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Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982

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Sun Feb 15 2026

Summary

Episode Summary: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” – Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture, 1982

Podcast: New Books Network

Host: New Books
Featured Speaker: Nadine Gordimer
Date of Lecture: October 14, 1982
Episode Release: February 15, 2026

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode replays Nadine Gordimer’s seminal 1982 James Lecture, “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum,” delivered at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Gordimer, Nobel Laureate and lauded anti-apartheid writer, explores South Africa’s turbulent transition from apartheid towards an uncertain future. She examines the existential crisis of white identity, the obligations and limitations of liberal whites, conflicts within the anti-apartheid struggle, and the fraught intersections of art and politics. The lecture forms the basis for her influential essay “Living in the Interregnum” (The New York Review of Books, 1983).

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Meaning of “Interregnum” in South Africa

Gordimer frames the early 1980s as an “interregnum”—the uncertain period between the dying of the old apartheid order and the birth of a new, yet undefined, social reality.
She references Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” (06:19)

2. The Colonial Legacy and South Africa’s Peculiarity

South Africa is positioned as the ultimate, explicit expression of 19th-century colonialism, where racism and exploitation are legalized and institutionalized without pretense.
The term “apartheid” is described as a “baptism” by the Dutch Reformed Church, coining a new term for enduring manifestations of race prejudice (06:49).

3. White Identity and the Fear of Structurelessness

Gordimer explores how white South Africans, especially liberals and radicals, must face the stripping away of white-centric institutions and privileges.
Whites face an existential crisis: “The interregnum is not only between two social orders, but between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined.” (40:18)

4. The Role and Responsibility of Whites in the Liberation Struggle

Drawing on Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mangani Wali Siroti’s words, Gordimer argues that white participation must be active but non-dominant—“Blacks must learn to talk, whites must learn to listen.” (25:57)
Whites must find their own forms of activism and struggle, distinct but sometimes intersecting with black-led actions.

5. The Complexity and Contradictions of Anti-Apartheid Activism

The anti-apartheid movement is not monolithic. Gordimer recounts an anecdote about a complex public meeting involving contradictory positions among black, white, and Zulu leaders.
She describes the confusion and ambivalence, even among committed activists, in navigating contradictory impulses and historical legacies (33:20).

6. The Complicity of Habit and the “Banality of Evil”

Whites’ inability to “see” blacks, born of systemic segregation and daily habits, perpetuates alienation and dehumanization:

“Apartheid is above all a habit. The unnatural becomes to seem natural, a far from banal illustration of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil.” (17:11)

7. Dilemmas of Privilege and Sacrifice

Gordimer confronts liberal whites’ limits—particularly regarding military service and risk-taking.
Blacks ask: “why whites who believe apartheid is something that must be abolished…continue to submit to army call up.” (47:12)
For whites, activism is compartmentalized; for blacks, “struggle is everywhere or nowhere.”

8. The Place of the Writer & Art in the Interregnum

Gordimer distinguishes between the “morality of life” and the “morality of art,” asserting the writer’s need to reconcile these within a turbulent, political context.
She discusses literary traditions, noting how early black writing was moralistic, while the 1970s saw a shift to agitprop and revolutionary aims among black authors.
On agitprop:

“Agitprop, not recognized under that or any other name…I know that agitprop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people.” (52:07)
Gordimer insists that both black and white writers must have freedom to write beyond prescriptive “kits of emotive phrases” or typologies.

9. The Duty to Imagine an “Alternative Left”

Gordimer calls for the re-creation of the left, distinct from both failed communist regimes and exploitative capitalism:

“We have to begin with a kind of cosmic obstinacy to believe in the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without military or economic terror.” (63:08)
She challenges the audience, tying Western intellectual responsibility to the struggle:

“This is where your responsibility to the Third World meets mine. Without the will to tramp toward that possibility, no relation of whites of the West with the West’s formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past.” (65:05)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Existing in Turbulence:

“I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change…It’s accurate, not romantic.” (06:03 – Gordimer)
On White Habit and Vision:

“The weird ordering of collective life in South Africa has slipped its special contact lens into the eyes of whites. We actually see blacks differently, which includes not seeing, not noticing their unnatural absence.” (16:28 – Gordimer)
On Black Participation and White Allies:

“Whites, unfortunately, have a habit of taking over and usurping the leadership…The point is that however much they want to identify with blacks, it is an existential fact that they have not really been victims of this baneful oppression and exploitation.” (25:36 – quoting Bishop Desmond Tutu)
On Literary Freedom:

“I can’t accept either that [the black writer] should have served on him as the black writer in South Africa now has an orthodoxy, a kit of emotive phrases, an unwritten index of subjects, a typology— all this on top of official censorship hammering him from the other side.” (55:24 – Gordimer)
On the Need for an “Alternative Left”:

“I believe we have to begin with a kind of cosmic obstinacy to believe in the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without military or economic terror. If we cannot, the possibility itself will die out for our age.” (63:08 – Gordimer)
Moral Courage and Complicity:

“There was consternation when early this year, Susan Sontag had the great courage and honesty publicly to accuse herself and other American intellectuals of the left of having been afraid to condemn the repression perpetrated by communist regimes…” (61:24 – Gordimer)

