Burger's Daughter

Being Burger’s Daughter

Rosa Burger has been performing her father’s politics since before she could have chosen them. The novel opens with her as a teenager, standing outside the prison where her father Lionel Burger—a white South African Communist, convicted anti-apartheid activist—is being held, bringing him supplies in her school uniform. The image is the novel’s argument: she is there because she is Burger’s daughter, playing a role in a drama she did not write, whose meaning she is still too young to fully understand.

Lionel Burger is based partly on Bram Fischer, the real Afrikaner Communist lawyer who was imprisoned for life for his anti-apartheid work and died in prison in 1975. Gordimer uses the historical figure to ask a question Fischer’s biography cannot answer: what is it like to be his child? To grow up in a household where the political is not just personal but is the entire organizing principle of family life? To attend political meetings as a child the way other children attend church, absorbing a faith not by choice but by immersion?

Rosa does not reject her father’s politics—she believes in them, in the way that a person believes in what they were raised in. But the novel is about the difference between belief and identification, between sharing a cause and being subsumed by a name. For much of the first section, Rosa is performing loyalty: maintaining the network, visiting the prison, presenting the face of the committed daughter. Gordimer is interested in the gap between the performance and the interior—in what Rosa actually thinks, when she is not being Burger’s daughter.

Europe and Return

Rosa escapes to France. The lover who offers her a different life—an elderly French painter, a life of Mediterranean ease and aesthetic pleasure—represents the choice that the novel’s politics seem to prohibit: the choice to simply live, to put down the cause, to become a person rather than a symbol. Rosa takes it, at least provisionally. The European section of the novel is Gordimer exploring what she cannot fully explore in South Africa: the seduction of the private life, the peace of political disengagement.

The return is forced, not by guilt or obligation but by a specific event: Rosa sees, on a French television screen, footage of the 1976 Soweto children’s uprising. Children her own age are being shot by South African police in the streets of Soweto. The television screen is the novel’s pivot—it is the moment when Rosa understands that she cannot be anywhere else, that the choice she made in coming to Europe is not actually available to her, that Burger’s daughter is not a role she can put down while the children of Soweto are dying.

The return is not a moral triumph. It is a recognition: that she is who she is, that history has made her, that the private life she found in France was real but insufficient. She returns to South Africa and is arrested. The novel ends with her in prison—following her father, not in imitation but in consequence.

The Banned Novel

The South African government’s Publications Control Board banned Burger’s Daughter within weeks of its publication in 1979. The grounds given were several: the novel depicted Communist characters sympathetically, it described police brutality, it quoted real political documents, and it portrayed the anti-apartheid struggle as morally legitimate. The censorship board’s report—which Gordimer was eventually given access to—is reproduced in some editions of the novel as an appendix, and it is itself a revealing document: the apartheid state’s attempt to specify exactly what truths the novel had told that could not be permitted.

The international response to the banning was substantial. Writers’ organizations protested; the book was widely reviewed outside South Africa; Gordimer, who was already internationally recognized, became more so. The ban was eventually lifted. Gordimer would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, becoming the first South African to do so. Burger’s Daughter, published at the height of her engagement with apartheid, is the novel many critics consider her deepest and most personally invested work.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Gordimer’s most inward and psychologically complex novel: Rosa Burger is the most fully realized character she ever created, and the questions the novel asks about inherited political identity have not been answered by any other fiction.