July's People

Nadine Gordimer’s 1981 dystopian novel July’s People was published in 1981, while the apartheid system of institutionalized racism was still in effect in South Africa. The novel imagines a turbulent end to apartheid. The system was officially codified in 1948 but had its origins in centuries-old exploitation. In 1652, the Netherlands became the first European country to colonize the vast territories now known as South Africa. Gradually, white settlers began to dominate the region, taking possession of the land by force and enslaving much of the Black population. Eventually, the British Empire absorbed much of the region, and it was thus subject to the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833; however, this did not appreciably improve conditions for Black people because the brutal “indentured labor” system that followed abolition was de facto slavery in all but name.

For the next century, South Africa’s white-dominated colonies continued to systemically exploit the land and its Black population, denying Black people the right to vote and allowing them to work only menial jobs. In 1910, the region’s four main colonies merged to form the white-ruled Union of South Africa, and in 1948, apartheid (meaning “separateness”) became the nation’s official policy, further consolidating white control and legislating a rigid hierarchy based on race and ethnicity.

Under apartheid, white people officially designated Black people as third-class citizens, affording “Coloured” people (biracial citizens) a status just above that of Black people. Numerous laws on both the national and local levels disempowered Black people (or Bantus) and allowed white people to seize their land. For instance, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 stripped Black people of their South African citizenship, and often their land, by relocating millions of them to semi-autonomous territories known as Bantustans, thereby casting them out of the larger body politic. The white government often covertly controlled even those Black-only territories through compliant Black authorities—like the local chief whom Maureen and Bam Smales encounter in July’s People. The passbook that the Smaleses must regularly sign (before the revolution)—to grant their Black servant, July, permission to work in the “white area” where they lived—was a fact of Black life in South Africa: Ever since the days of the Dutch colonies, the white government had strictly regulated work and travel for Black people.

Historically, South Africa’s white population derived largely from the country’s Dutch and British ethnic groups, and the novel’s protagonists, Maureen and Bam, embody this dichotomy: Maureen’s ancestors are British, while Bam’s are the Boers, the Dutch invaders who first occupied the region. The Smaleses, liberal white people who decry racism and injustice in all forms, have tried to distance themselves from the social, economic, and political oppression that enable apartheid. However, as affluent white people who have a working relationship with South African government entities, the Smaleses have long benefited from this very system. In the novel, Gordimer, a white South African who fiercely opposed apartheid, satirizes white people who deny their complicity in their country’s oppressive, minoritarian profiteering.

The actual fall of apartheid and white dominance didn’t resemble the violent conflict that Gordimer imagined in her novel. Rather than a bloody revolution aided by other African nations and distant countries such as Cuba, the death of apartheid was a gradual process fueled by domestic (mostly peaceful) opposition along with widespread international censure. In 1990-1991, a full decade after the publication of Gordimer’s novel, the South African government of F. W. de Klerk, bowing to ever-mounting pressure, began the legislative dismantling of apartheid and white-minority rule.

In 1994, a free election that included millions of newly enfranchised Black voters ousted the eight-decades-old National Party, and former resistance leader Nelson Mandela (whom the white government had imprisoned for 27 years) became the nation’s first Black president, helming a Black-majority coalition government comprising members of the African National Congress (ANC). However, the systemic inequalities built into the nation’s economy and social structures weren’t as easily remedied, and many disparities persist to this day, along with lingering distrust and animosity. Ironically, July’s People, despite its progressive stance, was briefly banned from schools in South Africa’s Gauteng Province in 2001 because of objections to (among other things) its race-war theme and “racist” characterizations. Gordimer expressed shock and anger that this action originated in the new, ANC-led government rather than the old regime that her novel fiercely condemned.