Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

But if you move about in my city, you don’t need a criminologist to identify the reason for crime’s prevalence. And it is not a bleeding-heart apologist response when the blunt answer is: unemployment.

I have taught myself to drive, all over again, fifty or so years after I was first licensed, because there has to be a new, nippy know-how and understanding of an unwritten code among drivers to weave among the buffalo herd of the road, the minibuses. We call them ‘combis’ because they are combination buses and taxis and conduct themselves as a hybrid, which is confusing to the uninitiated driver of a car. They hoot continuously, to attract the attention of potential passengers; they stop anywhere at the signal of a raised finger from the kerbside, the way a hailed taxi responds; they have regular routes they follow like a bus but no obligation to restrict themselves to any designated bus stops. They are always packed to suffocation limit: they have solved the transport question, which a succession of white regimes dealt with as the decision that blacks use their legs. To me, the combis are symbols of the immeasurable influx of people to the city since freedom was confirmed at the ballot box in 1994, the trek of many thousands who come to find work, and for whom there will be little or no possibility of finding it. When the humiliation of begging fails, desperation offers one way to survive — crime.

This phenomenon of crime is not, as some observers take smug satisfaction in regarding it, the phenomenon of freedom.

Things were not better in the old days of the apartheid regime: they were kept out of sight. The unemployed and underemployed who come to the city hungry in every way for a better life now were corralled in that extraordinary experiment in social engineering, poverty-ridden ‘ethnic homelands’. The social disease, unemployment, was quarantined; migratory labour from the rural areas, and from one province to another, was permitted to enter the city only in numbers determined healthy by the needs of industry. And these workers were legally forbidden to take their families with them. I have to remind myself of this when I see among us that sad developing-world category of childhood, street children; now they are there before our eyes instead of underfed and undereducated in the ‘homelands’ of apartheid.

It is not a politically correct convenience to blame the past, apartheid, for unemployment. The plain fact is that dammed-up unemployment has burst upon us from the inhuman confines of the past; it is not something inherent in freedom, a kind of punishment for our people’s audacity in defeating whites-only rule. As a result of the policies of the past, black people come to the city doubly disadvantaged. First, industrial development, hampered through sanctions that were necessary to end apartheid, has only limited employment to provide in a period when, despite every effort towards expansion, such development is affected by quaking conditions in world finance. Second, the majority of the unemployed do not have the education or skills to take on such jobs as are available. Many are illiterate or semi-literate, the products of the contemptible level of education apartheid decreed for blacks. Few have any of the basic skills demanded by an increasingly technological labour market.

I cannot shrug and dismiss them as a lost generation. I am one who will press for innovative large-scale government projects that will institute skills training and employment at the same time. When the adults are providers, the children will not be on the streets. And I am encouraged by the government’s chivying of business to give training in financial processes, and the condition laid down to foreign investors that there must be a training component in their most welcome decisions to profit from investment opportunities here.

There is enthusiasm among Haves in the city to see a solution to the unemployment of Have-nots in what they call, broadly, small business, and there are formations that commendably provide modest finance for this. Yet when I pass, near a supermarket, a young man mending shoes in a booth he has been supplied with, I can’t help thinking this is something of a dead end for him: couldn’t he be learning to be an electrician or plumber, even if he cannot become one of the millennium’s computer-literate? His ‘small business’ venture doesn’t seem to have the vigour of self-initiated brisk trading by those pavement vendors whom I note, month by month, acquiring the acumen of what will arrest the gaze of customers beyond a mere pile of bananas — the latest sports-club logo on a cap, the look-alike Nikes. South African blacks are new to shopkeeping, having been barred from owning shops in the city. They don’t have the capital to do so, yet, but you can see they’re learning fast — the hard way.

In awareness of sharing as a post-apartheid ethos, at what levels is this evident? At the top economic level, which used to be exclusively that occupied by whites, like begins to live beside like. It was a pejorative — aimed at white privilege in general — to refer to ‘Houghton’, but now our President Mandela lives in that residential area, more modestly than he would if he made the conventional choice of the official residence occupied by the white regimes’ presidents in Pretoria. Sandton — the most luxurious of garden suburbs — can’t really be regarded as the generic symbol of white capitalist living any longer, because black dignitaries in professions, business, communications and the arts now also favour the landscaped town house complexes complete with security service. They are a minority among blacks, of course. At the broadest, basic level of the new social pyramid there are changes that are not less contrasting, in their way, with the living conditions of the past. Late last year, I was in the city’s old black township of Alexandra, in the brand-new three-room house, built with government subsidy and a low-interest bank loan, into which the Mashabela family of five had just moved after seventeen years in a one-room shack housing fourteen people. This kind of levelling of material conditions is my primary criterion of justice in my country, the city I live in.

I know it could not possibly be brought about in five years, or ever can be completely achieved, on the evidence of the chasms between the life of rich and poor in developed capitalist countries that have declared themselves dedicated to it for several hundred years, and the failure of socialist countries (of socialism — so far in human history, but not for ever, in my belief) to avoid making freedom a prisoner of its own dictates. South Africa — like its combis — has had to choose pragmatically to be a hybrid: a mixed economy, with every bias it can afford towards making the legal equality, now achieved, meaningful in economic, material form for the impoverished majority.

It follows that community of purpose is particularly decisive for us, coming as we do, rawly, from our divided, racist past. My own natural preoccupations, within my life as I see it as a responsible citizen, have always been in the arts, what are called (rather embarrassingly for my taste) cultural formations, in which race or colour or even language differences were an irrelevance in common enthusiasms, the realm of the imagination that couldn’t be annexed, even by apartheid. But now, as it should be, in pursuit of South Africa as an African country rather than an Africanised outpost of the West, the initiatives and much of the innovation in culture are taken up by blacks — a form of unofficial, organic affirmative action that creates a balance that was missing while partnerships between black and white were always weighted by the fact that whites, by law, in the ordinary pursuits of daily life, had access to opportunities blacks did not have. I feel at home — in the real sense of the concept — as never before, even in working with my long-time close friend Mongane Wally Serote, poet, former freedom fighter, now a member of parliament with a high position in the Department of Arts and Culture, and with Walter Chakela, director of the Windybrow Centre for the Arts, in a total context that didn’t exist for them and for me before.