Coetzee’s Freedom

In the 1980s, when it seemed that the situation in South Africa would never improve, debate raged about the responsibility of South African novelists to act as witnesses to, and opponents of, apartheid. Some believed that white writers, especially, should use their privileged position in the fight. Nadine Gordimer was prominent among those who felt it was essential to be, in J.M. Coetzee’s words, a ‘stripper-away of convenient illusions and unmasker of colonial bad faith’1 in the realist convention, rather than a spinner of postmodern metafictions.