Burger's Daughter - Background

Background

Gordimer said in an interview in 1980 that the idea for Burger's Daughter had been with her for "a long time", and that she was fascinated by the role of "white hard-core Leftists" in South Africa. She was inspired by the work of Bram Fischer, the Afrikaner advocate and Communist who was Nelson Mandela's treason trial defence lawyer in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Gordimer was friends with many of the activist families, including Fischer's, and knew that the children in these families were "politically groomed" for the struggle, and that "the struggle came first" and they came second. She modelled the Burger family in the novel loosely on Fischer's family. While Gordimer never said it was about him, she did describe the novel as "a coded homage" to Bram Fischer. Fischer's daughter said later that she "recognised their lives" in the book.

Gordimer herself became involved in South African struggle politics after the arrest of a friend, Bettie du Toit in 1960 for trade unionist activities and being a member of the South African Communist Party. Just as Rosa Burger in the novel visits family in prison, so Gordimer visited her friend. Later in 1986, Gordimer gave evidence at the Delmas Treason Trial in support of 22 African National Congress (ANC) members accused of treason. She was a member of the ANC while it was still an illegal organization in South Africa, and hid several ANC leaders in her own home to evade arrest by the security forces.

The inspiration for Burger's Daughter came when she was waiting to visit a political detainee in prison, and amongst the other visitors she saw a school girl, the daughter of an activist she knew, and Gordimer wondered what this child was thinking, and what family obligations were making her stand there. The novel opens with the same scene: a 14-year-old Rosa Burger waiting outside a prison to see her detained mother.

Burger's Daughter took Gordimer four years to write, starting from a handful of "very scrappy notes" of "half sentences" and "little snatches of dialogue". Once she got going, she said, the writing became an "organic process". During those four years she also wrote two non-fiction articles to take breaks from working on the novel. Gordimer said that the book is more than just a story about white communists in South Africa, it is about "commitment" and what she as a writer does to "make sense of life".

In 1991 Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her works of "intense immediacy" and "extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment". During the award ceremony speech by Sture Allén, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Burger's Daughter was cited as one of Gordimer's novels in which "artistry and morality fuse".