Nadine Gordimer

## Biography

**Nadine Gordimer** (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".

Gordimer was born near Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė (then Russian Empire, now Lithuania), and her mother, Hannah "Nan" (Myers) Gordimer, was from London. Her mother was from an assimilated family of Jewish origins; Gordimer was raised in a secular household. **Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents**. Her **father's experience as a refugee in tsarist Russia** helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under Apartheid. Conversely, **Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa ostensibly led her to found a crèche (day care center) for black children**. **Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home**, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room. Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bounded as a child because her mother, for "strange reasons of her own," did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart). Home-bounded and often isolated, **she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 15**. Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold," which appeared in the *Children's Sunday Express* in 1937; "Come Again Tomorrow," another children's story, appeared in *Forum* around the same time. **At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published**.

Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the colour bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. She did not complete her degree and **moved to Johannesburg in 1948**, where she lived thereafter. While taking classes in Johannesburg, **she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines**. She collected many of these early stories in *Face to Face*, published in 1949. **In 1951, the *New Yorker* accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead", beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public**.

### Activism and professional life

**The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement**. Thereafter, **she quickly became active in South African politics**, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. She also **helped Mandela edit his famous speech "I Am Prepared to Die"**, given from the defendant's dock at the trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see.

**During the 1960s and 1970s**, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. **She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major award in 1961**. Throughout this time, Gordimer **continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of Apartheid**.

During this time, **the South African government banned several of her works**, two for lengthy periods of time. Throughout these years she also regularly **took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and traveled internationally speaking out against South African Apartheid and discrimination and political repression**. In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organization by the South African government.

Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the **Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991**.

Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid. **She resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts**. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the Apartheid government. Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer was also active in South African letters and international literary organizations. She was Vice President of International PEN (Poets, Playwrites, Editors, Essayists, Novelists). **In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer was active in the HIV/AIDS movement, addressing a significant public health crisis in South Africa**.

Gordimer died in her sleep on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### Apartheid and legal separation of the races

Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s

Apartheid was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on white supremacy, which encouraged state repression of Black African, Coloured, and Asian South Africans for the benefit of the nation's minority white population.The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid have continued to present day. Apartheid was adopted as a formal policy by the South African government after the ascension of the National Party (NP) during the country's 1948 general elections. A codified system of racial stratification began to take form in South Africa under the Dutch Empire in the late eighteenth century, although informal segregation was present much earlier due to social cleavages between Dutch colonists and a creolised, ethnically diverse slave population. With the rapid growth and industrialisation of the British Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, racial policies and laws became increasingly rigid.

The first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949, followed closely by the Immorality Act of 1950, which made it illegal for most South African citizens to marry or pursue sexual relationships across racial lines.  The Population Registration Act, 1950classified all South Africans into one of four racial groups based on appearance, known ancestry, socioeconomic status, and cultural lifestyle: "black", "white", "Coloured", and "Indian", the last two of which included several sub-classifications. Places of residence were determined by racial classification. From 1960 to 1983, 3.5 million nonwhite South Africans were removed from their homes and forced into segregated neighbourhoods, in one of the largest mass removals in modern history.

Apartheid sparked significant international and domestic opposition, resulting in some of the most influential global social movements of the twentieth century. During the 1970s and 1980s, internal resistance to apartheid became increasingly militant, prompting brutal crackdowns by the National Party administration and protracted sectarian violence that left thousands dead or in detention.

Between 1987 and 1993 the National Party entered into bilateral negotiations with the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid political movement, for ending segregation and introducing majority rule. In 1990, prominent ANC leaders such as Nelson Mandela were released from detention. Apartheid legislation was abolished in mid-1991, pending multiracial elections set for April 1994.

### Rhodesia

**Rhodesia** was an unrecognised state in southern Africa from 1965 to 1979, equivalent in territorial terms to modern Zimbabwe. With its capital in Salisbury (now Harare), Rhodesia was considered a *de facto* successor state to the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia (which had achieved responsible government in 1923) until 1970, when Rhodesia was proclaimed a republic without a monarch.

During an effort to delay an immediate transition to black majority rule, Rhodesia's predominantly white government issued its own Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965. The UDI administration initially sought recognition as an autonomous realm within the Commonwealth of Nations, but reconstituted itself as a republic in 1970.

