No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  —So what should we be doing? The Convocation of the university doesn’t run the education department’s schools.— Professor Nielson still wears a suit, shirt and tie as the undergarments of the academic gown although there is a relaxed standard of suitability started with the example of Mandela’s tunics. Professor Nielson cannot avoid having the tone of enlightenment dispensed even when not teaching. He’s what father Andrew’s generation calls a stuffed shirt, the starched shield once required as evening dress. —You’re not proposing we lower university entrance standards further. Is that what a university is, not an advancement of knowledge but a descent.—

  What Steve’s question is—whether a token of coaching in hopes of bringing them up to university standards can achieve recovery from ten years of hopelessly poor schooling.

  —We’re simply to make the scientists, engineers, economists—you name them—out of its product.—

  So what came of it, she wants to know.

  What would there be to tell that wasn’t an excuse.

  Well, it was time for everyone to get back to the lecture halls, seminars. Or those declared hours when students could come to them in the small rooms that have their names on the door, bringing requests disguised as problems. That’s what’s come of it. Band-aid. He brought it up before Jake, Isa, the Mkizes grilling sausages and chops on a Sunday (as the former inhabitants of the suburb did). Their children inventing wild games, wrestling and tumbling, limbs mingled as those of their parents never could. He thinks he knows what should come of it. But he’s telling the comrades, not the academic colleagues. University’s Convocation, student organisation—the vice chancellors!—they ought to be demanding meetings with the minister responsible for education in schools. Breaking down his bloody door! It’s our business. Education can’t be lopped off in two, it’s a contiguous process, our Moloi in African Studies gets students who can’t read and write in command of their own languages, I have some—maths is a foreign language they haven’t had the teaching to grasp, just enough, functionally, to scrape through the final school paper.—

  —So what are you and your profs doing about the get-together?— Jake mimics an empty hand signalling Isa to offer more bread.

  —That’s what I said.— Jabu turns her shoulders and breasts, one of her unconscious physical reactions of differing opinion that made her individual to Steve from the beginning of clandestinity. Since way back in Swaziland they had taken it as part of freedom to be gained that they can imply criticism without breaching love.

  The same applies to friendship; Peter Mkize takes up from comrade Jake. —Why don’t you start it going? Get together lecturers, profs, approach the vice chancellor and have an appointment, whatever, meet the minister up there in the parliament, tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.—

  The children are asserting their rights, clamouring for ice cream. —It’s not time yet.— The mothers clamour in rivalry. Everyone is laughing, biting into the meat that must first be eaten. The choir starts up again, ice cream ice cream.

  One of the many things you learn in a liberation movement is take heed of what comrades challenge you in. A week or two after, he began to broach to colleagues, first those already grouped as on the Left, what was the teaching profession’s responsibility in the situations of freedom, and then, on the same principle to the old guard, the proposal that there be a discussion whether a delegation of academics should meet with the minister to face the facts of two educational processes that should be one and are not. The discussion took place in the faculty room for an informal start. Opinions were hesitantly if not reluctantly expressed. The coffee machine again resorted to; this sort of meddling academia in government was heard as (of course) in conformation with the Left, citizens of the university unite, that stuff, update variation of an old rallying shibboleth that recruited whites against the swart gevaar. But it was one of the Lefties who came up with the irrefutable the minister would put on the table: there is not enough money to fund school education of a standard to pass seamlessly to universities, less than a generation after the end of hundreds of years when resources for education were spent overwhelmingly on the minority of the vast population. —Education. Funds in the exchequer are to be shared with health, housing, transport, everything that is social need. (Doesn’t mention Big Brother Defence.) To ask for more?—

  It’s not time yet, for ice cream.

  She listens to his account of the academic meeting while folding clothes Wethu has washed and ironed, and continuing a process, placing his shirts and socks in one pile, Sindiswa’s dresses, jeans, Gary Elias’s shorts and shirts in others.

  Why does he give up.

  If you’re used to rejection you just go on for what you need, working at it. How could we have got to vote in ’94 if we hadn’t followed the banned Freedom Charter. How’d I have got to school ahead of my brother and then away from ‘Bantu Education’ to Swaziland, if my Baba had accepted that at Home females come second, for a black daughter education comes last. Hopeless. Why doesn’t he just carry on. If that first lot is left hands-down there will be others in the university and even outside who’ll act differently. You only decide it’s hopeless if you’re used to having everything. If you’ve been white.

  Ashamed to be thinking that. Of him.

  Life intervenes. Coincides with the group putting an approach to the minister on the back burner. The time for death of a parent; parents are always older and closer to this than a son realises, the main relationship was in childhood, boyhood. The Struggle brought other fundamental bonds in its place; if it’s something for regret. Wasn’t there a time once for the good son to have joined the father’s cricket club. He’s going to be cremated, as stated by him in his will. The son’s moment of presentiment . . . Jonathan’s not going to turn up with a rabbi? How ignorant of part of your inheritance can you be! Jews are forbidden cremation. Don’t worry.

