Burger's Daughter

by Nadine Gordimer

  There she sits, gazing, gazing. And if it’s time for the museum to close, she can come back tomorrow and another day, any day, days.

  Sits gazing, this creature that has never been.

  The children Rosa was teaching to walk who were born crippled were getting excellent rehabilitative care, better than her doctor half-brother could dream about providing in Tanzania. In the second half of 1976 those who were born deformed were joined by those who had been shot. The school riots filled the hospital; the police who answered stones with machine-guns and patrolled Soweto firing revolvers at any street-corner group of people encountered, who raided High Schools and picked off the targets of youngsters escaping in the stampede, also wounded anyone else who happened to be within the random of their fire. The hospital itself was threatened by a counter-surge of furious sorrow that roused the people of Soweto to burn and pillage everything the whites had ‘given’ in token for all, through three centuries, they had denied the blacks. The million or more (no one knows the exact figure) residents of Soweto have no municipality of their own; a white official who had done what he could, within the white-run welfare system for blacks, to help them endure their lives, was stoned and kicked to death. Other white officials had narrow escapes; several were rescued and hidden safely by blacks themselves, in their own houses. There was no way of identifying one’s white face as one that was different from any other, one that should be spared. The white doctors and other personnel among the hospital staff drove back and forth between the hospital and the white city of Johannesburg every day, privileged to pass through police roadblocks that isolated the Soweto area, and at the risk of being surrounded and dragged from their cars as they moved along the road where the armoured police vehicles the people called Hippos had gone before them, raising fists useless against steel plates and guns.

  After the funerals of the first wave of children and youths killed by the police, at each successive burial black people were shot while gathered to pay homage to their dead or at the washing of hands at the house of the bereaved that is their custom. The police said it was impossible to distinguish between mourners and the mob; and they spoke more truly than they knew—mourning and anger were fused.

  Although the white personnel at the hospital had knowledge of events and consequences in the black townships only touched upon by the reports in the newspapers gathered, among dangers and difficulties, by black journalists, no one of the white hospital staff could go into the places from which the patients came. Extracting bullets from the matrix of flesh, picking out slivers of shattered bone, sewing, succouring, dripping back into arteries the vital fluids that flowed away in the streets with the liquor from bottles smashed by children who despised their fathers’ consolations, these white people could not imagine what it was like to be living as their patients did. Rosa was visited one Sunday night in her flat by an acquaintance, Fats Mxenge. He apologized for turning up without warning, but it was not wise to use the telephone although (of course) he was one of the few people in Soweto to have one. He had a message; when it had been delivered he sat in her flat (a one-roomed ‘studio’ affair she had moved into when she returned from Europe) and accepted the brandy and hot tea she offered. He looked around him; someone brought aboard out of a tempest and seeing drawn curtains, lamplight, the turntable of the player circling where a record had just been lifted. He tossed off the brandy and then stirred the tea, knees close, stirred and stirred. Shook his head in summation—gave up. They exchanged the obvious.—Terrible, it’s terrible, man. I just want to get my kids out, that’s all.—She began to talk of some of the things she had seen at the hospital, not in her department: a little girl who had lost an eye; she was used to working with horrors (she used the word ‘deformities’) about which something could be done—nerves slowly brought back to feeling, muscles strengthened to flex again. —The left eye. Seven or eight years old. Gone for good.—She was not able to describe the black hole, the void she was seeing where the eye ought to be.—Last week the man who lives in the next house to us—you know our place ? you’ve been there with Marisa—just there, the next house, he went out to buy something at the shop, candles, something his mother wanted. Never came back. She came over—she says, what must she do ? Go to the police, my wife told her, ask them where he is—she thought he’s arrested. So the woman goes to the police and asks, where is my son, where can I look for him. D‘you know what they told that woman ? ‘Don’t ask us here, go to the mortuary.’—

  —I pass by on my way home. There’s been a queue outside every day.—A bus queue of black men and women waited, orderly, to lift up sheet after sheet to find the familiar face among the dead. There were babies, of course, asleep, warm and wet against backs under the blanket, there are always babies. There were the usual shopping bags that lug newspaper parcels of sustenance to courts and hospitals and prisons; one woman had a plaid Thermos flask sticking up out of her bag—the queue was long, and some people would have to come back next day.

