July’s People

— 1981 —

New York: Penguin Books, 1982; 160 pages

FIRST LINES

July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind.

The knock on the door. Seven o’clock. In governors’ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses’ company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite—the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap.

PLOT SUMMARY

Set in South Africa before the end of apartheid and white rule, this mesmerizing novella presents a vision of a country being torn apart by a racial civil war. As Black rebel forces battle the white minority government, one white family’s world is upended.

The narrative plays out as an intensely intimate tale of a white family—architect Bam Smales, his wife, Maureen, and their three children—given shelter in a remote village by their longtime Black servant, July.

To escape the fighting that has engulfed the country, Bam and Maureen Smales grab a few essentials—including Bam’s hunting gun—and drive to the remote village where July lives. With children in tow, Bam and Maureen flee in their “bakkie,” a small sport truck once used for camping and shooting trips. “The vehicle was bought for pleasure, as some women are said to be made for pleasure,” writes Gordimer.

Liberal-minded and privileged, they are soon sharing a thatched hut. The family has been dropped into a world in which none of their previous education or skills has value. Surrounded by an unknown language, with no electric lights or running water and little privacy, the Smales family must adjust to their new reality. Depending on a battery-powered radio that offers sketchy, broken news of the conflict, they are disoriented and seemingly futureless.

As their children adapt to this new world, Maureen and Bam are increasingly forced to rely for survival upon July, his wife, and the other villagers, as the tables—and their world—have been turned upside-down.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: NADINE GORDIMER

Novelist, short story writer, essayist, and political activist Nadine Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town outside Johannesburg. Growing up in a secular Jewish, middle-class family, she began writing at an early age and published a first story at age fifteen.

A collection of Gordimer’s short fiction, seen mostly in South African magazines, was published in book form in 1949 as Face to Face. It was followed by her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953. Gordimer had married in 1949 and had a daughter, Oriane, before divorcing her first husband three years later.

In 1951, the New Yorker published “A Watcher of the Dead” and Gordimer’s long relationship with the magazine began. In 1954, she married art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, a German refugee who had fought with the British Army in World War II; they had one son, Hugo, and remained married until Reinhold’s death in 2001.

When a friend was arrested during an anti-apartheid protest in 1960, Gordimer became more involved in the South African civil rights movement and national politics. She helped edit the “I am prepared to die” speech of Nelson Mandela, who was tried in 1964 and facing a death sentence. Mandela was spared but spent a total of twenty-seven years and eight months in prison before his release on February 11, 1990.

Gordimer continued to focus on the impact of apartheid, the strictly enforced separation of races that was the foundation of South African society. And each new book earned greater recognition. In 1974, she shared the coveted Booker Prize for The Conservationist. This was followed by a series of novels: Burger’s Daughter (1979), July’s People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), and My Son’s Story (1990). In 1991, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee said:

For fifty years, Gordimer has been the Geiger counter of apartheid and of the movements of people across the crust of South Africa. Her work reflects the psychic vibrations within that country, the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle, the forbidden friendships, the censored soul, and the underground networks. She has outlined a free zone where it was possible to try out, in imagination, what life beyond apartheid might be like. She wrote as if censorship did not exist and as if there were readers willing to listen. In her characters, the major currents of contemporary history intersect.

In accepting the award, Gordimer said:

For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction…. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses—the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.

Gordimer continued to write long after Mandela’s release from jail and eventual election as South Africa’s president. Her final novel, No Time like the Present (2012), follows veterans of the battle against apartheid as they deal with issues facing modern Africa. Nadine Gordimer died, aged ninety, in Johannesburg in July 2014.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT

Published a decade before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and eventual majority Black rule in South Africa in 1994, this novel would be of enormous value simply for its exploration of an extraordinary moment in recent world events. The largely peaceful end of minority white rule in the country was a milestone event in late-twentieth-century history.

But July’s People is not simply a marker of a time now past. The reversal of fortunes experienced by Bam and Maureen Smales as the onetime servant holds power over his former employers provides the tension in a compelling, provocative story that underscores the racial and sexual nature of power. Its riveting exploration of race, and the complexities of marriage, is why Gordimer’s work endures long after apartheid’s end.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Over more than six decades, Gordimer wrote fifteen novels and produced ten collections of short stories, the format many critics consider her best. The most recent of these is Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, thirteen stories collected and published in 2007.

For longer fiction, The Conservationist (1974), a joint winner of the Booker Prize, is a complex novel about a wealthy white South African tycoon on whose property a dead African is found. It was lauded for its theme of Africa being returned to Africans, as well as Gordimer’s richly detailed descriptions of the natural world.

Of her other novels, Burger’s Daughter is widely considered among her best. Once banned in South Africa, it is set in the seventies and details the story of a family of anti-apartheid activists. Of it Gordimer wrote:

In 1979, I wrote a novel, “Burger’s Daughter,” on the theme of the family life of revolutionaries’ children, a life ruled by their parents’ political faith and the daily threat of imprisonment. I don’t know how the book, which was banned in South Africa when it was published, was smuggled to Mandela in Robben Island Prison. But he, the most exigent reader I could have hoped for, wrote me a letter of deep, understanding acceptance about the book.