Key Timestamps

[01:04] – Introduction by Elle Leo on Nadine Gordimer's life & context of the lecture
[02:33] – Edmund White introduces Gordimer, her major works, and themes
[05:29] – Gordimer begins her lecture: context, epigraph from Gramsci, and setting the scene
[16:30] – On internalized habit & white South African vision
[25:36] – Gordimer quotes Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mangani Wali Siroti on the responsibilities of white allies
[33:20] – Anecdote of a contradictory anti-apartheid meeting in Johannesburg
[40:18] – On existential crisis and new identity in the interregnum
[47:12] – Dilemma of military service & commitment among anti-apartheid whites
[52:00] – Literary standards, agitprop, and arts under apartheid
[55:24] – On orthodoxy in black literature and the dangers thereof
[63:08] – The imperative of an alternative, humane left
[65:05] – Closing thoughts: shared global responsibility, human hope

Tone and Language

Gordimer’s delivery is reflective, intimate, and sometimes personal—combining the rigor of political analysis with the lyricism of literary sensibility. Her language blends philosophical references (to Gramsci, Adorno, Arendt, Camus) with concrete stories and sharp, often self-critical observations.

Conclusion

This lecture stands as both a snapshot of an epochal moment in South African and world history—and a searching inquiry into the role of writers, intellectuals, artists, and privileged bystanders in the face of oppression and transition. Gordimer’s argument for an “alternative left,” her insistence on artistic independence, and her frank reckoning with the limits of white liberalism all resonate beyond the time and setting of her speech, challenging listeners to reconsider their own complicity and potential for action in times of systemic crisis.

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Transcript

A (0:02)

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B (0:55)

To the New Books Network.

C (1:04)

Welcome to the New York Institute for the Humanities podcast. I'm Elle Leo. In today's episode from the Vault, we revisit novelist Nadine Gordimer's James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa on October 14, 1982. Born in 1923, Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist and one of the most honored women writers of her generation. During the 1960s and 1970s 1970s she wrote a number of novels set against the backdrop of the emerging resistance movement against apartheid. She was awarded the Booker prize for her 1974 novel The Conversationalist, and in 1991 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2014 in Johannesburg. In 1982, resistance to South Africa's apartheid was growing increasingly militant, and the state's broken, brutal repression heightened this tension. In her lecture, Gordimer speaks directly to this political landscape, describing the period as an interregnum. She discusses the crisis of white identity in South Africa, the relationship between art and politics, and the urgency for an alternative political left working toward what she calls a democracy without economic and military terror. This lecture was the basis of Gordimer's essay Living in the Interregnum, published in the New York Review of Books in January of 1983.

B (2:33)

My name is Edmund White and I'm a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and we're happy to have you here tonight for another one of our James lectures, and we're especially happy to have Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer is South Africa's leading author and one of the preeminent writers in English today. In her eight novels and her scores of stories, she has mapped every corner of her country, both its physical and spiritual milieu. She is a political novelist, but only in the edgy, complicated way in which those two words oppose each other. For politics is a form of lying to the degree it generalizes about people, whereas fiction is a way to tell the truth in that it records the specifics of one person's life. A political novel, then, in the hands of someone as penetratingly honest as Nadine Gordimer, plays polemic off against the resistant and not easily summarized minutiae of a life, as she herself has put it. The tension between standing apart and being fully involved, that is what makes a writer. That tension has been richly productive. Her subtlety of analysis and her fidelity to the actual have led her often to a recasting of conventional political positions. In her 1970 novel a guest of Honor, for instance, she pictured a post colonial society in which the main conflict is no longer between blacks and whites, but between blacks and blacks. In berger's daughter, in 1979, she again sank a probe into an unexpected part of the South African body politic, like one of those acupuncturists who. Who cure a headache by inserting a wand into the sole of the foot. In this novel, Ms. Gordimer wrote about Rosa Berger, the daughter of a martyred Afrikaner leader of the South African Communist Party, a young woman who struggles against her father's noble legacy. Though she acknowledges its importance, the conflict between the individual's responsibility to himself or herself and to others is one of the sensitively articulated themes of this book. July's people is projected onto the near future when a white family confronted with a black revolution must depend on the help of a loyal house servant. July. Once again, Ms. Gordimer has transcended the political cliches and examined the tragic future that may lie in wait for a divided society. Ms. Gordimer has not only written many novels and stories, but also spoken with much less detachment and much more urgency in her many political essays. In addition, she has consistently championed many of the black authors of South Africa whose books have been banned there. She's been highly honored in Britain, France and America for her work. Tonight she honors us all with her presence. Thank you.

D (5:29)

