July's People

The Flight to the Village

The unnamed civil war in July’s People has ended apartheid by force. Gordimer does not describe the war; it is background noise—radio reports, gunfire in the distance, the knowledge that Johannesburg is no longer safe for white people. What she describes is the flight: the Smales family packing what they can carry into their bakkie (their small truck, which July has borrowed as his own wage in lieu of payment), driving through the night with their children, arriving at July’s village in a rural area that has no electricity, no running water, and no frame of reference for what the Smales are or what is happening to them.

The village immediately reveals what the Smales do not know. They cannot speak July’s language—they have lived with him for fifteen years and never learned it. They do not know how to grow food, fetch water, manage a fire, or build shelter. They have skills—Maureen Smales was a professional, Bam Smales was an architect—that are entirely useless in the village economy. The physical incompetence is also a cultural incompetence: they do not know what is expected of them, what the social rules are, who the authority figures are, how to read the situation they are in.

This is Gordimer’s central device: place the white characters in the position that Black South Africans have occupied since colonization—dependent, disoriented, unable to read the codes of the world they now inhabit—and watch what it reveals about the structure of racial power. The revelation is not flattering.

Power Reversed

July’s transformation across the novel is the most carefully observed element in the book. He has worked for the Smales for fifteen years with a deference that was not submission but performance—the performance required by the apartheid system, by the power differential, by the economic dependency that kept his family in the village while he worked in their kitchen in Johannesburg. In the village, the performance is no longer necessary.

July does not become cruel or domineering. He becomes opaque—to the Smales, suddenly and completely. He is polite, still; he arranges their shelter, provides their food, mediates between them and the village. But he is no longer readable to them, and the unreadability is terrifying. Maureen Smales, in particular, is confronted with the realization that she did not know July—that what she knew was the role July performed for her, and that the person performing it was always elsewhere.

The scene in which Maureen demands her car keys back—the keys to the bakkie that is the family’s one negotiable asset—is the novel’s moral center. She demands them in English, which July no longer pretends to understand fully. The power that English represented in apartheid South Africa—the power of the colonizer’s language to command and to be obeyed—has evaporated, and Maureen has nothing to replace it with.

The Grammar of Power

What July’s People argues—in the compressed, almost allegorical form that Gordimer uses throughout—is that apartheid is not merely a political system but a grammar: a structure that determines what can be said, what can be meant, what relationships are possible. The Smales are not cruel people. They are, by the standards of white South Africa, relatively enlightened; they employed July, paid him, treated him with what they considered decency. But their decency was structured by the apartheid grammar, and outside of it they have no vocabulary for the relationship.

The novel’s ending—Maureen running toward the sound of a helicopter, leaving her family behind, running toward something unknown—is deliberately unresolved. Gordimer will not tell you whether the helicopter is rescue or threat, whether Maureen is choosing something or fleeing something, whether the run is liberation or madness. The point is that the question cannot be answered within any framework the novel has been working with. The Smales family has reached the edge of the only language they have, and Gordimer leaves them there.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — The most formally precise of Gordimer’s novels: 160 pages that do more to illuminate the structure of racial power than most books ten times as long.

The Revolution Imagined

July’s People, published in 1981, is the most concentrated of Gordimer’s political novels — 160 pages that imagine what her other books could only anticipate: a Black revolution that has overturned apartheid by force. Gordimer does not narrate the war. It is background noise, radio reports and distant gunfire, the simple fact that Johannesburg is no longer safe for white people. What she narrates instead is a reversal of domestic power. The Smales, a liberal white family, flee the city and are sheltered by July, who has been their servant for fifteen years, in his rural village — and in his world they are suddenly dependent, illiterate in its codes, and subject to his authority. The book was banned under apartheid, and it is easy to see why: it strips white liberalism of its self-image and shows what remains.

The reversal is Gordimer’s central device. Placed in the position Black South Africans had occupied since colonization — dependent, disoriented, unable to read the rules of the world they now inhabit — the Smales reveal how completely their decency had been structured by the apartheid system rather than chosen in spite of it.

The Grammar of Power

July’s transformation is the book’s most carefully observed achievement. For fifteen years his deference was a performance demanded by the power differential; in the village the performance becomes unnecessary, and he turns opaque to the Smales — not cruel, simply no longer readable. Maureen Smales is forced to recognize that she never knew July, only the role he played for her. The scene in which she demands the keys to the family’s truck, in an English July no longer pretends to fully understand, is the novel’s moral centre: the colonizer’s language has lost its power to command, and she has nothing to put in its place. Gordimer’s argument is that apartheid was not merely a legal system but a grammar — a structure determining what could be said, meant, and felt between people. The deliberately unresolved ending, with Maureen running toward an unidentified helicopter, leaves the family at the edge of the only language they have ever had, and refuses to tell us whether what waits is rescue or ruin.