I first heard of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, who died Sunday, in 1988. I was in my early 20s and living in Cincinnati. My book-of-the-month club offered A Sport of Nature as one of its selections. I read the description and thought, “Yes, I need to read that.”
The campaign against apartheid — in particular pushing U.S. companies and universities withdraw investments from South Africa — had been one of the dominant campus political issues during my college years. I agreed in principle, but I never protested. I worked on the campus paper, and staffers were prohibited from participating in political activities. Beyond that, though, I wasn’t sure that divestment would really make a difference. I thought it was the morally right thing to do. But I wasn’t sure South Africa could really change. Apartheid seemed so entrenched.
In the mid-80s, it seemed as though Nelson Mandela would always be in prison and the cycle of oppression in South Africa would never end. I expected something bleak when I opened A Sport of Nature, a novel about a white South African woman, Hillela, who falls in love with a black revolutionary, Whaila. Both are fighting to free their country from apartheid.
Much of the book is bleak, and Whaila does not live to see his dream realized. But this is how the novel ends:
Hillela is watching a flag slowly climb, still in its pupa folds, a crumpled wing emerging and — now! — it writhes one last time and flares wide in the wind, is smoothed taut by the fist of the wind, the flag of Whaila’s country.
It’s hard to convey now how stunningly, impossibly hopeful that ending seemed when the book was published.
Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and apartheid laws were repealed in 1991.
I need to remember this every time I read a story in the newspaper, sigh, and say, “This situation just seems hopeless.”