Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), South African novelist, short story writer was also a political activist. She received Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. She was active in anti-apartheid movement and her writings helped abolishing apartheid in South Africa. Nadin Gordmer’s ‘The Conservationist (1974), that won the Booker Prize was banned in South Africa because of its critique of apartheid. The characters and events portrayed in this novel imbued with symbolic significance. Moreover, Gordimer delineates the life style of a particular rung of white Johannesburg society through the protagonist of this novel.
Mehring
is a forty-nine year old industrialist and financier who buys a 400 acre farm
located 25 miles away from the city. As
he needs the farm productive, he practices conservation. Though he learns much about agriculture and
husbandry, he is only a weakened farmer.
There is Jocobus, the black chief herdsman, who looks after the farm,
cattle and machinery. Terry, an
estranged teenage son of Mehring leaves South Africa to join his mother who is
in New York as he doesn’t want to serve his term in the Army. If he stays in South Africa, he should have
the term. His ex wife has left South Africa
having realized the loss of white minority rule and the collapse of apartheid
in future. In her absence he has many
mistresses. Among them Antonia, a
liberal activist was one with whom he had a long term relationship. Actually she didn’t like the deplorable
conditions of his workers in the farm.
She too left him soon. Much of
the novel consists of Mehrings stream of consciousness.
Mehring
discusses the routine farm works with Jacobus.
All the emergencies caused by drought and fire are managed well by
Jacobus. One day a black man is found
dead in the property. Without having any investigation, the white police ask
them to bury the body there. Once, Mehring spends a New Year eve alone at the
farm. He gives his workers a single slab
of meat then. As they don’t have a place
to store, a dog steals it. Though he
sees them beat the dog to get it back and fail in their attempt, he doesn’t buy
a new slab. Then once he spends an
entire plane ride touching a teenage girl next to him. Though she screams for her
mother’s help on landing time, he escapes using his power and status. He criticizes his female workers for being
late to work without considering their tending their children during that
time. Then once when he walks by the
river alone he gets his foot stuck in the deep mud. Mehring thinks that the dead man has grabbed
at his foot.
Actually
on the few occasions each year when Mehring has the company of his son in the
farm, he doesn’t try to overcome the barriers between them. His son, like his ex-wife and lover, does not
believe that apartheid and white privilege can survive for long. Then the wet season starts. The rain starts and it doesn’t stop for two
weeks. As the road to the farm is washed
out, he is in panic. In the final chapter
of the novel, the unidentified body that was buried in the farm is brought to
the surface by flooding. Jacobus makes
the black workers get a coffin and give the man a proper burial. In the meantime, Mehring is engaged in another
of his faceless sexual encounters. He
picks up a young woman on the way to work.
She leads him to a remote area under a bridge. No sooner had he realized that it was a trap,
on seeing two men there, than he escaped from that place.
As
there are chances to continue similar things in future, Mehring will definitely
be killed and won’t get a decent burial sometimes. The people like him in South
Africa will definitely have ignoble ends.
Their claim to the land of South Africa is only momentary. Gordimer suggests that the unknown black man,
whose body buried there in the farm, has more of a claim to the land than
Mehring has. That is why she has made Mehring’s ex-wife in the novel say “That bit
of paper you bought yourself from the deeds office isn’t going to be valid for
as long as another generation…..The blacks will tear up your bit of paper…..No
one will remember where you’re buried”.
-----Thulasidharan V
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