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Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works Lecture 9

Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works Lecture 9 https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/ Course code: 140359. Derek Barker www.derekbarker.info Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com. Structure. Intro to Freedom Charter Exercize Discussions: Freedom Charter Jabu & Steve

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Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works Lecture 9

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  1. Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and WorksLecture 9 https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/ Course code: 140359 Derek Barker www.derekbarker.info Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

  2. Structure • Intro to Freedom Charter • Exercize • Discussions: • Freedom Charter • Jabu & Steve • Themes: equality in education • Themes: equality before the law

  3. Freedom Charter • The Freedom Charter was the statement of core principles of the South African Congress Alliance, which consisted of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies - the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats and the Coloured People's Congress. It is characterized by its opening demand: "The People Shall Govern”

  4. Freedom Charter • In 1955, the ANC sent out 50,000 volunteers into townships and the countryside to collect "freedom demands" from the people of South Africa. This system was designed to give all South Africans equal rights. Demands such as "Land to be given to all landless people", "Living wages and shorter hours of work", "Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality" officially adopted on 26 June 1955 at a Congress of the People in Kliptown.

  5. Exercize • Read the 1955 Freedom Charter, underline “weird” sentences (i.e. ones you think did not end up in the / any democratic constitution); pick out any inconsistencies • Discuss • Is the Freedom Charter relevant in the 21st century ?

  6. Watch • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFUNvk_-5CY • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrWczhTZBk

  7. Characters • Main characters • Steve & Jabu • Sindiswe & Gary Elias • Elias SiphiweGumede • The Dolphins • Madiba / Mandela • Jacob Zuma

  8. Steve & Jabu • At the beginning of the story, Steve and Jabu are living in the inner-city but are considering moving to a middle-class suburb where it is both safer and more comfortable. This decision, like most others they will make in the following years, is burdened by feelings of doubt and guilt. • Why should they feel guilty?

  9. Steve and Jabu • Is it ok to aim for a better life now that the Strugglehas come to an end and life conditions are beginning to improve, at least for those with a good education?

  10. Steve & Jabu • Once a comrade, always a comrade—and, still, it is different since not everyone is capable of keeping up with the demands of modern economic life, and many do not get a fair chance. • Is it reasonable to expect more now that the struggle is over?

  11. Steve & Jabu • But is the revolution over? • We are a long way from achieving equality of opportunity. There is racism. But that is not all. The persistent difficulties have also to do with the horrendous lack of infrastructures, physical as much as social. • Your thoughts? When is the struggle really over?

  12. Steve • Steve, an industrial chemist, gets a position as assistant professor and is confronted with the sad reality that despite the improved access to university education, the majority of black students are weighed down by it because of the low standards of the (apartheid) schools they came from.

  13. Steve • How to deal with that? Reduce the standards? Increase teaching? In the end, like so often, the solutions found are somewhere in-between and made on pragmatic grounds rather than on principle. In post-apartheid South Africa teachers are in short-supply, not least because of the exodus of the more qualified—whites are the first to go, but blacks will often follow. • What to do about “standards” in education?

  14. Jabu Jabu has multiple layers of identities, making her challenges different from Steve’s – what are these layers and what are her challenges?

  15. Jabu • She is a Zulu woman married to a White man she met when they were both comrades in the struggle against Apartheid. At the beginning of the book she works as a teacher and is mother to a young daughter, Sindi. Later, after she has begun legal training, she will bear a son, Gary Elias, because having a son is important for her ethnic community, and it is him she will bring to her father’s home for regular visits, and she becomes a lawyer.Her feelings of guilt derive in no small part from her relatively good economic situation.

  16. Jabu • Her natural sense of feminism, which will eventually bring her in conflict with her father when he sides Zuma despite the rape charges against him, co-exists with her traditional understanding of a woman’s role in a family—also the reason why she agrees to Steve’s decision to apply for academic posts in Australia with the prospect of emigrating.

  17. Final question To what degree and in what way are issues related specifically to feminism / equality of women, raised in the book?

  18. Homework Read the last part of “No Time Like the Present”

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