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Overview
July’s People is a novel by Nadine Gordimer. It was first published in 1981. The story is set in the near future and follows the style of social realism. The events take place in the South African bush country. The novel explores the collapse of apartheid through the story of a white family forced to rely on their black servant, July, for survival.
Plot Summary of July’s People
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer is a fictitious account of a black revolt in South Africa. In the novel, the blacks in the South African police force refuse to arrest their own people, public services break down, and fighting erupts in the major cities, quickly spreading into the rural areas. Bloodshed engulfs the country. The rebels have prepared well. They have heavy caliber weapons and airplanes and help from the neighbouring black states of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, and Mozambique, as well as from Cuba and the Soviet Union. Everywhere their forces threaten the security of the white settlers.
Bamford and Maureen Smales, a liberal, white couple, flee with their three children from their home in a comfortable residential district of Johannesburg and find refuge in the mud and thatched hut village that contains the extended family of their black servant, July.
July then becomes their protector. He quarters them in one of the dwellings that had been occupied by his wife. She resents the eviction, thinking that the whites should seek help from other whites, but defers to the authority of her husband. The lives of the white visitors are transformed beyond their imagination. In the bush, they have none of the amenities of their former existence: no electricity, no running water, no modern sanitation. Maureen believes that she is in another consciousness; “it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape.” Time, as the family once knew it, begins to lose meaning. Desperate for outside news, the adults practically worship their radio, fearful that its batteries might give out. Yet the garbled transmissions they receive do not tell them the fate of their society and its chances of survival.
July at first seems a considerate host, taking a certain pride in showing off his white family, almost like a trophy, but it is obvious that the pleasure of the Smaleses’ presence is beginning to wear thin. The Smaleses, increasingly isolated, try harder to adjust to their alien way of life. The children cope better than their parents, disturbingly so as they begin to play like black children, acquiring their language, adapting themselves to their customs. The youngest son, Victor, begins to forget how to read and does not miss his old comic book heroes.
The Smaleses’ material possessions, those that they managed to bring with them, are also falling away from them, including the small truck, the “bakkie,” in which they made their escape. Bamford Smales had intended it for weekend bird-hunting expeditions. July manages to get his hands on the keys and does not give them back. Unable to drive before, he now learns from Daniel, a younger black who had once driven a truck for a dairy in Bethal. The Smaleses are disturbed, but realizing that they cannot exist without the goodwill of the blacks, they avoid a confrontation by going along.
Maureen attempts to maintain a semblance of independence. She volunteers to participate in gathering food for her own family, but her offer is rejected by July, who says that his women perform this sort of work. Bamford tries to establish status as a provider of meat by shooting some young wild pigs with his twelve-gage shotgun, but the amount provided is hardly sufficient to make much of a difference.
The white couple’s sense of malaise is increased by the discovery that July’s village is under a higher tribal authority, exercised by a district chief. The chief summons the white family before him. The Smaleses are alarmed that he might order them out of the village, but they discover that he is more concerned with protecting his own territoriality against the black rebels. He views the Smaleses as potential allies, asking Bamford to teach him how to use his gun.
Following the return to July’s village, Bamford discovers that the shotgun and all its ammunition have disappeared. His wife suspects that July is the culprit, but she finds out that the real thief is Daniel, who has taken the weapon to join the rebels. Before the effects of this latest incident can be felt, a helicopter arrives. Maureen, obviously assuming that it brings news of the victory of the white forces, is ecstatic and runs toward the sound of its whirling blades with the desperate frenzy of one rushing toward salvation.
Characterisation in July’s People
Summary:
Bamford Smales is a Johannesburg architect.
Maureen Hetherington Smales is his wife.
Royce, Gina, and Victor are the preteen children of the Smales family.
July, also known as Mwawate, has been the Smaleses’ houseboy and caretaker for the past fifteen years. He is now their protector.
Martha is July’s wife.
Daniel is July’s former assistant.
The English-speaking Smaleses listen to the radio hoping for the best, but at the same time asking themselves whether they would even want to resume their former lives. They have never considered themselves part of the Afrikaner society, have always deplored the apartheid system, and once contemplated emigrating to Canada. They view their relationship with the blacks, especially with July, as almost one of friendship among equals, and they shudder at the thought that it in any way resembles one of master and servant. It would never occur to them that their treatment of the natives might be a form of condescension and that they share part of the blame for the state of affairs between the races.
The Smaleses speak no other language but their own and are equally provincial in other ways. Their good intentions cannot make up for their naivete and their lack of imagination. Despite the weeks of serious rioting in Soweto, Bamford downplays the impending crisis. He withdraws his money from the bank only after he has been alerted by a bank accountant for whom he once designed a house, and even then does so reluctantly in a state of “detached disbelief.” The Smaleses are professional liberals. “They had always—from a distance—admired Castro, the bourgeois white who succeeded in turning revolutionary.” Undoubtedly, there are other South African whites who share these sentiments, but in this emergency, they do not seem important enough to give protection even to each other.
