July's People

Gordimer’s epigraph for July’s People, a quote from Italian freedom fighter Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), states that “in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms” (v). An “interregnum” is usually defined as a transitional phase between two regimes, and in this novel, the violent end of white rule in South Africa ushers in a period of confusion and dislocation, in which all citizens (white and Black, male and female) grapple with changing roles, waiting to see what will come next. This imagined South Africa, the majority population of which the white-minority government has relegated to second- or third-class citizenship for more than 300 years, seems poised for a rocky transition to home rule. Throughout July’s People, the nation’s future is still far from settled. For example, the radio bulletins offer no coherent account of the shifting tides of the racial civil war. The Smaleses’ servant, July, however, has seen firsthand evidence that the Black people are (for now) ascendant: The once-swaggering white policemen, he says, are on the run. Also, the Smaleses know that Black revolutionaries have burned white neighborhoods and airports and shot jumbo jets out of the sky; this is why they chose to flee in their bakkie rather than trying to leave the country. The novel, instead of describing this hypothetical Black revolution on a global-political scale, takes an intimate, almost microscopic focus, training its lens on the tactile, pungent details of life for a few individuals caught up in the turbulence. This snail’s-eye view of a white couple’s fall from privilege and their shifting relationship with their former Black servant, along with their nearly nonexistent access to information about the revolution, helps build suspense and humanize the sudden, countrywide upheaval of the interregnum and its traumatic reversals.

The novel opens, fittingly, with the everyday disorientation of a couple waking up in the morning, shaking off the momentary haze of dreams and drowsiness. Maureen, the novel’s central figure, experiences a surreal dislocation that is physical as well as psychological. The sensory cues of waking, this time, are similar but unnervingly different: Her servant, July, as always for “his kind,” has gently roused her and offered her tea, but the lack of a knock on a wooden door is the first sign that things are terribly askew. This scene of waking up in new, reduced surroundings (a mud hut) is a metaphor for the white population’s harsh awakening—to a new reality and a new national consciousness. The Smaleses’ confusion on waking also represents the rupturing of a dream, or delusion, about the hypocrisy of their privileged life in Johannesburg.

For now, July, who rescued them by guiding them to his village and giving them his mother’s hut, seeks to cushion their fall from privilege, following lockstep in the rituals of servitude that he has kept for 15 years. However, his power over his former masters is now absolute, and as time goes by, he learns to assert it. His power struggle centers on the most important of the Smaleses’ few remaining possessions: the truck that saved their lives and the 12-gauge shotgun that offers their only defense against Black rebels who may yet find them. These symbols of power, the only ones of their kind in July’s village, were acquired, like all the Smaleses’ former wealth, under the aegis of the larcenous, white-ruled government. Though Maureen and Bam, as liberals, always considered themselves opponents of that regime, they’ve long (and inevitably) profited from apartheid’s exploitative power structure. Their attempts to “slough” white privilege were always half-hearted at best, and now, in the interregnum, they’re still fiercely possessive of these few material remnants of their former power, which introduces the theme of White Liberalism and Hypocrisy Under Apartheid.

July, too, grapples with a confusion of roles and responsibilities in the new status quo, as his “illegibly faded T-shirt” in the second chapter symbolizes (10). He has worked for the Smaleses in Johannesburg for so long, going home only every two years, that he’s almost a stranger to his own family, who have learned to manage their lives without him. The only filial duties that he has offered them over the years has been in the form of money, which white people paid him for his service. As an absentee husband and father, his status is low, and his wife distrusts him, believing (rightly) that he has taken a lover in the city. Moreover, both his wife and mother question his loyalty to his own people, accusing him of kowtowing to the Smaleses—for whom he has evicted his own mother—and of placing the whole community in danger from the insurgents by hiding white people. July defends the altruism of his actions, saying that the Smaleses had nowhere else to go, which introduces another theme, The Complexities of Benevolence and Dependency. His mother clings to the belief that white people are “clever” and all-powerful and don’t need his help, but he contends that they “can’t do anything. Nothing to [them] any more” (21). Saying this, July feels its truth for the first time. This epiphany marks a turning point in the story: July soon begins to recalibrate his relationship with his former employers, starting by using their bakkie. Lacking respect in his own community, he wields his newfound power over the Smaleses and their possessions to his advantage.

Seeking his own new role in the community, Bam, whose skills as an architect are now useless, seeks to make himself helpful by repairing the villagers’ crude tools and setting up a tank to collect rainwater. His efforts impress the men of the village, who invite him to their weekend drinking parties. Thus, Bam’s attempts to assimilate are more successful than Maureen’s: The village women generally snub her, mocking her dowdy appearance.

Maureen, who has always relied on powerful men, struggles to find a new way of being that is not centered on attractiveness and sexual allure. She becomes more introspective, dwelling, for instance, on painful memories of her childhood friendship with Lydia, a grown Black woman who worked for her family and used to carry Maureen’s book satchel on her head. Maureen never questioned this since Lydia, who related to her like an equal (or sometimes as a parent) rather than as a servant, seemed happy to do it. This early dynamic set the pattern for Maureen’s “benevolent” domination of her later servants, like July, and suggests how children raised in an oppressive power structure learn to rationalize their mastery over others. July, for instance, dotes on the Smales children, whom he helped raise. Had the apartheid regime lasted, the young Smaleses might have grown up thinking that their Black servants weren’t only happy to serve them but also saw them as equals or even friends. Maureen’s tragic misperception about July again references the complexities inherent in benevolence and dependency. Entrenched inequalities contribute to poisoning human relationships on every level. Thus, the novel is less a hypothetical speculation about a nation’s uncertain future than a postmortem of the apartheid past and present.