(1981)
July’s People is the latest novel by the astonishing South African writer Nadine Gordimer, and it’s one of her best to date. It’s set in a future that could be tomorrow: the blacks of South Africa have finally staged a general uprising and the country is in a state of civil war, with predictable foreign participation: Cuba and Mozambique on one side, the United States on the other, the outcome in doubt.
The war itself and the rights and wrongs of the participants do not form Gordimer’s primary subject, however. Rather she focusses on its effects at the private and human level. “July’s People” are Bam and Maureen Smales and their three small children, a white, middle-class, self-consciously liberal family for whom their black manservant, July, has worked with apparent devotion for the past fifteen years. When it’s become obvious that the rioting and killing are out of control and that the Smales have left flight too late, July rescues them by guiding them to his own family village hundreds of miles away in the middle of the African bush. They take with them only what they have remembered to snatch up at a moment’s notice. For everything else, they realize, they are now dependent upon their former dependant.
In less skilled hands this could have become a self-righteous and potentially malicious cautionary tale, of the “Look what’s going to happen to you” variety. But Gordimer handles the nuances of the relationships involved with exquisite dexterity. The Smales in their pre-revolutionary suburban colonial setting were not bad whites. They were not bigots, they told themselves, they favoured more self-determination for blacks, they went jogging. They are not depicted as angels, however; only as typical of their kind. July is no angel. His rescue of them is motivated more by habit and the desire to maintain a status quo in which he has a relatively favoured place than by charity.
Now that they think he’s no longer their servant, the Smales desperately want July to turn out to be a person much like themselves. Just as desperately, July clings to his role, because the only way he can see these people is as rich masters whose position and therefore his own will soon be restored. Each side makes a fetish of the other, while the subtle shifts in power and status make such fantasies increasingly impossible. The Smales owe their lives to July. Nevertheless, they can’t really stand it when he starts learning, without their permission, to drive their car.
The culture-shock for the Smales is massive. Uprooted, deprived of material objects, existing on tea and boiled grain, they can hardly maintain any coherent image of their own identities. Only gradually do they come to experience concretely, by the observation of details that would have been merely picturesque to them before —a chief dressed in cast-off whites’ clothing, the rusting bits of white junk scattered around the village —the fact that this kind of culture-shock has been going on for black South Africans for hundreds of years.
July has other “people” in addition to the Smales: the wife he has seen only at two-year intervals, during his leaves of absence; the children conceived by her, also at two-year intervals; the extended family of which he is the head and for which he provides; and, beyond the village, the larger “country” to which he belongs, headed by a chief who wants to fight the revolutionaries rather than joining them because he simply cannot imagine the end of white power. For these people the Smales are at first a marvel, then a curiosity, and increasingly a burden, since they must be fed and sheltered out of the already marginal resources of the village. “They have nothing,” Maureen Smales notes with wonder.
July’s People delivers its characters over to the reader with a chilling precision and a degree of understanding which would not ordinarily be called compassionate. Yet compassionate it is, for Gordimer is not accusing. July’s People is not concerned with villains and heroes but with the depiction of a next-to-impossible situation. Novels about the future, as Ursula Le Guin has said, are really about the present. The situation in South Africa is already impossible on any human level, Gordimer is saying, not only for the blacks but for the whites. The blacks at least have a sense of belonging. The whites, if the Smales are any example, don’t even have that.
This is a densely yet concisely-written book, beautifully shaped, powerful in its impact. It should gain for its author the wide audience she deserves.