Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The academic indecision to approach the minister, pussy-footing, brought about irritation of frustration which affected all his responses. Even Jabu’s constancy irked — Just call them together again. Don’t let them off. — It’s her variation of a woman’s nagging.

— I put notices on the staff board, I pushed messages under their doors. Three turned up yesterday, no sign of the others.—

— The old profs.—

— Not only…but I begin to smell there’s this idea — excuse, pretext, who the hell do I think I am?—

She jerks her head at them.

But it’s not as irrelevant a question as she dismisses.

— An upstart from ‘The Struggle’ who doesn’t know he’s under a different command now?—

She sweeps decisively into cupped hands bits of Gary’s plastic building units that have scattered. — Speak to them, one by one, each one. Khuluma nabo, ngamanye, emanye! —

— A kick in the butt. — He supplies what he thinks is more or less the meaning of the expletive-sounding one in her own language. It hasn’t been part of the coaching she’s given him.

Before he could take up the conviction he has of his own strength of character an event on campus, of the campus, not of the faculty room, made a kick in the butt too late. The students commanded possession of the university with an authority that made their previous protests mere tantrums which had been, could be contained in toleration, freedom of expression after all. The organisers — if such spontaneity can be attributed to a Student Council — were far outnumbered by other groups and factions, sects, political and religious, Gay and Lesbian. Gatherings that began before this faculty building and that, the library, the colonial-classical façade of the Great Hall where graduation ceremonies take place, were encompassed, overflowed and became one uproar on a venue generally regarded as too dispersed to demand attention for protests: the sports fields, football, cricket, invaded like the angry spectators who can’t be kept off when they reject a referee’s decision. The speakers were empty mouthings under the thunder of drummers and bellow in song, jetting as the crush surged; it didn’t matter, all knew what their issues were, on placards, T-shirts, home-contrived banners even if some were ancillary GAY BASHING CRIMINAL UNDER THE CONSTITUTION to the overall purpose NO TUITION FEES EDUCATION OUR RIGHT WHAT ABOUT THE BETTER LIFE — election promises hurled back at the other all-powerful referee, the government. Self-destruction that had seen people of their ghettos burn down the scrapheap of living begrudged to them, the ramshackle cinema, the school without books, the clinic without water — this irrational impulse of reality. Trash is vomited from bins, lecterns are crushed like matchboxes, files rifled from the admission offices are danced round as they burn, on the sports fields the goalpost altars of the games the rioters themselves worship, are dragged up, tossed over.

The students who come as friends, familiars of the house, Jabu and the children — Sindiswa has a favourite whom she tells boastfully about her school — they must be among the spore of heads covering the space he looks down upon from his room in the science faculty. It would be unlikely to come across them there, find them in the anonymity that erases all personal features of the crowd. Yet they are some sort of recognition to be claimed; allow him, member of the academic faculty, to go out into it?

He can’t see far among the bodies pressed around him. There are white hands among those raised in the stomping, chanting, so he couldn’t be so noticeably there, the absorption in purpose is blindly fervent, he knows from political rallies. In the mass you have no direction of your own, he is carried along in a surge towards the main gates of the campus. Outside between the street and the gates, another gathering — a few pausing in curiosity before turning away, others, some black men and women literally throwing their yelling weight about. All cling to gates too wide, tall and strong to shake: they’ve joined the students’ action.

He tries to make a way to other parts of the campus but progress is against powerful currents as urge drives each limb of the great body to join that. He reaches only the science block from where he had set out.

Did any of his academic colleagues to whom he’d been advised to kick arse attempt to be along with the uprising against tuition fees most of their students couldn’t pay (so the cell phones worn like ear ornament, who pays for the serial calls). The faculty coffee room may say, factually, the university couldn’t exist without tuition fees to supplement the government’s inadequate grant; ‘funding free education is that government’s affair’. No dereliction of the university’s responsibility towards students?

Did he have a place down there (he’s back up at his window again). Claim it — claim on him —because of his part, his decision to get mixed up in providing scientific know-how and ingredients to make bombs, his Jabu, his children gestated in a black womb. There are bonfires signalling here, there, like the Guy Fawkes ones of his childhood commemorating a revolutionary arson he and his siblings had never heard of. One of the bundles of whatever was being fed smoking to the flames was very near the archeological museum where tooled stones are the reminder that young men rioting are the descendants of peoples who had skills before invaders brought others; he had a sudden fear not for himself but for what is an extension of self, the work, research that was in progress in the science faculty. What if they burst into the laboratories where climate change is being studied for solutions that would save their own existence on this planet.

Who the hell does he think he is.

What’s the difference between trashing a university that can provide knowledge only for money, and the street gangs who hijack and rob — ah, but there’s the difference, the hijack brings means to buy, own the advertised products the hijacker doesn’t have; there’s no gain in ransacking a university.

What if they come. Would he say comrades, it may be justice to let you into the laboratories to break the privilege others have to qualify for such work, tuition at a price your parents and grandparents, great-great-grandparents have earned down the mines, building the roads, digging the earth for the crops of masters.

This opposition within, clashing contradictions, it didn’t exist when you were closed away with yourself solitary in detention, and even in the bush tents where between action that seemed the answer then, immediate, which accounted to and for every contesting manifestation of living. There were discussions on what’s supposed could be called moral choices taken — made do with? — in the ‘situation’ of the old regime — everyone would be freed for good (in all senses of the two words) of all evasions once that regime was finish and klaar .

Who the hell do you think you are.

The answer is go back down into the body of the throng. But this time someone pressed against him in the strange intimacy of a peristaltic crush, twisted face round. — Eish! You Professor Reed from Science! — He’s not a professor yet, Senior Lecturer with a thesis to complete, but with this greeting he has a rank in the protest, if far back, in the combined push from the playing fields and the surrounded faculty buildings again to the main gates. There’s a backlash in the great body followed by a surge forward as common breath taken: the police are at the gates now the gates have given way, their dogs are barking against hysterical shouts in the theatrical effect of tear gas. Fight your way (as if that were possible) to the front and then, as a white man, the old authority that was the ultimate one, tell the police to lay off the assault? The students are throwing whatever they can pick up at the police, who are mostly black. Through tears and retching coughs they yell insults in many languages as batons strike them. As far as can be made out the leaders of the Student Council who were in the front line have been overcome and arrested, there are police vans swirling sirens in the street, and the other students are being dragged pell-mell random into vans.