The **Rhodesian Bush War**—also known as the **Second Chimurenga** or the **Zimbabwe War of Liberation**—was a civil war that took place from July 1964 to December 1979 in Rhodesia. The conflict pitted three forces against one another: the Rhodesian government, led by Ian Smith (later the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government of Bishop Abel Muzorewa); the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the military wing of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union; and the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union.

The war and its subsequent Internal Settlement, signed in 1978 by Smith and Muzorewa, led to the implementation of universal suffrage in June 1979 and the end of white minority rule in Rhodesia, which was renamed Zimbabwe Rhodesia under a black majority government. However, this new order failed to win international recognition and the war continued. Neither side achieved a military victory nor was a compromise later reached.

Negotiations between the government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, the UK Government and Mugabe and Nkomo's united "Patriotic Front" took place at Lancaster House, London in December 1979, and the Lancaster House Agreement was signed. The country returned temporarily to British control and new elections were held under British and Commonwealth supervision in March 1980. Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980, when the country achieved internationally recognised independence.

### Post colonial literature (1950s- present)

**Postcolonial literature (c. 1950s–present)**: Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. **This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race.** Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

## Bibliography

**Novels:**

* *The Late Bourgeois World* (1966)
* *A World of Strangers* (1958)
* *Burger's Daughter* (1979)
* *July's People* (1981)

(The point in common they have is that these novels were banned during Apartheid)

### Literary Style

Like compatiots Alan Paton and J.M. Coetzee, Gordimer has dramatised the history of her country. **She has addressed the violence of Apartheid, the duplicity, tension and perversion of the totalitarian state**. In her works, **she examines the complexity of white privilege**, invinting us to see the weakness of the liberal response to Apartheid. She also investigates its attemps at self-justification, and **finds that even in benevolence there can be an ugly egotism**.

Like Alice Munro, Gordimer **has a detached, fractured, concise style**. At its best this is compelling and affecting, although there are moments when her pushing against the constraints of grammar threatens to undermine her sentences. Gordimer is a writer of extraordinary power and acuity. **Her voice is remarkably controlled and restrained, in contrast with the subject matter of much of her work**: the way people go about their daily lives and interactions with one another in the innumerable tensions of a totalitarian state.

Nadine Gordimer's **subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country**, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. **Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa**.

When Gordimer published “The Train from Rhodesia” in 1952, South African society was legally divided along racial lines by apartheid. Black Africans and other non-whites, including those of mixed-race heritage, were denied the most basic human rights and forced to live apart from whites in substandard living conditions. They were allowed only disproportionately small representation in government, and by 1960 they were denied all representation.

## The Train from Rhodesia

“The Train from Rhodesia” is one of Nadine Gordimer’s earliest stories, first published in 1952 in her collection *The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories*. The short piece about a train’s brief stop in an impoverished African village exhibits the concise complexity that marks much of Gordimer’s other work. As a native South African of European heritage, Gordimer has focused much of her writing on the injustice of apartheid as practiced in the country. Though not an overtly political story, “The Train from Rhodesia” depicts the prejudicial attitudes that apartheid caused and reinforced it once racial segregation became law.

By presenting characters of both races who are degraded by their belief in racial inequality, the author shows how both black and white South Africans are harmed by apartheid.

### Plot

A train is heading toward a small, **rural station in Southern Africa**. The area around the station is impoverished, as are the people who live there. In the station, the **stationmaster, the vendors, and the children** prepare for the train’s arrival. The train, from the white, considerably more wealthy area of Rhodesia, approaches the station. **A young white woman** stretches out of the train’s window to look at a **carved lion** that an **old African man** has for sale. The **poor villagers** flock to the windows of the train, selling items or begging for handouts from the other passengers. **Children ask for pennies.** **Dogs and hens** surround the dining car waiting for scraps. One girl throws out chocolates— “the hard kind, that no one liked” —but the hens get them before the dogs do. The young woman decides the lion is too expensive: three shillings and sixpence. Her husband thinks the price is preposterous(silly) also, but his wife urges him to stop bargaining with the old man. She withdraws from the window to sit in the compartment across the train’s corridor. She thinks about the lion she has not purchased and all the other similar carvings she has already bought: bucks, hippos, and elephants. She wonders how these items, which have come to represent the unreality of her honeymoon trip, will fit in at home and what meaning they will take on in her everyday life. She realizes that she has been subconsciously thinking that her new husband was part of this unreality, as if he would vanish as soon as the honeymoon ends. The bell rings in the station, and the stationmaster prepares the train to leave. As the train starts moving on the track, the old man with the lion runs alongside it, offering the carving for “one-and-six” —only a fraction of what he had asked for before. The husband tosses the money out the window and the old man throws the lion to him. As the train leaves the station, the old man is standing, holding the shilling and sixpence he has picked up from the ground. The young man enters the compartment where his wife sits, pleased with having obtained the lion figure for so little, and hands it to her. Though she admires its finely crafted features and the ruff of fur around its neck, she holds it away from her. She is dismayed at this purchase because it represents the humiliation her husband has forced upon the old African. She demands to know why he did not pay a fair price for it. He protests that she herself had said it was too expensive. The young woman throws the lion onto the seat in frustration. A sense of shame engulfs her as she thinks of the price. She feels an emptiness inside herself. She has felt this way before but mistakenly thought it came from being alone too much; now she knows that is not true. The empty feeling is tied up with her new husband and their differing value systems. Her husband is sprawled out on the seat and she remains with her back toward him. The abandoned lion has fallen into a corner.

