No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  What was once a gate hung collapsed in the fanged security of this fence. —Ever since I came here I’ve been thinking, what the hell was this, squatters? Here?— He’s been answered now by one of the guards of the residential complex: people from Zimbabwe who were living in Alex township. Our people got fed up with them, taking our houses, taking the jobs in town, there was big trouble.

  Read about the violence, the killings unlike murder for money; survival is something else. This is the flood of pavement overflow from the Methodist Church. Here, nobody stops you from going in. The men inside don’t pay any attention to the visiting intruders, white men some authority again, inspectors come to harass. The black woman—if she’s come to give something to the women—there are no women living here. Perhaps the wives are sheltering somewhere else, the only other ones who fulfil a man’s need get in with the dark at night.

  The intruders come up to tents where a man is washing clothes in a bucket, pants and shirts sag to dry on the tent ropes. A weary beached Volkswagen is the source of the cavorting heard over the radio; but this raises nothing of the lively assertion that is in the homeless supermarket in town.—Dumela, hullo—their approach is taken up by one among the men bent under the bonnet of the car, apparently giving advice about what’s to be done there, another standing as if in defence at the lifted flap of a tent. The responsive one speaks confident English —when Mugabe became president in British Rhodesia become Zimbabwe, ex-teacher himself the first thing he did was scrap the colonial education system and establish a general standard of literacy and numeracy higher than that in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s telling: all people here—we have been told get out of this place at the end of the month. —Go back! Back! There’s nothing there in Zimbabwe. No school. No hospital when you get sick. The money is paper you can’t even buy a loaf of bread. I’ll rather go back to Alex, I don’t care.—

  A truck stumbles through the gate and makes for the brick outhouse. While the informant keeps talking—his wife and children are there in the old apartheid Alexandra, someone is hiding them. Him? He has a job, he’s been two years an assistant electrician in a construction firm—men are coming slowly from the direction of the truck each holding before them carefully balanced a tin bowl, same as the church ones. It’s the Salvation Army truck that has brought a meal. —Yes, every day.— The man does not leave with the others, their heads lifted from under the car hood, the bucket of soapy water flung out and its owner drying his hands against the legs of his pants. He takes from a bag hooked to his belt a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway; he has this job someone else covets, even if his room in a house shared with Zim brothers was burned down, he had to carry the kids through fire—he has money, to eat.

  From the tin bowls brought back there is being scraped up to mouths a small mound of stiff pap, a hunk of bread and what might be a slice of cabbage.

  They don’t like to intrude further but it’s obvious it has been sensed, the whites and the woman who has shown herself to be a sister—she even speaks their language—are not eviction officials. Then let them be the exception for whatever the reason, to the other side of the street where the ones behind the walls have got city bosses to give the police order—the people of Zimbabwe, out!

  An escort of several along with the informant, names have been exchanged, takes the visitors down the irregular order of tents and here and there occupants come out as if to exchange mutual curiosity, and a few words. How long have you been in this place. (It’s not taken as ‘in this country’.) We’ve stayed in this place more months than three. Where will you go. They say we must go home to Zimbabwe, there’s nothing . . .

  In most tents no privacy to respect in ‘this place’; that’s stripped along with everything else—inside the ground is taken up like flooring by what once might have been uniform bright-coloured mattresses that must have been donated by some international refugee agency along with the tents?

  The academic will find out, he’s an instinctive researcher. The playwright, man of theatre props used to reveal characters, will see flotsam of individual identities in the few objects, possessions from personal life, a pair of fashionable pointed-toe shoes, a magazine photograph of a naked woman in jackknifed erotic position tacked up on the sack wall; some sort of certificate in a plastic folder; on wire hangers shirts in stripes, checks or Afro-design, the signature of the tent’s occupant or the donor of the hand-me-down. And of course there are in these tents the displaced’s, the outcast’s remaining connection, proof of existence in the world, the cell phones.