Friends. I'm going to talk about. Living conditions in the interregnum police files are our only claim to immortality. I didn't say it. Milan Kundere did I live at 6,000ft in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change? The vision's heady, the image of the demonic dance. And it's accurate, not romantic, an image of action springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa and the time, the last years of the colonial era in Africa. It's inevitable that 19th century colonialism should finally come to its end there, because there it reached its ultimate expression. Open in the legalized land and mineral grabbing, open in the labor exploitation of indigenous peoples, open in the constitutionalized, institutionalized racism that was concealed by the British under the pious notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. The extraordinary obdurate cross breed of Dutch, German, English, French in the South African white settler population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone's refined white racism. The flags of European civilization dropped, and there it was, unashamedly the ugliest creation of man. And they baptized the thing. In the Dutch Reformed Church. They called it apartheid, coining the ultimate term for every manifestation over the ages in many countries of race prejudice. Every country could see its semblances there, and most peoples. The sun that never set over one or other of the 19th century colonial empires of the world is going down. Finally, in South Africa, since the black uprisings of the mid-70s, coinciding with the independence of Mozambique, in Angola, and later that of Zimbabwe, the past has begun rapidly to drop out of sight, even for those who would like to go on living in it. Historical coordinates don't fit life any longer. New ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It's not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my most recent novel a quotation from Gramsci. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living 10,000 miles from home. Tonight I speak to you out of it. And I'm going quite frequently to let events personally experienced as I was thinking towards or writing this paper, interrupt the theoretical flow. Because this interaction, this essential disruption, this breaking in upon the existential coherence we call concept is the very state of being I must attempt to convey. I've never before spoken publicly from so personal a point of view, apart from the usual Joycean reasons of secrecy and cunning, to which I would add, a jealous hoarding of private experience. For use in fiction. There's been for me a peculiarly South African taboo. In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white. It has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world media, itself overwhelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and women come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites. They rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes. I've shunned the arrogance of interpreting my country through the private life that, as Theodore Adorno puts it, drags on only as an appendage of the social process in the time and place of which I am part. But now I'm going to break the inhibition or destroy the privilege of privacy, whichever way you look at it. I have to offer you myself as my most closely observed specimen from the interregnum. Yet I must remind you that I remain a writer, not a public speaker, and nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction. I believe that. I know it. There's another reason for confession. The particular segment of South African society to which I belong, by the color of my skin, whether I like it or not, represents an existential crisis that has a particular connection with the Western world to which you in this audience belong. I think that may become self evident before I arrive at the point of explication. But it's not, I want to assure you, at the start, the old admitted complicity in the slave trade or the price of. Of raw materials. I've used the term segment in defining my place in South African society because within the white section of that society, which is less than one fifth of the total population now, and it's predicted to drop to 1/7 by the year 2000, within this there is a segment preoccupied in the interregnum neither by plans to run away from or merely how to survive physically and economically in the black state that is coming. I can't give you numbers for this segment, but in measure of some sort of faith in the possibility of structuring society humanly in the possession of skills and intellect to devote to this end. There is something to offer the future. How to offer it is our preoccupation occupation since skills technical, technological and intellectual can be bought in markets other than those of the vanquished colonial power. Although they are important as a commodity ready to hand, they do not constitute a claim on the future. That claim rests on something else, something other. How to offer oneself in the eyes of the black majority which will rule Azania, Whites of former South Africa will have to redefine themselves in a new collective life within new structures. From the all white parliament to the all white country club and the separate white television channels. It's not a matter of blacks taking over white institutions. It's one of conceiving of institutions from nursery schools to government departments that reflect a societal structure vastly different from that built to the specifications of white power and privilege. This vast difference will be evident even if capitalism survives. Since South Africa's capitalism, like South Africa's whites only democracy has been unlike anyone else's. For example, free enterprise among us is for whites only and black capitalists may trade only and with many limitations on their quote free, unquote enterprise. In black ghettos, in cities of the future, the kind of stores and services offered will change when the lifestyle of the majority black working class establishes the authority of the enfranchised demand in place of the dictated demand whereby the consumer gets what the producer's racially estimated idea of his place in life decrees to be his need. A more equitable distribution of wealth may be enforced by laws. The hierarchy of perception that white institutions and living habits implant through our daily experience in every white from childhood can be changed only by whites themselves and from within. The weird ordering of the collective life in South Africa has slipped its special contact lens into the eyes of whites. We actually see blacks differently, which includes not seeing, not noticing their unnatural absence. Since there are so many perfectly ordinary venues of daily life, the cinema, for example, where blacks have never been allowed in and so one has forgotten that they could be, that they might be encountered there. I'm writing in my winter quarters at an old deal table on a veranda in the sun. Out of the corner of my eye I see a piece of junk mail, the brochure of a chain bookstore assuring me of constantly expanding service, showing the staff of a newly opened branch photograph. Ms. So and so, Mr. Such and such and one black face, Gladys. What a friendly, informal form of identification in an equal opportunity enterprise. Gladys is seen by fellow workers, by the photographer who noted down names and it's assumed by the reader of this pamphlet quite differently from the way the white workers are seen. I gaze at her as they do. She's simply Gladys, the convenient handle by which she's taken up by the white world, used and put down again like the glass the king drinks from in Rilke's poem. Her surname, her African name, belongs to Soweto, which her smiling white companions are less likely ever to visit than New York or London. The successfully fitted device in the eye of the beholder is something the average white