Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Then who are these?’ I asked.

  ‘The local representatives of international crooks,’ said my companion boredly.

  The cosmopolitan city of Cairo is dead as the Dead City itself. But does it matter? Does it really count? When I sat in the train, waiting to leave for Upper Egypt, I had a sense of release from involvement with a prevalent emotional atmosphere that had little or nothing to do with me; my emphatic identification with the dispossessed foreign community left me, and I very properly took up my own role again, which was that of a stranger in a strange land. The train took a long time to get started; a boy with rings of sesame-studded bread braceleting his arms from armpit to wrist ran up and down the platform; trolleys full of fowls in cane cages were wheeled past; the crowd, predominantly male, as usual, took an elaborate farewell of the passengers. I had plenty of time to think, and look. The scene on the platform was just as it would have been, five years ago. The streets of Cairo, too, with the exception of the ‘foreign’ streets, were just as before. At sunset that afternoon, I had stood on the balcony of the flat where I was staying, and had watched the people below, never ant-like as in big cities of the West, but leisured, in full cry, pushing carts, selling peanuts and roasted maize cobs, balancing coffee cups, zigzagging the hazard across hooting cars and the little red petrol tanks (from which householders buy the spirit for their stoves) drawn by jingling, brass-cluttered donkeys. As I had come out of the building to make for the station, I had passed the caretaker, sitting resting his back against the blast-wall that was put on during the War and has never been taken down; he was eating his bean soup supper preparatory to his night’s work, which consists of climbing into the bed that is pushed into the foyer every evening, and falling asleep under his yellow coverlet.

  Here, among the real population, the people themselves, not enough seemed to have changed. Nasser’s infant industrial plans are not yet sufficiently under way to thin out the ranks of the thousands who exist on half-jobs, waiting for a share of a half-job, or simply waiting for the opportunity to turn some absurd and unwelcome service into a job – the urban manifestation of an over-populated country that is increasing its count of souls by the disastrous number of a million every two years. And while the military caste is raising its standard of living hand over fist along with its social position, the civil servants are struggling to keep up decent appearances on salary scales that would have been adequate before the last war. Many people told me that these totally unrealistic salaries were largely responsible for corruption; families could not hope to make ends meet without the ‘little extra’ brought in by bribes.

  Yet though these facts were disappointing – they were at least negative – by and large, they had not been brought about by the new regime; the new regime had failed, as yet, to change them.

  One of the things I had liked about Cairo, five years after the revolution, I decided, was what I cautiously call national confidence – something that I don’t believe has anything to do with the braggart ‘Voice of Cairo’ or Pan-Arabism, or, indeed, anything more ambitious or aggressive than an inner assurance that each man is a man measured against his own people, and not a cipher found wanting against the standards of those who are born of other countries and to other opportunities. All of a piece with this was my satisfaction when I saw what good care the new government is taking to preserve many of those great hunks of the past which jut out here and there, all over Cairo – walls and city gates as well as more obvious and spectacular monuments. When I went to the Cairo Museum, that very morning of my last day in Cairo, I was not surprised to see that although the tourists were reduced to myself, two whispering Indian girls and an American couple sitting exhaustedly in a window embrasure, the museum was full of parties of Egyptian schoolboys and girls; it seemed to me natural that a young and poor nation should be eager to teach its children that it is not so young or so poor, after all.

  But what was a horrifying surprise was the state of the museum. It was dusty and dingy as a second-hand dealer’s; many exhibits had lost their labels, and those of others were almost indecipherable. Vaguely military-looking attendants lounged about, their sticky tea-glasses stowed away in dark corners. Even in the Tutankhamen rooms the jewellery is falling to pieces and the gold is flaking off the incomparable splendour of the shrine. Such neglect of the exquisite work of human hands that has survived time almost long enough to have achieved immortality gives you a feeling of real distress; I had hastened back into town to find someone who could explain to me why this was being allowed to happen. And then I heard about another side of national pride, a foolish, childish side, that will see its wonderful artistic heritage rot rather than let the foreigner – any foreigner – bring the expert help and knowledge that is needed to preserve it.

  The train finally did go, and I woke up next morning in an Egypt that is not Cairo. For the next few days I followed the life of the Nile. Where in the world do you get a statement of the human condition as simple and complete as this? Look out of the train or car window and the entire context of the people’s lives is there – the river, the mud, the green of crop and palm it nurtures, the desert. There is no existence outside the beneficence of the river, the scope of the mud, the discipline of the desert. This pure statement comes like peace, after the complexity and fragmentariness of life as we know it.

  The land looks as it has always looked – ‘always’ is an impudent five years, for me, out of many thousands. Although the big estates have been broken up under a fairly vigorous and, most people agree, fairly successful agrarian reform, they are worked by the same people in the same way. I was struck again by the unfair picture of these people that soldiers who had been in Egypt during the War gave to their Western countries. I know that South Africans built up for me a caricature of a squinting, cringing, night-shirted Egypt – ‘those old Gyppos’. The fact is that many of the peasants, who went on with their work in dogged dignity, as we walked past, are good-looking, while the youths, especially the Nubians round Aswan, are as beautiful as the lovely faces in tomb carvings. This is extraordinary when you remind yourself that these people have been underfed and debilitated by bilharzia and malaria for many generations, and that ever since year-round irrigation was achieved, they have been overworked as well.

