No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  It’s what was a depot for tramcars way back when the city had tramways—for Whites Only. Must have been long before this distinction was named apartheid, that term that’s even used—comrade Jake, not a Jew, often insists, to characterise mistakenly the situation between Israelis and Palestinians. Nothing to do with the justice of returning the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Palestine. Both peoples with ancient claims of origin to the same territory, whereas we whites in South Africa have no such claim, no common origin with local aborigines—unless you accept the palaeoanthropologist discovery of the origin of all hominids in The Cradle of Man, the site in this African country.

  A huge skeleton shed is crowded to standing crush at the entrance. Way is made for the mixed group, either in amused recognition of the novelty among them or as a small sign of reconciliation that’s supposed to exist. A woman buffeted, answers Isa’s apology. —Welcome, my sister— this electioneering event is in one of the ‘safe’ areas of the country, confident of Party votes. ‘Kill for Zuma!’—some youths have declared— Isa looks about, quoting in mumble. Jake prods her along by the elbow: —Well, suppose Zuma’s ‘Bring Me My Machine Gun’ is heard as permission.—

  —See any AKs.— Peter is gazing around from where the comrades from the Suburb have found a bench and people in possession have shifted to make cramped space. There’s nothing to signify in appearances, anyone who isn’t too fat is like the Suburbans, in jeans; there are the usual hair constructions, more spiky than Jabu’s, some Afro-bushes dyed redhead, nose-rings and shackling ear-baubles. Isa’s appreciative of political participation. —That’s how we are . . . you can’t tell which is pop group and which is Youth League showing signals of having outgrown wisdom from Party leaders—

  —Heritage isn’t a grand old pile out of which nothing new must come.—

  —Stevie— Blessing, head on side. —Shame, they mustn’t rubbish it.—

  —Mandela and Tambo, the young ones, changed Luthuli’s ANC, the great man for the reality of his time—for what they’d say, ‘knocking on the back door’—youth came up, eh, and brought the Party to Umkhonto.—

  —That’s it! That’s it! We need a youth group, wild to keep us awake, know it’s now—a luta continua—but it’s a new one at home and globalised, Internet, blog.— Peter repeats in a mix of isiZulu and isiXhosa, for the benefit of the sharers on the bench he hears speaking in their tongues.

  —So we’ve got to take up the AK to fight a free and fair election?— He hasn’t waited for Peter to finish the translation amid the delighted attention of the beneficiaries.

  His own vehemence registered by Isa; he’s aware of the questioning blankness turned on him: her usually expressive face.

  Zuma has not come to address this gathering. Kgalema Motlanthe, interim President of the country since Thabo Mbeki was dismissed, is up there. Jabu, just loud enough to be heard —He was under pressure to appoint an inquiry into the arms deals.—

  Motlanthe repeats Party promises, he doesn’t charm, sing or dance. Speeches have had their place, electioneering is taken over by the crowd. A man has heaved to the vacated stage a bulbous street-shiny successor to the cowhide drum and stretches a crane of arm to haul beside him a small boy clutched round an example of the old kind. The man performs, with all fury of a star preacher, angry hysteria of victory to bring about an event to come, and turns a gasp for breath into command for the boy to lift his child’s head too big for the body, and flail tiny hands expertly over his drum. Out of the battle-song chorus of the crowd all the women have risen and are wending widely round and round, up and down, they are the breasts and belly foremost of an anti-privatisation movement’s expectation, government takeover of the mines, gold, platinum, uranium, coal. The stark echo of the tram shelter becomes itself their voice.

  Jabu beside him sings with her sisters, from where she sits; one of the men sharing the bench legs up over it to cheer AMANDLA!, brotherhood granted he leans to put an arm either side on Peter Mkize and the academic who has the promise of professorship in Australia. AMANDLA! It comes out of this one along with the Brother, Jake, Peter and Isa. But not Jabu; as if now she hasn’t the right? Although she cannot help singing. AWETHU! the others respond with the call from the crowd, power to the people.

