Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter": the Soweto Uprising

 

One major historic uprising that shocked the entire world and stirred Gordimer deeply is the Soweto Students’ drive against ‘Afrikaans medium decree’, which forced all black schools to have Afrikaans as the language of instruction. The movement also culminated as a protest against other forms of injustice like Bantu Education and educational segregation. On 16th June 1976, the protest rally turned violent, and indiscriminate shooting by the police killed more than seven hundred students.

The history is known to the world, but what Gordimer offers is the effect of this event on the lives of individuals, which is often slipped or missed out in factual detailing. She wrote in the New York Times about this massacre of young children and how this was only a ‘pretext’ for the white government to show supremacy over innocent black children, the real villain being the system of Apartheid:

“The proverbial box of matches in the hand of a child has set the house on fire--the house, in which 18 million blacks are confined, the house whose walls and bars is group areas, influx control, job restrictions and pass laws. The Afrikaans language, associated with the police and Government officials, is indeed a ''pretext,'' standing for wrongs as old as white supremacy. The agitator behind the revolt of the children is apartheid itself.”



In her novels like Burger’s Daughter and A Sport of Nature, we find Gordimer mentioning the Soweto Students Revolution (SSR) and how it plays a pivotal role in social conditioning of racial inferiority. While Burger’s Daughter discusses the event in process, the complicated socio-political circumstances, violence and sacrifice of many, beyond divisions of colour, A Sport of Nature, published five years later, talks about the aftermath of the violent revolution.

Burger’s Daughter contains a complete pamphlet of Soweto Students’ Representative Council (S.S.R.C) in verbatim. Written with incorrect spellings and faulty grammar, the pamphlet criticizes the Soweto uprising and challenges the Apartheid government with another revolutionary outbreak. A depiction of the Soweto uprising of 1976 is portrayed through the pamphlet: “Black people of Azania remember our beloved dead!........... Remember Hector Peterson the 13 year old Black child of Azania, a future leader we might have produced fell victim to Kruger’s uncompromising and uncontrollable gangsters of the riot squad.” Hector Peterson was one of the first victims when the police opened fire on a group of black youths who were demonstrating against the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. He was one of the martyrs of the 16th of June 1976, and the Soweto Students Representative Council wants these beloved people to be commemorated because history must not forget them.

Gordimer narrates in the present novel how the youth took up the struggle and joined hands in the streets without the fear of the bullets: “ …but they kept on walking towards the police and the guns. You know how it is they understand what it is they want…Rights, no concessions. Their country, not ghettos allotted within it, or tribal ‘homelands’ parcelled out. The wealth created with their fathers’ and mothers’ labor and transformed into the white man’s dividends. Power over their own lives instead of a destiny invented, decreed and enforced by white governments…”.

Marisa Kgosana, wife of Joseph Kgosana, led the student's procession in the Soweto Revolt. The Soweto Revolt was also based on the questioning of the parents by their children about their heritage. It was a revolt of the black children. Rosa also questions her parent's beliefs and her heritage. Marie Nel also defies her parents to participate in the struggle. Though Rosa does not show any open affiliation for the Soweto strike she indeed participates in the children's revolt against paternalism. The school children's revolt is directed against the white paternalist state and also against the assumptions of black fathers.



Rosa is seen assisting the young black children and subsumed within the struggle. She is concerned about the young black kids like their own mothers. She reaches out to the poor children handicapped by the violence and assists them to walk again through physiotherapy in a city hospital. Suddenly, in the trying times we see Rosa transforming from a sensual figure to a motherly, concerned figure: 

“…They say no one must break the boycott. And they’ll do it….They don’t listen to me or their mother…how d’you know every day they’re going to come back alive ?-I don’t know what I would do.- she was white, she never had a child, only a lover with children by some other women. No child but those who passed under her hands, whom it was her work to put together again if that were possible…”

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