Maureen struggles to remain true to her ideals. Yet she does not have the personality or the experience to relinquish her parental attitude toward blacks. By indulging July in his appropriation of the truck, she allows him to gain the upper hand. He works on her conscience by accusing her of not trusting him—her boy who worked for her for fifteen years. He further insists that even out here in the bush he be paid exactly as he was in town. Maureen does not dare demand the return of the keys but tries to make him feel guilty instead. She reminds him about the mistress he left behind in Johannesburg, “Where is she, in the fighting there? Has she got something to eat, somewhere to sleep? You were so concerned about your wife—and what does she think of Ellen?” The ineffective ploy does not work. July walks away, the keys still in his pocket. Maureen’s character is flawed by her lack of understanding about the people whose interests she had presumed to foster.
Nadine Gordimer involves the reader in the Smaleses’ struggle to adjust to their new way of life; she describes its adverse effect on their sex life, Maureen’s efforts to adjust to a life without sanitary napkins, the attempts to retain dignity as European-style clothing becomes increasingly tattered. By contrast, Gordimer tells her readers less about July, allowing access to his thoughts rarely and then only insofar as he struggles to comprehend whites and their institutions. In his way, he is as isolated and dependent as the Smaleses. He cannot even decide for himself the fate of his Johannesburg bank account, the exact worth of which he does not know. Now that the fighting has started, he suspects that his passbook is no longer worth anything, but he does not know. Should he destroy it? “He needed someone— he didn’t know yet who—to tell him: burn it, let it swell in the river, their signatures washing away.”
July’s lack of direction and helplessness (at least outside his own native milieu) is confirmed by Maureen as she angrily tells him: “You want the bakkie, to drive around in like a gangster, imagining yourself a big man, important, until you don’t have any money for petrol, there isn’t any petrol to buy, and it’ll lie there, July, under the trees, in this place among old huts, and it’ll fall to pieces while the children play in it.” The whites are equally unsympathetic in their judgment of the native chief, who they feel has done so little, and even betrayed, his own people. Thus, the races are defined by their relationship to each other.
Themes in July’s People
Summary: The themes in July’s People are racial upheaval, power shifts, and survival. The novel explores the collapse of apartheid and the reversal of societal roles. It examines identity, privilege, and the struggle for control in an uncertain South Africa.
Except for wearing a new snap-brimmed hat, the district chief looks like many other rural blacks in cast-off European clothing, but he has “the sharp, impatient, sceptical voice of a man quicker than the people he keeps around him.” He interrogates the Smaleses about the war: Who is blowing up the government? Why have whites lost control? What are the goals of the rebels? The chief views the black nationalists with greater trepidation than he does the white settlers because the black rebels might come and take away his land.
Bamford Smales cannot believe that the chief would shoot his own people. “You wouldn’t kill blacks. .. . You’re not going to take guns and help the white government kill blacks, are you? . .. You mustn’t let the government make you kill each other. The whole black nation is your nation.”
Bamford is referring to a black nation that does not exist, and probably never will unless, if European experience is any judge, there has been a wholesale butchery of blacks by blacks. A successful black revolt against white masters will only be a prelude to an eventual civil war among the blacks themselves. Bamford and Maureen are as badly prepared to help avoid this eventual tragedy as they are to meet the blacks on a level of true equality, which neither really wants anyway. Their rescue will only be a reprieve. If they can return to their home in the suburbs with its endless supply of toilet paper and soap and electrical energy, it will always be as strangers in an alien land, and their existence will be even more marginal and hopeless than before.
Critical Context
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs in the Transvaal gold-mining district and reared, as she has put it, “on the soft side of the color bar.” In a previous novel, A World of Strangers (1958), she writes about the polarity of the South African people and the impossibility of achieving any true racial harmony. The main character is an English engineer come to South Africa on special assignment. In time, he believes that he has a sense of belonging but only “as a stranger among people who were strangers to each other.”
Apartheid is the one constant in the author’s unhappy homeland, and almost all of her characters are infected by its disease. July’s People reexplores this persistent theme but does not bore the reader by its repetition because of Gordimer’s success in infusing her characters with drama and personality. The action is contained and fairly localized but well-defined. Her vision is disturbingly pessimistic, especially about the prospects for South African liberalism, depicted here as essentially sterile and irrelevant.
The book possesses a fine sense of irony mixed with vivid realism, enabling one to forgive frequent stylistic eccentricities. Gordimer makes South Africa more than simply an exotic setting for conflict, but a character in itself, a basic element in changing, establishing, and molding the lives of all its people. African and European cultures, although in constant conflict and largely incompatible, are nevertheless interdependent and inextricably linked.
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