The Essential Gesture, a collection of essays by one of South Africa's most brilliant writers, is an excellent work, but not one that is likely to appeal to complacent Americans who can ignore or approve the evil that is the racist South African government. Nonetheless, it is a book that the whole world should read.

In his excellent and detailed Introduction, Stephen Clingman promises "the reader will gain an intricate and intimate view of what life in South Africa is like" (p. 2). The book more than fulfills that promise, as it also fulfills his contention that a history of South Africa emerges from Gordimer's essays. He does not, though, promise, nor even hint at, Gordimer's sad vision of the inevitable result of her country's race policies.

These essays, even the travelogues and those ostensibly about writing, not only catalog the evils of apartheid and the sickness which produced and nurtures it, but are also suffused with Gordimer's growing conviction that only violence will end it. That is not to say that Gordimer advocates, or even approves, violence; rather, she sees all other solutions to a completely intolerable situation being blocked or aborted by a malevolent government and an uncaring world.

When, for instance, in "Living in the Interregnum," she says that "[w]hatever the Western democracies have done for themselves, they have failed and are failing, in their great power and influence, to do for us" (p. 282), she does not speak in anger. Neither is she angry when she says "all black South Africans know of Western capitalism is political and economic terror. And this terror is not some relic of the colonial past; it is being financed now by Western democracies . . ." (p. 282). Rather, she is explaining why it is inevitable that a black South African government will reject whites, including herself, and the white Western politico-economic systems.

Through all this, Gordimer's dominant tone is resigned acceptance of the fact that she has no place in either the current white society or the black one certain to replace it.

Neither are the essays mere catalogs of atrocities, though she provides hundreds of specific, concrete examples of the repressiveness, the inhumanity, the outright cruelty of the South African government. She tells us, for instance, that black children, whose families earn little, must pay for textbooks, which are free to white children. She tells us, too, of little children forced out of whites-only schools because their race is questioned -- despite their having been legally certified white. And she shows us the poverty and pain that constitutes daily life in the black residential zones, as well as the virtual slavery blacks must sell themselves into simply to make a living. But her purpose is not to sensationalize. She merely shows what is.

Gordimer is an excellent writer, a meticulous observer, and a sound, superbly educated thinker. Thus, the essays are thoughtful and readable. However, they do not lend themselves to quick reading, nor are they amusing or light reading. They focus a powerful intellectual light on a great human shame, one for which Americans must share the blame because they have, for too long, let their own schools and pulpits and government ignore their moral responsibility to demand freedom for all humankind.

Jim Vandergriff is an English Instructor at SMSU.