Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in South Africa. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
For more than fifty years, Gordimer has written thirteen novels, over two hundred short stories, and several volumes of essays. Ten books are dedicated to her works, and about two hundred critical essays appear in her bibliography. Only a handful of living authors have given so much to work with to academics.
For fifty years, Gordimer has been the measuring instrument of apartheid and of the movements of people across the crust of South Africa. Her work echoes the psychic vibrations within that country, the road from passivity and blindness to resistance and struggle.
The very concept of apartheid means racism, racial segregation, and injustice. Academically talking, Apartheid literally means “separation” in the Afrikaans language.
The best exemplification of apartheid is that:
most South Africans don't understand what apartheid
This situation is instilled by of the separation among them, caused by the white men with the purpose of dividing the black people to better control them. This situation is suggested in the very text from Nadine, in the sentences:
"It depends on who answers" and "I cannot answer". Referring to the key concept “apartheid”