Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

If there was a refugee camp just over the road from Aristotle School, and the boys showed off on their mountain bikes in their school uniforms—?

What is he coming to; always expecting another aspect from her, this began for them long ago in Swaziland. She knows what he’s saying for himself and for her.

— No — it’s not the same, you can’t say that, you have to look at what would have happened before. The boys from the camp and the boys from the school have played soccer together, the school invited the boys over to the grounds, the swimming pool…—

— Liberal cop-out! You don’t change the lives of rejects, you just make for them a few hours more bearable—

— Yes. Yes you do . Or you don’t even do that for them while they’re waiting for the new justice, globalisation, African Union — whatsit — to award their claim—

—‘Award’. An award, that’s also a handout, given to you by somebody else.—

But Jabu is a lawyer, she uses the term objectively as it signifies in court, the wronged have a right to what they are wrongfully deprived of. What she knows, he doesn’t, is what a single recognition — a librarian secretly lending a man books from a library he’s barred to use — means in the man’s life and by consequence that of his daughter.

The contradictions to deal with right on your own doorstep. At present. Schools, microcosms of worlds. Gary Elias is campaigning, in the freedom to express themselves Jabu and Steve expect of their children, to leave that school chosen for him, Aristotle, where they’ve seen him develop well, out of his withdrawn nature. That was congenital? Or their fault, something in their nature? The instinct to regard children within the deepest relation they themselves have known along with the sexual intimacy out of which these children have come: regarding them as comrades. Withdrawn. Something in the genes? Sindi has the same ample DNA, of Pauline and Andrew Reed, back to the mating of different bloods during the Crusades, the English who were Shakespeare’s Globe audiences, the nineteenth-century diaspora Czarist Jews, back to the tribal wars of Chaka and Mzilikazi and the Christianised pastors, the ancient African and colonialised line of Elias Siphiwe Gumede, Elder, Headmaster. Sindi at Aristotle School throws her arms round the world she’s born to.

Gary Elias is choosing for himself the boys’ school in a suburb and of the time when he, Steve, went to school, upmarket (that current social identity tag) and gender segregated. He wants that boys’ school, a former white school, because his best friend, Peter Mkize’s son Njabulo, is a pupil there. Of course the school is non-racial now, Mkize’s son wouldn’t otherwise have been accepted and neither would Gary Elias be, coloured by his mother’s blood. Gary Elias had not been unhappy at the school, Aristotle, that was everything a school should be; proof of that in the opening of his personality to be seen. But the explanation, also to be seen, was that he was in that intense state of bonding friendship with Njabulo that happens in childhood and is strongest, against family bonds, until adolescent stirrings in the testes take over in turn. Sindiswa affronted by lack of loyalty to their school, attacked, to dissuade him; but she was a sister…his parents — so many selves to be responsible to as individuals — went to Peter and his wife, a ‘mixed couple’ in another recipe, Peter Jabu’s brother Zulu, Blessing Khosa, to be informed about Njabulo’s school. The comrades were reassuring, their son was getting a good education and — they’re frank — no trouble with the white boys, everyone gets along together.

There was to be an interview with the headmaster.

— Is he black, we didn’t ask Peter.—

— Does it matter, the headmaster at Aristotle’s not.—

She’s amused, as a reproach to the question.

The uniform and badges for the school are bought, his Assistant Professor father takes him to his first term, first day, he’s tactfully insinuated that it shouldn’t be a mother who would; and from then on the Mkizes will transport Gary along with their Njabulo.

For Gary Elias, it can be seen at breakfast, these mornings now are joyous rendezvous.

What would her Baba — headmaster — think of the move.

Her open face is of one who hasn’t yet given a thought to this, but they have a past, she and her father, and what he would declare, matters.

— I don’t know what he felt about Aristotle. He’d only want to know if the standard of teaching is high. The rest — her fingers are interleaved and the thumbs open widely the cup of palms — he expects of us. You and me… — She makes clear as if in formal terms unfamiliar to them — The father and the mother.—

It is actual that the boy’s expanding experience, the first weeks in a new all-male environment on his own decision, a venture out of the adult determinations of childhood, is overwhelmed for them by distortion all around the country of the standard human behaviour it set for itself against that of its deadly past. In the area where most blacks and shades-of-black (blend of Sindiswa and Gary Elias) still live although if they could afford the politician’s better life for all they could live wherever they liked, the refugee immigrants have moved in where because of their colour they won’t be noticed in the mass. There’re African Brothers who crowd the already insufferably packed shacks, draw the tap water that is hardly enough for the local community. White: unless you stick your nose into places like the precinct of the Methodist Church and the squatters on the wrong side of the road, you don’t have to be particularly aware of this invasion except for being importuned at suburban shopping malls by more and more beggars’ outstretched hands. In the townships and shacks the presence of refugees — uncounted, who knows, getting in illegally over the vast borders impossible to control, the river some swim across in low water season. Unlike rate-paying property owners of fine houses the poor in their squatter camps have no hope of an official order ridding themselves of the invaders.

No authority but what they can lay their hands on: knives, axes, their resident gangs’ stolen guns; fire. Some Somalis fled from their country’s particular conflict bring with them their trading instincts and have set up stores which are torched with the new traditional weapons of South Africa resorted to during the Struggle, burning tyres.

And the invaders are fighting back.

In band-aid bridging classes, academic subjects give way to the Science Faculty Assistant Professor’s volunteer lecturers’ and their students’ uneasy preoccupation, via the remove of television, with the wilderness violence beyond the campus. Lesego Moloi from African Studies in the Faculty of Humanities: the refugees — They’re not The Brothers now, they are The Foreigners.—

When she hears what’s been said at the university she doesn’t this time ask again, what are they going to do about it. The teachers, the students.

What are the Comrades going to, can do about it, the cadres of Umkhonto (can you ever be an ex-cadre?)

Done what they had to do : in the Struggle, and have no say, unless they are city councillors or sitting in parliament, in the conduct of the free country. Cadres that’s us: Peter Mkize, Jake and all the other comrades, we companeros of the Suburb. Marc, round the any-colour, any-race, any-sex swimming pool reads aloud from the weekend papers.

— Xenophobia — the whole country’s xenophobic…I don’t know if you can just talk it off like that—

— Well, what else—

Jake signalling — Peter, xenophobia, African hating African?—

She is accustomed to precision. Jabu breaks in — Is everyone sure what they mean.—