Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The Struggle’s not over.

There are still some professors of the past on the faculties along with the intake of comrades like himself known as the Left by academics not wishing to question themselves too exigently whether as an acceptable political category this can be taken to include, in support of just ends, power stations that were blown up.

The comrades, the Left or however they’re seen, are aware they have to re-educate themselves somewhat. The immediacy of uncompromising back-and-forth in the bush, guns and cell walls instead of theses and coffee-vending machines in a faculty room — their kind of blunt confrontation will be misinterpreted by people who haven’t known they may be dead in the dirt next day. — If something new is going to be made of the university we’ll have to start with what we’ve got. We have to get on with the old guard on the principle that we don’t accept they’re guarding the same education any more, doors closed. That we trust they know this.—

— Even if they don’t?—

— Even if they don’t.—

— Exactly.—

— They should take early retirement — it’s late.—

He’s stirring his coffee as if repeating the sequence of those words heard. — No, no. Hang on. Most of them are good teachers. Some better than we are. They have the broad, worldly — sophisticated — general knowledge the students need to be given real access to. Grant that. Who’s out there to replace them right now.—

Shudula Shoba’s Struggle record isn’t known, maybe it’s enough he rescued himself out of the ghetto to earn a Masters, but he’s one of the new appointments at lecturer level, under distinguished professors, novelists and poets. — Mphahlele, Ndebele, Kgositsile.—

He’s too new to the faculty to ignore voices over his informing what he ought to know, they’re already professors in other universities. — Sharp sharp — but some of the other big names, they’re in rural colleges, just one step above high school, wasted there in the backveld.—

— You’re going to poach them away from the people?—

The exchange isn’t abandoned even as a few establishment professors come in with greetings all round. Coffee-vendor bonhomie. He puts his words into practice at once — What we’ve got is with us. — Steve’s remark is for professors all, against a clink of cups and the derogatory hiss of the coffee dispenser. — Don’t you find our bridging efforts inadequate. Band-aid.—

— Here we go talking end results when we ought to be doing something about the beginning, I’ve got students in African Studies who don’t know how to write, spell in their own language, mother tongue, they have the TV black sitcom vocabulary, that’s all. — Lesego Moloi, survivor not only of the Struggle but by the old-time academic favour whereby a black would be hired as an exception by a white university only for that branch of learning, no matter what other post he may qualify for. He lifts and drops the soles of his heavy shoes in accompaniment to his words.

— So what should we be doing? The Convocation of the university doesn’t run the education department’s schools. — Professor Nielson still wears a suit, shirt and tie as the undergarments of the academic gown although there is a relaxed standard of suitability started with the example of Mandela’s tunics. Professor Nielson cannot avoid having the tone of enlightenment dispensed even when not teaching. He’s what father Andrew’s generation calls a stuffed shirt, the starched shield once required as evening dress. — You’re not proposing we lower university entrance standards further. Is that what a university is, not an advancement of knowledge but a descent.—

What Steve’s question is — whether a token of coaching in hopes of bringing them up to university standards can achieve recovery from ten years of hopelessly poor schooling.

— We’re simply to make the scientists, engineers, economists — you name them — out of its product.—

So what came of it, she wants to know.

What would there be to tell that wasn’t an excuse.

Well, it was time for everyone to get back to the lecture halls, seminars. Or those declared hours when students could come to them in the small rooms that have their names on the door, bringing requests disguised as problems. That’s what’s come of it. Band-aid. He brought it up before Jake, Isa, the Mkizes grilling sausages and chops on a Sunday (as the former inhabitants of the suburb did). Their children inventing wild games, wrestling and tumbling, limbs mingled as those of their parents never could. He thinks he knows what should come of it. But he’s telling the comrades, not the academic colleagues. University’s Convocation, student organisation — the vice chancellors! — they ought to be demanding meetings with the minister responsible for education in schools. Breaking down his bloody door! It’s our business. Education can’t be lopped off in two, it’s a contiguous process, our Moloi in African Studies gets students who can’t read and write in command of their own languages, I have some — maths is a foreign language they haven’t had the teaching to grasp, just enough, functionally, to scrape through the final school paper.—

— So what are you and your profs doing about the get-together? — Jake mimics an empty hand signalling Isa to offer more bread.

— That’s what I said. — Jabu turns her shoulders and breasts, one of her unconscious physical reactions of differing opinion that made her individual to Steve from the beginning of clandestinity. Since way back in Swaziland they had taken it as part of freedom to be gained that they can imply criticism without breaching love.

The same applies to friendship; Peter Mkize takes up from comrade Jake. — Why don’t you start it going? Get together lecturers, profs, approach the vice chancellor and have an appointment, whatever, meet the minister up there in the parliament, tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.—

The children are asserting their rights, clamouring for ice cream. — It’s not time yet. — The mothers clamour in rivalry. Everyone is laughing, biting into the meat that must first be eaten. The choir starts up again, ice cream ice cream.

One of the many things you learn in a liberation movement is take heed of what comrades challenge you in. A week or two after, he began to broach to colleagues, first those already grouped as on the Left, what was the teaching profession’s responsibility in the situations of freedom, and then, on the same principle to the old guard, the proposal that there be a discussion whether a delegation of academics should meet with the minister to face the facts of two educational processes that should be one and are not. The discussion took place in the faculty room for an informal start. Opinions were hesitantly if not reluctantly expressed. The coffee machine again resorted to; this sort of meddling academia in government was heard as (of course) in conformation with the Left, citizens of the university unite, that stuff, update variation of an old rallying shibboleth that recruited whites against the swart gevaar . But it was one of the Lefties who came up with the irrefutable the minister would put on the table: there is not enough money to fund school education of a standard to pass seamlessly to universities, less than a generation after the end of hundreds of years when resources for education were spent overwhelmingly on the minority of the vast population. — Education. Funds in the exchequer are to be shared with health, housing, transport, everything that is social need. (Doesn’t mention Big Brother Defence.) To ask for more?—

It’s not time yet, for ice cream.

She listens to his account of the academic meeting while folding clothes Wethu has washed and ironed, and continuing a process, placing his shirts and socks in one pile, Sindiswa’s dresses, jeans, Gary Elias’s shorts and shirts in others.