No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  The old year is seen off at the Jake/Isa venue, but all were joint hosts, Blessing and Peter Mkize, Jabu and Steve, the Dolphins, including renegade Marc and his wife. The comrades in the sense way back in the Struggle and now in the Suburb commune, ignite one another in enjoyment just as they are ready at hand when anyone among them is in trouble.

  Dancing, she and he are the clandestine lovers in Swaziland where Baba sent her to be educated and the university student was evading the Special Branch. They circled Marc dancing, nuzzling his wife as in parties round the church pool he used to one of the Dolphins—his lover?

  Jabu whispering after an unaccustomed extra drink or two. —What d’you think there was about her . . .—

  She means in particular that attracted Marc; what—in the one who’s not a male . . . ?

  Yes? Not easy for himself a man who’s attracted only to women, to place himself in Marc’s—what—body sense and aesthetic sense.

  Into the small ear close to him. Wine speaking. —She has a beautiful long waist.—

  Connections. (Jonathan had brought them up.) England.

  The one with the feminine version of a man’s name, she has a waist that your hand goes smoothly down from the intimate armpit to the hollow at the hip.

  Time hasn’t materiality, the New Year’s arrival is aural, cheers jetting with fireworks from the Suburb and the city all around, the stamp of drums and farting blare of vuvuzelas, supermarket clone of the oxhorn that used to be blown to honour tribal dignitaries, not in its plastic evolution deafening crowds when a goal is scored on the football field. From whatever was their partying in the yard the sons have appeared among the adult embraces landing where they will, the hugging, shoulder-thumping half-triumphant to have made it through an old year, half-expectant of the new one—and the seeking out, alone among all the press of others, a special meeting, embrace between those who live each-to-each. They are clasped as one body, but they kiss for the first time—never before in the time that is now, this year, he sees tears magnifying her eyes in celebration. She laughs and they’re kissing again.

  This is the last. To be the last change of time in the Suburb, with its normal life claimed.

  Subject Ozl: OUR PEOPLE

  It’s the heading of information pages come online to his room in the faculty. Australia the world’s smallest continent and sixth largest country etc. (all that’s in the cuttings read before). Indigenous people lived on that continent up to 60,000 years ago; their lives were changed irrevocably after the British claimed Australia in 1788. British colonisation began as a penal colony with convicts shipped from Britain. Free settlers from there were joined by people from other parts of Europe, and Malays, Japanese . . . they started the pearling industries. By the 1930s the indigenous population was reduced to 20 per cent of its original size. Today a little more than 2 per cent of Australians are identified as Indigenous (seems ‘aboriginal’ has become a no-no, like ‘Kaffir’). Large-scale immigration began after the Second World War . . . and after the abolition of the ‘White Australia’ policy, migrants came from many parts of Asia. Recent patterns show more coming from Africa.

  In the years that followed European settlement the indigenous population declined significantly as a result of increased mortality. In 1967 the Australian Constitution was changed to recognise the indigenous for inclusion in the national census. (So earlier figures must be guess estimates?)

  RECONCILIATION. Six years into the twenty-first century that population had increased by 11 per cent to 45,000 out of the country’s total 21 million. In 1992 in the High Court of Australia, Eddie Mabo was the first Indigenous person to have native title rights to land recognised on behalf of Indigenous people. The Mabo decision led to the establishment of the Native Title Act 1993 which recognises native land ownership throughout Australia. In 2008 the Australian Prime Minister apologised to the Indigenous people for the ‘Stolen Generation’: the Indigenous children who between 1910 and 1970 were forcibly removed from their families, inflicting profound suffering and loss in Indigenous Australians. Education, health, housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than non-Indigenous Australians . . . overcrowding is associated with poor health outcomes, 2004–5 health survey found 27 per cent of Indigenous were living in overcrowded conditions.

