July's People by Nadine Gordimer

When it all happened, there were transformations of myth or religious parable.  The bank accountant had been the legendary warning hornbill of African folk-tales, its flitting cries ignored at peril.  The yellow bakkie that was bought for fun turned out to be the vehicle: that which bore them away from the gunned shopping malls and the blazing, unsold houses of a depressed market, from the burst mains washing round bodies in their Saturday-morning garb of safari suits, and the heat-guided missiles that struck Boeings carrying those trying to take off from Jan Smuts Airport.  The cook-nanny, Nora, ran away.  The decently-paid and contented male servant, living in their yard since they had married, clothed by them in two sets of uniforms, khaki pants for rough housework, white drill for waiting at table, given Wednesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room--he turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be held; frog prince, saviour, July.

How would apartheid end?  It must have seemed both impossible and inevitable, until it did.  And when it did end it came in political shape, in the form of legislative repeal, bilateral conferences, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Successes like that one led to the (pretty misbegotten) conception of the 90's as the "End of History," a terminus achieved by liberal democracy.  But it might have been otherwise, and Nadine Gordimer's July's People offers a vision for one such end: a violent overthrow of white society by native South Africans.  They storm banks; they kill white Afrikaners; they shoot down planes to prevent escape.  In this scenario Maureen and Bam Smales escape, along with their three children, into the bush, under the protection of their longtime servant July, who takes them to his native village.

In the village, everything is turned upside down for the Smales.  Once they lived in a posh Johannesburg house; now they sleep in a hut on the seats removed from their Jeep-like Bakkie.  Their youngest child begs to be taken to a movie--how to explain to him what has happened to the world?--and their oldest absconds from them, drifting so far into the world of her new friends that Bam and Maureen cannot follow her.  But the most difficult change is the reversal of roles between the Smales, especially Maureen, and July.  July has been well-treated, well-paid, cannot complain, and his protection of the Smales is in recognition of it.  But he is in charge here, and both he and his (former?) employers struggle to understand the new nature of their relationship.  Is it right for Bam to be angry, when July takes the bakkie without asking?  Does it even belong to Bam anymore?  Is it July's?  The car itself is not so important, but it is the center of the new ambiguity, which is deeper and stranger than any party has expected.  The questions run deeper than, who is in charge: Who is July when he is in charge?  And who is Maureen when she is not the master?

It is July, not Maureen, who insists past the point of reasonableness that their relationship remains unchanged.  There is a fear in him: by accepting the change in South Africa, will he ally himself with the people who would turn the Smales in, or murder them?  To whom is July now responsible?

But as magnetic and mysterious as July is, July's People is about whites.  It is about white liberal South Africans, like the Smales, who have always been in favor of political equality for black South Africans.  Yes, there's a measure of old-fashioned liberal pigheadedness that the turmoil cures them of, but for the most part, both Bam and Maureen see the inequity of South African society clearly.  In fact, that's the root of their sympathy and kindness toward their servant.  But seeing clearly does not extricate them from the system itself.  They don't question the reasonableness, or the moral rectitude, of the revolution, but they don't know what to do when it puts them in the crosshairs.  How can a white person be, Gordimer asks, when the roots of inequity are so deep that their very existence perpetuates it?  Gordimer strips the novel of the kind of hopey-changey centrist pap that dominates our own discourse about political equality, and replaces it with lucid fear, even despair:

The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings.  If people don't all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need?  There was fear and danger in considering this emotional absolute as open in any way; the brain-weighers, the claimants of divine authority to distinguish powers of moral discernment from the degree of frizz in hair and conceptual ability from the relative thickness of lips--they were vigilant to pounce upon anything that could be twisted to give them credence.  Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at?  Who decided?  'We' (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register.  Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife's hut, and a backyard room in a city.  The balance between desire and duty is--has to be--maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers' place in the economy.  These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself.  The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.

July's People is about a race war, a phrase you see these days only on the scummiest parts of 4chan.  And it's easy to see how a right-winger might respond to a book like this: Even a liberal thinks that race war is inevitable, and their ready to betray their own, even give up their own lives.  But Gordimer rejects the easy partisanship of racist "brain-weighers" in favor of a more honest, and complicated perspective.  How can we achieve political equality when our understandings of the world are so different?  She's speaking about the great divide in the way she and July think about love and marriage, but she might as well be speaking about other kinds of desire and other kinds of duty.  How can the Smales accommodate July's desires, July's duties, when they can't conceive of them, and ow can July, when power is thrust upon him, accommodate theirs?

July's People is a big old shrug of a novel, as certain that South Africa's problems are intractable as it is that Maureen, at the novel's end, will rush toward the coming helicopter not knowing if she's headed toward rescue or death, just because the state of uncertainty is untenable.  It's easy to be shaken by it, especially in these times of ethnonationalist revanchism.  But it's worth remembering that, as far as we have yet to go, apartheid ended not with the bang of a plane being shot down, but with a whimper.