“The
Ultimate Safari” by Nadine Gordimer
It was Nadine Gordimer herself
who recommended to us, to my wife Annie and me, that we stay at Letaba Rest
Camp in the heart of Kruger National Park. We had—by some miraculous conspiracy
of forces—found ourselves sitting face to face with the world-famous author and
her husband, Reinhold Cassirer, one evening in their modest, if eclectically
tasteful living room at 7 Frere Road West in Johannesburg, South Africa. The
year was 1990, a year that proved a curious window in time for us, as it was
not only the year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison on Robben Island,
what was surely the death-rattle of the apartheid regime, but was just months before
Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after which point it
is unlikely I would have had the chance to meet her at all, let alone in such
an frank and convivial way.
It had started at a
faculty lunch table in the small cafeteria of the independent school in
Manhattan where my wife and I were teaching high school. Lunches in hand, we’d joined
a colleague of ours, a woman named Judy Platt. As usual we’d talked of school,
of students, when she, knowing how we loved to travel, had asked us what we had
planned for the summer vacation, which was due to begin in a matter of weeks. After
three successive summers of travelling in South East Asia, we’d told her that
were planning to go to southern Africa instead, to South Africa in particular,
where we looked forward to staying with a couple we knew in Johannesburg before
commencing our travels in the region. “South Africa? I love South Africa!”
she’d exclaimed. “One of my best friends lives there, in Jo’burg. Perhaps
you’ve heard of her. Her name’s Nadine Gordimer.” I remember gasping at the
name. “Heard of her!” I’d cried. “Why, she’s my favorite writer in the
world!”
I wasn’t exaggerating. I
had fallen in love with her fiction—her short stories and novels—for their
heady mixture of acute psychological insight and Chekhovian refinement of
language and theme, as well as with the author herself for her morally courageous
chronicling of apartheid in its most complex and pernicious forms. Elegant,
cosmopolitan, a passionate reader of Gramsci and Proust, she was no ivory tower
intellectual, but struggled daily in the trenches themselves, regularly
berating the white Nationalist government in essays and editorials and letters
to the editor, marching in protests, signing petitions, joining boycotts, and
generally doing her best as an active and avid member of the ANC, Nelson
Mandela’s long-outlawed African National Congress.
Facing her there in her
own home that evening was nearly too much for me to believe. Together we talked
about New York, a city she loved, and about her friend Judy, and we talked
about her books, her writing, so that soon (and with a considerable amount of whiskey) the
four of us were conversing and laughing with ease.
After it grew dark, and
fearing for our safety at that time of night, she drove us back to our hotel in
the once-Bohemian, then run-down, often violent neighborhood of Hillbrow (in
fact we were awakened by gunshots that same night). Having made plans for her
husband to pick us up tomorrow and show us his art gallery in town, in nearby Rosebank,
we thanked her and said our goodbyes.
Surely one of the
highlights of that extraordinary evening for me, one I could hardly have
anticipated, was the very car in which she’d driven us back to our hotel, a yellow
Volkswagen ‘Thing’ (remember those?), which—in what is perhaps my favorite of
her novels, July’s People—she used as
the model for the Smales family’s car in their escape into the countryside
under the care and protection of their servant, July, a vehicle, a symbol of
wealth and power and mobility, referred to repeatedly in the story as the
‘yellow bakkie’, so that it had felt to me that night, as she’d driven us back
through the dark Johannesburg streets, as if I were riding through the novel
itself!
Of all Gordimer’s short
stories, surely one of the most poignant for me, for reasons I will explain, is
her story “The Ultimate Safari”. Set largely in Kruger National Park, where we spent
a few nights upon her recommendation, a wildlife reserve of more than 7,500
square miles in the northeastern part of the country that, by the time we’d
arrived in South Africa, had become a treacherous no-man’s land between the
Republic of South Africa and the neighboring country of Mozambique, then
shattered by a violent civil war that had set tens of thousands of people on
the move, each of them desperate to escape the fighting between the South African-sponsored
Rhodesian rebel group RENAMO and the Marxist government forces known by the
acronym FRELIMO. Gordimer herself secretly sheltered some of these refuges in
her own home.
My admiration for the
works of Nadine Gordimer quickly lead me to seek out the work of other South
African writers. I read Alex La Guma, Alan Paton, Bessie Head, Miriam Tlali, Peter
Abrahams, J.M. Coetzee, Andre Brink, Dennis Brutus, Olive Shreiner, Zakes Mda, Richard
Rive, Elsa Joubert, Breyton Breytenbach, Es’kia Mphahlele, Laurens van der
Post, Rian Malan, Zoe Wicomb, and Damon Galgut. While in Johannesburg my wife
and I had the pleasure of seeing Athol Fugard’s play My Children! My Africa! at the famous and revolutionary Market
Theatre, a production directed by none other than the playwright himself. This reading
lead me to cast my net even more widely in the years to come, reading the
literature of writers throughout the African continent. Here, for your
consideration, is a list of some of the African authors I read (so many of them
made available to the west by the remarkable Heinemann Press): Naguib Mahfouz,
Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Sonallah Ibrahim, Amy Djoleto, T.
Obinkaram Echew, Narrudin Farah, Mariama Bâ, Ousmane Sembène, Amos Tutuola, Laila
Lalami, Ayi Kwei Armah, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Alifa Rifaat, Tsitsi
Dnagarembga, Albert Memmi, Yusuf Idris, Tahar Ben Jalloun, Mohamed Choukri, Mongo
Beti, Camera Laye, Mia Couto, Assia Djebar, Tayeb Salih, Mongane Wally Serote, Leópold
Sédar Senghor, Ali Ghalem, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Abdul Razak Gurnah, and Ben Okri—yes,
why not start with Ben Okri’s brilliant novel The Famished Road—the perfect means by which to find your way in.
Here, finally, is Gordimer
herself reading her story “The Ultimate Safari” at the 2007 PEN World Voices
Festival:
Peter Adam Nash
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