Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

A room in a yard.

It was the year the Holy Father decided to appoint their most progressive teacher, loved by the children, to direct the junior school.

Why did she give up teaching?

It was also the year she completed with high marks the correspondence courses as preliminary study for a degree in law.

Look at this without any quick answer of unquestionable certainty ready to slip off her tongue. There was the attempt at objectivity they had learnt necessary in examining a choice between decisions to be taken in the revolutionary cadres.

What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self. Whatever that identity may be, or in the process of becoming. She was the child of a rural ghetto, daughter of an Elder in a Methodist church, she is the woman — wife, that legal entity — to a man of the pallor of colonialism. Which of these identities, or all, make hers. The books her father had brought her to read, from childhood; their text contained more than messages she was to spell out by stringing disparate underlined words. The reading habit he’s nurtured (another identity); while reading as a student she’d smoked good Swazi marijuana but given up that as a cadre with the need of a clear head. One among books she and Steve buy as presents for each other and the bookshelves they’d put up in the house, is by an Indian, Amartya Sen, and these ideas of who you are, made up of the activities, genre of work, skills, shared interests, environments you are placed and place yourself in, are his definition of identity. Multiple in one. That’s who you are. It’s something her own life, Steve’s life, fits. But so far the most definitive self comes from the Struggle. Whatever that means now.

It’s not something to talk about even to him. It’s not left in the bush camp or the desert or the prison, it’s the purpose of being alive; still a comrade. And it’s law that confirms or denies it. There’s the Constitution to make freedom possible.

So she’s going to become a lawyer. He’s aware it is not a choice enticed by money although teachers are poorly paid as if they owe a special tithe to the country’s development. She’ll be somebody’s articled clerk for some time, earning peanuts. A kind of pupil herself, again; didn’t the devout Elder, her Baba, send her away to get something better than apartheid education, something of freedom, over the border.

Whenever she arrived on a visit to that definition of home as where you come from, no matter home has become somewhere quite else, the women looked at the flat stretch of cloth between her hips; and then towards her mother: what was she saying to the daughter about this. All that should be said again and again. When are there going to be more babies? The child she brought to her magogo, gogo , sisters, brothers, aunts, cousins in the Elder’s congregation, was a girl. How could she tell them without offence, those with high bellies and those with round heads and exquisitely tentacled miniature hands at the breast, that she and Steve postponed another child rather than taking the obligation to fecundity, because the nuclear one isn’t the only family, its brood the only children. Your time doesn’t belong to you exclusively or even foremost to own progeny. The revolution comes first because the sacrifices that were and are its right demand are for your own and all children. That’s not a plug from political rhetoric. There’s no good breeding future slaves of one kind of regime or another.

Of course Jabu’s work influences their postponement of a companion for Sindiswa. With the achievement of her LLB she has been taken in as attorney by one of those new three-name legal practices which are literally up on the board, signs of change, one with an Indian name, another with an African name, among the partners. No denying that her political CV if not her colour was an advantage in the choice out of other applicants, but that’s no reflection on the abilities she had to offer. The firm did not deal with divorce cases, the partners kiddingly accusing one another of turning down the most lucrative briefs, but was known as appearing for the defence in property disputes which used to be more or less exclusive to whites, with a few Indians who had acquired business concessions in the urban area where at one period Indians had some undetermined rights. Blacks had none. Now, anyone may own property anywhere — capitalism freed of its chains, Jake says wryly, announcing he and Isa, who always could have had that white right, were buying the house they rented — but inheritance rights were compounded by the remnant of religious or traditional law that had been recognised by the apartheid system, whether just or not. Keep the natives quiet where this doesn’t affect anyone else. Among blacks, after the husband’s death the wife has to quit their home acquired together; the house was to be passed to his brother. Jabu was Ranveer Singh’s assistant in court on one such case, taken up and instructed by a legal aid organisation as a Constitutional rights issue, let alone a humanitarian one. The Justice Centre had briefed a prominent civil rights Senior Counsel, comrade whose patriarchal white face did not match his feared cross-examination techniques. At tea recesses he was centre stage in discourse, an oratory she was too impressed and inexperienced to know an attorney should not interrupt, and her unexpected questions surprised him with their aptness to the relevance of his anecdotes to the case being heard. This young black woman must have grown up as what it meant to be black in that old regime — his big head agitated encouragement at her — the political nuances in such cases, while upholding the breach of law, not to mention (he did) preposterous breach of human dignity, one must know that from the perspective of custom, unwritten laws, by getting the verdict in favour of the complainant you are putting down Constitutional law’s feet sacrilegiously on some traditionalists. Black victims again…and without them, what sort of national unity? A legalistic-moral system seceded from it? The traditionalists believe freedom includes recognition — no, incorporation of the particular organisation of life that governed their ancestral relationships, their concepts of entitlement, before colonialism and apartheid. Apartheid dead, black president in the cabinet, members of parliament, but their traditional laws are alive. Can we afford to insult for their own just benefit members of the majority population. Answers himself. — Well we’re going to win this case. — A wide laugh, everyone joins him. — Law enforcement means taking risks — on principle.—

The other lawyers use his first name, first names all round, she addresses him formally as she has been inducted since childhood in approaching an elder and anyone of obvious rank; the other siblinghood, of comrades, hasn’t outmoded that for her even while she’s uninhibited as a result of that comradeship. — The majority of the black majority (she underlines the neat significance with drawn breath in tightened nostrils) — I don’t think would want to see traditions made law, certainly not when it comes to property. I mean, there was so little we could own that all white people had a right to, who would want to have in the Constitution the right to evict a woman, hand over a woman’s home to a collateral — a man, of course.—

It was a diverting contradiction, appreciated by the Senior Counsel and others; that the member of the population from which traditionalists came should speak treason.

At the end of the trial, which indeed the S.C.’s lead won for the defence, as she thanked him for her benefit of having been allowed to be even a small part of it, he said as if he suddenly had his attention tapped by a detail overlooked — You should be at the Justice Centre. Why don’t you come along and see the director, I’ll have a word with him.—