### Characters

**Old man**

The old man initially tries to sell his carved lion for three shillings and sixpence to the young couple, but fails. Later, he shouts to the young man already on the train that he will sell it for one-and-six. His acceptance of such a low price and his breath, visible “between his ribs,” indicate that he is desperate and probably very poor. His polite manners, his “smiling, not from the heart, but at the customer,” indicate both his dire circumstances and his dependence on tourists like the young couple. Gordimer offers little description, but indicates that he is very old, a man who murmurs, “as old people repeat things to themselves.” Gordimer refers twice to his feet in the sand, thus showing the old man’s connection with the land, which contrasts with the young couple who are enclosed in the train

**Stationmaster**

The stationmaster appears briefly in the story. As the train approaches, he comes “out of his little brick station with its pointed chalet roof, feeling the creases in his serge uniform.” His discomfort in the suit represents his attempt to fit in an unnatural role imposed on him by his job. The presence of his barefoot children and wife emphasize the poverty of the small town. When his children collect “their mother’s two loaves of bread,” the stationmaster’s dependence on the benevolence of the train from white, European-dominated Rhodesia is emphasized.

**Young man**

The young man accompanies the young woman on the train. He is surprised when she declines to buy the lion from the native at the train station. Despite the woman’s decision, he bargains with the old man “for fun” and then “automatically” accepts the old man’s low offer of one-and-six. He throws the money to the old man and catches the lion as it is thrown to him. Whereas the young woman’s conscience is torn, the young man simply seems to be enjoying his trip. Thus, with “laughter and triumph” he presents the lion to the young woman and is ” shocked by the dismay of her face.” He is finally depicted, “sitting, with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs.” His silence implies an inability to understand the young woman.

**Young woman**

The young woman is the central character of the story, since it is her thoughts upon which the pathos of the story depends. Upon arriving at the train station, she admires a carved lion but declines to buy it, saying that the old man selling it wants too much money. When she retreats into the train, though, it is revealed that she already owns several similar items and does not know what she will do with them once she is home. The woman becomes upset after her husband buys the lion for a few cents. “If you wanted it, why didn’t you pay for it?” she asks, “Why didn’t you take it decently, when he offered?” This outburst indicates that the woman feels guilty over the patronizing and demeaning way her husband has treated the old man. As the train pulls out of the station, her shame overwhelms her, and they sit in an angry silence. Their relationship has been affected by the racial injustice her husband defines as “fun, bargaining.”

Gordimer reveals the thoughts of only the young woman, thereby focusing the exchange in the train station on the human toll exacted by apartheid. The woman is wealthy enough to travel in style; as a white, she is a beneficiary of the government’s system of racial discrimination. Nevertheless, even as she participates willingly in an unjust society, she tries to appreciate the natives—especially for their fine artistry. When unsettling feelings overcome her, she blames them on “being alone and belonging too much” to herself. The incident on the train, however, makes her realize that she is upset by larger social issues. The starving man was made to beg for a few coins in return for an elaborately and skillfully carved animal. Yet, she remains with her back towards her husband, indicating that she is still unable to discuss the topic; she is too bound by her complicity in society.

### Themes

* The exploration of apartheid in South Africa
* Racial discrimination
* Inequality
* Social inequality
* An exploration about ideologies and relationships

### Symbols

“The Train from Rhodesia” begins and ends with the symbol of the train.

