Burger’s Daughter is a 1979 novel by South African Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer. It details the life of Rosa Burger, the title character, as she comes to terms with her father’s legacy as an activist in the South African Communist Party. While banned in South Africa, a copy of the book was smuggled into Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island, and he reported that he ‘thought well of it’ It won the Central News Agency Literary Award in 1980 and was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in June 1979.
About Burger’s Daughter in brief
Burger’s Daughter is a 1979 novel by South African Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer. It details the life of Rosa Burger, the title character, as she comes to terms with her father’s legacy as an activist in the South African Communist Party. The novel is rooted in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle and references to actual events and people from that period, including Nelson Mandela and the 1976 Soweto uprising. While banned in South Africa, a copy of the book was smuggled into Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island, and he reported that he ‘thought well of it’ The novel was generally well-received by critics, with one reviewer calling it Gordimer’s’most political and most moving novel’ It won the Central News Agency Literary Award in 1980 and was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in June 1979. The book was expected to be banned in. South Africa and a month after publication in London the import and sale of the. book was prohibited by the Publications Control Board. Three months later, the Publications Appeal Board overturned the. banning and the restrictions were lifted. The book is set in the mid-1970s and details a group of white anti-APartheid activists in South. Africa seeking to overthrow the South. African government. Gordimer herself was involved in South African struggle politics, and she knew many of the activists, including Bram Fischer, Mandela’s treason trial defence lawyer. She modelled the Burger family in the novel loosely on Fischer’s family, and described Burger’s Daughter as \”a coded homage\” to Fischer.
Rosa Burger is 26, and her father, Lionel Burger, has died in prison after serving three years of a life sentence for treason. Rosa had grown up in a family that actively supported the overthrow of the apartheid government, and the house they lived in opened its doors to anyone supporting the struggle, regardless of colour. Despite being labelled a Communist and under surveillance by the authorities, Rosa manages to get a passport, and flies to Nice in France to spend several months with Katya. Rosa is devastated by her childhood friend’s hurtful remarks and overcome with guilt, and returns to South Africa as she plans to go into exile. Back in France she resumes her job as a physiotherapist and resumes a relationship with Bernard Chabalier, a visiting academic from Paris. In 1975 Rosa attends a party with a black university student dismissing all whites’ help as irrelevant, saying that whites cannot know what blacks want, and that blacks will liberate themselves. Rosa leaves Conrad and moves into a flat on her own and works as a Physiotherapist. At one event, Rosa sees Baasie, a black boy Rosa’s age the Burgers had adopted, but when she tries to talk to him, he starts criticising her for not knowing his real name. He says that there is nothing special about having black fathers have also died in jail as many black fathers also died there, and adds that he does not need her help.
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