  White South Africans didn’t apologise to black South Africans for the abuse suffered by blacks from whites, seventeenth century to apartheid’s final perfection of the means. Didn’t apologise for anything—didn’t have to, they were dealt with in the retribution that counts most—their last regime finished off by the Struggle.

  Humans lived in Australia 60,000 years ago.

  The San, humans living in what is now South Africa 200,000 years ago, joined by the Khoi Iron Age people from the north of the African continent; these also have managed to survive under whites that saw them as hardly human—some must have done so by clandestine breeding with other blacks, the whites’ Malay slaves—and even the whites? They got the vote along with everyone else in 1994. They now have radio stations broadcasting in what has survived of their own languages. They live wretchedly degraded in poverty, the freedom transformation of the country to which they belong more than any others in the population.

  So it’s not emigration. What’s left behind? It’s not another country, if you’re an aborigine, over there.

  At home in their living room, he has the information at hand to show her. She’s worked late at the Centre, it has taken on a case against mining companies which have for years dismissed with token or no compensation workers who contract asbestos poisoning and develop TB due to conditions breathed in underground.

  She gives it back in the gesture for later.

  —Not going well?— The case, he’s aware, has been lost in two lower courts, now it is for the Constitution height.

  Doesn’t seem to have accepted the question. She’s telling him something, nothing to do with the day’s work. —I stopped by the supermarket for grapes Sindi wants and one of the men who hawk brooms in the street came up to me, now, as I was leaving. I gave the usual sorry, don’t need, and he said Headmaster Gumede’s daughter, I know you—recognised me from home, even my name. He’s one of Baba’s schoolboys but he hasn’t found a job since he finished school two years ago. Come out of Baba’s school really literate, numerate . . . all he can do to feed himself is try to sell straw brooms he says Zimbabwe refugee women make.—

  She has an aspect of being unreachable. How say to her, give her the other handout, the man’s one of thousands. But this is one of Baba’s charges, educated by Baba for the new opportunities. She’s describing exactly how the man approached, the mask of the beggar’s confronting face that comes with the calling as that of the preacher or the judge comes with theirs. What he is seeing is that what she, Jabu, is experiencing is guilt. Why? She’s guilty of belonging to the new black class that is not out on the streets. Not a cadre along with a Home-Boy whom Baba hasn’t been able to give freedom as he gave it to her to pursue. Guilty of false pretences.

  That’s what this country is doing to its people. Guilt for the better life for all not being delivered by themselves. If you stay put long enough perhaps that will just go away, away, a court case not heard. Only Jabu giving judgement on herself.

  So long as she lives here.

  He’s taking cuttings from newspapers and printouts from Internet not only on Australia; about here and now. She doesn’t ask for explanation of this, she has it in herself—surely he’s also realised it has no purpose. He is in negotiations with universities Over There.

  Unless—will we still follow. What happens, is going to happen not just to our own we’ve left, Baba KwaZulu; and even his Reed family he isn’t close to. The transformation; it is going to come now. The date of the national election this year is soon to be announced, already there are the promises from those hoping to stand for parliament. Shifting alliances of politicians’ bargaining, power patterns; the new kind of Struggle. What c
hanges are coming, inevitable. At the Justice Centre, it’s the judiciary in debate.

  —Too many white backsides seated on the Bench and too few blacks, that’s the first contention—

  —Judgments affecting government ministers and high-rank public servants influenced in their favour by government—

  —Hold on—perceived to be, ay—

  —And if there is—must be—democratic balance in proper proportion to the black majority—that’s going to change pardons for pals—

  —Conclusion. Don’t clean up connivances, call corruption what it is.— One of the advocates from whom she has learned so much has the right to reproach her.

