Gordimer's writing career to date has run in parallel with the era of apartheid in South Africa, an era in which the racist organization of South Africa was systematically intensified through legislation and brutal state control following the election to power of the Nationalist Government in 1948. Apartheid (separateness) was a political programme of separate development supposedly justified by the perception of Africans as a distinct subspecies of humanity, inferior to whites, and who had no historical claim to the territory of Southern Africa. Despite the manifest contradiction of biological, archaeological and historical evidence contained in these underpinnings, the political programme might appear, at least, to have had its own coherence; even this, however, is rapidly dispelled by the manipulative machinations of apartheid and the contradictory way in which it buttressed itself through the attempted control of individuals. Prominent measures of early apartheid rule (especially for Gordimer) include the prevention of inter-racial relationships, and the arbitrary division of black Africans into ten separate ‘nations’, each confined to a designated ‘homeland’. (Selected key events in modern South African history, including those mentioned or alluded to in Gordimer's fiction, are listed in the chronology.)