  Strung along the Nile, their villages appear as single units – no straggler houses, and a shelter of palms drawn in around them, fortressed against the sun. In the distance they seem to be those very oases that appear in the deserts of fairy tales. The beauty of this poverty has to be shaken off. Then you see that these people are breathtakingly poor, even by the standards of African poverty that I know in South Africa. How, you ask yourself, mentally groping down to confine comparisons only to those things which seem reasonably essential to life – how can they live, so possessionless, so stripped? Apart from a more equitable distribution of land – no one is allowed to own more than 300 feddans (315 acres) and fifty feddans for each of his first two children, and the vast absentee-owned estates have been distributed among the landless – the regime has brought one obvious enrichment to village life. Nearly every village now has a fine modern school, just outside its confines, and it was good, in the mornings, to see the children running out of the dark, close mud walls across to the spanking new white buildings with big windows. Oddly enough, contemporary architecture does not look out of place beside mud brick and tea-cup domes; I wondered about this until I remembered the model of an ancient Egyptian villa that I had seen in a dusty case in the Cairo Museum – it made use of the same juxtaposition of simple rectangles as one sees in contemporary buildings.

  At last, I stood at Aswan on the barrage and felt the power of the Nile water thudding up through the concrete under my hands as it forced through the sluices. ‘Aswan’ has become a place-name of immense overtones to anyone who reads a newspaper; since 1956 its pronouncement as a colossal barrage of the Nile to be created there has stirred feelings – loyalties, resentments, fears, satisfactions, g
uilts – rather than conjured up the imaginative picture of a town. It was quite a surprise – it was as if I had forgotten – to find that Aswan was a place where people lived; a lively Arab town, a view of the Nile flowing in great hanks of calm water round islands of granite behind which the feluccas appeared and disappeared in scythes of white. A few miles from the town, standing on the barrage itself, it is difficult not to indulge in the dramatic feeling that you have all the life of Egypt piled up there behind you in the great dam, and in the still greater dam whose plan lies, bandied about in the abstractions of international politics and finance, but marked out clearly on the landscape, not many miles behind it. I walked along the barrage to the hydro-electric power station which is under construction, cutting into the west shore. The clumsy steel giants of Europe were busy there; great turbines and cables and cranes from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. A workman waved me back; and laughed like a boy with a firecracker when I jumped at the hollow boom of an explosion. We leaned together over the steel rail and watched the granite dust settle, far down in the immense rock basin that has been blasted out.

  I am not a watcher at the peep-holes so considerately provided by builders when they are at work; the sight of men swarming about their jobs on some project that will swallow the work in their hands anonymously in its immensity is more likely to depress than thrill me. But I found myself watching the Egyptian workmen labouring below on their power station, and I felt I could go on watching for a long time. There was something hopeful and even exciting about the sight of these men with their energies caught up by the demands of a huge imaginative task – not the labour of the cotton and the bean field whose fruits are used up each day by the day’s existence, and nothing more to show for it. When the power station is completed, it will be theirs to use; it does not merely feed them now, but will change their lives. Surely these people need so badly not merely to be fed better and to live better, but also, after so many centuries of humbleness, to achieve, as other people do? I hope that Nasser will not forget them in dreams of world power, as all their rulers in the past have forgotten them or sold them out, for one reason or another. People who ‘know Egypt’ and deplore the Nasser regime tell me that ‘kings and governments come and go, but it makes no difference to the fellah’. How tragic is the smug comfort of this remark if, this time again, it should prove to be true.

  1959

  Chief Luthuli

  There are three million white people and more than nine million black people in the Union of South Africa. Only a handful of the whites have ever met Albert John Luthuli. He has never been invited to speak over the radio, and his picture rarely appears in the white daily press in South Africa. Yet this government-deposed African chief – who, far from losing his honourable title since he was officially deprived of it, is generally known simply as ‘Chief’ – is the only man to whom the nine million Africans (‘African’ is becoming the accepted term for a South African black) give any sort of wide allegiance as a popular leader. He is a man in black politics in South Africa whose personality is a symbol of human dignity which Africans as a whole, no matter what their individual or political affiliations are and no matter what state of enlightenment or ignorance they may be in, recognise as their dignity.

  Luthuli is a sixty-year-old Zulu and an African aristocrat. His mother was a Gumede – one of the most honoured of Zulu clans – and his grandmother was given, as was the custom with the daughter of a prominent tribal chief, to the court of the famous paramount chief of unconquered Zululand in the 1870s, Cetshwayo. Luthuli has a number of those physical characteristics which are regarded as typical of the warrior Zulu and to which even the most ardent supporter of apartheid would pay grudging admiration. His head is large and set majestically back on a strong neck; he has a deep, soft voice; and although he is not a tall man he seems always to look as big as anyone else in the room.

