Once Upon a Time Study Guide

Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa to a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant father and a Londoner mother. Gordimer was kept at home for much of her childhood, as her mom worried that Gordimer had heart problems. Gordimer took to writing during this time and published her first work of adult fiction by the age of 16. After a year studying at the University of the Witwatersrand, she moved to Johannesburg and married a dentist named Gerald Gavron in 1949. The pair had a daughter, Oriane, the following year but quickly divorced. By the 1950s, Gordimer was publishing short stories in prominent publications including The New Yorker. In 1954, she married an esteemed art dealer named Reinhold Cassirer, and they had a son named Hugo the following year. Reinhold died from emphysema in 2001. Gordimer got involved with the anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s, an interest catalyzed by the arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, as well as the Sharpeville massacre. Gordimer’s friendship with Bram Fischer and George Bizos—Nelson Mandela’s defense attorneys during his 1962 trial—led Gordimer to work closely with Mandela himself, editing his impactful “I Am Prepared to Die” speech, which he gave from the defendant’s dock at his trial. Around this time, Gordimer began rose to international acclaim, but the South African government responded by banning several of her books. While some were banned for only short periods of time, others (like The Late Bourgeois World and A World of Strangers) were banned for a decade or longer. She joined the African National Congress and even hid in her home members of the ANC evading arrest. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Gordimer died in 2014 at the age of 90.

The implied backdrop of “Once Upon a Time” is apartheid-era South Africa, a time in South African history marked by racism, white supremacy, violence, and systemic oppression. South Africa officially gained independence from the UK in 1931, but the Afrikaner-led National Party won the 1948 elections, closely studied government-enforced racial segregation policies around the world, and implemented what they saw as the most effective ones to create the system of laws and governance known as apartheid. The population was divided into four groups: white people, Indian people, “colored” (mixed-race) people, and black people. Unlike the racism in countries like the U.S., there was no illusion of anything like “separate but equal”; rather, the apartheid government openly proclaimed an ideology of white supremacy. Apartheid guaranteed the white minority most of the nation’s land, wealth, and political power; gave colored and Indian people limited political rights; and forced native black Africans to labor in what was effectively a form of slavery and to live in cramped slums (townships) and depleted rural areas (homelands or bantustans). Apartheid also created separate zones for each group to live in—something that’s gestured to in “Once Upon a Time”—and prohibited intermarriage between people from the different groups. As domestic and international opposition to apartheid grew from the 1950s through the 1980s, the South African government became increasingly violent and repressive, slaughtered and imprisoned thousands of dissidents, and even developed nuclear weapons. In conjunction with international sanctions against the South African government, the internal anti-apartheid movement led by organizations including the African National Congress (ANC) campaigned for equality through both nonviolent methods (protest and civil disobedience) and armed resistance. Secret negotiations between the apartheid government and anti-apartheid leaders began in 1987, and the National Party began dismantling the apartheid system and legalizing opposition parties in 1990, when it also released prominent ANC leader Nelson Mandela from jail.

Like “Once Upon a Time,” Cry, The Beloved Country, a novel by anti-apartheid activist Alan Paton, shows how economic inequality along racial lines sows seeds of mistrust. While “Once Upon a Time” largely centers on wealthy white neighborhoods, Cry, The Beloved Country charts how non-white people were pushed to the fringes of their own city and forced to live in makeshift camps called shantytowns, which were often riddled with disease, suffering, and crippling poverty. The most famous book on apartheid is Nelson Mandela’s classic prison autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, while recent memoirs by black South African celebrities include Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, rapper Kabelo Mabalane’s I Ran for My Life, and actress Bonnie Mbuli’s Eyebags & Dimples. In her other works, Nadine Gordimer wrote extensively about how in apartheid South Africa, love quickly turned into tragedy, trust eroded between communities and within families, and individuals grappled with the relationship between their ideals and their material interests—all thematic threads that appear in her short story “Once Upon a Time.” Some of Gordimer’s most prominent novels include The Lying Days, Burger’s Daughter, and the recent No Time Like the Present.