Burgers Daughter

Rosa visits him and encourages him, but after three years he dies in prison. As a young woman, Rosa attends the trial of her father. At this time she forms a relationship with a young man Conrad, who is not political. They both have other lovers but still live together in a neglected cottage and debate about what is the proper way of life.

Conrad argues that Rosa has been brainwashed to care only about the revolution, not about her own life. Rosa is working in a hospital and on the outskirts of political involvement.

She sees her parents' old friends the Terblanches, but refuses a request to help make copies of a political leaflet. There, Rosa hears debates on whether blacks can depend on radical whites, even those who give their lives to the cause like Lionel Burger. Rosa decides to get out of South Africa and enlists the help of politician Brandt Vermeulen, who has her request reviewed to be issued a passport.

Rosa successfully flies to France. After a few days in Paris, she flies to Nice on the Mediterranean Coast to be with Katya, her father's first wife, who lives in a nearby village. There she lives a relaxed and pleasant lifestyle, and becomes involved in an affair with a Bernard Chabalier, a Paris professor who is writing a book.

Rosa and Bernard love each other, but Rosa is clear that she is only the mistress and Bernard will not leave his wife and children. This seems to be acceptable to Rosa, since the people she meets in France are fairly liberal about their social arrangements. Rosa flies to London and agrees to meet her lover there, using a flat from family friend Flora. She meets students and activists and her long-lost adopted black brother Baasie at a political gathering.

Baasie calls her on the phone in the middle of the night and says that he is sickened by Rosa's neglect of black martyrs like his father. He is tired of hearing about the great martyr Lionel Burger and makes Rosa very enraged. She vomits and later rethinks her commitments. Rosa decides to abandon her affair and return to South Africa. In South Africa there is an increase in tension after the recent liberation of the Portuguese colonies.

Rosa gets a job working in a hospital and sees more black children that are injured by police bullets than before. For Rosa, answering these questions is far from obvious as she has been enculturated in a milieu dominated by a sense of family and social duty that goes beyond ratiocination, a milieu that demands total commitment.

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As one of her friends puts it: It was all taken in with your breakfast cornflakes. The people who came to your house weren't there for tea-parties with your mother, or bridge evenings with cigars. They weren't your father's golf-playing fellow doctors, or ladies your mother went shopping with, ay?

They came together to make a revolution. That was ordinary to you.

It was the normal atmosphere in that house" p. The meanings given to the concept of "revolution" are many, but for Lionel Burger and his family it meant fighting without fear the racist ideology and the legislations that prevented political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Union. Beyond orthodoxies, it was a practical answer to the country's woes. Bringing fundamental changes in power and organisational structures of the country was certainly the ultimate aim, but revolutionising people's relationship was already in full swing "in that house" where blacks and whites connected without reservation, where "political activities and attitudes come from the inside outwards", where there was "nothing between the white man's word and his deed", where blacks and whites were "spluttering the same water in the swimming pool, going to prison after the same indictment" p.

That, of course, was contrary to the government segregationist laws and it contravened the Act that formally banned the Communist Party of South Africa, its ideology and its modus operandi; so Rosa's parents landed in jail for extended periods of time, leaving her with the heavy responsibility to play her part in covert operations and, to take care of the people sent to prison.

While adolescents of her age were mucking around with their friends, Rosa was already involved in grown-up responsibilities. The very beginning of the novel highlights this state of affairs in describing her: Rosa's dilemma when she reaches her twenties cannot be separated from the responsibilities and sense of duty entrusted to her as she was growing-up.

See a Problem?

Powerful life experiences are determining and limiting her room to manoeuvre as she reaches adulthood and tries to express her own individuality. After her parents' death, she suddenly realises that she is free. But far from giving rise to a state of elation, this revelation registers as "a kind of discovery that makes one dead-cold and wary. What does one do with this kind of knowledge? Cutting ties with the past is an option, but she soon realises that she will not find solace in selling her parents' house, quitting her job and getting acquainted with a young man who goes through life committing himself to nothing except observing others at a distance.

Life cannot be reduced to one of the latter's pronouncements: The will is my own. The emotion's my own When I feel, there's no 'we', only 'I'" p. Getting a passport to leave the country is all but impossible and various opportunities to work in Tanzania and other places are denied to her by officialdom. It is only the intervention of an Afrikaaner acquaintance, with powerful connections in the government, that allows her, after many years, to leave the country temporarily on the condition that she would keep away from expatriate political activists.

With Katya, she discovers a world oblivious to political concerns, basking in the unassuming pleasure of meeting neighbours and taking life as it comes. But with the young teacher with whom she falls in love, she also discovers the misappropriation of the disadvantaged 'have-nots' by a self-centred elite whose intellectual pursuits are dictated solely by greed and worldly preoccupations. Rosa came to France with the hope of distancing herself once and for all from her father's legacy, but it dawns on her that "No one can defect.

How to end suffering" p.