  Spared nothing. They don’t go near, but here are the toilets, single booths in their escaped trickles of pee. The marquee signposted ABLUTION BLOCK—it’s closed. No water. That’s why the man was washing clothes in a bucket—there’s water to draw from some of the single taps standing here and there between the tents. Dumps are not trash but stored households with the leg of a chair poking up, periscope of a life.

  Leave it all behind. At least, faced.

  You’ve seen it all.

  But stepping round the collapsed gate to the street: they haven’t.

  She clutches his hand on one side, the Dolphin’s on the other, the difference in relation to lover, to neighbour, of no account in what all three are seeing in the street. Curving figures-of-eight displaying mock collisions skilfully avoided, there are white boys on bicycles in the gentlemanly uniforms of the most expensive private school, and have parents who can afford it. They are being joined, happily zigzag, by fellow pupils in the same garb, riding out of the town-house complex gates opened for them with greetings from the guard.

  They are black schoolboys. The sons of a new middle class.

  They are innocent; their parents are tenants white and black of the upmarket garden complex whose residents’ association must have declared the presence of homeless people is a danger, a health hazard to residents of the suburb. A devaluation of their property in the housing market. They have succeeded in getting eviction ordered, across the street.

  Couldn’t have afforded that school anyway! But he had thought . . . remarked to her when they went to consider a very different one, that first time, the school outfit there was a bit too showy. A triviality. As it turned out we couldn’t have expected to find anything else as close to what we want, a democratic education.

  If there was a refugee camp just over the road from Aristotle School, and the boys showed off on their mountain bikes in their school uniforms—?

  What is he coming to; always expecting another aspect from her, this began for them long ago in Swaziland. She knows what he’s saying for himself and for her.

  —No—it’s not the same, you can’t say that, you have to look at what would have happened before. The boys from the camp and the boys from the school have played soccer together, the school invited the boys over to the grounds, the swimming pool . . .—

  —Liberal cop-out! You don’t change the lives of rejects, you just make for them a few hours more bearable—

  —Yes. Yes you do. Or you don’t even do that for them while they’re waiting for the new justice, globalisation, African Union—whatsit—to award their claim—

  —‘Award’. An award, that’s also a handout, given to you by somebody else.—

  But Jabu is a lawyer, she uses the term objectively as it signifies in court, the wronged have a right to what they are wrongfully deprived of. What she knows, he doesn’t, is what a single recognition—a librarian secretly lending a man books from a library he’s barred to use—means in the man’s life and by consequence that of his daughter.

  The contradictions to deal with right on your own doorstep. At present. Schools, microcosms of worlds. Gary Elias is campaigning, in the freedom to express themselves Jabu and Steve expect of their children, to leave that school chosen for him, Aristotle, where they’ve seen him develop well, out of his withdrawn nature. That was congenital? Or their fault, something in their nature? The instinct to regard children within the deepest relation th
ey themselves have known along with the sexual intimacy out of which these children have come: regarding them as comrades. Withdrawn. Something in the genes? Sindi has the same ample DNA, of Pauline and Andrew Reed, back to the mating of different bloods during the Crusades, the English who were Shakespeare’s Globe audiences, the nineteenth-century diaspora Czarist Jews, back to the tribal wars of Chaka and Mzilikazi and the Christianised pastors, the ancient African and colonialised line of Elias Siphiwe Gumede, Elder, Headmaster. Sindi at Aristotle School throws her arms round the world she’s born to.

