Nadine Gordimer, South African writer HARDtalk

Now on BBC News, HARDtalk looks back at an interview with the late author

Nadine Gordimer, recorded in 2011. My guest today is one of South

Africa's greatest writers. Her fiction offers a compelling insight

into the country's troubled past. Nadine Gordimer has faced harassment

and condemnation. Several of her novels were banned by the apartheid

regime. Her personal commitment to the liberation struggle never

wavered. But is South Africa today what she hoped it would be? Nadine

Gordimer, welcome to HARDtalk. Let me start with something that you

said some time ago. You describe some of Africa as having been

deformed by its history. Is that still the case? Yes, I think so, to

a certain extent. We're living the morning after. We celebrated when we

all voted together for the first time, in 1994. And as we all know,

when you wake up the next morning after a celebration, you face the

reality. During the years before that, we were so concentrated on

getting rid of apartheid, of defeating that regime, that we did

not really have the time or the mind to think of the problems that would

inevitably be there afterwards. But disfigurement is an interesting

metaphor. Because disfigurement can be permanent. It would be

extraordinarily depressing to think that South Africa were forever to be

disfigured? No, and this gives me the opportunity to say what I always

liked to tell people from overseas. We have now had 17 years, that's

all, not even a generation, to put right what started in the 17th

century. Not just with apartheid. In the 17th century. As far as you are

concerned, 17 years is just the beginning? Yes, I am not excusing

the fact that there are many things that we should have done in the 17

years. But I am saying, please remember, we have not even have one

generation. I do want to talk about what has happened in those 17 years.

Before that, I want to go much further back. In all of your fiction

and all of your writing, race is such a dominant issue. The morality

and psychology of it and what it does to human beings, to have racial

division at the heart of a society. I want you to tell me how you

yourself, first became aware, growing up as a young girl in South

Africa, of the central part that race played in the lives of South

Africans? I'll tell you an event that happened in my childhood. I was

of course in a white neighbourhood. And black people of course, they

were not allowed to live there. One night, I was alone with my parents.

My elder sister had already left the house. There was a hullabaloo. My

mother and father got up and I got up and we went out into the

backyard, where our maid, who had been with us for a long time with

us, and who was like a second mother to me, there the police were. Black

policemen, with a white policeman in charge. And they had gone into her

room, they had turned over her mattress and her bed and they had

pulled out all of her possessions. Why? It was a time when blacks were

not allowed to buy liquor. So naturally, everybody brewed their

own. And in the backyards and in the quarters where they lived. I do not

know whether she did brew or not. But fortunately she had not been

brewing that day. And then it occurred to me, merely a child with

a lively mind, reading newspapers and things, why haven't my parents

said anything? This worked and worked on me. I began to think, what

is this? How do we live? Who are we? That is my first old story. ``adult

story came about. And you have said that white South Africans in a way,

they are born twice. They have the wide world, which they are born

into, and then as they grow up, they develop an understanding of the real

South Africa, the real Africa. And you say that if you had in

intelligence, you began even as a child, to question everything about

the way that you were living. I have given you the true example of when I

first began to ask myself these questions. Of course, it was a great

process that went on slowly. For me, the most important thing was that I

was a member of the local municipal library. And once I was grown`up,

and becoming a writer, I realised that had I been a black child, I

could not have used that library. And I wonder whether I would ever

have become a writer. Because you have to read in order to write. Here

we have you, growing up in the 1930s and the 40s, becoming a young woman

in a deeply racially divided society, and you started writing

your fiction, and the very beginning, there were all of these

characters, who were well meaning white people. For example, just one

of your short stories about this group of ` it is an early story of

yours ` about a group of theatrical players to go into a black

community, and they think it is worthwhile to put on a share for

poorer black people. But it does not really work because there is such a

mis`comprehension. I was one of the actors, so I know. It was Oscar

Wilde. The question is, even for you, a young Nadine Gordimer, was it

actually very difficult to communicate, to reach out to the

black community that you wanted to reach out to? The point is, I did

not really reach out into that black community, living in the segregated

part. But I took myself off briefly by train, for one year, to the

English university, doing occasional courses. This was 1946. And there

and get people coming back from the war. Young male South Africans. With

a lot of ideas about what was wrong with our country. And there were

people, they were troubled as I was. There and also people politically.

And for the first time, not as servants, but as young people just

like myself, black people. And especially, they were beginning to

write. And I found that I had much more in common with them than I had

in the small town where I lived, the white people. Fear is a big theme

between your writing. Between the races. It strikes me that some of

the things that you wrote back in the 50s about fear, personal safety,

they are actually still true today in South Africa? Very much so. Yes.

