Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer is a very out spoken white women in her writings about the horrors of the Apartheid.  She writes in a way that makes the reader think about what it is like to be anything else other than an upper middle class white man.  She tends to not give her characters names in order to have them represent a general whole.


The most shocking story was "Six Feet of the Country."  This story gave me so much insight about the Apartheid , the entire system was just so corrupt that not even the people who created it could even control it anymore.  And if you had no power you looked to anyone who did because surly they could make a change...not always the case.  Though if you had power and you couldn't make a change, those who thought you could viewed you wouldn't rather than you couldn't.  The entire system is just too corrupt to make a difference.  The part in this story that stood out most to me was when they were trying to get Petrus's brother's body back.  Petrus and his father wanted it back to give their lost loved one a proper burial, where as the baas wanted it back for pride that he was able to take control of a situation in which the system had screwed him over.  It appalled me that he did not care one bit about this young boy who had died on his land, his only priority was to handle a situation his way to make him look superior and in control.


Anther story that got to me was "Amnesty."  I hated how this woman waited for so long for her husbands return from prison and all he ever did was criticized her.  He had called her ignorant for not going out and learning certain processes (needing the permit to visit him in prison) when she was not given much if any opportunity to even realize she needed to learn these things.  He had given her children and he was never around for them.  He had told her numerous times things would be different and they never were.  Personally I would not have put up with it, no matter how much I loved him.  Sometimes you do need to put yourself first and in this certain situation that is the case.  I feel she is undermining herself by putting up with such verbal abuse.  Understanding she may not have a chase to just up and leave him, though, I do see a reflection in the end of how she views her life.  She does seems content with who she is, as it should be, and it seems to me that she has seen the cards dealt to her and even though she can't do much about it she will make the most of it.


Apartheid is a horrible history that hit South Africa like a ton of bricks.  The way black South Africans were looked at was a monstrosity.  I can't even imagine how horrible it could have been.  It does however remind me of a Disney movie I had seen when I was younger.  It was called "The Color of Friendship" and had two settings, one in America and the other in South Africa in the year 1977.  Mahree Bok is a white South African girl who goes to America for a student exchange program to stay with Piper Dellums and her family.  Mahree does not expect her host family to be black, nor does her host family expect a non-black South African.  Things were very hard for the girls at first because they did not understand one another.  Throughout this entire week this movie has been buzzing in my brain.  When Mahree first goes to America she thinks of herself superior to her host family, but after learning how different it is America versus her home in South Africa she gets a completely different view of her host family and was able to accept them for who they were.