Burger’s Daughter 495in any self-professed morality I knew.” Lionel risks
everything, including his own life, as he holds to his
personal convictions and his conception of justice
while fighting against ever-present injustice.
Gordimer’s story suggests that nothing short
of a sweeping change of the ways in which things
have always been handled will cause a change in
Afrikaners’ minds concerning notions of societal
justice and injustice. Marxism, with its attendant
shift in personal viewpoints of perceived racial and
social hierarchies, clearly evokes the idea of revolu-
tion. And while the Burger family stands strongly
for such radical change to help the down and out of
any race, Rosa is dubious that well-off whites will
ever willingly espouse any such transformation. She
realizes that “children the white couple would make
in their whites’ suburb would [no longer] inherit
the house bought on the municipal loan available
only to whites, or slot safely into jobs reserved for
whites against black competition.” Likewise, Rosa
continues to be haunted by the sight of a white
man dead on a park bench, seen one day during her
lunch break, and she wants to believe that “when
we had changed the world, . . . the ‘elimination of
private conflicts set up by the competitive nature
of capitalist society’ would help people to live,
even people like this [dead man], who, although
white and privileged under the law of the country,
couldn’t make a place for himself.” The oppositions
of life and death, privilege and disadvantage, justice
and injustice cause Rosa to reflect on life’s inher-
ent challenges, which seem to be overly magnified
in the society she knows. Rosa even wrestles with
the seeming meaninglessness of a life—a universal
preoccupation—as depicted in the scene of the dead
man in the park. She reckons: “Justice, equality, the
brotherhood of man, human dignity—but [death]
will still be there . . . .” Any semblance of justice—
simply having a few things, working hard, or living
life according to one’s desires—remains elusive in
Burger’s Daughter.
The Burgers’ collective fight for justice becomes
all-consuming as details of their personal lives are
slowly and almost completely erased by deeds done
on behalf of those who are less fortunate. Even tra-
ditional celebrations hardly take place in their home
as they fete instead “the occasions . . . when some-
body got off, not guilty, in a political trial. Leaders
came out of prison. A bunch of blacks made a suc-
cess of a boycott or defied a law. There was a mass
protest or a march, a strike. . . .” Such “celebrations
of justice” dot their lives as they continue to work
toward comprehensive social change, understanding
that complete justice lies somewhere in the days
ahead: “There is nothing but failure, until the day
the Future is achieved. It is the only success. Oth-
ers—in specific campaigns with specific objectives,
against the pass laws, against forced dispossession of
land—would lead to piecemeal reforms . . . Failure
is the accumulated heritage of resistance without
which there is no revolution.” By the end of the
text, it is clear that “No one knows where the end
of suffering will begin.” While small victories are
celebrated along the way, the novel’s concluding
pages suggest that real South African justice remains
uncertain.
Walter Collins IIIrace in Burger’s Daughter
Burger’s Daughter is a story of racial struggle. Because
of their belief in racial equality, Lionel and Cathy
Burger and daughter Rosa stand in stark contrast to
the majority of whites, the Afrikaners, who populate
South Africa. Their activism is the cause of frequent
encounters with government officials. Indeed, as
the novel opens, readers join Rosa in line, arms full
of clothing and other provisions, outside a prison
where detainees, including her mother, are held.
The Burgers constantly expect prison detention,
unfair court proceedings, and eventual martyrdom.
Traitors, by most Afrikaners’ assessments, the fam-
ily members reject what for them would be easy
“[positive] reputation, success and personal liberty.”
Instead they live and die for a revolution that “would
change the lives of the blacks who left their hovels
and compounds at four in the morning to swing
picks, hold down jack-hammers and chant under
the weight of girders, building shopping malls and
office towers in which whites . . moved in an ‘envi-
ronment’ without sweat or dust.” Filtered through
Rosa’s stream-of-consciousness reflections, the novel
illustrates the hardships of blacks during apartheid.
In stores, blacks are routinely treated as second-
class citizens. In one scene, Dhladhla recounts his