Life in The Territory of Exile A SPORT OF NATURE

By Paul Gray

The drama of South Africa seems to be playing itself out with Aristotelian balance. There was a beginning, in the late 1940s, when the white minority government instituted apartheid, a crazy quilt of laws designed to restrict, presumably forever, the freedoms and aspirations of a black majority. The middle, the escalating restiveness and violence provoked by a system too rigid to bend, is now. And surely an end, whether it be awful or awesome, must come. Unlike such interminably troubled spots as Northern Ireland or the Middle East, South Africa generates each day one of the oldest questions to capture human attention: What will happen next?

And how can such a sweeping, unresolved saga be captured in fiction? In her eight previous novels, Nadine Gordimer has offered some excellent answers. She has fused her native land's agonies and contradictions into intense portraits of ordinary lives: that of a reactionary but troubled landowner (The Conservationist), for example, or of a white housewife caught up in the melee of a successful black revolution (July's People). A Sport of Nature is no less detailed and gripping than its predecessors, but its reach is more ambitious: a panoramic view not only of what has already taken place in South Africa but of what the future, inevitably or at least imaginatively, will become.

Gordimer's heroine appears, at first glimpse, an unlikely focus for any story with epic intentions. Hillela Capran comes onstage as an aimless teenager with a penchant for trouble. Effectively orphaned by the breakup of her parents' marriage, the girl proves to be too much for either of her mother's sisters, Aunt Olga and Aunt Pauline, to control. Nothing seems to register with the child, not Olga's antique collecting and social climbing, not Pauline's furious campaigning for black civil rights and social progress. When Pauline discovers Hillela in bed with her son Sasha, the welcome at the last possible adoptive home wears out. Before long, Hillela quits school and is on her own, drifting somewhere in Johannesburg. Eventually she takes up with an antigovernment journalist and then, during the summer of 1963, flees the country with him after the cottage they share has been ransacked by police. She is some months shy of her 20th birthday.

The reporter ditches Hillela in Dar es Salaam, which has become an important port of call for exiled members of the African National Congress. She has neither ambition nor money, no currency at all except her formidable good looks. The expatriate conspirators, white and black, who gather each afternoon to plot and gossip on Tamarisk Beach are distracted by the dark-eyed, full- breasted young woman in the skimpy yellow bathing suit. She is wooed by men who want not only to possess but to politicize her as well. After hearing Hillela admit that she does not understand anything that she has not directly experienced, a high-ranking ANC official says, "Someone needs to take you in hand, my girl. You are not a fully conscious being."

He is right about the girl's underdeveloped intellect, but he does not recognize her ability to learn, as her cousin Sasha will later write her in a letter, "through your skin." Hillela is a blank slate: "For me," she says, "everything happens for the first time." She does not, for instance, think that her people, the whites, are necessarily better than the blacks. Since she is free of such preconceptions, she can travel easily and lightly through Africa, a place where old rules are crumbling or no longer apply.

Gordimer takes risks with Hillela. Feminists may not be happy with a character whose identity and importance depend so thoroughly on the men she sleeps with. Early in the novel the author starts dropping hints that Hillela will someday be famous, and that of course is what happens. The former beach girl becomes the wife and then the widow of an important black revolutionary, assassinated by South African security forces. She later marries another black, who becomes President of his (unnamed) liberated country. She hobnobs with Indira Gandhi and Bishop Desmond Tutu. She and her husband are honored guests at the ceremony marking the accession of black rule in South Africa.

But Hillela is more than just another woman who has turned sexual attractiveness to her own advantages. Gordimer writes that her heroine "has never been one to make mistakes when following her instincts," and this judgment is confirmed throughout the novel. Hillela's behavior, even at its loosest and least conventional, does not seem calculated but rather a natural response to the proper, perhaps even the moral, demands of shifting situations. Looking back on his time with her, a friend from the early days says, "She was innocent." Later, marked by personal tragedy and the rough- and-tumble life she has led in the "territory of exile," she seems oddly innocent still.

A Sport of Nature will surely provoke controversy. Its denunciations of South African politics are ferocious, its portraits of whites often scathing. The argument implied throughout the book can be caricatured: all South Africa needs is love. But Gordimer is saying much more than that. Her novel is both richly detailed and visionary, a brilliant reflection of a world that exists and an affirmation of faith in one that could be born.