Paul Haspel's Reviews > July's People

July, in this context, is the name of a person, not a month – the first thing one needs to know about Nadine Gordimer’s excellent short novel July’s People. The National Party apartheid regime still held power in South Africa when Gordimer wrote this novel in 1981, and it is understandable that the Nobel Prize-winning author would want to set for herself the task of imagining what might happen in her native country if resistance to apartheid expanded into full-blown civil war. Yet July’s People is not a political novel first and foremost; rather, it is a thoughtful and perceptive study of how societies, families, and individuals change under stress.

The novel’s main characters are architect Bamford Smales and his wife Maureen, affluent suburban whites, and their erstwhile servant July. What had seemed like “normal” rioting in the black townships has suddenly morphed into something much more dramatic – “the gunned shopping malls and the blazing, unsold houses of a depressed market…the burst mains washing round bodies in their Saturday-morning garb of safari suits, and the heat-guided missiles that struck Boeings carrying those trying to take off from Jan Smuts Airport” (p. 9).

Appropriately, the details that one gets regarding the civil conflict are fragmentary and uncertain, capturing that sense of a society in breakdown. Maureen wonders what shape the future will take, listening to sporadic radio broadcasts from the urban frontlines of the civil conflict, including “reports of an RPG7 rocket-propelled grenade attack on the Carlton Centre [Africa’s tallest building], followed by occupation of the five-star hotel there by black forces” (p. 37). The Smaleses’ only hope lies in July, who has “turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be held; frog prince, saviour, July” (p. 9), and who spirits them out of Johannesburg to his ancestral village.

That movement from the Smaleses’ world to July’s, from a wealthy suburb to a humble village, is the first of many reversals that occur throughout July’s People. Indeed, the title reminds us that the Smaleses, who once might have referred to July as “their man,” are now “July’s people,” dependent upon him for protection and preservation. And then there is the additional irony that the Smaleses don't even know the real name of their saviour; "July" is a sort of convenience name that he has used when interacting with white South Africans. His true name, the name he was given at birth, the name he holds among his people, remains - like so much else in the book - a mystery.

The Smaleses were never adherents of apartheid – “They had fled the fighting in the streets, the danger for their children, the necessity to defend their lives in the name of ideals they didn’t share in a destroyed white society they didn’t believe in” (p. 51) – but Maureen still wonders what kind of society will exist after the conflict is over, and whether they will be able to go back, and whether they will want to.

Bam, gradually losing the artifacts that have always marked his place in society – his money, his vehicle, his rifle – becomes a passive shadow of his former self, spending more and more of his time among, and almost as one of, the children. July becomes more conscious of the power he wields: “Me? I must know who is stealing your things? Same like always. You make too much trouble for me” (p. 151). And Maureen, who has always fancied herself a gracious and tolerant liberal, must confront the limits of her own liberalism – “How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing there was to say between them that had any meaning” (p. 96).

When I visited South Africa in 2013, I saw a multicultural society of proud people working together to build a country that is much more powerful and important now as a democratic regional power than it ever was as a tyrannical bastion of white-minority rule. The novel’s scenario of a South African civil war – “several Sam missiles fell on the city in a rocket attack late on Friday night…Prudential Assurance Company building was the worst hit…an attempt to take over the SABC-TV studios in Auckland Park was repulsed” (pp. 50-51) - seemed only too possible at the time of the novel’s publication in 1981, the time just after the Soweto student uprising of 1976 and the Soweto riots of 1980.

Today, by contrast, one can walk in Johannesburg and see South Africa’s Constitutional Court, a symbol of democracy built upon the site of the apartheid regime’s much-feared Old Fort Prison. In Soweto, once a site of riots and necklacings and secret-police commando raids and unspeakable misery, visitors of all backgrounds are welcome to experience the community’s vibrant culture, to enjoy the food and music, to visit the historical sites and museums, and to walk along Vilakazi Street, the only street on earth to be home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners (President Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu).

That is how things turned out. July’s People, by contrast, captures how things might have turned out, and indeed demonstrates how many observers in those earlier times expected things to turn out. From its intense beginning through its marvelously ambiguous conclusion, July’s People is a great novel.