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That Other World That Was the World
- Rutgers University Press
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73 NADINE GORDIMER More than three hundred years of the colonization of modem times (as distinct from the colonization of antiquity) have come to an end. This is the positive achievement of our twentieth century, in which so much has been negative, so much suffering and destruction has taken place. Colonization is passing into history, except for comparatively small pockets of the earth’s surface where new conquest has taken a precarious hold and the conquered, far from being subdued into acquiescence, make life for the conquerors difficult and dangerous. Surely the grand finale of the age of colonization took place in the three years, to , when South Africa emerged amazingly, a great spectacle of human liberation, from double colonization. For unlike other countries where the British, the French, the Portuguese and other European powers ruled the indigenous people and when these colonizers were defeated or withdrew, left the countries in indigenous hands, South Africa in the early twentieth century passed from colonization from without— Dutch, French, finally British—to perpetuated colonization within, in the form of white minority power over the black majority. All the features of colonization were retained: taxes and the appropriation of land by whites, so that blacks would have to come to town and provide cheap labour in order to survive; favoured status for the minority in civil rights, education, freedom of movement . Freed from British imperialism, South Africa was far from free; it was a police state based on the claim that the white skin of colonials was superior to black skin. That Other World That Was the World “That Other World That Was the World,” reprinted by permission of the publishers from Writing and Being by Nadine Gordimer, pp. –, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © by Nadine Gordimer. CH017.qxd 7/15/09 7:41 AM Page 73 74 NADINE GORDIMER I think there is a definite distinction to be made, everywhere, between what were the first settlers, the so-called pioneers who fought their way into a country , killing Indians or blacks, and the people of later generations who were born into a society that had long established its ruling accommodation with the indigenous people: a society removed from all danger, that had made itself comfortable with injustice, in this case the theory that there are genetically inferior races with lower needs than others. I emerged into this milieu with my birth in South Africa in the Twenties. I shall never write an autobiography—I’m much too jealous of my privacy, for that—but I begin to think that my experience as a product of this social phenomenon has relevance beyond the personal; it may be a modest part of alternative history if pieced together with the experience of other writers. And it has a conclusion I did not anticipate would be reached in my lifetime, even when I became aware of my situation. We lived in a small gold-mining town thirty miles from Johannesburg, lost in the veld nearly , feet above sea level. The features of the landscape, its shapes and volumes, were made of waste. We were surrounded by yellow geometrical dumps of gold tailings and black hills of coal slag. I thought it ugly when I was a child brought up on English picture books of lush meadows and woods—but now I find the vast grassland beautiful and the memory of it an intimation to me, if I had known it then, that the horizons of existence are wide and that the eye and the mind could be carried on and on, from there. My mother came from England when she was six years old. My father came from Latvia at thirteen. She had a solid, petty middle-class, piano-playing background , a father lured to emigration by the adventure of diamond prospecting rather than need. My father was sent away by his father to escape pogroms and poverty. Perhaps because of their youth when they left, and because of this economic and social disparity, my parents kept no connections with the countries they emigrated from. They could not talk of a common “home” across the water, as many other whites in the town did. My father was ashamed of his lack of formal education and my mother did not disguise the fact that she felt she had demeaned herself by marrying him. There was a certain dour tact in not talking about where they had sprung from. Though both Jewish, they did not...