  Pauline somehow persuaded their father to have their sons snipped. But seems to have recognised. Andrew’s non-observant Christianity. Andrew’s will also specifies—no religious service. Several of his friends and business associates are invited or appoint themselves to speak of him before his coffin in the hall of the crematorium, its seating suggesting a place of worship of some kind. Strange for a son to hear his father summed up in eulogy, oratory. Jonathan (no rabbi) as the eldest son speaks for the family.

  It’s over, people are tentatively about to stir, as Jabu does beside him, but she rises to sing. Unselfconscious, she rises to sing for him, Steve’s father. She is in her full African dress as the understanding of the import of the final occasion in life. As the nanny-relative understood it first, at the presentation of a newborn son. No one moves, arrested.

  Some potent substance is being generated in his body by the voice. He knows now that his father has left him, has always been within, with him, and is gone. At the last note, there’s a susurration of admiration, movement urged by emotion, Jonathan’s Brenda is propelled to shackle Jabu’s robe in embrace, weeping proudly. She takes Jabu’s hand through people making for the doors, as if Jabu is her own production. Brenda’s changed the admiration, appreciation of some special tribute, into embarrassment, for some, at their own emotion; if it transcended something, it’s true that one of the characteristics of being black is that peasant or lawyer, they certainly can sing.

  The years are identified by event not date. The year of the third election in freedom was the year Sindiswa was of an age to have her education considered seriously. He had taken for granted, Pauline and Andrew’s son, that when the time came they must have chosen, for him, a school from where they believed he would be prepared at a university for some career. For the Headmaster of the boys’ school and Elder of the Methodist Church in the ‘location’ outside the coal-mine town, seriousness about his daughter’s education was a strategy against a social abnormality and—eventually, contriving to have her continue the learning process over the border—a political defiance?

  Wit
h what anticipation did they sift through the options open to choose a school for Sindiswa after the one she’s graduated to from day care. On their principles, she should go to a state school. Those that had been white schools, at last open to all children, were well equipped but deteriorated by lack of funding for maintenance, and teaching standards lowered by overcrowded classrooms.

  They could afford to give her something better.

  Privilege? Come on; admit it!

  He’s the one who challenges himself and her; she reacts to this as absurd, a convention craven to dogma even if it’s their own. Her Baba didn’t betray the black freedom movement in sending his daughter to a training college over a border, the result of which she has qualified to work for the advance of justice!

  He hears this as specious, something never to be expected from her. That was entirely different, another time.

  But now the child. All right. Not to be argued over; the child must have the right to come first, beyond orthodoxy of comrade principles.

  A different time.

  There is only one time, all time, for principles you live by.

  The Senior Counsel who had found a moment to put in a word for her employment at the Justice Centre was a descendant of immigration from a natal country once occupied by others: the Nazi army. He had escaped to a distant mirage Africa as a child with his father. They were poor and without a word of any language but Greek, but they were white. Acceptable. He grew up eking from whatever opportunities he could grasp an education which had culminated in his apocryphal appearances as defence of the accused in apartheid trials of liberation leaders, at risk of landing up in prison himself, and in the aftermath he is equally preoccupied with the process of justice in unforeseen occurrences of its transgressions in a free country. But he had never forgotten that as a South African—African who had earned that one-word identity—he also was Greek. When he became well enough known, which means recognised in the outside world for his standing in the annals of the legal profession, and was able to raise money among the diaspora Greeks who had either feared or admired him, he brought them into the founding of an open school where Greek would be a compulsory subject along with the usual curriculum. From something rather in the category of the sports and cultural clubs of Italians, Scots, Germans, and the eternal diaspora of Jews, the school had responded to the country’s freedom by expanding with the energetic promotion of admission of black children, any mix of colour on the population palette, the only stipulation that they learn Greek among their other subjects. The privilege of a classical education thrown in.

  A fee-paying school. It’s not an innovation to deal with illiteracy, but there are a number of bursaries endowed; any child with proven ability could come from a makeshift rural school without toilets or electricity among the shacks.

  She should see it for herself; naturally her mentor says it is the right, the only place for a child. But no, a father’s responsibility as much as hers, he must come although this child is a girl and back where her mother lived she’d—still, maybe—be last in line for school. Unless she had an exceptional Baba.

  So as they had taken up Jake’s invitation to look at the house which was their first home together (for him: she might not agree) they went on Senior Counsel’s invitation to visit the school. He toured them round classrooms, art studio, music section, library and Internet facilities, swimming pool, sports fields, botanical garden, with a volunteer entourage of eager pupils to whom he turned aside, interrupting his accounts of the values by which the school was directed, to chat and chaff.

  Each saw the other was picturing Sindiswa in these settings.

  On their terrace that early evening, with the subject, Sindiswa, there, as they had sat alone with her as a baby that evening in Glengrove when the street sky was ripped apart; a decision was made. But this time there was quiet.

