July's People

Roughly 80% of South Africa’s white population supported the segregationist policy of apartheid, a cornerstone of the country’s minority-rule regime, while Gordimer was writing her book. The remaining 20% opposed it to various degrees: Some took bold political action such as forming opposition parties like the Progressive Political Party. Others, though they disagreed with apartheid’s racist, exploitative policies, didn’t let their progressivism interfere with their material comforts or professional success. Gordimer, a fiercely committed anti-apartheid activist, felt particular scorn for such “weak-tea liberals,” who she felt wanted it both ways: priding themselves on their progressive, egalitarian opinions while giving up none of the financial and social advantages of belonging to the white ruling class. In the hypothetical scenarios of July’s People, which follow the violent overthrow of the white regime, Gordimer’s novel forces two representatives of this liberal but hypocritical subset (Bam and Maureen Smales) to delve into their past behaviors under apartheid—along with their true feelings about themselves, each other, and the subject people they always claimed to support.

Born to white privilege, Bam and Maureen rarely questioned the liberal probity of their sentiments and actions. Bam, a descendent of the original Dutch colonizers of the region, built a lucrative career as an internationally known architect, designing buildings for the government and for important figures in the white-dominated financial sector, such as a bank accountant, who in gratitude passed along privileged information to Bam about a banking crisis. Maureen, the daughter of the foreman of one of the Western Areas’ extensive gold mines, never questioned the servitude of the Black people she knew as long as they seemed content. For instance, as a schoolgirl, she allowed her house servant, Lydia, whom she considered a friend and a dominant figure in her childhood, to carry her book satchel on her head; only years later, upon seeing a photo of the two of them in a book that framed their dynamic as exploitative, did she feel any qualms.

As “liberal” adults, Bam and Maureen make half-hearted efforts to “slough privilege” by flirting with radical politics but are “not believed,” perhaps because others can see how attached they are to their success and comfort, which ultimately flow from the regime’s brutally exclusionary policies. After all, the Smaleses love buying things: “[I]t seemed nothing else could excite them [as much as] a new possession” (6). Bam and Maureen consider their longtime servant, July, grateful (even indebted) to them because they’ve been relatively generous, giving him his own bathroom and allowing him to take a mistress, which many other white people would forbid. They feel magnanimous in letting him visit his wife and family every two years. However, they don’t provide him with a sitting room, lest other Black people (unemployed by them and therefore suspect, in their worldview) might congregate there. Nevertheless, they know that other white people treat their servants (and Black people in general) more harshly and therefore congratulate themselves on their benevolence.

After the Black uprising upends their lives, making them entirely dependent on July, who gives them his mother’s hut to hide in, they reveal the arrogance and sense of entitlement that has always lurked behind their sensitive, socially conscious self-image. Discovering that July took small, almost valueless items (like an old pair of scissors and a knife-grinder) from their house in Johannesburg, they wring their hands over his deceit and ingratitude. When July takes their truck to the store to buy things for them without first asking permission, they frantically speculate that he plans to steal that as well. (Shortly before this, without any guilt or hypocrisy, Maureen admits to stealing malaria pills from a pharmacy.)

Though July’s family shares its meager food with the Smaleses without complaint, Bam and Maureen can’t move beyond their attachment to their material possessions, all of which they owe to the systemic exploitation of Black people like July. The Smaleses’ obsessing over scissors, cups, and shotguns ignores the centuries-long colossal, historical theft on which their inherited wealth was built. The Smaleses have deluded themselves that they can erase this injustice, at least on a personal level, by speaking “respectfully” to their servants and by voting for liberal politicians. However, Gordimer was always outspoken in her view that sharing property was the litmus test by which South African liberals must prove their progressive bona fides, and, despite all their intelligence and fine intentions, Bam and Maureen utterly fail this test.