But I was not talking about myself. I did not suffer from personal fear.

I was mistaken in fearing. Here, everybody has a lot of fear. The

fact that I live in a house that has electric alarms that I set at night.

Frankly, every house in this neighbourhood and most wealthy

areas, they are surrounded by security. Even in Soweto, if you go

to a black neighbourhood, you will find that anybody who has anything

like a home, it protects it in some ways. Which brings me back to the

opening question. One is tempted, 17 years after liberation, to assume

that so much has changed in South Africa, but in these detailed ways,

maybe not so much has changed? It has changed in the sense that people

are now free. That is something. When I was growing up here, a black

person could not move from one perk up the country to another. They were

working in Johannesburg, they wanted to move to Durban. They could not do

this. They could not move from one province to place or another. You

had your passbook here that showed where you were living and where you

were working. So now, one has to see ` it is an enormous sigh of relief

for the black population. A friend of mine in the last few weeks, a

wonderful writer, he and I were talking and his boy of about ten was

there. And we were talking about the passbook. And this child did not

know what this was. This is wonderful. You don't have to carry

it any more. In your fiction, you have always written about stories

which involve different people from different races. You have central

characters who are black. You have had central characters who are

Afrikaner, as well as English`speaking white. How easy it

has it been to get inside the end of a black man or woman, and be really

confident that you are writing in a way that is effective? You are

asking a question that all writers ask. And it cannot be explained. I

can only say, if you think of people who become opera singers, they are

born with certain vocal chords. You can train them. But that certain

ability, which is congenital, that is there. I presume that you do not

sing. I wish, but I do not. I don't either. I know that I have not got

those vocal cords, I could not sing. But we writers, we are born with

something, I do not know what it is, and there is an attribute or

something in the brain, most likely something in the formulation of the

brain, that from early childhood, we are unusually observant. We are

always taking in what it is to be the other. The other person. Do you

sometimes wish that you could have been this intense writer that you

describe to me, in a country other than South Africa? Perhaps would not

have been so involved with the issue of race, race relations and race

politics that hangs over everything in South Africa. I think that people

concentrate on the political aspects. In mind any baulks,

personal relations or rye influenced by them. `` In my many books.

Because to me, with my mind or anybody else's, writing is a

discovery of life. It is an attempt to discover what human life is

about. And if you live in a country where there is a lot of political

conflict, of course, that will be a part of it. But if you are a real

writer, you can make it a bit of a canary. I am going to talk to you

specifically about the politics that have surrounded you in your life and

I want to ask you about your relationship with the African

National Congress, the ANC. You have been a loyal supporter of the ANC. I

am a member. I know, but even before you were a member. You could not be

a member. I worked for the ANC in my humble way, before it was possible

to be a member. In this house you have sheltered

activists who were on the run. You took risks? Did you ever consider

that you might be on the brink of making sacrifices that, perhaps,

were going to stretch you too far? Well, there was always an element of

fear there. But you live with it. You didn't know. Suddenly people

were detained and it was somewhat the normal life at the time if you

were a really responsible being. And that was the era of the liberation

struggle. And as you said, 1994, the liberation was achieved, at least

politically. Power was transferred to the majority. Nelson Mandela

became president. But some south Africans looking at what's happened

in the last 17 years have expressed grave disappointment. I just quote

you one fellow south African white brighter, Justin Cartwright, who has

written a lot about you and glowing tributes to you. ``South African

white writer. But he said, "I've often wondered she would one day not

become disillusioned with her South Africa?" I am disillusioned, of

course. Particularly in the matter of corruption. To me, perhaps it was

naive to think that our people who were heroes in the struggle, who

were terribly brave in the bush, who were terribly brave in prison, that

some of them now have turned out to be corrupt. Some would say that it

is not just about individuals, it is about the corruption of the party,

that it's become institutional? The party is made up of individuals. Any

political party is made up of individuals. But this party... It is

not a body. It is not a creature in itself, the party. No, the party,

though, does demand great loyalty. And when you say things, as you've

said to me, there are people inside the ANC who begin to get very

resentful. Yes, but as we know, within the ANC, as in all political

parties, there are people who take loyalty. Now I will speak for myself

` real loyalty is the right criticise your party, yourself,

because we all do things that seem to be dubious sometimes. I wonder

whether you feel Nelson Mandela perhaps blinded South Africans, the

wider world to some of the terrible problems that remained after 1994.

