Nadine Gordimer's affirmative and patriotic side has emerged in the South Africa I've only visited. Her work then was situated in a specific time and place, in the very Transvaal soil which sometimes seemed to figure almost as a character in her writing. The result is a body of work that resonates powerfully with people who were never engaged in her struggle. With the passage of time and the sinking of that old South Africa, this becomes ever clearer. The apartheid era's instruments of repressive power sound almost as antiquated today as the Spanish Inquisition's.
Interior thoughts rush on as verbalized ones clatter half-formed, then trail off.
And when it's well-off whites confronting blacks of any description, what's usually unsaid tends to drown out what's said. Black and white Gordimer characters are not allegorical, but they confront us with the question of whether humans can ever really know one another. Those laws just brought them into relief. In just a few days, it will be the 10th anniversary precisely of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, a rare turning point in human affairs that came as close to fulfilling its promise as anyone could possibly have imagined. On that level, Mandela's South Africa gives us all hope, however great the distance from which we view it.