South African is not conscious of. For apartheid is above all a habit. The unnatural becomes to seem natural, a far from banal illustration of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil. The segment of the white population to which I belong, however, has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood. And we're aware that with the inner eye we've seen too much ever to be innocent. But this kind of awareness, represented by white guilt in the 1950s, has been sent off by us into the sunset since, as Czeslov Milosz puts it, guilt saps modern man's belief in the value of his own perceptions and judgments. And we have need of ours. We have to believe in our ability to find new perceptions and our ability to judge their truth. Along with weeping over what's done and past, we've given up also rejoicing in what, what Gunter Grass calls head births, those Athenian armchair deliveries of the future presented to blacks by whites. Not all blacks even concede that whites can have any part in the new that cannot yet be born. An important black leader who does, Bishop Desmond Tutu, who's recently been in this country, defines that participation like this. This is what I consider to be the place of the white man in this popularly called liberation struggle. I am firmly non racial and so welcome the participation of all, both black and white, in the struggle for the new South Africa, which must come whatever the cost. But I want to state that at this stage the leadership of the struggle must be firmly in black hands. They must determine what will be the priorities and the strategy of the struggle. Whites, unfortunately, have a habit of taking over and usurping the leadership and taking crucial decisions, largely, I suppose, because of the head start they had in education and experience of this kind. The point is that however much they want to identify with blacks, it is an existential fact that they have not really been victims of this baneful oppression and exploitation. It's a divide that can't be crossed and that must give blacks a primacy in determining the course and goal of the struggle whites must be willing to follow. Blacks must learn to talk, Whites must learn to listen. So wrote the black South African poet Mangani Wali Siroti in the 70s. And this is the premise on which the white segment to which I belong lives its life at present. Does it sound to you like an abdication of the will? Well that's because you who live in a democracy are accustomed to exerting the right to make abstract statements of principle for which at least the structures of practical realization exist. The symbolic action of the like minded in signing a letter to a newspaper or the lobbying of Congress is a reminder of constitutional rights to be invoked for us. Tutu's premise enjoins arousing of the will. A desperate shaking into life of the faculty of rebellion against unjust laws that has been outlawed by the dying power and faculties of renewal that often are rebuffed by the power that is struggling to emerge. The rider that Desmond Tutu didn't add to his statement is that although white support is expected to be active, it's also expected that white's different position in the still standing structures of the old society will require actions that while complementary to those of blacks, must be different from the blacks actions. Whites are expected to find their own forms of struggle which can only sometimes coincide with those of blacks. That there can be at least this coincident cooperation is reassuring for whites, that at least should be a straightforward form of activism for them. But it's not. For in this time of morbid symptoms there are contradictions which within the black liberation struggle itself, based not only, as would be expected, on the opposing ideological alignments of the world outside, but also on the moral confusion of claims on land, on peoples from the pre colonial past in relation to the unitary state the majority of blacks and the segment of whites are avowed to. So for whites it's not simply a matter of follow the leader behind blacks, it's taking on as blacks do, choices to be made out of confusion empirically, pragmatically, ideologically, idealistically about the practical moralities of the struggle. This is the condition imposed by history, if you like, in those areas of action where black and white participation coincides. I met a meeting in the Johannesburg City hall one night after working at this paper. During the day the meeting is held under the auspices of the Progressive Federal Party, the official opposition in the all white South African parliament. The issue is a deal being made between the South African government and the kingdom of Swaziland, whereby 3,000 square miles of South African territory and 850,000 South African citizens, part of the Zulu homeland KwaZulu would be given to Swaziland. The principal speakers are Chief Gacha Butulezi, leader of five and a half million Zulus, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mr. Ray Swart, a white liberal and a leader of the Progressive Federal Party. Chief Butelessi has consistently refused to take so called independence for KwaZulu, but although declaring himself for the banned African National Congress, by accepting all stages of so called self government up to the final one has transgressed the non negotiable principle of the African National Congress which is a unitary South Africa. Bishop Tutu upholds the principle of a unitary South Africa. The Progressive Federal Party's constitution provides for a federal structure in a new non racial South Africa, recognizing as de facto entities the homelands whose creation by the apartheid government the party nevertheless has opposed and continues to oppose. Also up there on the platform are members of the Black Circle, the white women's organization that has taken a radical stand as a white ally of the black struggle. These women support a unitary South Africa. In the audience of about 2,000 or more, a small number of whites is lost among exuberant ululating applauding Zulus. Order and what's more, amicability is kept by Gacha Butelessi's marshals equipped beneath the garb of a private militia drawn from his tribal Inkata movement, equipped with Zulu muscle in place of guns. What is Bishop Tutu doing here? He doesn't recognize the homelands. What are the black sash women doing here? They don't recognize the homelands. What is the Progressive Federal Party doing? A party firmly dedicated to constitution constitutional action only hosting a meeting where the banned black liberation salute and battle cry Amandla Awektu power to the people is shaking the columns of municipal Doric and a black man's tribal army instead of the South African police is keeping the peace. And what am I doing here applauding Gatia Butalezi and Ray Swat? I don't drink a lot the homelands, nor do I support the federal South Africa. I was there. They were there because removed from its areas of special interest, KwaZulu's national concern with land and people belonging to the Zulus. The issue was yet another South African government device to buy off surrounding states that give shelter to South African freedom fighters and to dispossess black South Africans of their South African citizenship, thus reducing the ratio of black to white population. Well, the glow of my applauding stinging palms cooled. What a Paradox I had accommodated in myself, moved by a display of tribal loyalty when I believe in black unity, applauding a homeland's leader, above all scandalized by the excision of part of a homeland from South Africa, when the homeland's policy is in itself the destruction of the country as an entity. But these are the confusions blacks have to live with. And if I'm making any claim to accompany them beyond apartheid, so must I. The state of interregnum is a state of Hegel's disintegrated consciousness, a state of contradictions. It is from its internal friction that energy must