  Was Isa bewildered, after all, by his presence; was that what had come to him from her moment of blankness, earlier. What do hopes in this election have to do with Steve and Jabu, now.

  Life goes on. Whether or not there is a future in common. It’s a life of contentions when national elections announced for 22 April may bring personal as well as social change some will receive as justice and progress, others as defeat and danger to these.

  The trade unions in ANC’s Congress Alliance produce a booklet attack on COPE. There’s accusation of Struggle Heroes, COPE President Mosiuoa (Terror) Lekota and his Deputy President Mbhazima Shilowa having deserted the African National Congress to ‘pursue an agenda of the capitalist class’.

  And there’s some sort of division already in the breakaway party itself: a pastor nobody but his congregation seems to have heard of, a Reverend Dandala—his face is the one that’s appearing instead of Lekota’s on COPE election posters. So is this the leader of the party now?

  —How can Terror be ditched, what for! It’s mad.—

  He has the answer for her, she ought to have known. —To capture from Zuma a big haul—rural Christians who’ll follow a man of the Church, God’s will, ei-heh.—

  Election time. The ANC in the Free State finds it a time to decide the other kind of initiative, the students’ ‘initiation’ in that province hasn’t quite gone away: it’s time for a black principal to ‘undo the damage’ at the university. Political pressure is now on to find one. The racist nightmare of last year will shudder back—no excuses. Principal Fourie, white, must be replaced; but the ANC complains there’s not much effort by the university to attract a ‘progressive’ candidate. The four students about whom headlines of the urination into a pot of stew for blacks went around the world will go on trial—later—in August this year, charged with crimen injuria.

  August. The same month. Jacob Zuma’s lawyers have formally proposed the date 12 August for his application for his corruption prosecution to be permanently quashed. He has promised his application will detail a political conspiracy behind the corruption, racketeering, money laundering and fraud charges against him.

  The precedent in other countries is that the President cannot be charged with alleged offences committed before his election to Presidency. The election of the new government and a new President will be on 22 April.

  August: four more months later. This charge really will go away.

  Additions to the store of newspaper cuttings are continuing. In particular concerning education. At a university of technology students reported to be horrified at rubber bullets fired on the university’s workers who had rejected a wage increase. The university says ‘Trying to match wages with other human resources—the challenges are still primary’. Women living in a hostel where 800 people share four toilets in one of Johannesburg’s old ‘locations’ are demanding decent housing the way industrial workers use the streets for protest but in the higher register of women’s voices and the different spectacle of female bodies. Some group on a high have announced the launch of the Dagga Party to join the electioneering roster. Shabir Shaik, Zuma’s friend and financial adviser in the arms corruption case is released from prison on medical parole grounds of a state of approaching death and is seen driving his car around his city. At a university other than that of the initiation potjiekos the principal has aligned himself with COPE, making an impassioned speech of support at a COPE convention; as a result the Congress of South African Trade Unions, part of the ANC alliance, says it will campaign until the principal steps down from office. Study for Democracy at yet another university declares that the principals must be non-partisan; the Chair of a Parliamentary Education portfolio committee says there is no law again
st voicing one’s political affiliation.

  Fallen leaves, paper sweepings on the shelf. Among hard news, the writer quotes from an open letter to Nelson Mandela by a poet long away in emigration, an Afrikaner freedom militant jailed for years during the apartheid regime. Breyten Breytenbach to Mandela. ‘I must tell you this terrible thing . . . if a young South African were to ask me whether he or she should stay or leave my bitter advice would be to go. For the seeable future now, if you want to live your life to the full with some satisfaction and usefulness, and if you can stand the loss, if you can amputate yourself, then go.’ A fellow Afrikaner Max du Preez answers in his newspaper column ‘It is not only possible to live a full and useful life in South Africa of today. It is indeed easier to do it here than in, say France or the US . . . or Australia, Canada or the United Kingdom, other favourites among white South Africans.’ And there are the last lines in the ragged cutting ‘Don’t allow bad politics to drive you out of the country of your heart.’

