None to Accompany Me

Due to the governmentally enforced segregation between the different races, citizens found that living in South Africa under apartheid caused a hypersensitive awareness of his or her own race. Gordimer is no exception to this and has spent much of her writing discussing where white people position themselves in relation to black people. She tries to think out how people can change their frame of mind to assimilate to the idea of a South Africa where people have an equal sense of national identity instead of trapping themselves within terms of binaries. She makes this clear in her statement, "If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay in Africa." What she seems to be saying is that to live peacefully in a nation you must accept you are entitled to be a citizen of that nation rather than an outsider who happens to inhabit it. This is a dilemma for white Africans who live under the image of "black Africa". To be African does not necessarily mean that you are black. This is something Gordimer has always vehemently asserted in her writing. It is in the fixed idea of "black Africa" that boundaries within the national identity are laid and Gordimer is committed to writing of Africa as inclusive of all the relations between its people of all colors. Both the National Party and the Inkath Movement stressed physical boundaries between white and black people. The impact they had on South African citizens over the 20th century encouraged the idea of a national identity divided by color. It is only with the end of apartheid and subsequently the first democratic national election that South Africans can evaluate the impact this division has had with hindsight and whether or not they choose to leave it behind.

A major theme of the novel is how to reconcile the ideological transformation taking place politically in South Africa with the personal notions of national identity formulated up to the present time. For people who worked to terminate apartheid, it is difficult to envision any progression when the primary motives of one's actions are committed to ending the politically instituted segregation. Personal actions were planned with thought of a watchful government eye. For the majority of the writing there could be no subject other than the institutionalized racism. It became a polemic for a political position whether direct or indirect that perpetuated itself in all the literature produced. Only now that apartheid has ended and a new political group has succeeded to power can South African individuals envision a future that is not strictly concerned with this national condition. Gordimer is trying to capture in None to Accompany Me the moment of this change through personal transformations: "Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible. I'm getting there." Leaving an old notion of national identity behind may make possible the dispensing of an old sense of selfhood. This illustrates the uncertainty of the people who live under this changing government to decide upon how they will perceive their sense of self now that an essential factor of what they perceive to be their identity has changed. The primary subject of this novel then is the omnipresent transformations taking place in South Africa at that time ranging from the personal to the broadly political. This novel is an important work that captures a nation in the midst of dramatic change. It will teach you about the conflicts in South Africa if you have never read much about it before and prompt you to find out more.