  Among his less obvious characteristics is a sense of repose; sometimes a monumental quiet. If more white South Africans could meet him, or even hear him speak on a public platform, they would be astonished (and perhaps even a little ashamed – he makes that sort of impression) to measure the real man against the bloodthirsty demagogue that is the African leader as they imagine him. Apart from anything else, he speaks English with a distinct American intonation, acquired along with his education at schools run by American missionaries.

  Luthuli’s ancestral home is Groutville Mission, in the Umvoti Mission Reserve on the coast of Natal, near Durban, and his personality stands sturdily upon this little corner of Africa. He has never, even as a child, lived in the collection of thatched mud huts in which tribal Africans usually live because Reverend Grout, an American missionary who came to South Africa in 1835, had planned his mission village on the European pattern, with houses; and if as a child the young Luthuli did his share of herding cattle, he did it after school hours, because Grout had seen to it that there was fenced common that would free the children to attend school. As the Umvoti Reserve is a mission and not a tribal reserve, the chiefs are elected, and there is no dynasty in the hereditary sense. Yet ability has tended to create a dynasty of its own; a number of the elected chiefs have been members of the Luthuli family. When Luthuli was a child, his uncle was chief, but after 1921 the chieftainship went out of the hands of the family until 1936, when Luthuli himself, then a teacher at Adams College (one of the most respected of mission educational establishments for Africans) was elected.

  Luthuli was educated at various mission schools and at Adams College, and in 1921 he qualified as an instructor in the teachers’ training course and joined the staff of Adams. He could look back on a gentle, almost sheltered childhood in the protective shadow of his uncle’s house and the mission at Groutville. The one had given him the confidence that comes to children who belong to an honoured family; the other, which provided his first contact with the world of whites, did not impose the harsh impact of the colour bar too early on his young mind. Perhaps as a result of this, even today, when the white government of South Africa has deposed him as chief of his people, several times banned him from free movement about the country, and arrested him – as President-General of the African National Congress and a leader of the liberation movement of Africans in South Africa – on a charge of treason that kept him in court through almost a year of inquiry, he has no hate in him. He has never been anti-white and believes he never will be. He started off his life by seeing human beings, not colours. It is a very different matter today for the urban African child who is born and grows up in the slum areas of big cities in South Africa, cheek by jowl with the whites in the paradox of the colour bar; he is made aware, from the start, that his blackness is a shroud, cutting him off, preparing him to be – as the Africans often describe themselves as feeling – ‘half a man’.

  Luthuli seems to have come to politics through an ideal of service fostered by religion rather than by way of any strong ambition. As early as his primary school days, what he calls the ‘Christian ideal’ of service captured his faith and his imagination. Many politically minded Africans deplore the influence the missions – which brought education to Africa and which have continued, because of government neglect of its obligation, to dominate African education – have had among their people in the past. The cry is that the missions have used their influence to reconcile the people to white domination rather than to encourage them to demand their birthright as free human beings. But Luthuli’s experience has been that mission teaching gave him a sense of the dignity of man, in the sight of God, that he wants to see made a reality for all colours and creeds.

  The truth probably lies somewhere in the fact that for those, like Luthuli, who had eyes for it, there was a glimpse of freedom in the gospel of humble submission to a discipline greater than man-devised. Out of that glimpse, more than any reasoning of politics and experience, a man may come to say, as Luthuli did when he gave up his chieftainship under government pressure in 1952, ‘Laws and conditions that tend to de
base human personality – a God-given force – be they brought about by the State or any other individuals, must be relentlessly opposed in the spirit of defiance shown by Saint Peter when he said to the rulers of his day, “Shall we obey God or man?”’

  Luthuli’s consciousness of the disabilities of the African people awoke as soon as he began to teach. ‘Before that,’ he explains,

  when men like myself were children at school and college students, we didn’t have much chance to compare our lot with that of white people. Living in a reserve and going to a mission school or college, far away from the big white cities, our only real contact with white people was with the school principal and the missionary, and so if we suffered in any way from discriminatory treatment by white men, we tended to confuse our resentment with the natural resentment of the schoolboy towards those in authority who abuse him.

  But the moment he was adult and a teacher, the normal disabilities of being a black man in South Africa, plus the disabilities of being a black teacher, plus the special sensitivity to both that comes about through being an educated and enlightened person, hit home. Through church work and the activities of the teachers’ association, he busied himself with trying to improve the world of his people within the existing framework that the white world imposed upon it; he was too young and, in a sense, too ignorant to understand then, as he came to later, that the desire and the context in which it existed were contradictory.

  In 1936, after some deliberation and misgiving, for he loved to teach, Luthuli left Adams College and teaching for ever and went home to Groutville as chief. The duties and responsibilities of chieftainship were in his blood and his family tradition, so from one point of view the change was not a dramatic one. But from another aspect the change was to be total and drastic. His thirty-eight years as a non-political man were over; he found himself, as he puts it, ‘plunged right into South African politics – and by the South African government itself’.