Nadine Gordimer

Although Sonny had been refused a passport for the compassionate
purpose of visiting his wife and daughter, others were making the trip
across the frontier for openly political purposes. White industrialists,
churchmen, academics, liberals and lawyers: they were people belonging to
professional and social structures within the law, even if they now pressed
official confidence in them by tentatively stepping beyond it. Most never
had had, nor sought, any contact with the liberation movement within the
country. The instinct of a ruling class to seek out what it hoped might be the
discovery of something of their own kind beneath a different skin and a
different rhetoric ignored the opportunities to do so at home and led them to
go abroad to meet the movement's leaders in exile, instead. For the feared
future seemed to exist, already, there, outside the country. Perhaps some of
its expected retribution might be won over, by pre-emption, before it arrived
within