  Election time. Among Suburb comrades there’s not much exchange of the usual parents’ talk about their children, except in the projection of what form of political perspective—no longer rising sun post-apartheid but the present freedom’s storms—will mean for the generation. Whether this child is showing aptitude for maths, that one is sulky, this is ignored, aside, when the determinants of coexistence are all-demanding.

  But the private school for boys Gary Elias chose to be with his pal Njabulo Mkize has its news headline somewhere down among the heavy-type of the municipal workers’ strike leaving the streets turned slum with trash, the transport workers’ strikes leaving commuters stranded; darkness, lights out when power fails. (And it’s not due to Umkhonto homemade explosives placed in substations, now.) A group of seniors living in the youth hostel lined boys up against a wall for an initiation. They beat them with golf clubs and cricket bats until their buttocks bled; a mother has laid charges of assault against the school; her son was forced to rub a powerful substance, ‘Deep Heat’, used for the relief of muscle pain, on his genitals.

  Njabulo and Gary Elias are not boarders in the school hostel. Of course they are back home safely in the Suburb with Blessing and Peter, Jabu and Steve, every night.

  What kind of assurance is that.

  Jake’s house is the tribunal for whatever affects the comrades, although the Anderson boys don’t attend the Mkize and Reed boys’ school. But as the calm survivor of peacetime violence, robbed of his car and dumped unconscious in a vacant lot, succoured by homeless people dossed down there for the night, Jake is the one who can be counted on to see situations objectively; what he has been able to come to in himself he can arrive at for others.

  It’s Peter Mkize who has been to the school, walked in on the headmaster; been assured a teacher in charge of the hostel has been ‘suspended’, the head boy at the hostel has been ‘removed’.

  —Where?— Jabu would have pursued: and does. —There’s only one hostel.—

  —Is that enough. Everything’s OK. Finish and klaar.— It’s Marc who has no children. Marc and Claire (the shift to think ‘Marc and his wife’) have dropped in by chance after Jake called the Mkizes and the Reeds to come round without explanation needed.

  The boys whose future is in question are out taking part in a cycling marathon the school arranged to raise money for the fund it has created to donate sports equipment to rural and shack settlement schools who can’t afford golf clubs and cricket bats.

  —How come our hostel boys have golf clubs—we didn’t know private schools provide coaching for the future chairmen of boards—

  —But Jabu, don’t forget comrade Thabo Mbeki, when he was president, he revolutionised the status of blacks on the golf course from caddy to player, taking up golf, low handicap he had, himself.— Jake gets his laugh.

  —D’you think the leader should be expelled?— Isa seems unaccustomedly embarrassed by the Mkizes and the Reeds with whom until now so much has been shared. Anderson boys are not at that school, don’t risk being initiated or initiating others—so far as the Andersons are aware.

  —What’d you do if it’d been your boy— The playwright, dramatic. —I mean how’d it feel for anyone to know your own kid had somehow become so brutal, where did it come from in his life, the decency he must get from you—you’d know, wouldn’t you—he wasn’t a kid you’d let torture a kitten.—

  —It’s not just the one they’ve ‘removed’, there was a gang, can a school expel a group maybe most of them in that hostel have been through the ordeal, proud of it, expect others to be tested the way they were—one of these manhood rituals eih, isn’t what’s really behind it is that a male must be made killer enough to be conscripted to kill in some war your country decides on. Peter—blacks, you have your initiation, circumcision school whatever you call them, in the bush, and look at the cases when the job is botched, the victim suffers horribly to ‘become’ a man.—

  —We Zulus don’t circumcise, Steve, don’t you know that—

  Reproach: white ignorance.

  A Christian father, yet ritually, as a baby, made a man, the Jewish way, was that really what my mother couldn’t have known: preparation for the Struggle . . . and finally a man for the contradictions of a decision.

