Country Lovers Essay Example for Free

Country Lovers EssayThe farm children play together when they are small but once the white children go away(p) to school they soon dont play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black children get some sort of schooling, they drop every category farther behind the grades passed by the white children the childish vocabulary, the childs exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies, mealie lands and veldthere comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabulary of boarding-school and the possibilities of interscholastic sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This usefully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, a presbyopic with the tangible changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and baasielittle master. The trouble was Paulus Eysen dyck did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now merely unmatched of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal, recognizable in his sisters old clothes.The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boardingschool he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had do in his wood-work class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went pricker to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their coquet spans.) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his fathers farm and he would try.When he was fiftee n, six feet tall, and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the sister school in the same town when he had learnt how to rag and flirt and fondle quite intimately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had go to with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made lovewhen he was as far from his childishness as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt pack ear-rings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had doneit was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse.She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her. There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have bought her a belt and ear-rings. When the farmers son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone. They had not arranged this it was an urge each followed independently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her. Down at the dried-up river-bed where five or six years ago the children had caught a leguaan one great daya creature that combined ideally the size and ferocious aspect of the crocodile with then an interview published in Women Writers Talk (1989), edit by Olga Kenyan, Nadine Gordimer had this to say about the political evolution of South Africa TJhere are some extraordinary black and white people who are prepared to arrogate a Pascalian wager on the fact that there is a way, that there must be a way. It goes be yond polarisation, it groundworknot happen while the situation is what it is. It can only be after the power structure has changed. But the fact is that if whites want to go on living in South Africa, they have to change. Its not a matter of just letting blacks in white life is already dead, over. The big question is, given the kind of conditioning weve had for 300 years, is it mathematical to strike that down and make a common culture with the blacks?Since 1953, when she published her first novel, The Lying Days, Nadine Gordimer has been aligned with the liberal white consciousness of South Africa. She was born(p) in the Transvaal in 1923. Her father was a shopkeeper, her mother a housewife. A childhood illness kept Gordimer out of school until she was 14, by which time she was already an avid reader. By 15 she had published her first short story. It was not until she was somewhat older that she became aware of the South African political situation, and it was not until she was 30 that her first novel was published. Beginning with A World of Strangers (1958), Gordimers novels focus directly on the South African racial situation. The most famous of th ese works hold A Guest of Honor (1970), The Conservationist (1974), Burgers Daughter (1979), Julys People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Sons Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), and The House Gun (1998).Gordimer has as well as published 10 volumes of short stories, as well as several volumes o/non/iction. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. Asked by Olga Kenyan what it means to be a white South African, Gordimer responded as follows You have to shout that you support change. In my case that you support a complete revolution, if possible a collected one. I use revolution in a broad sense, a complete change of the whole political organisation, from grass roots. Its not enough for a white to say Right, Ill be prepared to live under black majority rule, and sit back, waiting for it to come. Yow.also have to work positively, in whatsoever way you can, as a human being.