1. Nadine Gordimer

2. • born in Springs, South Africa in 1923; father was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, mother was also of Jewish ancestry, raised in London
• her mother was politically active, founded a créche for black children
• mother was concerned about her health, so she completed most of her schooling at home
• her first published work was a children’s story she wrote at the age of 15
• studied at university for a year where she mixed for the first time with black peers
• moved to Johannesburg in 1948 where she lived for the rest of her life
• one daughter by her first marriage, a son by her second marriage who became a filmmaker in New York
• entered the anti-apartheid movement in 1960 after the arrest of her best friend and the Sharpeville massacre

3. • close friends with Nelson Mandela’s defence attorneys and helped him edit his famous speech before his 28 year imprisonment „I am prepared to die.” After his release in 1990 Gordimer was one of the first people he wanted to meet
• joined the African National Congress when it was still an illegal organization; hid ANC leaders in her home to help them escape arrest; testified in 1986 at the Delmas Treason trial on behalf of 22 anti- apartheid activists
• several of her books were banned for years at a time
• in 1974 she won the Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist
• awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991
• in post-apartheid South Africa she was an advocate for the HIV/AIDS movement
• died in 2014

4. The Conservationist (1974)
Main characters
Mehring, a rich industrialist
his politically liberal mistress
Terry, his son
Jacobus, his foreman
Indian shopowners

5. Amatongo (they who are beneath) Uthlanga (the beginning of life)
Key concepts
Lack of intimacy
Amatongo (they who are beneath)
Uthlanga (the beginning of life)

6. „Pale freckled eggs” --A whole clutch of guinea fowl eggs. Eleven
„Pale freckled eggs” --A whole clutch of guinea fowl eggs. Eleven. Soon there will be nothing left. In the country. The continent. The oceans, the sky.

7. --For a moment he does not know where he is—or rather who he is; but this situation in which he finds himself, staring into the eye of the earth with earth at his mouth, is strongly familiar to him. It seems to be something already inhabited in imagination.

8. --The birds hang on, where there’s water, to the last dried-up pool where the hippos abort their half-formed young. There were atrocities in Cambodia, no maize crop at all, the second year running…but the children ignore him as he ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can we go on getting away scot free? When the aristocrats were caught up in the Terror, did they recognize: it’s come to us. Did the Jews of Germany think: it’s our turn. Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our turn to start and suffer. Why not? ..Earth in his mouth.

9. --An unnecessary presence
--An unnecessary presence. The fact is—he has reached the third pasture, he has opened the gate for himself and looped the wire over the post behind him…My—possessions—are—enough—for—me. Who dares say that? He has not spoken. There’s no one to speak to, on the farm. He’s aware that he’s accountable to no one. There is no answer. You are not here, nor he. You are not here, nor she.

10. --…even at thirty-thousand feet you can squint down from the window-seat at long intervals and see it here, soft lap after lap of sand, stones, stones in sand, the infinite wreckage not of a city or a civilization but the home that is the earth itself…the plane is privately veiled, hidden in sand, buried in space. Nothing is disclosed.

11. --Come to think of it all the earth is a graveyard, you never know when you’re walking over heads—particularly this continent, cradle of man, prehistoric bones and the bits of shaped stone.

12. --That bit of paper you bought yourself from the deeds office isn’t going to be valid for as long as another generation. It’ll be worth about as much as those our grandfathers gave the blacks when they took the land from them. The blacks will tear up your bit of paper. No one’ll remember where you’re buried.

13. --So we came out possessed of what sufficed us, we thinking that we possessed all things, that we were wise, that there was nothing we did not know…we saw that, in fact, we black men came out without a single thing; we came out naked; we left everything behind, because we came out first. But as for white men…we saw that we came out in a hurry; but they waited for all things, that they might not leave any behind. –The Religious System of the Amazulu, Reverend Henry Callaway

14. „He took possession of this earth”
--But the roots don’t yield, and he can’t see where they can come from.
--As he heaves, the mud holds him, holds on, hangs on, has him by the leg and won’t let him go, down there. Now it’s just as if someone has both arms tightly round the leg.
„He took possession of this earth”

15. The Moment Before the Gun went off
Marais von der Vyver
„…it’ll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country.”