  —The police must’ve shot him between our place and the shop. Shot dead. She identified him all right. Just there in his own street, man. It was about nine at night when he went out, that’s all. You lock yourself in and stay home as soon as it’s dark. You don’t move, man. I won’t go back tonight, a-a-h no! I can tell you—when it’s dark I’m afraid to go across my yard to the lavatory. I never know when I’m going to get a bullet in my head from the police or a knife in me from someone else.—He shook back shirt cuffs with square gilt and enamel links. He was dressed for success and happiness, his usual snappy clothes, like a woman who has nothing to hand in an emergency but the outfit she wore to dinner last night and left hanging over the chair when she went to bed. —Every morning I expect to find my car burned out. We’ve got no garages in our places. What can I do ? It stands in the street. The students are going around setting fire to the cars of reps and so on, people who have good jobs with white firms... Who doesn’t work for whites ? If they know the owner of such-and-such a car is a sports promoter who arranges boxing matches with whites... They can come after me...—His laugh was an exclamation, protest.—What this government has done to us. Can I just—She pushed the brandy bottle over to him and he helped himself. She tipped the last drops of tea out of her cup and poured brandy into it, taking a first sip that burned along her lips voluptuously while she listened.—I want to get my kids out, that’s all. Margaret and the baby can go down to Natal with the old lady—her people are there. I want to put the older kids in boarding-school somewhere... But you know what the students are saying ? They’re going to go to the trains when the kids leave for schools in the country and they’re going to stop them, they’re going to drag them off the trains. They say no one must break the boycott. And they’ll do it, I’m telling you, they’ll do it. I’ll take mine away by car. They don’t listen to me or their mother, there’s no school, they run in the streets and how d’you know every day they’re going to come back alive ?—

  —I don’t know what I would do.—She was white, she had never had a child, only a lover with children by some other woman. No child but those who passed under her hands, whom it was her work to put together again if that were possible, at the hospital.

  SOWETO STUDENTS REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL

  Black people of Azania remember our beloved dead! Martyers who were massacred from the 16th June 1976 and are still being murdered. We should know Vorster’s terrorists wont stop their aggressive approach on innocent Students and people who have dedicated themselves to the liberation of the Black man in South Africa—Azania. They shall try at all costs to suppress the feelings of the young men and women who see liberation a few kilometres if not metres There’s no more turning back, we have reached a point of no return as the young generation in this challenging country. We have proved that we are capable of changing the country’s laws as youths this we shall persue until we reach the ultimate goat—UHURU FOR AZANIA.

  Remember Hector Peterson the 13 year old Black child
of Azania, a future leader we might have produced, fell victim to Kruger’s uncompromising and uncontrollable gangsters of the riot squad. What does his parents say, what do his friends say, what does the stupid and baldheaded soldier who killed—actually murdered him in cold blood—say, of course he is less concerned. What do you say as an oppressed Black and brother to Hector? Remember our learned scientist ‘who decided to commit suicide all of a sudden’ Tshazibane ? We suspect that somebody somewhere knows something about this ‘suicide’ For how long will our people persue with these ‘suicide attempt’ and ‘successful suicides’.

