None to Accompany Me

None to Accompany Me (1994) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Set in South Africa, it is a chronicle of the moral and psychological evolution of civil rights attorney Vera Stark, told against the backdrop of her country's own progress and its reckoning with apartheid. The novel features a variety of characters that weave in and out of Vera's life as she comes into her own, embracing her power and her purpose.

The action of None to Accompany Me takes place in a South Africa undergoing critical, painful, but altogether necessary changes. Nelson Mandela, just released from prison, has not yet been elected to public office. New political alliances begin to take shape, exerting a more peaceful influence on the country. But the old way of life—and the mindset that precipitated and fostered it for so long—is still alive. The journey from apartheid to integration, from isolation to connection, from war to peace, is a rocky one for South Africa.

Into this changing environment, Vera Stark emerges. As the novel opens, she comes across an old photograph, which shows a group of people smiling for the camera. In it, she has circled the face of one man. Long ago, during World War II when her first husband was in Africa, she had sent him this photo with the circled face. It was Vera's way of telling him that she had met someone else, the man who became her subsequent husband, Bennet Stark. She had long been dissatisfied with her first husband—sexually and otherwise—and Bennet seemed an ideal mate. When her first husband returned years later to reclaim some of his old possessions, he and Vera had sex, and she ended up pregnant. She has always passed their son, Ivan, off as Bennet's child, even though he is really her first husband's.



Vera, who is white and a lawyer, works for the Legal Foundation. It is a job she truly feels is more of a calling than a career. She spends most of her workdays helping South African blacks take back the land that whites stole from them during apartheid's reign. Bennet, once an aspiring sculptor of considerable talent, has put his own artistic ambitions on the backburner, working as a high-end luggage salesman instead. He has made this sacrifice so that Vera can do the work she loves; lawyering for a nonprofit is a noble profession but doesn't exactly pay the bills.

Mirroring Vera and Bennet's relationship is the marriage of Didymus and Sibongile "Sally" Maqoma. They are black revolutionaries once exiled by the previous government, and they have returned to be a part of the new political influence taking hold of the country. In the past, Didymus's work largely led to the couple being exiled, and he spent his years away diligently working underground to battle apartheid in South Africa. However, now that they have returned, the once-promising activist Didymus is looked over in favor of Sally, whom voters elect to public office. Didymus instead takes care of their home and writes his memoirs.

As the novel unfolds, each of the couples' children deals with their own struggles. Ivan, now a banker in London, has a marriage that's falling apart. Vera and Bennet's daughter, Annie, is a doctor in South Africa. Her parents wonder why she has never married; gradually, they realize she is gay.



Meanwhile, Sally and Didymus are distraught when their daughter, Mpho, reveals she is pregnant by Vera's assistant, Oupa, a former prisoner on Robben Island. Sally and Didymus pressure Mpho into an abortion; she eventually attends New York University on scholarship.

Ivan and his wife divorce, and they send their son, Adam, from London to South Africa to live with Vera and Bennet. Annie finds her happily-ever-after with Lou, and the two women have a commitment ceremony; they ultimately adopt a baby girl, who is black.

Vera's best friend, Zeph Rapulana, figures into the narrative as well. Once the leader of a squatter camp, he becomes a well-positioned representative of the new black middle class. He possesses the power and the talent to usher in a new era of South African prosperity.



None of these transitions is smooth, however; a fact paralleled by the larger transition of the country. There are deaths and violence; power struggles; political conflicts; housing shortages; and the taint of corruption is hard to wipe away. In the end, the novel reminds us that the worthiest and noblest work is the hardest work, and people sacrifice much of themselves in the process—in some cases, their very lives. As told through the experiences of Vera Stark and the various people in her orbit, None to Accompany Me is an unvarnished view of the ways the personal and the political intersect—and how matters of love and sex, birth and death, and exile and homecoming can all shape a nation.