somehow be struck for us whites, energy to break the vacuum of which we are subconsciously aware. For however hated and shameful the collective life of apartheid and its structures have been to us, there is now the unadmitted fear of being without structures. The interregnum is not only between two social orders, but between two identities, one known and discarded, the other unknown and undetermined. Whatever the human cost of the liberation struggle, whatever Manichaean poisons must be absorbed as stimulants in the interregnum, the black knows that he, he will be at home at last in the future. The white who has declared him herself for that future, who belongs to the white segment that was never at home in white supremacy, does not know whether he will find his home at last. It's assumed, and not only by racists, that this depends entirely on the willingness of blacks to let him in. But we, if we live out our situation consciously proceeding from the Pascalian wager, that the home, that that home of the white African exists, know that this depends also on our finding our way there, out of the perceptual clutter of curled photographs of master and servant relationships, the old 78rpms of history repeating the conditioning of the past. A black man I may surely call my friend because we've survived a time when he didn't find it possible to accept a white's friendship and a time when I didn't think that I could accept that he should decide when that time was past. He said to me this year, whites have to learn to struggle. It wasn't an admonition, but a sincere encouragement expressed in political terms. The course of our friendship, his words and his attitude signify the phasing out or the passing usefulness of the black consciousness movement with its separatism of the past 10 years and the return to the tenets of the broadly based and prestigious black movement, the banned African National Congress, non racialism belief that race oppression is part of the class struggle and recognition that it's possible for whites to opt out of class, race privilege and identify with black liberation. My friend wasn't, needless to say, referring to those whites, from Abraham Fisher to Helen Joseph and Neil Agate, who have risked and in some cases lost their lives in the political struggle with apartheid. It would be comfortable to assume that he wasn't referring either to to the articulate outriders of the white segment. People like me, intellectuals, writers, lawyers, students, church and civil rights progressives who keep the whips of protest cracking. But I know he was, after all, addressing those of us belonging to the outriders on whose actions the newspapers report and the secret police keep watch as we prance back and forth ever closer to that fine line between being concerned citizens and social revolutionaries. Perhaps the encouragement was indeed meant for us as well as the base of the segment. Those who are always in the audience but not up on the platform, young people and their parents generation who must look in South Africa for some effective way in the living of their personal lives to join the struggle for liberation from racism. For a long time such whites have felt that we're doing all we can short of violence, a terrible threshold none of us is willing to cross, though aware that all this may mean is that it will be left to blacks to do so. But now blacks are asking a question to which every white must have a personal answer on an issue that cannot be dealt with by a show of hands at a meeting or a signature on a particular an issue that comes home and enters every family. Blacks are now asking why whites who believe apartheid is something that must be abolished, not defended, continue to submit to army call up. We whites of the whole liberal radical spectrum have assumed that army service was an example of Czeslav Milosz's powerlessness of the individual involved in a mechanism that works independently of his will. If you refuse military service, your only options are to leave the country or to go to prison. Conscientious objection is not recognized in South Africa at present except on rather rigidly defined religious grounds. Legislation may establish it in some form soon. There's talk. But if this is to be, is working as an army clerk or doing any other non competent job not functioning as part of the war machine. These are reasons enough for all except a handful of men who choose prison on religious rather than political grounds to go into the South African army despite their opposition to apartheid. These are not reasons enough for them to do so on the condition on which blacks can accept whites dedication to Mutual liberation between black and white attitudes to struggle. There stands the overheard remark of a young black woman. I break the law because I am alive. We whites have still to thrust the spade under the roots of our lives. For most of us, including myself, struggle is still something that has a place. But for blacks it's everywhere or nowhere. What is poetry which does not save nations or peoples? Czeslav Milos said that, or wrote it. I have already delineated my presence here on the scale of a minority within a minority. But now I'm going to reduce my claim to significance still further. A white, a dissident white, a white writer. If I were not a writer, of course I shouldn't have been invited here at all. So I must presume that although the existential problems of a white writer are of no importance compared with with a liberation of 23 and a half million black people, the peculiar relation of the writer in South Africa as interpreter both to South Africans and the world of a society in struggle makes this narrow corridor I can lead you down one in which doors fly open on the tremendous happening experienced by blacks. For longer than the first half of this century, the experience of blacks in South Africa was written about more by whites than blacks. The first imaginative works exploring the central fact of South African life, racism, were written in the twenties by whites, by William Plumer and Sarah Gertrude Millen. If blacks were the subjects, but not the readers of books written about them, then neither white nor black read much of what have since become the classics of of early black literature. The few works of Herbert and Rolfez Dlomo, Thomas Mafolo and Sol Plaicke. Their moralistic essays dealt with contemporary life. Their fiction was mainly historical, a desperate attempt to secure in the art forms of an imposed culture, an identity and history discounted and torn up by that culture. In the 50s, urban blacks Eskia Mpashlele, Louis Nkorsi, Kant, Temba Bloke Modesani, following Peter Abrams, began to write in English only and about the urban industrialized experience in which black and white chafed against one another across the color barriers. The work of these black writers interested both black and white at that age improvised level known as intellectual in South Africa. I think that aware would be a better and more accurate term designating awareness that the white middle class establishment was not, as it claimed, the paradigm of South African life and white culture was not the definitive South African culture. Somewhere at the black writers elbows, as they wrote, was the joggle of independence coming to one colonized country after another north of South Africa. But they wrote ironically of their lives under oppression as victims, not fighters. And even those black writers who were political activists, like the novelist Alex Laguma and the poet Dennis Brutus, made of their ideologically channeled bitterness not much more than the Aristotelian catharsis creating in the reader empathy with the oppressed. Rather than rousing rebellion against repression, the fiction of white writers also produced the Aristotelian effect and included in the price of hardback or paperback a catharsis of white guilt for writer and reader. It was at this stage, incidentally, that