Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— This did not relate to Zuma’s guilt or innocence in the criminal charges against him — what the hell does that mean? — Now it is Jake who turns up: at the Reed door. She’s home, the lawyer comrade, and it’s to her that a page torn from a newspaper is thrust.

Steve brings beers and a packet of chips to one of the Suburb’s usual sites of discussion, the terrace.

— You’re guilty or you’re not guilty, isn’t that what the court decides! What else does the whole rigmarole, evidence, counter-evidence—

— Oh hold on Bra, you’re not a lawyer, neither am I, but there’s the case of extenuating circumstances, I remember that time when what’s-his-name, Fikile—

— Extenuating all right, the charges have been hanging on for a year now, no hearing.—

Under this, she has been rereading to herself the newspaper report she knows from a copy of the judgment at the Justice Centre — there were calls for a commission of inquiry. This means he says he was not in this specific corruption case handing down judgment on the arms deal — Zuma’s involved there, too, through allegations of his money-making tenders conspiracy with Shaik and the French arms company. — Look, Zuma’s had threats of prosecution over his head for years.—

— Commission of Inquiry. Not to worry, delay, delay, and it’ll all j-u-s-t go away. — Jake’s sweep of the arm to a future. It is set before them: this is what the years in prison, exile, deaths in the bush battles were for.

And Zuma himself was ten years on the Island.—

Wethu has seen Marc at the gate and brought him through the garden, the Reed and Anderson, Mkize boys come along from the street with their steeds, a rivalry of ikon-adorned bicycles.

— What’s making your cabal so long-faced, losses on the stock exchange, you should be so lucky, afford the bull and the bear ring, ay? Don’t you listen to the radio, this evening’s Friday programme how to appreciate booze was on whisky, enjoy the single malt from the unpolluted streams of Bonny Scotland, not that beer you’re swallowing brewed with urine from streams around squatter camps. — He’s come to invite them to church, not the church pool but the Anglican one where he is going to be married, and to a party with the Dolphins after. — They’re reconciled to my defection, not only same-sex marriages are respectable, kosher, now.—

The flash of laughter changes the aspect of everyone.

Isa swings round to reach him with a knowing embrace, they’re laughing together as if in some secret shared. Yes, of course, he, the Dolphin was the one who came to take care of her and the children while Jake was in hospital after the hijack attack, when no comrade made her- or himself available. After the celebratory neighbours left with the future bridegroom the mood remained. Jabu who rarely makes any intrusive remarks about the Suburb’s private lives, softly, barely mouthed, — D’you think she…did it that time when they… — He spluttered again into laughter, now at her, his turn an urge to embrace her as if in example. — Are you telling me our Isa initiated him!—

And then recovered, asking himself — why are we heteros so joyful, is he a trophy for us, do we still have a trace, throwback contempt for the third sex, righteous about any conversion to our kind, the only way to live; to be.

A week after Jacob Zuma had again walked free out of court not on a charge of rape but of corruption, the National Executive Council dismissed the President of the country, Thabo Mbeki, from the National Presidency. It’s the landline that’s summoning not the Michael Jackson signal on Sindiswa’s mobile. Jake — So the vacancy’s there for Zuma!—

The Christmas season — not in climate sense, the southern hemisphere is summer holiday time. Instead of snow for the old man’s sleigh, time of peace and goodwill brings also the time of summing up the academic year ended. Total enrolments, 97 per cent of the country’s children are in schools, 40 per cent are now no-fee schools. Recent statistics show 67.4 per cent of schools have no computers, 79.3 per cent have no libraries. And 88.4 per cent no functional lavatories.

Under the ‘Outcome Based’ education system (what’s happened to ‘Results’?) due to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme black enrolments doubled this year: black students now may enter universities with a lower academic qualification than coloured, Indian or white students. — The freedom hierarchy. — No one catches Lesego’s low bass, or if they do, takes him up on devaluing his own university. Between Faculty room farewell exchanges of who is going where, sea or mountains there is the rumour that our universities are going to lose accreditation in the world because here students are accepted without adequate qualification.

Over the seasonal get-together drinks at house or church pool in the Suburb it’s not the comrades’ academic who turns within the holiday mood to interrupt, it’s Marc, there with his bride, who’s brought up the subject — How do we know that the students are not granted degrees on the same principle, that’s the Outcome of Outcome based education…—

— How are you going to open up higher education without making some concessions for blacks to get in—

— But that’s still exactly where we were months, a year ago. — Since the injury to his spine Jake has a tic of gathering himself to pout his chest. — Can you tell me the ‘advancement’ in granting degrees to students who’re going to enter professions unequipped to do the work they’re supposed to do. What’s the sense? So people are happy to say — see, dumb blacks! That’s perpetuating the racist ‘inferiority of blacks’ brains’, that’s apartheid dolled up as Black Economic Empowerment.—

In the flying decibels of voices these are directed at Steve, the university professor. Although the comrades know about Australia: what has he to do with what happens, is going to come about in education, here.

So what right has he to be asked. To give any answer. Are they pretending not to know about Down Under, avoid, deny judgement of him, one of their own.

Presuming the comrade still has the decision for Australia in mind whether or not negotiating it; at the university Lesego in African Studies and one or two other academics sometimes speculate on who might have the chance to succeed him in the Faculty of Science; an opportunity, however come about. Everything in what’s known as the country’s new dispensation erupts, and then drags on, become somehow everyday life. The country is in its adolescence.

The Christmas season.

By chance brings return of one of those violent happenings whose consequences are resolved by Jake’s other gesture, his sweep of the arm, delay, delay, delay, it’ll just go away. The initiation of black cleaners by white students into the barbarity of white culture seemed to have done just that. There had been now and again a few inner-page references to what the university’s intentions were to be ‘dealing with the incident’. These apparently were whether the students should be allowed to continue with their studies; whether or not the university’s concern included the consequences of the ‘incident’ for the cleaners wasn’t mentioned. But while the year was running out the incident of the year before untimely surfaced; as black and white unemployed men took the Santa Claus job in supermarkets under the ritual beard, one of those students gave or sold a copy of the video and more photographs appeared in newspapers. Greeting of the guests, circus of prancing drunken display under the glee whip of encouragement, heads bent over the pot the guests were uproaringly forced to eat from; again the back of the student pissing in preparation of the potjiekos . It hasn’t just gone away: a reminder. But maybe at the wrong time. Everyone preoccupied elsewhere.