Born in 1923 in the small mining town of Springs, South Africa, Nadine Gordimer is a white South African of Jewish descent. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, immigrated from Lithuania to escape the pogroms there, and her mother, Nan Myers Gordimer, was of English extraction. Nadine Gordimer was raised South Africa’s white suburbs. She attended a convent school and, briefly, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Only slowly, she explains, did she gain a political awareness: “When you’re born white in South Africa you’re peeling like an onion. You’re sloughing off all the conditioning that you’ve had since you were a child” (Gordimer in Malinowski, p. 204). Gordimer went on to write short stories, novels, and essays, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. Her works have explored the devastating effects of apartheid on her society. Burger’s Daughter was her first extended portrayal of white revolutionaries in South Africa.
Before apartheid. At the turn of the twentieth century, the area now known as South Africa was embroiled in a war between the country’s two prominent groups of white rulers. There were the descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European (mostly Dutch) settlers—named Boers (the Dutch word for “farmers”), then renamed Afrikaners—who sought to preserve the independence of their settler states.
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