reviewers abroad added their dimes worth of morbid symptoms to our own by creating, creating, quote, courageous, unquote, as a literary value for South African writers. The subject of both black and white writers, which was the actual entities of South African life instead of those defined by separate entrances. For white and black, these subjects were startlingly new and important. And whatever any writer, black or white, could dare to explore, there was considered grand ground gained for advance in the scope of all of us, of all writers. There had been no iconoclastic tradition, only a single novel, William Plumer's Turbot Wolf, written 30 years before, whose understanding of what our subject really was was still a decade ahead of our time. When he phrased the native question, it's not a question, it's an answer. In the 70s, black writers began to give that answer for themselves. It had been vociferous in the consciousness of resistance politics and manifest in political action black mass organizations, the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and others in the 1960s. But except at the oral folk literature level of freedom songs, it was an answer that had not come yet from the one source that had never been in conquered territory, not even when industrialization conscripted where military conquest had already devastated the territory of the subconscious, where a people's own particular way of making sense and dignity of life, the base of culture, remains un get at able writers and not politicians are its spokespeople. With the outlawing of black political organizations, the banning of freedom songs and platform speeches, there came from blacks a changed attitude towards culture and literature as verbal, easily accessible culture. Many black writers had been in terrible conflict and challenged by political activists. Among them, are you going to fight or write now? They were told in the rhetoric of the time, there's no conflict if you make your pen our people's weapon. The Aristotelian catharsis relieving black self pity and white guilt was clearly not the mode in which black writers could give the answer black resistance required of them. The iconoclastic mode, though it had its function, where race fetishists had set up their china idols in place of heathen wooden ones. This method was too ironic and detached. Other directed black people had to be brought back to themselves. And black writers arrived out of their own situation at Brecht's discovery. They found that their audience needed to be educated, to be astonished at the circumstances under which they functioned. They began to show blacks that their living conditions are their history. South Africa does not lack its Chernyshevsky's to point out that the high road of history is not the sidewalks of fashionable white Johannesburg shopping malls any more than it was that of the niven prospect in the bunks of migratory labors, the four AMQs between one room, family and factory, the drunken dreams that are argued around braziers is the history of blacks defeat by conquest, the scale of the lack of value placed on them by whites and the degradation of their own acquiescence in that value. The salvation of revolt, that is their two a match dropped by the builders of every ghetto, waiting to be picked up and struck. The difficulty, even boredom, that many whites experience and sometimes conceal when reading stories or watching plays by blacks, in which, as they say, nothing happens, is due to the fact that the experience conveyed is not the development of actions but the representation of conditions. It's a mode of artistic revelation and experience for those in whose life dramatic content is indeed in its conditions. This mode of writing was the beginning of the black writer's function as a revolutionary. It was also the beginning of a conception of himself as differing from that of the white writer's self image. The black writer's consciousness of himself as a writer comes now from his participation in those living conditions, in the judgment of his people. That's what makes him a writer. The authority of the experience itself, not the way he perceives it and transforms it into words. Tenets of criticism are accordingly based on the critic's participation in those same living conditions, not his ability to judge how well the writer has achieved. Quote the disposition of natural material to a formal end that shall enlighten the imagination, unquote. This definition of art by Anthony Burgess would be regarded by many blacks as arising from premises based on white living conditions and the thought patterns these determine an arabesque of smoke from an expensive cigar. If we have our Chernichevskys, we're pretty short on Herzens. Literary standards and standards of human justice are hopelessly confused. In the interregnum, the syllogism of talent goes like this all blacks are brothers. All brothers are equal. Therefore, brother, you cannot be a better writer than I am. And the black writer who questions the last proposition is betraying the first two. As a fellow writer, I myself find it very difficult to accept, even for the cause of black liberation to which I'm committed as a white South African citizen, that a black writer of imaginative power, whose craftsmanship is equal to what he has to say, must not be regarded above someone who has emerged admirably from political imprisonment with a script, scrap of paper on which there is jotted an alliterative arrangement of protest slogans. For me, necessity for the black writer to find imaginative modes equal to his existential reality goes without question. But I can't accept that he must deny, as proof of solidarity with his people's struggle, the tortuous inequalities of prescience and perception which will always differentiate him from others and that make of him, well, a writer. I can't accept either that he should have served on him as the black writer in South Africa now has an orthodoxy, a kit of emotive phrases, an unwritten index of subjects, a typology. All this on top of official censorship hammering him from the other side. The problem. The problem is that agitprop, not recognized under that or any other name, I may say, has become the first contemporary art form that many black South Africans feel they can call their own. It fits their anger, and this is taken as proof that it is an organic growth of black creation, freeing itself instead of the old shell that it is inhabited so many times by the anger of others. I know that agit prop binds the artist with the means by which it aims to free the minds of the people. I can see now how it thwarts both the black writer's common purpose to master his art and his revolutionary purpose to change the nature of art, to create new norms and forms out of and for a people recreating themselves. But how can my black fellow writer agree with me, even admit the conflict I set up in him by these statements? He has to accept the criteria of his people because in no other but the community of black deprivation is he in possession of selfhood. It's only through unreserved, exclusive identification with blacks that he can break the alienation of being other. For nearly 3, 350 years in the white audit society, and only through submitting to the beehive category of cultural worker programmed that he can break the alienation of the artist elitist in the black mass of industrial workers and peasants and finally, he can toss the conflict right back in my lap with Camus words. Is it possible to be in history while still referring to values which go beyond it? The black writer is in history, and its values threaten to force out the transcendent ones of art. The white as a writer and South African, does not know his place in history. At this stage, in this time in my own life, there are two absences. One is that racism is evil to me, it's human damnation in the Old Testament sense, and no compromises as well as sacrifices