Literary places in the Transvaal

The Conservationist

Nadine Gordimer

Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist, buys a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend retreat and a tax shelter, and clings to his ownership of the land even as an unclaimed Black corpse, found and carelessly buried in his veld, quietly asserts a deeper and older claim. Gordimer's Booker-winning novel is set on the real Highveld of the Transvaal: the farm and its river and reeds, the African workers' compound, and the encroaching city and location that press on Mehring's fragile idyll.

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