Nadine Gordimer
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008
The 1950s
A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape
Growing up in one part of a vast young country can be very different from growing up in another, and in South Africa this difference is not only a matter of geography. The division of the people into two great races — black and white — and the subdivision of the white into Afrikaans- and English-speaking groups provides a diversity of cultural heritage that can make two South African children seem almost as strange to each other as if they had come from different countries. The fact that their parents, if they are English-speaking, frequently have come from different countries complicates their backgrounds still further. My father came to South Africa from a village in Russia; my mother was born and grew up in London. I remember, when I was about eight years old, going with my sister and mother and father to spend a long weekend with a cousin of my father’s who lived in the Orange Free State. After miles and miles of sienna-red ploughed earth, after miles and miles of silk-fringed mealies standing as high as your eyes on either side of the road and ugly farmhouses where women in bunchy cotton dresses and sun-bonnets stared after the car as we passed (years later, when I saw Oklahoma! in a Johannesburg theatre, I recalled that scene), we reached the dorp where the cousin lived in a small white house with sides that were dust-stained in a wavering wash, like rust, for more than a foot above the ground. There we two little girls slept on beds of a smothering softness we had never felt before — feather beds brought from Eastern Europe — and drank tea drawn from a charming contraption, a samovar. There — to our and our mother’s horror — we were given smoked duck, flavoured with garlic, at breakfast. The two children of the house spoke only Afrikaans, like the Boer children who played in the yards of the mean little houses on either side, and my sister and I, queasy from the strange food and able to speak only English, watched their games with a mixture of hostility and wistfulness.
How different it all was from our visit to our mother’s sister, in Natal! There, with the ‘English’ side of the family, in the green, softly contoured hills and the gentle meadows of sweet grass near Balgowan, we might almost have been in England itself. There our cousins Roy and Humphrey rode like young lords about their father’s beautiful farm, and spoke the high, polite, ‘pure’ English learned in expensive Natal private schools that were staffed with masters imported from English universities. And how different were both visits from our life in one of the gold-mining towns of the Witwatersrand, near Johannesburg, in the Transvaal.
There are nine of these towns, spread over a distance of roughly a hundred and forty miles east and west of Johannesburg. The one in which we lived was on the east side — the East Rand, it is called — and it had many distinctions, as distinctions are measured in that part of the world. First of all, it was one of the oldest towns, having got itself a gold strike, a general store, a few tents and a name before 1890. In the pioneer days, my father had set himself up in a small, one-man business as a watchmaker and jeweller, and during the twenties and thirties, when the town became the most rapidly expanding on the Witwatersrand, he continued to live there with his family. In the richest gold-mining area in the world, it became the richest square mile or so. All around us, the shafts went down and the gold came up; our horizon was an Egyptian-looking frieze of man-made hills of cyanide sand, called ‘dumps’, because that is what they are — great mounds of waste matter dumped on the surface of the earth after the gold-bearing ore has been blasted below, hauled up, and pounded and washed into yielding its treasure. In the dusty month before spring — in August, that is — the sand from the dumps blew under the tightly shut doors of every house in the town and enveloped the heads of the dumps themselves in a swirling haze, lending them some of the dignity of cloud-capped mountains. It is characteristic of the Witwatersrand that any feature of the landscape that strikes the eye always does so because it is a reminder of something else; considered on its own merits, the landscape is utterly without interest — flat, dry, and barren.
In our part of the East Rand, the yellowish-white pattern of the cyanide dumps was broken here and there by the head of a black hill rising out of the veld. These hills were man-made, too, but they did not have the geometrical, pyramidal rigidity of the cyanide dumps, and they were so old that enough real earth had blown on to them to hold a growth of sparse grass and perhaps even a sinewy peppercorn or peach tree, sprung up, no doubt, out of garden refuse abandoned there by somebody from the nearby town. These hills were also dumps, but through their scanty natural covering a blackness clearly showed — even a little blueness, the way black hair shines — for they were coal dumps, made of coal dust.
The coal dumps assumed, both because of their appearance and because of the stories and warnings we heard about them, something of a diabolical nature. In our sedate little colonial tribe, with its ritual tea parties and tennis parties, the coal dump could be said to be our Evil Mountain; I use the singular here because when I think of these dumps, I think of one in particular — the biggest one, the one that stood fifty yards beyond the last row of houses in the town where we lived. I remember it especially well because on the other side of it, hidden by it, was the local nursing home, where, when my sister and I were young and the town was small, all the mothers went to have their babies and all the children went to have their tonsillectomies — where, in fact, almost everyone was born, endured an illness, or died. Our mother had several long stays in the place, over a period of two or three years, and during these stays our grandmother took us on a daily visit across the veld to see her. Immediately lunch was over, she would spend an hour dressing us, and then, brushed and beribboned and curled, we would set off. We took a path that skirted the coal dump, and there it was at our side most of the way — a dirty, scarred old mountain, collapsing into the fold of a small ravine here, supporting a twisted peach tree there, and showing bald and black through patchy grass. A fence consisting of two threads of barbed wire looped at intervals through low rusted-iron poles, which once had surrounded it completely, now remained only in places, conveying the idea of a taboo rather than providing an effectual means of isolation. The whole coal dump looked dead, forsaken, and harmless enough, but my sister and I walked softly and looked at it out of the corners of our eyes, half fascinated, half afraid, because we knew it was something else — inert. Not dead by any means, but inert. For we had seen. Coming back from the nursing home in the early-winter dusk, we had seen the strange glow in the bald patches the grass did not cover, and in the runnels made by the erosion of summer wind and rain we had seen the hot blue waver of flame. The coal dump was alive. Like a beast of prey, it woke to life in the dark.
The matter-of-fact truth was that these coal dumps, relics of the pre-gold-strike era when collieries operated in the district, were burning. Along with the abandoned mine workings underground, they had caught fire at some time or other in their years of disuse, and had continued to burn, night and day, ever since. Neither rain nor time could put the fires out, and in some places, even on the coldest winter days, we would be surprised to feel the veld warm beneath the soles of our shoes, and, if we cut out a clod, faintly steaming. That dump on the outskirts of the town where we lived is still burning today. I have asked people who have studied such things how long it may be expected to go on burning before it consumes itself. Nobody seems to know; it shares with the idea of Hades its heat and vague eternity.