should be too great to fight against it. The other is that a writer is a being in whose sensibility is fused what Lucas calls the duality of inwardness and outside world. And the writer must never be asked to sunder this union. The coexistence of these absolutes often seem irreconcilable within one life. For me, in another country, in another time, they would present no conflict, I think, because they would operate in unrelated areas of existence. But in South Africa now, there have to be coordinates for which the coupling must be found. The morality of life and the morality of art have broken out of their categories in social flux, and if you can't reconcile them, they cannot be kept from one another's traits inside you. For me, Lucas, divinatory, intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life is what a writer poorly evolved for the task as he is, is made for, as fish that swim under the weight of many dark fathoms look like any other fish, but on careful examination are found to have no eyes. So writers, looking pretty much like other human beings, but moving deep under the surface of human lives, have at least some faculties of supra observation and hyper perception not known to others. If a writer doesn't go down and use these ones, why, he's just a blind fish. Exactly, says the new literary orthodoxy. He doesn't see what's happening in the visible world among the people on the level of their action where battle is done with racism every day, and on the contrary, say I, he brings back with him the thematic life material which underlies and motivates their actions. Art lies at the heart of all events. Joseph Brodsky wrote that it's from there in the depths of being that the most important intuition of revolutionary faith also comes. The people know what to do before their leaders. It was from that level that the yearning of black school children for a decent education was changed into to a revolt in 1976 in South Africa. Their strength came from the deep silt of repression and the abandoned wrecks of uprisings that sank there before they were born. It was from that level that an action of ordinary people for their own people made a few lines low down on a newspaper page in South Africa just before I left, when some migrant contract workers from one of the so called homelands were being laid off at a factory, workers with papers of permanent residence in the white area asked to be dismissed in their place, since the position of papers meant that they could at least seek work elsewhere, whereas the contract migrant workers would be sent back to the homelands jobless. So they volunteered to take their place. Being an authority has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably responsible to a given order. Nowhere in the world is Susan Sontag's statement truer than in South Africa. The white writer has to make the decision whether to remain responsible to the dying white order. And even as a dissident, if he goes no further than that position, he remains negatively within the white order or to declare himself positively as answerable to the order struggling to be born. And to declare himself for the latter is only a beginning, as it is for whites in a less specialized position, only more so. He has to try to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable within himself, establish his relationship to the culture of a new kind of posited community, non racial, but conceived with and led by blacks. I've entered into this commitment with trust and a sense of discovering reality, coming alive in a new way. And I believe that the novels and stories I've written in the last seven or eight years reflect this to some extent. Coming alive in a new way for a South Africa in which middle class values and mores contradict realities has long become the unreality to me. Yet I admit that I am indeed determined to find my place in history while still referring as a writer to the values that are beyond history. And I shall never give them up. Brave words, yes. Can the artist go through the torrent with his precious bit of talent tied up in a bundle on his head? I don't know yet. I can't tell you. I can only report that the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and very frequently frequent disappointments in oneself. I suppose it's a necessary learning process and like all learning processes, painful. At this point I take a break from writing. I'm in a neighbouring black country at a conference on Culture and resistance. It's being held outside South Africa because exiled artists and those of us who still live and work in South Africa cannot meet there at home. Some white artists have not come because, not without reason, they fear the consequences of being seen by South African secret police spies, of course, in the company of exiles who belong to political organizations banned in South Africa, notably the African National Congress. Others are not invited because the organizers, right or wrong, regard their work and political views as reactionary. I am dubbed the Black Starling by some whites back home because I've been asked to give one of the keynote addresses at the sessions devoted to literature. But I wonder if those who think me favored would care to take the flack I know will be coming at me from those corners of the hall where black separatists group. They are here not so much out of democratic right as of black solidarity. Paradoxically, since the conference is in itself a declaration that the conviction of participants and organizers, that in the conviction of participants and organizers the liberation struggle and post apartheid culture are non racial, there's that bond, nevertheless, of living conditions that draws all blacks within, a loyalty containing, without constraining or resolving bitter political differences. Do I think white writers should write about blacks? The artless question from the floor disguises both a personal attack on my work and an edict publicly served upon white writers by the same orthodoxy that prescribes for blacks in the case of whites. It proscribes the creation of black characters and by the same token, flipped head to tails with which the worth of black writers is measured. The white writer does not share the total living conditions of blacks, therefore he may not write about them. There are some whites. They were not writers, I believe, in the hall, who share this view. And in the ensuing tense exchange I reply that there are whole areas of human experience in work situations, in farms, in factories, in the city, for example, where black and white have been observing one another and interacting for nearly 350 years. And I challenge my challenger to deny that there are things we know about each other that are never spoken, but that are there to be written and received with amazement and consternation on both sides of having been found out within those areas of experience limited but intensely revealing, there's every reason why white should create black and black white characters in their work. For myself, I have created black characters in my fiction. Whether I've done so successfully or not is for the reader to decide. What's certain is that there's no representation of our social reality in South Africa without that strange area of our lives. In which black and white we have knowledge of one another. I don't equip myself so honestly. A little later, when persecution of South African writers by banning is discussed, someone links this with the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, and a young man leaps to reply that the percentage of writers to population is higher in the Soviet Union than in any other part of the world and that they work, quote, in a trench of peace and security, unquote. The aptness of this bizarre image, the hell for the haven he wishes to illustrate it brings no smiles behind hands among us, because beyond the odd word substitution is indeed a whole arsenal of tormented