The region known as the Highveld in South Africa consists of a large plateau that peaks at 2100 metres and embraces much of the provinces of Gauteng and the Orange State. Much of it is open grassland embraced by the Mpamulanga Drakensberg mountain range and washed by the Vaal and Orange Rivers. It is a region of natural beauty, although the surrounding Karoo and Kalahari deserts can make it appear rather desolate for miles. Mining has gone on here since the nineteenth century.
It also comprises some of the richest farm lands in all of South Africa.
It was in Springs, a small mining town in the Highveld that the writer Nadine Gordimer was born on 20th November 1923 to a Lithuanian émigré father and an English mother. Both her parents were secular Jews. It is in this idyllic region that Gordimer was to make the setting of some of her best novels and short stories.
I once spent a weekend at a holidays resort on the edge of the Karoo at the invitation of Jonathan Oppenheimer, scion of the great mining family. It is a place of breathtaking, if rugged beauty. The air is fresh. Nature bristles with a rich harvest of flora and fauna. At the private wildlife reserve, we drove through a pride of overfed lions while rhinos and impala grazed contentedly by the lake. Gazelles darted listlessly across the landscape. And the birds, the birds! They reminded me of the unforgettable Jos Plateau of my youth.
In that sense, and also through her novels, I felt a deep connection with Nadine Gordimer, who passed away in her sleep last week Sunday 13th July, age ninety. It is somewhat eerie that, only two weeks ago, while foraging through some book bookstores in — of all places, Turin, Italy — I stumbled upon her collection of essays, Telling Times: Writing and Living 1950—2008 (Bloomsbury 2011). I went through the 742-page tome in a matter of days.
Through that work, one gets acquainted with a mind of wide-ranging intelligence and deep ethical sensitivity. At the tender age of 11, her mother had withdrawn her from formal schooling, fearing that she was suffering from a heart condition. At home, she took to reading and soon began to write. At the age of 22 she was admitted into the University of the Witwatersrand, but left within a year.
While I have nothing against the professors and schoolmasters, I agree with the poet Odia Ofeimun who once remarked that formal schooling has capacity to kill creativity. This seems to have been confirmed in the life and career of Nadine Gordimer. With no degree and no doctoral thesis to sit on, she allowed her mind to wander through the length and breadth and the incredible mansions of world literature: Shakespeare and the great English classics, Lippman, Nabokov, Turgenev, Olive Schriener, Baudelaire, Maupassant, T. S. Eliot – the lot.
Nadine Gordimer was no religious proselyte or crusading ideologue. She took her stand in the South Africa of the twentieth century in the deep conviction that racialism and Apartheid were evil and indefensible. Together with anti-Apartheid writers such as Andre Brink, Breyten Breteynbach and Athol Fugard, she became the conscience of her country in dark times. She joined the African National Congress and was on personal terms with leading anti-Apartheid stalwarts such as Chief Albert Luthuli, Bram Fischer, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston and Nelson Mandela. She helped Mandela edit his famous “I am Prepared to Die” speech during his famous court appearance in 1964.
Nadine Gordimer befriended and mentored younger black writers such as Lewis Nkosi and Nat Nakasa. I was rather startled by how much she knew of our continent. She travelled through West Africa and went up the great Congo River in search of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She followed the trail of the mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Burundi. She also explored the idyllic island of Madagascar. She followed with great interest the rich literary harvest that was coming out of our continent – Achebe, Soyinka, Senghor and others.
With over a dozen novels and other great literary accomplishments, Gordimer won a bouquet of prizes, from the Booker, Tait, Orange and Premio Malaparte (Italy) to the Rome Prize, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Grande Aigle d’Or (France), Nelly Sachs Prize (Germany), Scottish Arts Council and Laureate of the International Botev Prize, among several others. In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee declared in their citation that she was a woman “who through her magnificent epic writing has…been of very great benefit to humanity”.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, one of the first people he wanted to see immediately was Nadine Gordimer.
Nadine Gordimer was not only a great writer and activist; she was also a faithful witness of the great upheavals which overtook our continent and her beloved South Africa; an uncompromising moral sentinel against the evils of our twentieth centurythat historian Eric Hobsbawm depicted as The Age of Extremes. Sadly, towards the end of her life she was gravely disappointed with the ANC government, with the widespread corruption, joblessness and nihilistic violence.
Nadine Gordimer fought bravely and loved deeply. The love of her life was her second husband, the famous art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, who predeceased her in 2001. She leaves behind a son, the film maker Hugo Cassirer and three grandchildren. As the curtain closes on this extraordinary flower of the Highveld, I can only think of the famous lines from her fellow compatriot, the poet Ingrid Jonker who tragically committed suicide age 32 in 1965:
The child is not dead
The child lifts his fist against his mother
Who shouts Afrika! Shouts the breath
of freedom and the veld
In the location of the cordoned heart
….in the march of the generations who are shouting Afrika!
….the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world
Without a pass
