What were you dreaming?

An inside look to the short story wrote by

Nadine Gordimer

By Luis Marcano

What were you dreaming? is a short story by the 1991 novel

price of literature winner Nadine Gordimer. It tells the story of a Cape
Coloured man who gets a lift by a white couple somewhere in South
Africa. The story exposes various facts about the apartheid and the
general situation of black people in South Africa during said system.
Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced through
legislation in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. During this system the
rights of the black majority of the population were restricted and the
white minority was in control of the country.
The first aspect of apartheid that we see in the story is introduced
to us by the Cape Coloured man, who explains that white people never
stops to help black people in the road. He says that they have reasons,
people is often robbed and even killed by black people in this kind of
places. This tells us that there was resentment in the black population
towards the white minority. When he finally gets a ride by a white couple
he feels like he needs to make them like him and is very mindful of every
word he says, in his mind they were very selfless. They, who he thinks
are superior to him, are the masters and he is a servant. Along the road
he talks to them about his life often recurring to little lies and keeping
parts to himself for he thinks that they would dislike him if they knew the
entire truth about him and his family. He talks about the terrible
conditions black people were forced to live in, towns with little to no
healthcare, not enough work and money to eat and live, the way some
of them were forced to travel up to 6 days in the road to go to places
with better payment, all of this facts that were part of the life of every
South African black man and woman.
Eventually the man fall sleep in the back seat and the writer
presents the point of view of the white couple, a young English man who
is new in South Africa and an old South African white woman who is
showing him the country and doesnt seem to agree with the apartheid
and the way black people are treated. The young man its surprised by

the poor life quality black people have in the country even when they
are the majority, he also cannot believe that all of that people were
relocated from their homes sometimes far away from their relatives and
lost almost everything they had. He asks the woman about many things
related to this people during the rest of the journey. He is surprised by
the way the man speaks about blacks being himself black, and she tells
him that he is not like every black man that he has seen, he is a Cape
Coloured which means he probably have a white relative like a
grandmother or even a father, she then explains that this people were
sometimes offered better places to live than the average black people
but still were living in terribly poor conditions. The woman is aware that
some of the things the black man said may be lies and she describe
them as very theatrical but still admits that a lot of the things that he
said are true for most of the population in the country.
One of the things that catch the attention of the English man is
that the black man is missing his front teeth. When he ask about it to the
woman she responds that it is a sexual preference that it was common
to see it in young girls and even in mans like in this case. They removed
their front teeth as soon as they were 17 years old to be able to do oral
sex more easily and this was a characteristic very often seen in
prostitutes. This tells us that prostitution was an issue in the country,
white mans use to look for such services in the black population and
even woman sometimes recurred to that but they never talked about it.
When they arrive to their destiny they give him a little money to travel
to eat and in the end the woman says at least is Sunday and bars are
not open showing that even when she is aware of the terrible situation
and seems to be against it she still falls in stereotypes and judge the
man just by the race he was born to.
Reading the writers biography and all the activism and
humanitarian work she did its easy to see that her point of view of the
apartheid is showed in the English man perception of things, she is
horrified by the way black people lived during apartheid in south Africa
and believed that just feeling sorry for them was not enough to make a
difference. Even when the writer itself has more in common with the old
white woman, being a white South African just like her, this woman
shows that she wouldnt have helped any black man in the road and she
also falls in prejudice at the end saying what she said about bars not
being open on Sundays.