contradictions that could explode the conference. Someone says out of silence, quietly and distinctly, bullshit. There's silence again. I don't take the microphone and tell the young man there is not a cop contrast to be drawn between the Soviet Union's treatment of writers and that of South Africa. There is a close analogy. South Africa bans and silences writers just as the Soviet Union does, although we do not have resident censors in South African publishing houses and dissident writers are not sent to mental hospitals. I am silent. I am silent because in the debates of the interregnum, any criticism of the communist system is understood as a total defense of the capitalist system which has brought forth the pact of capitalism and racism that is apartheid, with its treason trials to match Stalin's trials, its detentions of dissidents to match Soviet detentions, its banishments and brutal uprooting of communities and individual lives to match the gulag. Repression in South Africa has been and is being lived through repression elsewhere is an account in a newspaper, a book, or a film. The choice for blacks cannot be distanced into any kind of objectivity. They believe in the existence of the lash. They feel nothing could be less than better than what they have known as the peace and security of capitalism. I was a coward, and no doubt I shall be one again. I didn't speak in my actions and statements as a citizen of the interregnum. It's likely to happen again. It's a place of shifting ground, and perhaps it was forecast for me long ago. In the burning slag heaps of coal mines we children, youth to ride across with furiously pumping bicycle pedals and flying hearts in the little Transvaal mining town where I was born. And now the time has come to say, I believe you stand on shifting ground with me across 10,000 miles, not because I brought it with me, but because in some strange pilgrimage through the choices of our age and their Consequences. The democratic left of the Western world has arrived by many planned routes and plodding detours at the same unforeseen destination. It seems to be an abandoned siding. There was consternation when early this year, Susan Sontag had the great courage and honesty publicly to accuse herself and other American intellectuals of the left of having been afraid to condemn the repression perpetrated by communist regimes because this was seen as endorsement of America's war on Vietnam and collusion with brutish rightist regimes in Latin America. This moral equivocation draws parallel with mine at the Writers Congress far away in Africa. Susan Sontag has given me the courage at second hand to confess this riding handlebar to handlebar across our coal slag. Both equivocations reveal the same fear. What is its meaning? It's fear of the abyss of the greater interregnum, of human hopes and spirits where against Jean Paul Sartre's socialism as the horizon of the world is silhouetted the chained outline of Poland, Solidarity and all around in the ditches of El Salvador, in the prisons of Argentina and South Africa, in the ruthless habitations of Beirut, are the victims of Western standards of humanity. I lie and you lie not because the truth is that Western capitalism has turned out to be just and humane after all, but because we feel we've nothing else to offer now except rejection of it. Because communism since 1917 has turned out not to be just and humane either, has failed this promise even more cruelly and brutally than capitalism. Have we to tell the poor and dispossessed of the world that there's nothing else to be done but to turn back from the communist bosses to the capitalist bosses. In South Africa's rich capitalist state, stuffed with Western Finance, 50,000 black children a year die from malnutrition and malnutrition related diseases, while the west piously notes that communist states cannot provide their people with meat and butter. If the injustices of communism cannot be reformed, must we assume that those of capitalism's longer history, constantly monitored by the compassionate hand of liberalism, can be? Must we accept that the workers of the Third World may hope only to be manipulated a little for their betterment and never to attain worker self rule because this has been defeated in Poland by the very people in power who profess to believe in it? The dictum I quoted earlier carried. I know its supreme irony. Most leaders in the communist world have betrayed the basic intuition of democracy that the people know what they need and what to do. Which is perhaps why Susan Sontag saw communism as fascism. With a human face. But I think we can, contrary to have you distinguished among communisms, and I'm sure beyond the heat of the meeting at which she spoke, so does she was Allende's Chile Cuba or the holy Marxist Iran? I believe we must distinguish to the point where we taking up the real import of her essential challenge to love truth enough, pick up the blood dirty shamed cause of the left and attempt to recreate the left in accordance with what it was meant to be, not what 65 years of human power perversion have made of it. If, as she rightly says, once we did not understand the nature of communist tyranny, now we do, just as we've always understood at first hand the nature of capitalist tyranny. This is not a Manichaean equation. Which is God in which is the Devil is not a question that evidence could decide anyway, and it does not license withdrawal and hopelessness. We surely learned by now something of where socialism goes wrong, which of its precepts are deadly dangerous and lead in practice to fascist control of labor and total suppression of individual freedom. Will the witchcraft of modern times not be exercised eventually by this knowledge that we have gained? If fascist rule is possible within the framework of a communist society, does not this mean that we must apply the kind of passion that goes into armaments research to research a socialism that progressively reduces that possibility? Let the west call us traitors once again and the east deride us as revisionists. Is it really inconceivable that socialism can ever be attained without horrors? Is that inconceivable? Certainly Lish Falazer and his imprisoned followers don't find it so in the interregnum in which we coexist. The American left, disillusioned by the failure of communism, needs to muster with us of the third World, living evidence of the failure of capitalism, the energy and persistence to conceive of an alternative left. Why an alternative left? Why not an alternative capitalism? Because whatever its reforms, capitalism's avowed self perpetuation of advancement for the many by the creation of wealth for the few doesn't offer any final hope to fulfil the ultimate promise of of equality, the human covenant. Man entered into with himself in the moment that he did the impossible. He stood up a new self on two feet instead of four. I believe we have to begin with a kind of cosmic obstinacy to believe in the possibility of an alternative left, a democracy without military or economic terror. If we cannot, the possibility itself will die out for our age. And who knows when after what, even bloodier age, it will be rediscovered because, reattempted, toiled back to light it will be. So long as something of what has made us human as a species survives, there's no forgetting of how we could live if only we could find a way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal. Its possibility must be there for peoples to attempt, to put into practice, to begin over and over again wherever in the world it has been tried or has failed. I believe that this is where your responsibility to the Third World meets mine. Without the will to tramp toward that possibility, no relation of whites of the west with the West's formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past. Because the past for them, for their subject peoples, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them.