From the archives.
A clip from a longer interview with writer Nadine Gordimer in 2005.
And in October 1982 in a talk entitled “Living in the Interregnum,” (one of my favorite pieces of writing on the conundrum of South Africa, that despite the context changing, still remains relevant) she told an audience at the New York Institute for the Humanities, among other things, that:
“… In the official South African consciousness, the ego is white: it has always seen all South Africa as ordered around it. Even the ego that seeks to abdicate this alienation does so in an assumption of its own salvation that in itself expresses ego and alienation. And the Western world press, itself over-whelmingly white, constantly feeds this ego from its own. Visiting journalists, parliamentarians, congressmen and congresswomen come to South Africa to ask whites what is going to happen there. They meet blacks through whites; they rarely take the time and trouble, on their own initiative, to encounter more than the man who comes into the hotel bedroom to take away the empty beer bottles. With the exception of films made clandestinely by South African political activists, black and white, about resistance events, most foreign television documentaries, while condemning the whites out of their own mouths, are nevertheless preoccupied with what will happen to whites when the apartheid regime goes.”
