Nadine Gordimer used last interview to condemn South Africa's secrecy bill

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/14/nadine-gordimer-south-africa-secrecy-bill

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We are already falling all over each other to pay homage to Nadine Gordimer. The stampede will increase as the news is carried over our borders and spreads across the world.

She is, after all, one of our greats: a committed and relentless voice against apartheid throughout her life, a literary giant who received the greatest accolades – a Booker and Nobel, among many others - from a swooning global audience.

In the darkest times of South Africa’s apartheid nightmare in the early 1960s, when the jackboot of apartheid was stamping on every dissident voice, she helped the journalist Nat Nakasa set up his iconic literary magazine The Classic. He was forced into exile in the United States, where Gordimer visited him, and where he took his life in 1965. Two days before his death he told a friend: “I can’t laugh anymore and when I can’t laugh I can’t write.”

That was the world that Gordimer chose to immerse herself in; a world in which to live consciously and with conscience as a white South African was to condemn yourself to a life of harassment and pain. She walked away from her comfortable white – silent, acquiescent – community, and became a pariah: her books banned, her movements spied upon, her freedom curtailed, her black friends breaking the law to have a drink with her.

And so we will be falling all over each other to mourn her, to sing her praises. We do death well here. We did it with Nelson Mandela and many of his comrades, as so many of their generation succumbs so frequently to death these days. We will do just as well - even better - with Gordimer.

Within a couple of hours of the announcement of her death, the ANC issued a fulsome tribute: “Our country has lost an unmatched literary giant whose life’s work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity.”

It is true. But there is another way to honour a giant such as Gordimer – or any other of the mighty oaks of our struggle who are falling in their numbers these days – that is beyond platitudes. It is a better way to honour them. That way is to seek to live as consciously as they did. It is to speak for the opening up of the avenues for freedom – of speech, of expression, of thought – as Gordimer did unrelentingly for the six decades of her public life.

Over the past few years Gordimer’s voice has inspired many journalists and activists to stand up against possibly the most pernicious piece of legislation to be brought before South Africa’s democratic parliament, the euphemistically-named Protection of State Information Bill. It is a secrecy law. It will force journalists to reveal their sources and will send whistle-blowers to jail. It is a piece of law which has no place in a country once led by a Nelson Mandela.

“The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms,” she said in a recent interview published on Monday in the South African publication The Times. “And the fact that it’s called the Protection of State Information Bill is very disquieting. State information belongs to all of us - this is our right under the constitution. This has got nothing to do with betraying the safety of the country.”

At 90, Gordimer’s fierce commitment to the freedom she helped attain - now encapsulated in the South African Constitution - can be heard in these words. Hers is a voice that many will laud this week and into the future, but that many in South Africa's ruling elite do not emulate.

Indeed, our parliament has already passed the secrecy bill, and it now sits on President Jacob Zuma’s desk awaiting his signature. No doubt his office will issue a statement singing Gordimer’s praises this week, and men in suits from his office – and perhaps the president himself – will be at her funeral.

We owe her more than that. We owe her the gift of straining every sinew in our bodies to walk in her footsteps, to leave behind a South Africa in which our children can exercise her greatest gift to us: to speak, to raise our voices, without fear.