A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife's eyes by a racist regime. The namesake's small black hand in her mother's white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King--this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they need to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Hillela Capran is, effectively, an orphan; her mother has left her to be raised by two sisters in alternation--proud, priggish Olga and progressive Pauline. Her father is away somewhere in Rhodesia. And yet, from this circumstance, Hillela grows up headstrong, confident, even sure of herself. She often takes what she wants, including the love of her cousin Sasha, with whom Pauline finds her in bed one day. This moment ushers in Hillela's long, not very bitter exile. From Pauline's house she makes her way to a beach camp outside of South Africa that's home to political refugees, to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, to other parts of southern Africa. She marries an activist with ties to Mandela's ANC and has a daughter with him, whom they name for Winnie Mandela (her less known first name--Nomzomo). When he's killed by an assassin--just on the other side of the refrigerator door from her--her exile grows, expands: Eastern Europe, London, America.

The title, A Sport of Nature, refers to a Latin term meaning a "spontaneous mutation," a kind of creature or form of life whose appearance cannot be explained by its genetic material. Again and again, the novel suggests that Hillela will become an internationally known figure, whose life is being reconstructed from primary sources, though it seems equally likely for being a terrorist as for being a diplomat. Only later in the novel do we discover that Hillela becomes the second wife of an African general, later the president of his unnamed state--though apparently it's supposed to be a fictionalized Kenya. How does Hillela become this person, who consorts with ANC freedom fighters and posh diplomats both? As the title suggests, nothing in her background suggests it. She certainly doesn't get it from Olga, and not from Pauline, either, whose progressive values are of the "work within the system" variety, even as she opens her home to dissidents en route to their escape from the apartheid regime. Hillela is not even like Sasha, her cousin, whose bitter hatred of apartheid lands him a lengthy jail sentence.

It's not clear that Hillela has values at all, not in the way we typically think of them. She's motivated by something deeper, and more sensual, in every sense of the word. We are told that her "skill is men," meaning her flirtations, her provocative sexuality, come in handy for her dissident associates--but the sexuality precedes the dissidence. Her association with the ANC emerges from her relationship with her first husband, Whaila, and not the other way around. Her love for Whaila, and her desire for a family wit him, serve in place of a conscious principle:

Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn't exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful--but a creature made of love, without a label; that's a freak.

Gordimer was a political novelist, but A Sport of Nature may be her most political novel. Those of us who are not South African may forget, or be ignorant of, her long association with Mandela and the African National Congress; famously, she helped write and revise Mandela's fiery speech that dared a judge to put him to death, before his life sentence. A Sport of Nature doubles as a kind of history of the anti-apartheid movement: there's the ANC, the SWAPO, the SACP, the MK, and every other acronym under the sun. Mandela is here, and several other figures whose names are less familiar to foreigners like me, like Oliver Tambo. It's a far cry from the abstract crisis of July's People--this is real history, recorded by a person who lived it. This is true for better and for worse, perhaps mostly worse, as the novel seems at times too granular. But as the novel's only fictional creation, Hillela hovers above it all, a character of power and individuality that, as far as I've read, is unmatched in Gordimer's fiction. Perhaps she was Gordimer's way of imagining a personality that might cut through the various contradictions and tensions of apartheid, a white woman freed from belief, led to the life of liberation by feeling only.