Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

What is called the intake of shades-of-black students at the Faculty of Science has increased at least sufficiently to more than compensate for those who have failed their year or abandoned the idea of becoming an industrial chemist, engineer, and other scientific professionals, either because they’ve run out of scholarship support or the best intentions of band-aid classes have not proved able to subvent poor teaching of maths in schools from which they came. Research has become part of the curriculum, study of climate change, as well as alternatives to fossil fuels as producers of electric power. The university Business School has the largest number of new students, no longer seen as a dead end if you weren’t white and had the footprints of a businessman father to lead you into company directorship, banking, commerce. There are black directors in mining cartels and shopping mall complexes, insurance companies. It’s encouraging, while understood, certainly by an academic that attending lectures together, working in labs, libraries, side by side at computers and canteen takeouts is the simple side of transformation; so long as students live at home or in some pad in the city. Hostels bring together in the intimacy of shower stalls, adjoining beds, place for the need of differing personal possessions, the skin colours and habits of young people who have never lived together in the same closed space before. There’ve been some incidents of minor spats at the ‘mixed’ hostels — mixed only in the old jargon of race — these students play hard rock recordings when others are trying to study, this guy blocks the wash basin with combings from his hair; nothing serious as inference of racism.

A New Year.

The newspaper report of what happened last year at a university, in a part of the country that still has its old Boer Republic name — Free State — long preceding apartheid, dating from Boer defiance against the British (fellow) colonisers — it’s hardly credible in the version now revealed by whoever the informant or informers were.

There are accounts pursued for months by journalists on the Internet from individuals anonymous, reluctant to be interviewed, and then — photographs. Somehow got hold of, clips of a video apparently made by some of the participants in whatever the event was supposed to be. White students at the traditionally Afrikaans university of The Free State held out the ultimate hand of non-racialism and no class prejudice by inviting the university cleaners of their hostel, black, to a party customarily marking the initiation of new students, usually a very private clandestine ritual. The mostly elderly four women and one man whose role in these students’ higher education was to clean up after them, danced in drunken freedom, and then on their knees forced to help themselves generously from a pot of stew. One of the students had pissed into it.

What was the progenitor.

Yes. yes. Need to know. It goes that far back, initiation. Beyond ancient history, not of battles and kings, tyrants and slaves. Back beyond all that — into evolution. But not how apes stood upright and lost their tails. So very far: back to the intimate anatomy. If you’re female, Jabu is a girl, you have a definitive initiation in your body. The day of that is when you bleed. (What it must be like to put your hand between your thighs and there it is.) You have become a woman. As a male, a boy, for us nothing so drastic as bloodletting. The rising of the worm you pee through, become a stiff upright, it happens apparently in the womb and you can make it happen through childhood by toying with it. Must have experienced when the attention of your hand became urgent and there was fluid spurting excitement, pleasure. So. Then you were not a boy: a man.

Rituals the body has.

Was there some sort of other, gleeful ceremonial in the dorms at the high school where Reeds have been educated over at least two generations. Don’t remember so could not have been significant either as good or traumatic. Must anyway have felt by it totally recognised, safe and accepted, in that manly white enclave, sons of those who mattered.

University. Could you call it recruitment outside the curriculum. Nothing so authoritative. Initiation; beginning to understand a contradiction in the ways of living, let alone thinking — that’s political initiation. Didn’t really come out of the bibles of revolution read: rather the disappearances into Swaziland, putting into practice tentatives of what theory called liberation, contradictions resolved by action, you can choose sides, you don’t have to belong in the one you were born to. Guts not obedience. The proof of it later at the paint factory, ingredient of concoction of explosives to blow up power substations and rupture the service of apartheid. Initiation: what you yourself did.

And Umkhonto . The comrades who went for the first time on raids, into battle across the desert and through the bush, to kill the apartheid army and be killed by them — what student hostel initiation, if it is to test endurance, did they need.

Religious initiation. But of course how could you remember that you must have yelled as you were snipped — when do Jews do it — before two weeks old? — at some atavistic whim of your mother married to a Gentile (if not observant Christian). Muslims do it at a stage in development, marriage, when at least it makes more sense to become a man by ordeal of some sort; we males don’t go through childbirth. And the justification, for non-believers: it’s not mutilation but a hygienic advantage. And there are differing opinions apparently, among women frank enough in gender freedom to come out with these: intercourse with a circumcised penis is more/less rousing than with an intact foreskin. What will she say. It’d imply a wider experience than with me. Before me? Since. You don’t ask such opinions of your woman.

As with Jews and Muslims, initiation to manhood is tribal among Africans. AmaXhosa circumcise in adolescence or adulthood, in time to be considered a man ready for marriage, Zulus don’t, any more. It’s probably not in the traditions observed now by her Baba.

Not only is the coffee hot in the Faculty room. Westling from Psychology should have something enlightening to say on the Free State. He is professionally beyond disgust, judgement — Suffering. Doesn’t have to be surgical. It seems adult initiations all involve that other form: humiliation. You have to show you can take it, the jeering and taunting by your peers. And then you get drunk with them. That’s exactly what it is, what it’s supposed to signify you become one of them, behaviour of your own adult-kind, as in turn you will initiate the next student.—

— But it is exactly that what has happened at that university was not.—

Lesego is ready. — What do the people who scrub the floor flush the shit from the lavatory have to do with students becoming men? It wasn’t, can’t be initiation . Tell me, say it, into what? Those students accepting them as their own, same as themselves? Out of despising those men and women who clean their dirt they trick them into something you can’t even think about. Was the come on in, the worst insult of all; invite these poor blacks to party with the students, get them drunk, make them dance for you — and then eat from a pot one of the same students has pissed in. It’s all there, filmed on video.—

But the academic colleagues don’t commit themselves to probing revulsion, disgust, and — understood but not breathed — something like that , unimaginable as it is, could happen only in that province, that university.

Disgust. Disgust can’t be the end of it.