The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
How the perpetration of privilege led to our current environmental crisis
Winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist is a challenging stream of conscious narrative that examines the rumblings of the anti-apartheid movement and exploitation of land and resources by European colonizers in South Africa. Interrogating the “perpetration of privilege,” Gordimer links “inheritance of property and unearned possessions” to institutional racism (77).
The plot centers around elite businessman Mehring who earned his fortune in the extraction and exportation of pig iron, a form of crude iron that can be blasted and refined to produce steel. Mehring’s personal life is a wreck and so he purchases a 400-acre farm with a flowing river to irrigate it, employing dozens of local Afrikaans to maintain this hobby. Trouble ensues when a dead body is discovered on his land foreshadowing the end of the white man’s reign with the first election in 1994. One of Gordimer’s most honest reflections about humanity acknowledges the human tendency to want to maintain the comfort of the status quo.
“Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself — who wouldn’t make the world over it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself, you…
