496 Gordimer, Nadine
experience: “When I go into the café to buy bread
they give the kaffir yesterday’s stale. When he goes
for fruit, the kaffir gets the half-rotten stuff the
white won’t buy. That is black.” Additionally, unlike
whites, blacks are required to carry passbooks when
in public. One of Lionel’s early realizations regard-
ing the passbooks catalyzes his enduring mission
for racial equality. Rosa recounts this moment of
her father’s recognition: “Lionel once told me how
when he was about fourteen and had just come to
boarding-school in Johannesburg he saw torn-up
passbooks in the street . . . and curiosity led him
to realize for the first time that the ‘natives’ were
people who had to carry these things while white
people like himself didn’t.” Later, when a black
father, Fats, contends that his son should be allowed
to participate in sports and be seen as the equal to
any big name international boxer, he receives this
response: “Your boy can negotiate to go to Germany
and America and hell. He’s still a ‘boy’ that’s been
let out like a monkey on a string. . . . You’ll make
a lot of money and he can show his medal with his
pass when he gets back.” Not only does the future
look bleak for this player, but also Gordimer dem-
onstrates that South African blacks know that sports
cannot solve national issues of racial inequality:
“And if next year or the year after white soccer clubs
play blacks, and take in black members, the soccer
players will shout there’s no more racism in sport.
But everywhere else in this country the black will
still be a black. Whatever else he does he’ll still get
black jobs, black education, black houses—.” Ubiq-
uitous racism never deters the Burger family from
attempts to mollify its effects.
Their involvement with Baasie exemplifies the
extent to which theirs is a personal cause. In a place
where segregation and inequality rule, the Burgers
take Baasie in and treat him like family. Baasie
and Rosa fall asleep together in her bed at night,
Baasie is educated illegally in Rosa’s private school
and he is taught to swim and more. Baasie “fought
for the anchorage of wet hair on Lionel Burger’s
warm breast in the cold swimming-pool” as he is
taught not only to swim but to claim freedom from
what would be incapacitating fears even if his was
a desegregated society. In adulthood, when Rosa
again meets Baasie, she becomes aware of his bit-
terness over treatment of blacks by whites. With
his own perspectives concerning South African
racism and without gratitude to Rosa for her fam-
ily’s earlier concerns, he rejects any white aid, sin-
cere or otherwise: “I’m not your Baasie, just don’t
go on thinking about that little kid who lived with
you, don’t think of that black ‘brother’, that’s all—.”
Baasie’s attitude reflects the attitudes of other
blacks who feel that whites, no matter how pure
their motives, can never really help blacks. Instead,
for truly untainted lives, blacks must establish their
own equality.
In the end, readers realize that “All collabora-
tion with whites has always ended in exploitation
of blacks.” In Dhladhla’s words: “We must liberate
ourselves as blacks, what has a white got to do with
that?” Implicit in this notion is that South Africa’s
hope and future lie with black citizens. Ancient
black spirits interweave with contemporary black
spirits working for freedoms today to convey that
“Through blackness is revealed the way to the
future.” And once blacks and whites escape wholly
the oppression of apartheid everyone will find
the way “to the only rendezvous that matters, the
victory where there will be room for all.” Racially
speaking, Burger’s Daughter ends on a guardedly
hopeful note.
Walter Collins IIISur vival in Burger’s Daughter
Along with issues of race and justice, the issue
of survival permeates Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter.
Lionel Burger dies in prison of nephritis in the third
year of his life sentence for fighting for the equal-
ity of black South Africans. Cathy and Tony, Rosa’s
mother and brother, face untimely deaths. But the
complex notion of survival is embodied in Rosa’s
life. The text makes it clear throughout that in her
personal and professional dealings she will always
be Burger’s daughter—eternally connected to her
father’s ideals, principles, and controversial ideologi-
cal stances. Rosa continues her father’s work, and
in that very real existence she ensures the survival of
the family’s cause. Considered from another angle,
actual human survival becomes complicated as well,
due to the promotion of divisive racial equality and
social justice causes.