  —Violence is—cool—even if the hero wins in the end it’s also by violence—all this comes to our children on TV. We allow them to see hours of it— Peter’s head is jerking, his eyes squeezed, then wide. —What happened last year not in a school—a university? Right, not on TV, but d’you think those boys haven’t followed that shit, what’s to be done with the big brothers at schools whose filthy kind of initiation has been got away with—that’s manpower all right? They followed . . .—

  —Subconsciously.— Marc supplies for Peter.

  —Eish, I wouldn’t know how to explain it, perhaps someone else . . . ? Something in the . . . what we breathe—

  It’s Blessing, who listens more than she speaks. —We haven’t asked our boys. What they want us to do about—school. How they feel.—

  It is not easy to find the right time, the place in a day to bring the subject up with Gary Elias. His subject. She’s threading new laces in one of his football boots while he is threading the other, and naturally, without a choice, she finds herself asking —What’s it like at school now. Have the teachers changed, are they more strict with everyone . . . did you know, I mean . . . any of those boys.—

  —Oh they’re matric, not in class with Njabulo and me, but Raymond, he’s one of them, he’s our top goalie, first team.—

  —Were you very surprised he’d do—things like that. Does it make you . . . Njabulo and your other friends unhappy. In school. So awful such a thing happened.—

  —Headmaster had us in the big hall—you know, I told you and Dad that day. There was Father Connolly from the Catholic’s church and Reverend Nkomo our school pastor, they were praying and now every morning at prayers those boys are there, we look at them— He breathes slowly on his hands deftly looping long laces.

  Quickly lifts his head. He’s smiling directly at his mother to comfort her. —They’re mad.— Vociferous scornful dismissal.

  It must be said although she has the confident answer already. —Gary, you don’t think, you wouldn’t rather be at another school.— If nothing else (he’s dealt with shock, disgust by declaring the perpetrators freaks) is he not afraid that as he advances to become a senior, the age at which such ‘madness’ takes place, he could be a victim.

  Or—how could she ever have thought—a ritualised ‘man’ subjecting others to torture.

  The freedom comrades fought for.

  —Our boy is strong.— She’s telling how the necessary moment came about, of itself. —He’s not afraid. And not to worry. He’ll never become a bully. He won’t take on that ‘madness’ and he doesn’t want to run away to another school, I could see he already knows what happened is something, the sort of thing that is going to come up anywhere. As you grow, make your life.
—

  Even in Australia. He does not feel bypassed as a father; she has opened the way for him. —It wouldn’t come up at Aristotle. Ask Sindi; she’d freak out, as she’d say, even at the idea.—

  It lies between them where their bodies and shoulders touch in bed at night, their hands encounter, settling for sleep. A conformation brought from clandestinity of Glengrove to that of the Suburb and wherever they may go. —Suppose it doesn’t make sense anyway—move school when there’s only the rest of this year here.—

  He’s the one who took the initiative, if the process has been, is being followed by them together. —I just wish I could have taken up a post now. Bad luck it was too late for this year’s academic entry, all that paperwork, emails dragged on so long.—

  —We’re stupid to think of it, crazy.—

  Take him out of one school? Put him somewhere else? New surroundings, new teachers, new kids—and he and Sindi are going to have to deal with all that, new country, people don’t even speak—no, what is it, yes, don’t pronounce English like we do— And she breaks into a little snort invading the clandestinity of the darkness.

  We’re going to hear Terror.— One leg then the other, shaking off the shine of drops as she gets out of the bath. It’s a statement.

  He’s shaving. —Yes.—

  And it is not a simple agreement, it’s a consent. She will not question, for either, the right to be at gatherings at which declarations will be made for the present and future of the country. The question which Isa’s moment of blank regard had realised in him at the ANC meeting.

  Neither the Andersons nor the Mkizes would be asked if they would be coming to hear the Congress of The People gathering.