  Remember Mabelane who ‘attempted to escape from John Vorster Square by jumping through the 10th floor window’ apparently avoiding some questions? Remember our crippled brothers and sisters who have been disabled deliberately by people who have been trained to disrespect and disregard a black man as a human being ? Remember the blood that flowed continuously caused by wounds inflicted by Vorster’s gangsters upon the innocent mass demonstrating peacefully ? What about the bodies of our dead colleagues which were dragged into those monsterous and horrible looking riot squad vehicles called hippos ? We the students shall continue to shoulder the wagon of liberation irrespective of these racists maneouvers to delay the inevitable liberation of the Black masses. June the 16th will never be erased in our minds. It shall stand known and registered in the minds of the people as STUDENTS’ DAY as students have proved beyond all reasonable doubt on that DAY that they are capable of playing an important role in the liberation of this country without arms.

  We are also aware of the system’s conspiracy:

  1. To discredit present and past leadership with the hope of distracting the masses from the leaders.

  2. To capture present leadership with the hope of retarding the student’s struggle and achievements.

  FORWARD FOREVER.....................BACKWARD NEVER!!!

  issued by the S.S.R.C.

  Our children and our children’s children. The sins of the fathers; at last, the children avenge on the fathers the sins of the fathers. Their children and children’s children; that was the Future, father, in hands not foreseen.

  You knew it couldn’t be: a change in the objective conditions of the struggle sensed sooner than the leaders did. Lenin knew; the way it happened after the 1905 revolution: as is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory. The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new. They seem to know what is to be done. They don’t go to school any more and they are being ‘constantly reeducated by their political activity’. The parents who form committees to mediate between their children and the police are themselves being detained and banned. It could happen to Fats; a black heavyweight can win a title from a white heavyweight now and black and white teams play together on the soccer fields, but that isn’t what the children will accept. It has even happened to Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, who used to come to Flora’s lunch parties. There are new nightclubs in Johannesburg where fashionable get-ups provide consumers’ equality and apparently privilege the self-styled black and white socialites from police raids. But these are not the kind of pleasures on which the children are set. The black men with yearnings to be third-class, non-Europeans-only-city-fathers, who sat on the Advisory Boards and school boards set up by the whites have resigned at the threat of a generation’s retribution. The people who were Uncle Toms, steering clear of the Mofutsanyanas, Kotanes, Luthulis, Mandelas, Kgosanas, Sobuk-wes who went to jail for the ANC and PAC have begun to see themselves at last as they are; as their children see them. They have been radicalized—as the faithful would say—by their children; they are acting accordingly; they are being arrested and detained. The real Rosa believed the real revolutionary initiative was to come from the people; you named me for that ? This time it’s coming from the children of the people, teaching the fathers—the ANC, BPC, PAC, all of them, all the acronyms hastening to claim, to catch up, the theory chasing events.

  The kind of education the children’ve rebelled against is evident enough; they can’t spell and they can’t formulate their elation and anguish. But they know why they’re dying. You were right. They turn away and screw up their eyes, squeal ‘Eie-na!’ when they’re given an injection, but they kept on walking towards the police and the guns. You know how it is they understand what it is they want. You know how to put it. Rights, no concessions. Their country, not ghettos allotted within it, or tribal ‘homelands’ parcelled out. The wealth created with their fathers’ and mothers’ labour and transformed into the white man’s dividends. Power over their own lives instead of a destiny invented, decreed and enforced by white governments.—Well, who among those who didn’t like your vocabulary, your methods, has put it as honestly? Who are they to make you responsible for Stalin and deny you Christ?

  Something sublime in you—I couldn’t say it to anyone else. Not in your biography. You would have met in your own person with what happened to blacks at Bambata, at Bulhoek, at Bondelswart, at Sharpeville. But this time they are together as they never have been, ever, not in the defeat of the ‘Kaffir’ wars, not at Bambata’s place, at Bulhoek, at the Bondelswarts’ place, Sharpeville. It’s something peculiarly their own? You used me as prison visitor, courier, whatever I was good for, you went to prison for your life and ended it there, but would you have seen yourself watching Tony and me, hand-in-hand, approaching guns? You will never tell me. You will never know. It’s not given to us (don’t worry, the reference is to the brain’s foresight, not to a niggardly God; I haven’t turned religious, I haven’t turned anything, I am what I always was) to know what makes us afraid or not afraid. You must have been afraid sometimes ; or you couldn’t have had your sweet lucidity. But you were a bit like the black children—you had the elation.

