandela's lawyer George Bizos warned her to watch for danger when leaving her car.^[7],[9],[10]

• 2006

  Other

  At 82 she was grabbed by young robbers in her Johannesburg home, had her wedding ring pulled from her finger, and was locked in a storeroom with her domestic worker. Against some friends' advice she stayed in her old house rather than move to a gated complex, and she said the answer to crime was jobs and education.^[20],[21]

Both parents were Jewish immigrants. Her father, Isidore, a watchmaker, had an Orthodox upbringing in a Baltic shtetl of the Russian Empire; her mother, Nan Myers, came from an Anglo-Jewish family in London. The home was secular: her father went to synagogue alone on the High Holy Days, and Nadine attended a Catholic convent school. She called herself an atheist but said she was Jewish by birth for life, and she learned about Judaism only as an adult. She rejected the idea that her fight against apartheid came from being Jewish, arguing that every decent person must oppose injustice. Both her husbands were Jewish.^{[4],[6],[7],[8],[9],[10],[11],[12]}

1. November 20, 1923

   Born in Springs, a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, the second daughter of Jewish immigrants Isidore and Nan Gordimer.^[1],[4],[6]

2. 1935

   At about 11 her mother takes her out of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy over a supposed heart condition; she is taught at home and reads widely.^[6],[9]

3. 1945

   Spends a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she meets black writers and artists as equals for the first time.^[6],[7],[9]

4. 1953

   Publishes her first novel, The Lying Days, after her first story collection, Face to Face (1949).^[4],[6]

5. 1954

   Marries Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer and Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.^[4],[7],[9]

6. 1960

   The arrest of her closest friend, trade unionist Bettie du Toit, and the Sharpeville massacre draw her into the anti-apartheid struggle.^[5],[7],[8]

7. 1964

   Mandela's lawyer George Bizos shows her the draft of Mandela's speech from the dock; she discusses it but says she added no sentence of her own.^[7],[9]

8. 1966

   The Late Bourgeois World is published and banned in South Africa for a decade.^[9],[14]

9. 1974

   The Conservationist wins the Booker Prize, shared that year with another novel.^[7],[8]

10. 1979

    Burger's Daughter is banned a month after publication. The ban is lifted within months, and in 1980 she publishes the censors' reasoning.^{[7],[14],[15]}

11. 1988

    Testifies in mitigation of sentence for Terror Lekota and others convicted at the Delmas treason trial; she later called it her proudest day.^[5],[6],[10]

12. October 3, 1991

    Named winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first South African to receive it.^[1],[4],[5]

13. 2004

    Telling Tales, her anthology raising money for HIV/AIDS treatment, is launched at the United Nations on the eve of World AIDS Day.^[6],[18]

14. July 13, 2014

    Dies at home in Johannesburg, aged 90.^[1],[8],[12]

1. 1.Nadine Gordimer - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
2. 2.Nadine Gordimer - Biographical (with 2005 addendum) · NobelPrize.org (from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995), 1991
3. 3.Nadine Gordimer - Nobel Lecture: Writing and Being, 7 December 1991 · NobelPrize.org, 1991
4. 4.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991 - Press release · NobelPrize.org (Swedish Academy), 1991
5. 5.Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience (Per Wästberg) · NobelPrize.org, 2001
6. 6.Nadine Gordimer (Milton Shain and Miriam Pimstone, updated by Karen Lazar), Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women · Jewish Women's Archive, 2009
7. 7.Nadine Gordimer: biography and interview · American Academy of Achievement
8. 8.Nadine Gordimer obituary (Dennis Walder) · The Guardian, 2014
9. 9.White magic (Jonathan Steele) · The Guardian, 2001
10. 10.The Spirit of Freedom: South African Leaders on Religion and Politics (Charles Villa-Vicencio), chapters 'Nadine Gordimer: A Vocation to Write' and 'Franz Auerbach: A Jewish Humanist' · University of California Press, 1996
11. 11.'Prickly' Gordimer, anti-apartheid star (Jenni Frazer) · The Jewish Chronicle, 2014
12. 12.Nadine Gordimer, chronicler of South Africa, dies at 90 · Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2014
13. 13.Nadine Gordimer: A Life Well Lived (1923-2014) · PEN America, 2014
14. 14.South African writer given Nobel (Gail Caldwell), archived copy · The Boston Globe, 1991
15. 15.Nadine Gordimer on the ban of her novel Burger's Daughter · Radio Netherlands Archives, 1979
16. 16.South Africa reinstates authors · BBC News, 2001
17. 17.Gordimer detractors 'insulting', says Asmal (archived copy) · News24, 2001
18. 18.Gordimer and literary giants fight Aids (AFP; archived copy) · iafrica.com, 2004
19. 19.60 Years of Heroes: Nadine Gordimer (Donald Morrison), archived copy · TIME Europe, 2006
20. 20.Nobel writer Nadine Gordimer, 82, attacked and robbed (R. W. Johnson), archived copy · The Sunday Times (London), 2006
21. 21.Gordimer's sorrow for men who robbed her (Andrew Meldrum) · The Guardian, 2006
22. 22.South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom (Nadine Gordimer) · The New York Review of Books, 2012
23. 23.PACBI Slams Nadine Gordimer for Participation in International Writers' Festival during Israel-60 Celebrations · BDS Movement (PACBI), 2008
24. 24.Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Volume 2 (chapter 4: The Liberation Movements from 1960 to 1990) · Truth and Reconciliation Commission / Department of Justice, South Africa, 1998
25. 25.South Africa (Sally Frankental), Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women · Jewish Women's Archive, 2021