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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
I did something that nobody else had done, because I figured -- which book of mine? I think it was, it might have been The Late Bourgeois World. Or was it Burger's Daughter? No. I then asked the censorship board the reasons. And of course I consulted with my lawyer friends whether I was entitled to this, and indeed it turned out that within, I don't know, two weeks or something of the banning order, you could apply. But if it was any later So I did it very quickly and I got the opinions of these people on why the book was banned. And indeed then, I had a friend at the University of Witwatersrand, an Afrikaans lecturer there, but he and other friends were doing a little secret kind of little publishing venture of anti-apartheid literature. And to do this as an Afrikaner was not easy, believe me, even less easy than for the rest of us, and we talked about it and they agreed -- I think he may have even suggested it -- that I should write what happened in court, which I did, and there's this little booklet, which is called What Happened to Burger's Daughter. So it was Burger's Daughter, yes. And it was then printed. They did it, and it was given to book shops to give away free to people who bought books there. So it was the only way of distributing it.
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Nadine Gordimer
Nobel Prize in Literature
I met Bettie du Toit and my future husband then, Reinhold Cassirer, on the same day in somebody's house, yes. And the three of us were very great friends, and both Reinhold and I felt she was our guru in many ways, because she was right in the thick of the whole thing. Now of course, the time came when she was detained, she was in detention. Her family had abandoned her. All her comrades in the movement, in the ANC and the South African Communist Party, dare not come forward and say, "We want to visit her." You were supposed to have family visits only. Anyway, it was no great courage on my part, it was just the obvious thing to do. I went to the police, you had to go, and said I'm her sister and I wanted to see her. So they said, "But you've got a different name." I said, "Of course I'm married now." So I got permission to see her, and that meant I could go to the women's section of the Old Fort, which is now the famous Constitution Hill complex, part of that. Albie would have talked about it. So I saw the inside of a prison for the first time. And to see your friend there is quite extraordinary, all part of your education if you lived here. On a visit then, I would be sitting here, there would a heavy grill in front of me. She'd be brought in and she'd sit on the other side, and then we would talk through this with two warders looking at their watches and so on. But I think it was very fortunate for me that I had this experience. It made me understand the realities of where we were living. And so my involvement with and adherence to the liberation movement started.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Nothing much to say that's beyond the personal that I don't choose to discuss. I was real sick for about a year and a half, and through some combination of good medicine and a little bit of determination, I got better, thank goodness. There's this great desire, since it was pretty miserable and I had to spend a lot of time struggling to get well, to think there was something worthwhile that came out of it. That's what people ask me all the time. "Well, what did you learn having to change the direction of your life?" I wish I could say that it did, since I had to spend the time and there was a certain amount of pain and suffering involved in it. I would like to say, "Well, it changed everything. I got a great insight to my whole life." But it wasn't. Basically it was a most unwelcome interruption that had to be dealt with. I don't know what else to say about it.
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David Halberstam
Pulitzer Prize for Journalism
As this tension built and I became the enemy of the government, and my stories went under more and more criticism from Washington and Saigon, there was an additional moral, ethical burden on me, if I was taking on the government of the United States, just to be out in the field more than anybody else. To be there, to see battle, to put myself on the line. The one thing I could not afford, it seemed to me, given the way I had been raised up, and the kind of values that I had had imposed upon me in my childhood and in my professional apprenticeship -- I could not be an armchair person sitting in Saigon doing it theoretically. I had to be out in the field, seeing more battles, if possible, than anybody else at that time. Later, Peter Arnett saw more combat than anybody else, but I had to be there. It was implicit in my role. It was very deliberate on my part.
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