**The train**. Symbol of separation between racial and social groups.

The train itself is the most overt symbol. The train comes from Rhodesia, a privileged British colony in South Africa, and thus **symbolizes British colonialism.** “Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station,” Gordimer describes it, thus imparting a view that **British domination resembles a huge, mechanical, unhealthy, and overbearing beast.** The train only stops briefly and few people get on or off, further symbolizing the indifference and lack of understanding inherent in British imperialism. The train moves along “the single, straight track,” emphasizing the “tunnel vision” of the dominant power. The old man and his impoverished neighbors are incidental; the train is merely passing through on its way to another British outpost. As it leaves, **it “cast the station like a skin,” an image that imparts the idea that the village was something to be rid of, unwanted and unneeded.**

**The sand/nature**

In contrast to the mechanical, manufactured symbol of the train to represent the whites, the Africans of the small village are identified with images of nature. The villagers are surrounded by “sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow,” and which closes over the barefoot children’s feet. Furthermore, the stationmaster’s wife is identified with a sheep’s carcass that is hanging over the veranda. This, also, is a symbol of nature, even though it negatively connotes their position in society as nothing more than pieces of meat.

**The lion**

The lion is considered the most imperial and majestic of all African animals. Together with the symbolization of the lion, the lion is described as to have a “black tongue”. The use of the adjective “black” represents villagers/non white people being voiceless, the silencing of the indigenous voice.

* Imagery :"Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping the train filled the station." (paragraph 7)
* Personification: "The train called out (...) " (paragraph 5)
* Similes :"like spongecake" (paragraph 8); "like performing animals" (paragraph 9)

### Structure

* Linear plot:
	+ Beginning - descriptive, setting of poverty
	+ Middle - busy selling - clash of rich and poor
	+ End - epiphany of a woman
* Setting : Africa in the 1950s
* Omnicient Point of View

The narrator reveals only the thoughts of the young woman, thus focusing the story around her perspective: “She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.”(p. 38)

### Quotes

**Train symbol of british domination – separation**

“Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station,” (p.7) Gordimer describes it, thus imparting a view that British domination resembles a huge, mechanical, unhealthy, and overbearing beast.

The train “cast the station like a skin,” (p.40) an image that imparts the idea that the village was something to be rid of, unwanted and unneeded.

**Sand symbol of nature**

“sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow” (p.2)

The narrator reveals only the thoughts of the young woman, thus focusing the story around her perspective: “She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.” (p. 38)

**Lion symbol of Africans**

the lion’s “Vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in an endless roar too terrible to be heard” with “a black tongue” (p. 9) are voiceless to the injustice of the ruling whites.

**Dichotomy:**

There is a contrast between, the comfortable train full of food and drinks suggesting an artificial and limited reality full of luxury and privileges: “Those sitting inside looked up: suddenly different, caged faces, boxed in, cut off, after the contact of outside” (P.14), and the arid village outside the train where chickens, dogs, and people share the same misfortunes. “The two children careered over the sand…up the path through the garden in which nothing grew”(P.13)

Privileged travellers observe the villagers from a higher level in the train while eating delicious while delicious food: “the train breathed out the smell of meat cooking with onions”(P.11) Opposing those, the barefoot natives trying to make a living by selling handicrafts in the limited time passengers stay: “All up and down the length of the train in the dust the artist sprang, walking bent, like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held toward the faces on the train” (P.10)

## Intro Paragraph

Written in 1947, Nadine Gordimer’s (1923-2014) short story, “The Train from Rhodesia”, was published in *The Soft Voice of the Serpent and other Stories* (1952) and it explores, as many of the author’s works, the injustice of Apartheid, an authoritarian system based on racial discrimination in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, which established Black South Africans, coloured, and Asian South Africans’ segregation to benefit the white population, leaving the majority black alienated and impoverished. Gordimer witnessed this context and became an active opponent of the system. As a result, many of her works were censored by the South African government for being highly critical and raising awareness on the cruelty and irrationality of Apartheid. “The Train from Rhodesia” superficially revolves around the story of a train’s brief stop in a poor rural area in Southern Africa, where native vendors try to sell carvings to wealthy travelers who, taking advantage of the local sellers’ poverty, bargain over the crafts and continue their journey. In this story, Gordimer’s effective use of literary techniques such as symbolism and the exploration of dichotomies or binary opposition, succeeds in subtly uncovering social inequality and discrimination supported by Apartheid since middle 20th century to almost the end of it.

### MLA citation

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Train from Rhodesia”. *The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories*. Simon and Schuster, 1952.