Nadine Gordimer sees the men who attacked her in her home as symbolic of the challenges facing South Africa.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

As an 82-year-old woman confronted by four fit young men out to rob her home, Nadine Gordimer might have been paralysed by terror at the thought of what has befallen others in Johannesburg.

Just a few weeks earlier, an elderly couple were shot and stabbed to death in their house. They were two among the thousands murdered, beaten or raped every year -often during burglaries - in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

But Gordimer won the Nobel prize for literature in 1991 for her insights into racial and economic divides that cut through South African society. As the thieves grabbed the widowed author and her …