  Gary Elias is choosing for himself the boys’ school in a suburb and of the time when he, Steve, went to school, upmarket (that current social identity tag) and gender segregated. He wants that boys’ school, a former white school, because his best friend, Peter Mkize’s son Njabulo, is a pupil there. Of course the school is non-racial now, Mkize’s son wouldn’t otherwise have been accepted and neither would Gary Elias be, coloured by his mother’s blood. Gary Elias had not been unhappy at the school, Aristotle, that was everything a school should be; proof of that in the opening of his personality to be seen. But the explanation, also to be seen, was that he was in that intense state of bonding friendship with Njabulo that happens in childhood and is strongest, against family bonds, until adolescent stirrings in the testes take over in turn. Sindiswa affronted by lack of loyalty to their school, attacked, to dissuade him; but she was a sister . . . his parents—so many selves to be responsible to as individuals—went to Peter and his wife, a ‘mixed couple’ in another recipe, Peter Jabu’s brother Zulu, Blessing Khosa, to be informed about Njabulo’s school. The comrades were reassuring, their son was getting a good education and—they’re frank—no trouble with the white boys, everyone gets along together.

  There was to be an interview with the headmaster.

  —Is he black, we didn’t ask Peter.—

  —Does it matter, the headmaster at Aristotle’s not.—

  She’s amused, as a reproach to the question.

  The uniform and badges for the school are bought, his Assistant Professor father takes him to his first term, first day, he’s tactfully insinuated that it shouldn’t be a mother who would; and from then on the Mkizes will transport Gary along with their Njabulo.

  For Gary Elias, it can be seen at breakfast, these mornings now are joyous rendezvous.

  What would her Baba—headmaster—think of the move.

  Her open face is of one who hasn’t yet given a thought to this, but they have a past, she and her father, and what he would declare, matters.

  —I don’t know what he felt about Aristotle. He’d only want to know if the standard of teaching is high. The rest— her fingers are interleaved and the thumbs open widely the cup of palms —he expects of us. You and me . . .— She makes clear as if in formal terms unfamiliar to them —The father and the mother.—

  It is actual that the boy’s expanding experience, the first weeks in a new all-male environment on his own decision, a venture out of the adult determinations of childhood, is overwhelmed for them by distortion all around the country of the standard human behaviour it set for itself against that of its deadly past. In the area where most blacks and shades-of-black (blend of Sindiswa and Gary Elias) still live although if they could afford the politician’s better life for all they could live wherever they liked, the refugee immigrants have moved in where because of their colour they won’t be noticed in the mass. There’re African Brothers who crowd the already insufferably packed shacks, draw the tap water that is hardly enough for the local community. White: unless you stick your nose into places like the precinct of the Methodist Church and the squatters on the wrong side of the road, you don’t have to be particularly aware of this invasion except for being importuned at suburban shopping malls by more and more beggars’ outstretched hands. In the townships and shacks the presence of refugees—uncounted, who knows, getting in illegally over the vast borders impossible to control, the river some swim across in low water season. Unlike rate-paying property owners of fine houses the poor in their squatter camps have no hope of an official order ridding themselves of the invaders.

  No authority but what they can lay their hands on: knives, axes, their resident gangs’ stolen guns; fire. Some Somalis fled from their country’s particular conflict bring with them their trading instincts and have set up stores which are torched with the new traditional weapons of South Africa resorted to during the Struggle, burning tyres.

  And the invaders are fighting back.

  In band-aid bridging classes, academic subjects give way to the Science Faculty Assistant Professor’s volunteer lecturers’ and their students’ uneasy preoccupation, via the remove of television, with the wilderness violence beyond the campus. Lesego Moloi from African Studies in the Faculty of Humanities: the refugees—They’re not The Brothers now, they are The Foreigners.—

  When she hears what’s been said at the university she doesn’t this time ask again, what are they going to do about it. The teachers, the students.

  What are the Comrades going to, can do about it, the cadres of Umkhonto (can you ever be an ex-cadre?)

  Done what they had to do: in the Struggle, and have no say, unless they are city councillors or sitting in parliament, in the conduct of the free country. Cadres that’s us: Peter Mkize, Jake and all the other comrades, we companeros of the Suburb. Marc, round the any-colour, any-race, any-sex swimming pool reads aloud from the weekend papers.

