| Burger's Daughter | |
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First UK edition |
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| Author(s) | Nadine Gordimer |
| Cover artist | Craig Dodd |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Historical novel |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
| Publication date | 1979 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 364 pp (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0-224-01690-3 |
Burger's Daughter is an historical novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, originally published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Jonathan Cape. It was not published in South Africa because Gordimer expected the book to be banned in that country, and it was, although the restriction was lifted six months later.
Burger's Daughter is about white anti-apartheid activists in South Africa seeking to overthrow the South African government. Written in the wake of the 1976 Soweto uprising, it follows the life of Rosa, the title character, as she comes to terms with her father Lionel's legacy as an activist in the South African Communist Party (SACP) over the course of 30 years. The perspective shifts between Rosa's internal monologue (often directed towards her father or her semi-lover Conrad), and the omniscient narrator. The novel is routed in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with references to actual events and people from that period.
Gordimer described the novel as "a coded homage" to Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela's treason trial defence lawyer.[1]
Contents |
The novel is set mostly in Johannesburg in the early- to mid-1970s during Apartheid. Rosa is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, who has been arrested and is standing trial for treason. The court finds him guilty and sentences him to life in prison. Rosa visits him regularly, just as she visited her mother, Cathy Burger when she was imprisoned some ten years previously. Cathy died when Rosa was still at school. Rosa grew up in a family that actively supported the overthrow of the apartheid government, and the house they lived in opened its doors to anyone supporting the struggle, regardless of colour. Living with them was "Baasie", a black boy Rosa's age the Burgers had "adopted" when his father was arrested and later died in prison. Bassie and Rosa grew up as brother and sister. Both Rosa's parents were members of the outlawed South African Communist Party (SACP), and she was told from an early age that they could be detained at any time by the authorities. When Rosa was nine, both her parents were arrested and she was sent to stay with her father's sister's family in a rural farming community in the Northern Transvaal. Baasie was sent elsewhere because, she was told, he would not be accepted there. It was here that Rosa experienced apartheid for the first time and the way black people were mistreated.
In 1974, after three years in prison Lionel Burger succumbs to ill-health and dies. At 26, Rosa, for the first time in her life, has no immediate family. She sells the Burger's house and moves in with Conrad, a post-graduate student who had befriended her during her father's trial. Rosa is not in love with Conrad, but their relationship is convenient during this difficult time. Conrad questions her role in the Burger family and the fact that she always did what she was told. Once she was instructed to pretend to be a political detainee's fiancé so she could visit him in prison and give him messages. Rosa dutifully obliged. Conrad questioned whether she even has her own identity, because everyone sees her as Burger's daughter, not Rosa. Later Rosa leaves Conrad and moves into a flat on her own. She works for a while as a physiotherapist at a hospital, but then quits to work for an investment consultant.
Rosa grants a series of interviews to a biographer writing a book on her now famous father. Lionel became a medical doctor in the 1920s and married Colette Swan (Katya). They attended the 6th World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1926, and after returning to South Africa, joined the SACP. Lionel and Katya were divorced in the early 1940s, and in 1946 Lionel married Cathy Jansen, a trade unionist working with illegal black trade unions.
While some of Lionel's former associates are banned or under house arrest, Rosa is "named", meaning that she is labelled a Communist, is under surveillance and denied a passport. In 1975, despite her restrictions, she attends a party of a friend in Soweto, and it is there that she hears a black university student dismissing all whites' help as irrelevant, saying that whites cannot know what blacks want, and that blacks will liberate themselves. Realising she needs to be somewhere else, Rosa asks Brand Vermeulen, a prominent "liberal" Afrikaner, for help in getting a passport. Vermeulen knew and respected her father, but believed Lionel took a wrong turn when he betrayed his people. Against the advice of the Bureau of State Security, the government issues Rosa a passport, and she flies to France where she meets, for the first time, Katya in Nice. Rosa spends several months there and is able to be herself for the first time in her life. She meets Bernard Chabalier, a visiting academic and teacher from Paris, and in spite of the fact that he is married, they become lovers. He persuades her to return to Paris with him, where he says the French Anti-Apartheid Movement will be only too happy to organize a flat for Lionel Burger's daughter.