  —What’s the future of the Judicial Commission? Who’ll survive. Will the Commission continue to be the independent body to appoint judges, with the president-whoever-he-is— The colleague is interrupted —What d’you mean, whoever—(someone barks a laugh, they all know it will be Zuma.)—The President putting up his chosen four along with rubber-stamping the Commission’s choices—won’t he simply disband the J.C., make all appointees to the Branch himself.—

  —Himself! Zuma he’s been on the wrong side of the law. So that’s his qualification for knowledge of who is and who’s not fit to be a judge.— At once names of some come up who’ll understand the obligation to keep the President’s men out of jail. She brings this insider disquiet back to the Suburb, the bedroom night talks, and to exchanges with the comrades whose concerns these are going to be. He has for her a cutting from the night’s newspaper in his hand, not yet added to the storage box he’s keeping on the shelf the Australian immigration ones fell from. Nine million illiterates out of a population of 48 million. That’s a figure to sleep on before you begin to think about her KwaZulu Home-Boy wandering the street with straw brooms hitched against his shoulders.

  Neither is surprised, but although he’s Assistant Professor at a university, the lawyer is even less surprised than he. —That was one of my first functions when I was a junior. I sat for hours with witnesses reading aloud to them, explaining the meaning of the terms, words. Many couldn’t read for themselves. They were able to write their own name painfully. I used to think the pen was like a handle they couldn’t get a hold on—it was awful, so embarrassing for them and for me, black like them— Paused and drew first finger and thumb down either corner from her fine full lips to her chin. —If I’d been white it’d have been natural I know everything they didn’t.— Another moment. —Wonder how it would be for Sindi and Gary Elias, they’re both, on the look of them.—

  At least, there are apparently other Africans, blacks emigrated, accepted for migration. It’s an aspect that hasn’t surfaced, is Australia what she’s applying this thought to, rather than concentrating on witnesses in the defence of Constitutional rights in court. Australia’s become an element of the normal life. How they, Down Under, see beings who are both black-and-white, though not white-and-aboriginal, of course. And—of course—there’s Obama, since last year, how he’s to be seen, that may help identity in the world.

  At the Vice Chancellor’s meeting when the university opened for the first term of the New Year, comrade Lesego from African Studies was a commanding speaker. The matriculation results: only 62 per cent of ‘learners’ had passes. No improvement. But his voice rose with his hands as he reminded that 69 per cent of students enrolled at the university during the past year were black and over half were women. There was the stir of applause his volume and gesture expected.

  Another hand flagged rather than held up—academics are not ‘learners’ seeking attention to speak in school. Here it is again. —Those among the sixty-two per cent making application to the university this year—it’s on entry standards differentiated between higher school results required for whites and Indians than lower qualifications for blacks. Look at the consequences for those of us who’re going to teach them at undergraduate level.—

  But it was not the time or occasion for Lesego to take up, disinter the situation. The term must begin positively. When he with Steve and a few other colleagues went to their pub for a beer, he used his same decisive rousing as he lifted his glass. —Eish, here’s to more and longer bridging hours! Bigger intake this year!— Foam slopped over the lip of the glass and made the prospect of heavy responsibility, flippant.

  Would he be there to do whatever could be, had to be, done?

  Looked as if it would be Melbourne not Adelaide. The ‘remuneration’—compound term—offered a good level of academic status as well as excellent salary and housing allowance, settling-in benefits. Enquiries about the legal profession were misunderstood: Jabu wasn’t an academic, it was not an expectation of some lectureship for her, in the deal. He had made some enquiries, nevertheless, not mentioning this to her, for the law department here among his colleagues to give information on the legal profession in that far, other country.

  Sometimes had the sense that Australia . . . it was the return, a recurrence of the time of the conference in England: something existing, in him, not revealed, beneath the practicalities exchanges discussions with her—Jabu, there beside him within touch, as the woman with a version of a man’s name was at the mill. A subconscious deception of his own woman. Subliminal, not memory; some sort of constant in the flaws of being.

  Promises. Promises.

  No election date yet. But election manifestos budding: or shedding leaves already. Newspaper cuttings. The thirteenth day of the year’s first month report the African National Congress promises to rescue South Africa from global recession. Cut unemployment to less than 15 per cent by 2014.

