The following is an excerpt from my dissertation, "Generosity and Belonging in Post-colonial Ireland and South Africa." In a chapter focused on racial difference in Apartheid South Africa, I explore how the blurred boundaries of professional and personal relationships are revealed in Nadine Gordimer's novel July's People. A civil war forces the progressive white South African Smales family to shelter in the rural village of their long-time employee, July. The reader must decipher, much like the family patriarch, Bam, and matriarch, Maureen: Is July hosting them as a friend or is he expecting payment for services rendered as an employee? Who are July's People, and does it depend on who answers the question? 

EXCERPT

While the novel doesn’t offer July’s perspective on the potential of interracial friendship, it does hint that the he may be open to the possibility.  In one of his more insightful moments Bam points out that July’s “been mixed up within us for fifteen years. No one will ever be able to disentangle that” (July’s 128). July has been an essential part of the Smales household for a long period of time, and their lives are inextricably bound by the sheer weight of this experience.  This entanglement is alluded to when it is revealed that July has held on to both his pass and savings account books, the latter of which was an award from the Smales for ten years of service. Despite the fact that they are now useless “bits of paper” (136) July keeps them in his wallet, which has been “flattened and softened to its contents by the years he had carried it always against the contours of his body in hip or breast pocket” (135).  The now meaningless “bits of paper” have become a part of him, a part of his body, and bear symbolic import if only because they illustrate the impact of social conditioning—July can’t seem to move beyond the need to carry his pass book despite the fact that the system is defunct.  The award is particularly significant considering that he took care to spend only his own earnings, and never touched this account.  On one hand this could be an assertion of autonomy, for if July never spent the money he arguable never accepted the gift in the first place.  Doing so would keep his relationship with the Smales as one of service and exact repayment, guided by the strict reciprocity of a contractual exchange.  On the other hand July may have never withdrawn the money precisely because he doesn’t want to reduce their relationship to one of solely business.   The award, while couched in the language of business as a reward for faithful service, blurs the distinction between July as a servant to the Smales, and July as a loyal friend to the Smales.  Not spending the money keeps the gift from entering into a system of monetary exchange, and affirms its symbolic value as something beyond or in excess of a boss-employee relationship. 

    Is the latter interpretation illustrative of the hopes and desires of a white activist who views the world from a fundamentally different perspective than that of her black peers?  Or is it a conclusion that Gordimer has come to after years of observation, one of the many insights that she says “are never spoken, but are to be written— and received with such amazement and consternation, on both sides, of having been found out” (Essential 279)?  David Goldblatt, a white South African photographer and collaborator with Gordimer, presents a similarly optimistic perspective in “Farmer’s son with his nursemaid” (1964), an image of employer-servant relations couldn’t contrast more starkly from that of Solomon’s “Mother, Daughter, Maid.”  “Farmer’s son with his nursemaid” is found in Lifetimes: Under Apartheid, a photography book that weaves together Goldblatt’s photos and text from Gordimer’s novels.  Lifetimes makes the black labor of Apartheid visible by juxtaposing images of white leisure and opulence with those that capture the harsh and gritty work that makes such white privilege possible.  The rural setting of “Farmer’s son with his nursemaid” harkens to the utopic potential of the pastoral, but it is undercut by the fence in the background. The fence is suggestive of the various ways in which South Africa has been divided both physically and psychologically, whether through the colonial appropriation of land or the segregation and displacement of racial groups under the Homeland system.  It alludes to the violence of such traditions and policies, a form of destruction that Coetzee’s Michael K. refuses to participate in because “He could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land” (Life and Times 114).

Nonetheless, Goldblatt’s photo can’t be reduced to an image of racial division.  Although the majority of images of labor in Lifetimes are of industrial work in mines, “Farmer’s son with his nursemaid” resonates with the kind of care work that was inevitably performed by house servants.  Unlike the representation of white domesticity in Solomon’s photo, “Farmer’s son and his nursemaid” presents a racial binary that, while still prominent, is blurred and indistinct.  Although the boy’s and nursemaid’s body positions place them within a hierarchical relation of white supremacy, this division is softened by the sense of familiarity and affection generated by both their facial expressions and the placement of their hands.  It would seem that Goldblatt is trying to, like the Life photographer who took the picture of a young Maureen and her maid Lydia, place “the pair in its context, give the reason” that the farmer’s son and his nursemaid, “in their affection and ignorance, didn’t know” (July’s 33).  The intimacy and affection of this pair, who will likely never fully untangle the bonds of their work and personal relationships, doesn’t cleanly fit into the white supremacist narrative of rigidly hierarchical race relations— a narrative that is all too often reduced to the opposing figures of boss and servant.  July’s People and Age of Iron suggest that interracial friendship and community is only possible in a space outside of such binaries.  Moving towards this indeterminate space will require black and white South Africa to navigate their way “out of the perceptual clutter of curled photographs of master and servant relationships, the 78 rpms of history repeating the conditioning of the past” (Essential 270). 

Coetzee, J. M. Life & times of Michael K. New York: Viking, 1984. 

Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. New York: Random House, 1990.

David Goldblatt, Farmer's Son with His Nursemaid, Marico Bushveld. 1964. SF Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Gordimer, Nadine. July's People. New York: Viking Press, 1981.

Gordimer, Nadine. The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places. Ed. Stephen Clingman. New York: Knopf, 1988.