A Study of Political Struggle In Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer’s 1979 novel, Burger’s Daughter, makes a valuable contribution to the corpus of prison writing by responding to the socio-historical specificities of the South African prison during the apartheid regime. Drawing on Barbara Harlow’s work on women and political detention, and with reference to Ruth First’s memoir, 117 Days: An Account of confinement and interrogations under the South African ninety-day detention law (1965), this article offers an analysis of the potential for writing—both as fiction and memoir—to reinstate to the official historical record women’s roles in the anti-apartheid movement and their subsequent political detention. It explores how the apartheid regime intended prison not for rehabilitation but as a space of deactivation and invisibility. Prison is, however, a world apart, a liminal space which is simultaneously conducive to political struggle and deactivation, violence and communitas. This article begins by exploring how apartheid prison was both a space of deactivation and of resistance for women activists. It then moves to examine how both these contradictory aspects are registered, briefly, in Ruth First’s memoir, 117 Days and, to a larger extent, in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. First’s memoir depicts the prison as a space that imposes inertia while also allowing for moments of solidarity between incarcerated activists. Similarly, in Gordimer’s novel, the journey of Rosa, the eponymous Burger’s daughter, takes her from outside of the prison to inside it, and from feeling alienated to feeling belonging as she endures transformation that is spatial and spiritual, personal and political.