  —Xenophobia—the whole country’s xenophobic . . . I don’t know if you can just talk it off like that—

  —Well, what else—

  Jake signalling: —Peter, xenophobia, African hating African?—

  She is accustomed to precision. Jabu breaks in —Is everyone sure what they mean.—

  —Well never mind, everyone’s using it as what’s happening. Xenophobia. Same as anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim—can you come up with something else.—

  Back at home Jabu and Wethu cook lunch together, he’s come to the kitchen to put beer in the fridge.

  Wethu is stirring a sauce over a gas flame and conducting her own pulpit vehemence with gestures of the lifted wooden spoon scattering drips. She breaks from isiZulu to English, fluent with colloquialisms she’s picked up in the city, to include him in her congregation. —That rubbish, they must voetsak back to Mugabe, they are only here, come from that place to steal take our bags in the street, and shame, shame, look what they do to Mr Jake, they wanted to kill him to get his car, it’s only God’s will he’s still alive to see his children grow up, he can’t walk quite right, I see him there in the road, eish! They tell lies why they come here, the young ones are just tsotsis, Wonke umuntu makahlale ezweni lakhe alilungise! Everybody must stay at their country to make it right, not run away, we never ran away, we stayed in KwaZulu even while the Boers the whites at the coal mine were paying our men nothing not even for the children school, and getting sick, sick from down in the mines, we stayed we were strong for the country to come right—If those people don’t get out, we must chase them—

  Someone who studied by correspondence before the era of Internet, Jabu has her store of reference books (in her father’s example). They stand on what is supposed to be the desk in the bedroom but has no space clear for anyone to work at, his dictionaries crowd it.

  ‘Xenos. Indicates the presence of a reference to that which is strange, foreign, different. From Greek, Xenos, stranger.’

  ‘Xenophobic. Characterised by fear of foreign persons or things.’

  ‘Xenophobia. Intense or irrational dislike of people from other countries.’ That’s the only one in three dictionaries which in its concision has relevance? But the refugees are not invaders from some other continent, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British all over again. They are the continent, African people, taking collective place in the entire world that’s in process of its makeover.

  African unity. Eish!

  She’s looked in to call him, food is on the table.


  —What are you doing, forgotten how to spell, my professor.—

  —This ‘xenophobia’ . . .—

  —I can spell it for you.— She smiles. She sees there’s something on his mind but this isn’t the time for them to talk alone. Lunch must be eat-and-run, Sindi must be driven to Aristotle, there’s a dress rehearsal of a school play, Sindiswa is Antigone, the standby of heroism invoked anytime, anywhere, that comrades performed in Robben Island prison. For Sindi, it’s the Aristotle adaptation of a plot to recent African history.

  Jabu’s gone with her daughter to watch the rehearsal and Gary Elias—where’s the son—oh over at the Mkizes’. The looped circles of living.

  The bed’s there; kick off your shoes and stretch out. The pillow has the scent of her, different from perfume, she’s present. Take it up; xenophobia. All of us mouthing for what’s happening, a condition we’re in, epidemic.

  Isn’t it taking the way out, a denial, the country usefully finding diagnosis that doesn’t admit the facts, the truth (but let’s avoid grand absolutes), the reality.

  The blacks-of-all-shades, South Africans at home in the townships and the shacks they’ve somehow put together; they don’t disown discard attack and set fire to their brother Africans as if they were foreigners: in last resort against their own condition they are desperately defending the means, scraps of substance, their own survival. No roofs that don’t leak rain and cold, no electricity, no privacy even to shit, no roads to clinics run out of medicine, few jobs for too many endless seekers—this is what they have, theirs, those with nothing are moving in to compete for it.

  That’s the cause of what’s happening. Not ‘irrational fear or dislike of the Xenos, strange, foreign or different’. Familiar, African, black-like-me. She’s still there in him even if she’s with Sindi’s mythical transformation, Antigone demanding an updated version, the time of the Struggle, the return of her brother’s body from Robben Island. If you know one another intimately enough, mind as well as body, you can talk with the other, her, when she is absent. She’s ready to see, admit his explanation, everyone’s been letting themselves off the hook with the distancing of a catch-all term.