Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

Burger’s Daughter 497

At the beginning of the novel, Rosa is wait-
ing in line in front of a prison to visit her mother.
Within the first few pages, readers also learn that
Rosa’s father is serving a life sentence in prison. The
stability of the family might easily be compromised
given the activist roles that Lionel and Cathy play.
However, security and protection of their family are
important to the Burgers even as fighting for racial
and social equality is highly valued. Rosa recollects
the strategies her parents purposely employed to
ensure the survival of their family. She recalls:

I think that while my mother was alive and

my brother was a baby my parents arranged

their activities so that one of them was in the

clear, always, one would always have a good

chance of being left behind to carry on the

household if the other were arrested  . . Then

when my brother and mother were gone,

there was me. If my father were to be arrested,

there would always be me.

Lionel and Cathy negotiated their activist roles
in order to ensure the survival of their family mem-
bers and the survival of their message.
A card Rosa receives from her Auntie Velma and
Uncle Coen Nels crystallizes the degree to which the
influence of Lionel’s work to bring about equality will
survive within the family. Velma and Coen, who had
been strictly against Lionel’s efforts, offer for Rosa to
come and stay at their farm whenever she would like
or whenever she needs rest. Rosa states that

[Velma] does not ask from what activity [I

might seek rest,] she does not want to know

in case it is, as her brother’s always was,

something she fears and disapproves to the

point of inconceivability .  . . The Nels have

never had any difficulty in reconciling pride

in belonging to a remarkable family with

the certainty that the member who made it

so followed wicked and horrifying ideals . . .

Whatever my father was to them, it still stalks

their consciousness.

In very apparent ways, the work of the Burger
family survives and affects lives. In the end, one only

hopes that the Burgers’ struggle for equality will be

realized for all.

Survival in Burger’s Daughter encompasses the

complexities of both race and social class. When

Rosa observes a dead man in a park one day during

her lunch break, she ponders the depths of inequal-

ity and divisiveness in South Africa. Rosa is aston-

ished to learn in the newspaper the identity of this

man who is “white and privileged under the law of

the country.” Out of work, on hard times, and with

no hope of securing gainful employment, this man

finds it difficult to survive even as a white person:

The paper said the man’s name was Ronald

Ferguson, 46, an ex-miner, no fixed abode.

He drank methylated spirits and slept in

bus shelters. There is an element of human

wastage in all societies. But—in [the Burg-

ers’] house—it was believed 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 one, who .  . .

couldn’t make a place for himself.

If survival is difficult for this white, middle-aged

man, then it becomes all the more difficult for black

South Africans.

Perhaps the incident in Burger’s Daughter that

most distinctly demonstrates the difficulty of survival

is the Soweto Uprising of June 1976. Near the end

of the text, the narrator tells of the loss of life and

the struggle to survive that many youth in Soweto

faced following the riots: “The school riots filled

the hospital; the police who answered stones with

machine-guns and patrolled Soweto firing revolvers

at any street-corner group of people encountered,

who raided high schools and picked off the targets of

youngsters escaping in the stampede, also wounded

anyone else who happened to be within the random

of their fire.” After a long catalogue of gruesome

images of destruction, Burger’s Daughter closes on a

note of measured hope that the noble objectives of

the Burger family will live on to ensure not only the

physical survival of the disenfranchised but also the

betterment of life for all South Africans.

Walter Collins III