Rosa agrees to be Bernard's mistress, and moves into a flat in London for several weeks while Bernard sorts out his affairs in Paris. Now that she has no intention of honouring the agreement of her passport, which was to return to South Africa within a year, she openly introduces herself to others as Burger's daughter. This attracts the attention of the media and she attends several political events. At one such event, Rosa sees Baasie, but when she tries to reunite with him, he is reluctant to want to be seen with her. She gives him her phone number, and later he phones her in the middle of the night and immediately starts criticizing her for not knowing his real name (Zwelinzima Vulindlela). He says that there is nothing special about her father having died in prison as many black fathers have also died there, that he does not need her help and that "I'm not your Baasie!"[2] Rosa is devastated by her childhood friend's hurtful remarks, and overcome with guilt, she abandons her plans of going into exile in France and returns to South Africa.
Back home she resumes her job as a physiotherapist in Soweto. Then in June 1976 Soweto school children start protesting about their inferior education and being taught in Afrikaans. They go on the rampage, which includes killing white welfare workers in Soweto. The police brutally put down the uprising, resulting in hundreds of deaths. In October 1977, many organizations and people critical of the white government are banned, and in November 1977 Rosa Burger is detained. Her lawyer, who also represented her father, expects charges to be brought against her of furthering the aims of the banned SACP and ANC, and of aiding and abetting the students' revolt.
All characters are South African unless otherwise stated.
"Sentiment is for those who don't know what to do next."
"Communists are the last optimists."
Gordimer said in an interview in 1980 that the idea for Burger's Daughter had been with her for "a long time".[5] She was fascinated by the role of "white hard-core Leftists" in South Africa,[5] and was inspired by the work of Bram Fischer, the Afrikaner advocate and Communist who was Nelson Mandela's defence lawyer in the late 1950s and early 1960s.[6][7] Gordimer was friends with many of the activist families, including Fischer's, and knew that the children in these families were "politically groomed" for the struggle, and that the struggle came first and they came second.[8] She modelled the Burger family in the novel loosely on Fischer's family.[6] While Gordimer never said it was about him, she did describe the novel as "a coded homage" to Bram Fischer.[1] Fischer's daughter said later that she "recognised their lives" in the book.[1]
Gordimer herself became involved in South African struggle politics after the arrest of a friend, Bettie du Toit in 1960.[1] Just as Rosa Burger in the novel visits family in prison, so Gordimer visited her friend.[8] Later in 1986, she testified at the Delmas Treason Trial in support of 22 African National Congress (ANC) members accused of treason. She was a member of the ANC while it was still an illegal organization in South Arica, and hid several ANC leaders in her own home to evade arrest by the security forces.[1]
A month after its publication in London, Burger's Daughter was banned in South Africa for various reasons, including "propagating Communist opinions", "creating a psychosis of revolution and rebellion", and "making several unbridled attacks against the authority entrusted with the maintenance of law and order and the safety of the state".[5] Gordimer knew that the book would be banned,[8] but nonetheless protested by publishing a pamphlet in 1980, entitled What happened to Burger's daughter or how South African censorship works. After six months the South African government lifted their ban on the book,[7] which Gordimer attributed to her international stature.[9]
Burger's Daughter was smuggled into Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, and after reading it, Mandela requested a meeting with Gordimer.[10] She applied several times to visit him on the Island, but was declined each time. She was, however, at the gate waiting for him when he was released in 1990.[10]
Anthony Sampson, a British writer, journalist and former editor of Drum, a magazine in Johannesburg in the 1950s, wrote in The New York Times that Burger's Daughter is Gordimer's "most political and most moving novel".[11] He said that its "political authenticity" set in the "historical background of real people" makes it "harshly realistic", and added that the blending of people, landscapes and politics remind one of the great Russian pre-revolutionary novels.[11] In The New York Review of Books, Conor O’Brien compared Gordimer's writing to that of Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, and described the style of Burger's Daughter as "elegant" and "fastidious" and belonging to a "cultivated upper class".[12] He said this style is not at odds with the subject matter of the story because Rosa Burger, daughter of a revolutionary, believes herself to be an "aristocrat of the revolution".[12]
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