  Only Gary busy building and then gleefully attacking his Lego fortresses.

  It distracted her father’s attention from Sindiswa. There was only the caveat from him, in his mind; the school uniforms are too elaborate. —Those sports team blazers, white with braid and gold. Waste of money enriching some outfitter. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ crap.— He pulls a face at himself in admonition of this pious old tag of political correctness.

  The academic indecision to approach the minister, pussy-footing, brought about irritation of frustration which affected all his responses. Even Jabu’s constancy irked: —Just call them together again. Don’t let them off.— It’s her variation of a woman’s nagging.

  —I put notices on the staff board, I pushed messages under their doors. Three turned up yesterday, no sign of the others.—

  —The old profs.—

  —Not only . . . but I begin to smell there’s this idea—excuse, pretext, who the hell do I think I am?—

  She jerks her head at them.

  But it’s not as irrelevant a question as she dismisses.

  —An upstart from ‘The Struggle’ who doesn’t know he’s under a different command now?—

  She sweeps decisively into cupped hands bits of Gary’s plastic building units that have scattered. —Speak to them, one by one, each one. Khuluma nabo, ngamanye, emanye!—

  —A kick in the butt.— He supplies what he thinks is more or less the meaning of the expletive-sounding one in her own language. It hasn’t been part of the coaching she’s given him.

  Before he could take up the conviction he has of his own strength of character an event on campus, of the campus, not of the faculty room, made a kick in the butt too late. The students commanded possession of the university with an authority that made their previous protests mere tantrums which had been, could be contained in toleration, freedom of expression after all. The organisers—if such spontaneity can be attributed to a Student Council—were far outnumbered by other groups and factions, sects, political and religious, Gay and Lesbian. Gatherings that began before this faculty building and that, the library, the colonial-classical façade of the Great Hall where graduation ceremonies take place, were encompassed, overflowed and became one uproar on a venue generally regarded as too dispersed to demand attention for protests: the sports fields, football, cricket, invaded like the angry spectators who can’t be kept off when they reject a referee’s decision. The speakers were empty mouthings under the thunder of drummers and bellow in song, jetting as the crush surged; it didn’t matter, all knew what their issues were, on placards, T-shirts, home-contrived banners even if some were ancillary GAY BASHING CRIMINAL UNDER THE CONSTITUTION to the overall purpose NO TUITION FEES EDUCATION OUR RIGHT WHAT ABOUT THE BETTER LIFE—election promises hurled back at the other all-powerful referee, the government. Self-destruction that had seen people of their ghettos burn down the scrapheap of living begrudged to them, the ramshackle cinema, the school without books, the clinic without water—this irrational impulse of reality. Trash is vomited from bins, lecterns are crushed like matchboxes, files rifled from the admission offices are danced round as they burn, on the sports fields the goalpost altars of the games the rioters themselves worship, are dragged up, tossed over.

  The students who come as friends, familiars of the house, Jabu and the children—Sindiswa has a favourite whom she tells boastfully about her school—they must be among the spore of heads covering the space he looks down upon from his room in the science faculty. It would be unlikely to come across them there, find them in the anonymity that erases all personal features of the crowd. Yet they are some sort of recognition to be claimed; allow him, member of the academic faculty, to go out into it?

  He can’t see far among the bodies pressed around him. There are white hands among those raised in the stomping, chanting, so he couldn’t be so noticeably there, the absorption in purpose is blindly fervent, he knows from political rallies. In the mass you have no direction of your own, he is carried along in a surge towards the main gates of the campus. Outside between the street and the gates, another gathering—a few pausing in curiosity before tur
ning away, others, some black men and women literally throwing their yelling weight about. All cling to gates too wide, tall and strong to shake: they’ve joined the students’ action.

  He tries to make a way to other parts of the campus but progress is against powerful currents as urge drives each limb of the great body to join that. He reaches only the science block from where he had set out.

  Did any of his academic colleagues to whom he’d been advised to kick arse attempt to be along with the uprising against tuition fees most of their students couldn’t pay (so the cell phones worn like ear ornament, who pays for the serial calls). The faculty coffee room may say, factually, the university couldn’t exist without tuition fees to supplement the government’s inadequate grant; ‘funding free education is that government’s affair’. No dereliction of the university’s responsibility towards students?

  Did he have a place down there (he’s back up at his window again). Claim it—claim on him—because of his part, his decision to get mixed up in providing scientific know-how and ingredients to make bombs, his Jabu, his children gestated in a black womb. There are bonfires signalling here, there, like the Guy Fawkes ones of his childhood commemorating a revolutionary arson he and his siblings had never heard of. One of the bundles of whatever was being fed smoking to the flames was very near the archeological museum where tooled stones are the reminder that young men rioting are the descendants of peoples who had skills before invaders brought others; he had a sudden fear not for himself but for what is an extension of self, the work, research that was in progress in the science faculty. What if they burst into the laboratories where climate change is being studied for solutions that would save their own existence on this planet.