Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Translate every statement as if it were in a foreign language: a Shaik is go-between of the arms dealers, whom he claimed gave their bribes to Zuma.

Steve feels for and with Peter Mkize the shamefulness of the human race, not personal, worse than that. — Why do we expect to be different. Mexico after their revolutions. Russia after the revolution, and after the end of the Soviet Union, revolutionised this time by capitalism.—

Marc is the one among the Dolphins who is passionate about justice beyond discrimination against men and women who don’t fit emotional conventions. — The fat cats are always with us. Just have to get on with it. Ubuntu! —

— We must expect — we must be different! What are you all saying? Ubuntu —you know what that is? Do you? What is happening to it, why it comes to mean that because those comrades were in the Struggle they can drive their Mercedes and buy palaces for their wives with bribe millions from foreign crooks! Sell us out! How can you take it like that! — Jabu’s whole body restless with outrage.

Who can respond.

Jake will make an effort; she’s got guts, that woman of Steve’s. — Can somebody tell us? One of us say ? Shit. Ubuntu —we’re all one, I am you, you are me! What power do we have. We thought we would have, that’s what getting rid of apartheid and all the props meant. International finance cartels neo-colonialism call it what you like. The arms trade. Bribes are its accounting system. Crooking the books for customers, with money in exchange for tenders. This isn’t selling pizzas across the counter! So come on, what can ordinary guys like us ex-combatants do? It’s the Shaiks hand in pocket with the Zumas who inherit the earth in dollars sterling euros, whatever the currency up for the deal.—

Well, it’s not a response.

It’s too feeble to say what some are thinking: wait for the next election and the next. And according to what has come out of this meeting of minds: there will be a change of personnel, maybe, but the same world accounting system, Left or Right.

She went home, that unchanging destination, to the Methodist Church Elder’s, headmaster’s village, to KwaZulu at intervals as unthinking as change of season. It’s not expected, perhaps not even particularly wanted, that her husband would always come, with the exception of a Christmas visit or a funeral — there respect was obligatory whereas weddings were more women’s affair. Sindiswa was entering the phase when school friends were closer than family, and usually elected to spend time with them instead. But Gary Elias jumped into the car beside his mother in eager anticipation of the enthusiasm with which he would be received by boys who seemed all to be his cousins or at least in some way part of him. Jabu was pleased because she wanted her father, the man who could read the being of male children, to cast an eye over him, his development, from time to time. If grandfatherly it was dispassionate, professional, experience; Steve, though an educationalist, one must admit knew more about young adults the university age, his son he saw relived as in his own boyhood which was happy. The behaviour of rejection — in his situation necessary because of the imprint of his white hands conceived in privilege — had come only with adolescence. Gary Elias would not have to ‘grow out of’ a false situation into the real; he was born into reality.

Her father had called to invite her son to spend Easter school holidays at the KwaZulu family complex of which by his mother’s birth he was a member. — Baba, but wouldn’t it be better in the winter holidays, you’ll be so busy with the church over Easter.—

He dismissed delay with his old adage from a school primer. — No time like the present.—

She takes it that in her father’s wisdom he’s judged the boy is ready to bring ceremonies of the two experiences of living, which are his heritage, together in full self-confidence.

So she’s sitting again in her father’s cubby-hole of privacy: the perfectly refolded and stacked newspapers — of course her Baba’s an assiduous follower of what is evolving of the country’s freedom to which he can allow he took his part, risked to direct his daughter. But they are too engaged by her father with the decision whether Gary Elias will sleep in Baba’s house or stay with one of his mother’s brothers who has boys around the same age — to speak of what her father must have read in those papers. Jacob Zuma, the Mtowethu Zulu who before he attained the second highest position in government, Deputy President to President Mbeki, was Umpathí Wesigungu Sakwazulu-Natal, the KwaZulu head of Executive Council, these days is suspected of collusion in bribery for arms deals.

She has delivered Gary Elias to Baba.

Driving back to the city, home and Suburb where arms are the subject of speculation and questioning preoccupation between comrades — herself among them; like a tap on the shoulder: I didn’t ask. My father. What he makes of this. The Brother Zulu was one of the old Freedom Fighters out there among the best, close to Mbeki, he served his years on Robben Island. What this means. In the present.

The talent-spotting eminence, Senior Counsel who in her first years at the Justice Centre moved on appointed as a judge, had not been mistaken in casually recognising her potential. Her quick capability in providing preparatory work for the Centre’s advocates became noticed in court and she was several times approached by lawyers from commercial firms whether perhaps she was available part-time to take on Assistant Defence in one of their Common Law cases. Whether this was influenced by the fact that she was black as well as a woman would show the adherence of the firm, Abdillah Mohamed, Brian McFarlane & Partners or Cohen, Hafferjee, Viljoen & Partners, to standards of transformation of the legal profession from whites only status, was of no account so long as it was being put into practice. What was of account was that the Justice Centre, knowing it was conviction to defend the exploited that kept this bright and conscientious attorney from going into commercial practice, gave her leave to take part in private legal work now and then. The earnings at a Constitutional Rights organisation are a matter of commitment in comparison with what a lawyer can earn in commercial practice.

She might have stayed on at the firm where she was articled after she abandoned teaching at the Catholic Fathers’ School; just when he left the paint business and went into education. Hers would have been a choice of money over what had decided her concept of being alive since her recruitment to freedom struggle, the induction through detention in a prison. As generations of uncles and brothers from Baba’s extended family had been imprisoned for walking the streets of the city without the passbook in their pocket. But the choice — chance — now to engage as a lawyer honestly enough, without depriving the Justice Centre or herself of dedication, meant some resources to meet the expenses, mouths gaping for money, of the nuclear family life in the Suburb. Steve and back-up Peter Mkize, who had once been a motor mechanic before Umkhonto we Sizwe (and proved a usefully skilled cadre in the transport vehicle deficiencies of a guerrilla army) decided that her car was a write-off dangerously unreliable and selected for her to buy one that had safety features, fancy locks, she couldn’t be expected to think she’d have need of, was more pricey than she thought right for her limit of acquisition. But school fees were raised — that should be, she and Steve agreed if teachers are to be paid adequately in private schools even while those in state schools must be supported in their demands against miserable reward as if they were the least important factors in a ‘developing country’, United Nations-speak for one with no man’s land between the heights of the rich and the poverty swamps.