  Over with Jake at the Mkizes’ watching a cabinet minister on TV. ‘Change and continuity’ (contradiction?) to reassure investors fearing shift to the left—but faster change (at the same time) assuring the poorest 50 per cent of the population that mantra ‘service delivery’, water, electricity, refuse removal, will be accelerated. Almost half the country’s ‘learners’ dropped out of school last year. The number of university students who failed to graduate was high. A major renewal of the education system, 15,000 ‘trainers’ (not teachers?) to strengthen performance of schools on maths, science, technology and language development (literacy?). Ensure teachers are in class on time.

  Jake waggles one leg across the other. —No slipping off to the shebeen to get babelas.—

  Denials. Denials.

  Shed by a split in the Party, one of its most popular Struggle leaders, Mosiuoa Terror Lekota is lost defected from the ANC to lead a new party, Congress of the People, with its smart double-meaning acronym COPE. COPE calls for scrapping of the policy of Affirmative Action by which blacks must be employed when black and white are applicants for the same post, the criterion uncertain whether their qualifications are equal.

  Gone dark.

  Peter snaps off the voice and the wide-mouthed image. —Affirmative Action, it’s simply more jobs for cousins, in-laws to join the black elite—our Brothers—that’s joined the white elite.—

  A columnist writes as if speaking for the one who is snipping the cutting. ‘The National Prosecuting Authority, government and leadership of the ANC, should take notice—the endless power games the different parties are playing: prosecute or not Zuma.’

  She doesn’t need to read it. —It’s time for him to defend himself in court, he’s forgotten he said that’s what he wanted—he should stop his legal stalling tactics. Corruption, racketeering, tax evasions should be put to Zuma in the High Court on a date to be set for next week. Look, if the opposing parties aren’t ready for a trial now, never will be. Zuma probably will want the Supreme Court judgment against him tested in the Constitutional Court. Let that arbiter of human rights decide once and for all whether there’s any reason to believe the conspiracy theory that the Zuma camp says charges are purely the vendetta against him, rivalry in the ANC itself to keep him out of becoming President.—

  Next week? But there’s the real alternative . . . delay, delay. Once he’s President, cannot be charged
. It’ll all go away.

  Gary Elias and Sindiswa see many kinds of mass celebration that exists for them only on the screen; but it’s even bigger than the international football one with Maradona playing. The footage of who knows how many cameras can’t encompass the size, the whole.

  A commentator has made himself heard.

  —Eighty thousand people, that must be a guess not an estimate.— But to their children the sight and sound of such is familiar; while to the parents it’s some sort of consequence—of a different kind, of the protest crowds defying apartheid laws, police guns and arrest. It is Jacob Zuma’s launch of the ANC’s election manifesto. The date of the election still not given but in the air; and the triumphal joyousness as if the result has already been won. ‘Awuleth’ mashini wami’ Zuma sings, the chorus that soars with him is exaltation both of himself and the people themselves.

  The cohesion, mass transformation of what are individuals can be uplifting or an assault. The effect of whether you are down there at one with the mass in their purpose, or reject it. Gary begins to dance along Zuma-style, back-jacking from the knee, enjoying himself. Sindiswa with some schoolbook in her lap looks distracted and goes off to the family computer.

  Comrades are not accustomed to being onlookers. He gestures—enough!—the control in hand. She frowns no, stoical. If they’re not there, they’re part of the Party constituency, share responsibility for it as they did in action. There are going to be plenty of other gatherings of the Party in its election campaign, and not all a pop praise song.

  She assumes the Mkizes, Jake and Isa, will be coming with Steve and her to the one in the city. Jake’s low voice—is it poor reception on a cell phone. —I don’t want to hear him sing, I want to hear him in court.— Isa is laughing in the background and her message passed on, of course they’ll be there . . .