  I ran away. Baasie was repulsive to me; I let repugnance in: the dodge-em course between diverticulitis, breast cancer, constipation, impotence, bones and obesity. I was scared. You would laugh. You knew about such things all along; when people are dead one imputes omnipotence to them. I was scared. Maybe you will believe me. No one else would. If I were to try out telling, which I won’t. And the consequent effect is not the traditional one that I don’t ‘defend’ myself against anyone thinking ill of me; quite the contrary, I’m getting credit where it’s not due. When I came up behind him in the street, Dick said, I knew it was you, girl. Your daughter was expected. The man in France was the one I could talk to; and when it came to the point, this was the one subject I couldn’t open with him. Not that he lacks the ability to imagine—what ? This place, all of us here. He reads a lot about us. Our aleatory destiny, he calls it. He could project. He had plenty of imagination—a writer of a kind, as a matter of fact, as well as professor (but he laughs at the academic pretensions of that title). Once while I was drying myself after a shower he suddenly came out with an idea for a science fiction book that would make money. Suppose it were to happen that through chemicals used to kill pests, increase crops etc. we were to lose the coating of natural oils on the skin that makes us waterproof, as the oil on duck’s feathers does—we begin to absorb water—we become waterlogged and rot... On another level, it could even be seen as an allegory of capitalist exploitation of the people through abuse of natural resources... —I would never have thought of that.

  J. B. Marks, your first choice as best man, died in Moscow while you were in prison. I managed to tell you. Now again I have the impression of passing on bits of news as I did through the wire grille. I won’t see Ivy; she was gone, on orders, before the Greer trial. If she had stayed she would have been on trial, once more; she was named in absentia as a co-conspirator in the indictment. The prosecutor said she was the one who recruited Orde; Theo appeared and pleaded that his client’s outraged sense of injustice, coupled with the experience of a political journalist in this country that attempts at constitutional change are constantly defeated, led him to the hands of people who understood this outrage.

  And so, at last, you. It’s to you...

  A
ll the while the air is thick with summer, threaded with life, birds, dragonflies, butterflies, swaying lantern-shapes of travelling midges. After heavy rains the concrete buildings have a morning bloom in the sun that makes them look organic to me. The freeway passes John Vorster Square at the level of the fifth storey and in the windows of the rooms with the basic units of furniture from which people have jumped, I see as I drive there are hen-and-chicken plants in pots on the sills. Your lucidity missed nothing, in the cell or round the swimming-pool, eh. A sublime lucidity. I have some inkling of it. Don’t think I’m gloomy—down in the dumps. Happiness is not moral or productive, is it. I know it’s possible to be happy while (I suppose that was so) damaging someone by it. From that it follows naturally it’s possible to feel very much alive when terrible things—dread and pain and threatening courage—are also in the air.

  I’ve been to see the Nels. They were glad I came. I had always been welcome any time. There’s a Holiday Inn where the commercial travellers mostly go, now. But the off-sales trade is unaffected. The Vroue Federasie has its annual meeting in a private room at the Holiday Inn, Auntie Velma told me (distracted for a moment from her trouble), even though it’s licensed premises. And the chief of the nearby Homeland comes to lunch in the restaurant with the white mining consultants who are looking into the possibility that there’s tin and chrome in his ‘country’.

  The Coen Nels are bewildered. I hadn’t realized it could be such an overwhelming state of mind. More than anything else—bewildered. They were so proud of her, in a quasi-government position, speaking a foreign language; the brains of your side of the family, but put to the service of her country, boosting our agricultural produce. So proud of Marie, her sophisticated life—all this time imagining Paris as the Champs-Elysées pictured in the cheap prints sold to backveld hotels.