Tag: Nadine Gordimer

‘The Ultimate Safari’ by Nadine Gordimer

Our time in Malawi coincided with an appalling civil war in Mozambique, estimated to have displaced two million people. Refugees fleeing to Malawi only had to cross a road. For a stretch, the main north-south highway formed the border, and on the Malawian side there were huge refugee camps. The crossing into South Africa was more perilous. Thousands of refugees traversed Kruger National Park, a reserve the size of Israel, taking their chances with elephants, buffalos, and lions. The flow has never entirely ceased.

Once, during one of our extended self-drive safaris there, my wife and I saw in the distance a group making the crossing, porting all of their belongings with them. Nadine Gordimer’s The Ultimate Safari, published in 1989, puts the reader in the shoes – or lack of shoes – of the refugees.

First published in Granta in 1989, and then in the collection Jump and Other Stories, Bloomsbury, 1991

‘The Need for Something Sweet’ by Nadine Gordimer

Like ‘A Scandalous Woman’, ‘The Need for Something Sweet’ is the story of a formative but unequal friendship. In its case, the narrator is a young man, and the person to whom he attaches an attractive older woman by the name of Anita Gonsales. When they first meet, through the man’s job at the Civil Service’s international telephone exchange, he sees romance in the woman’s attempts to contact her estranged husband in Spain. In his innocence, it signifies a life lived.  

As they get sexually involved with one another, however, he soon realises the truth: that she is a sad, lonely alcoholic whom he is far too green to help. Fast-forward thirty-one years and we now find our narrator middle-aged, materially successful but no more happy in life and marriage than Anita Gonsales. The perplexing thing she said when they first met – “You don’t realise it will all happen to you” – now makes perfect, haunting sense to him.

First published in the New Review, January/February 1977. Collected in A Soldier’s Embrace, Jonathan Cape, 1980