When he came to power and he said those wonderful words, "We shall

build a society where all South Africans, black and white, will be

able to walk tall, a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world,"

do you think we became somewhat hypnotised by Nelson Mandela? No, I

think we wanted to believe it, but we stumbled. Stumbled would suggest

that it would be hard to get back on someone's feet. You may break

something when you stumble. What you have now is a democratic one`party

state. The ANC is entirely dominant. Yes. But isn't a democratic state,

isn't it a contradiction to say that it is one`party? That's where it

gets interesting. And there are certain areas where you have

expressed grave concern about what the ANC is doing and it does get to

the heart of whether it is a truly democratic institution. For example,

this protection of information law that they're trying to pass. Many

critics, including yourself, have suggested that it is a dangerous

encroachment on freedom of the press, freedom of speech?

Absolutely. So I come back to the point ` are you really confident,

despite your years of loyalty to the ANC, that they represent the values

that you, personally, really believe in? The original values of the ANC

are being betrayed in many areas of our political life and our social

life, yes. And if you... But I have... I maintain the right to

criticise my own party. I feel that it is a duty. But in the ANC, we who

are in the ANC must say what we think when the ANC goes wrong. Why

do you have to stay in the ANC? You're also furious about Thabo

Mbeki and his approach to the HIV/AIDS problem. Many people in the

AIDS movement say that his policies and his reluctance to embrace the

anti`retro viral drugs and his reluctance to accept the scale of

the problem in the country costs hundreds of thousands of lives. At

what point would you say to yourself ` if this is the ANC, I no longer

want any part of it? So where should I go? For my political allegiance?

There is an opposition party, the Democratic Alliance? The Democratic

Alliance, yes. But unfortunately, it hasn't yet become truly

representative. It does not represent enough of the black

majority. The ANC was the very brave architect of our freedom. And until

the end of my days, I will be grateful for the chance that I had

to play a very small part with them, to join with them in that. What I

would like to see and many of my comrades would like to see is that

we need and we have for a long time needed a good opposition. If we

could have a good opposition, then that is the corrective, I think, to

what's wrong in the party. And they have to wake up and see that they

can not carry on the way many of them are. Could you be part of that

good and effective opposition? In what way? Well, you are a very

important...? Yes, but I'm not in politics. You're a figurehead.

You're not in politics but one of South Africa's great writers. You're

someone who has chronicled South Africa's journey. It would be

important. If I saw, if I saw some of the smaller parties getting

together and forming a really good and realistic and intelligent

opposition, then I would obviously vote for them and throw my life in

to them. Before we end, I want to bring it back to the little girl

growing up in the mining town. Here you are now, you've lived in this

house for 50 years. Yes. There's been an awful lot of history in this

house. Yes. Do you think that South Africa is now on an irreversible

track to that rainbow nation that Mandela envisaged? Perhaps that

rainbow nation is a very difficult thing to achieve. I deplore many of

the things that are happening. You mentioned the information law. To

me, this is very, very important. This is one of the keys to a

democracy, absolutely. You have the vote, but you must have the freedom

of education as well. But we have... One can not give up. I call myself a

realistic optimist. I still believe that South Africa can be made a

liveable place with less division between having and have nots than it

has ever been thought of. But I don't know how long it will take and

how much suffering might be on the way. And on a philosophical level,

do you believe that the idea of a rainbow nation is ever attainable?

You spent so long thinking about relations between the races, about

common humanity between the nations. Even with the colours of the

rainbow, the colours are separate. And as my friends pointed out `

there's no black in the rainbow. Let's forget about the image of the

rainbow nation. Let's be realistic. But indeed, there could be a more

equitable society and more acceptance and tolerance. I also

think that racial mixing, that we shouldn't all be white and black.

Let us mix. This, I know, is an absolutely terrible thing to say...

No, it is very interesting to say. You say that you want to go out in

the streets of Johannesburg... No, I'm saying, let white and black

produce colours. You want to go out to the streets of Johannesburg and

see white men hand in hand with black women and vice`versa and a

generation which isn't white and black, it is every colour between

the two? Yes. Yes. I think it is a great pity that we have this obvious

difference in our skin and eyes and what not. So the final question is `

will there come a time when the colour of your skin genuinely

doesn't matter in South Africa? Not only in South Africa, my dear, but

all over the world. Certainly, it will be long after the present

generation and even the old people like me are all dead and even the

young ones. Let us hope that that is a long time from now. Nadine

Gordimer, thank you so much for being on HARDtalk. You're welcome.

Thank you so much, Nadine. After a night where there have been

further torrential downpours, strong winds and hail and flashes of

lightning. The pattern is set to continue on Saturday. We begin in

Northern Ireland