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.