Interregnum: A Struggle between the Past and the Present in 'July's People' Anonymous College

The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. (Gramsci 276)

This is the epigraph of the novel July’s People based on which Nadine Gordimer prophesies the chaotic situation that South Africa will undergo in future. The text to which this sentence belongs to is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks which was written in 1930. "Interregnum" is a recurrent theme in most of Gordimer’s writings in the post-apartheid years. Interregnum means the period in which the country does not have a leader. Gordimer presents the period of transition between the end of the rule of the Whites and the beginning of rule of the Blacks as Interregnum in her novel July’s People. Both Gramsci and Gordimer view nation as struggling between the dying old and the new which cannot take its birth. Gordimer sets her novel in a dystopian future in order to show the disastrous consequences that the country would face if the economic exploitation of Africans and the political hegemony of Afrikaners under the system of Apartheid continue uninterrupted.

The novel opens with a person asking whether they would like to have some cup of tea. The first line of the novel, spoken in...