Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

This is the last. To be the last change of time in the Suburb, with its normal life claimed.

Subject Ozl: OUR PEOPLE

It’s the heading of information pages come online to his room in the faculty. Australia the world’s smallest continent and sixth largest country etc. (all that’s in the cuttings read before). Indigenous people lived on that continent up to 60,000 years ago; their lives were changed irrevocably after the British claimed Australia in 1788. British colonisation began as a penal colony with convicts shipped from Britain. Free settlers from there were joined by people from other parts of Europe, and Malays, Japanese…they started the pearling industries. By the 1930s the indigenous population was reduced to 20 per cent of its original size. Today a little more than 2 per cent of Australians are identified as Indigenous (seems ‘aboriginal’ has become a no-no, like ‘Kaffir’). Largescale immigration began after the Second World War…and after the abolition of the ‘White Australia’ policy, migrants came from many parts of Asia. Recent patterns show more coming from Africa.

In the years that followed European settlement the indigenous population declined significantly as a result of increased mortality. In 1967 the Australian Constitution was changed to recognise the indigenous for inclusion in the national census. (So earlier figures must be guess estimates?)

RECONCILIATION. Six years into the twenty-first century that population had increased by 11 per cent to 450,000 out of the country’s total 21 million. In 1992 in the High Court of Australia, Eddie Mabo was the first Indigenous person to have native title rights to land recognised on behalf of Indigenous people. The Mabo decision led to the establishment of the Native Title Act 1993 which recognises native land ownership throughout Australia. In 2008 the Australian Prime Minister apologised to the Indigenous people for the ‘Stolen Generation’: the Indigenous children who between 1910 and 1970 were forcibly removed from their families, inflicting profound suffering and loss in Indigenous Australians. Education, health, housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than non-Indigenous Australians…overcrowding is associated with poor health outcomes, 2004–5 health survey found 27 per cent of Indigenous were living in overcrowded conditions.

White South Africans didn’t apologise to black South Africans for the abuse suffered by blacks from whites, seventeenth century to apartheid’s final perfection of the means. Didn’t apologise for anything — didn’t have to, they were dealt with in the retribution that counts most — their last regime finished off by the Struggle.

Humans lived in Australia 60,000 years ago.

The San, humans living in what is now South Africa 200,000 years ago, joined by the Khoi Iron Age people from the north of the African continent; these also have managed to survive under whites that saw them as hardly human — some must have done so by clandestine breeding with other blacks, the whites’ Malay slaves — and even the whites? They got the vote along with everyone else in 1994. They now have radio stations broadcasting in what has survived of their own languages. They live wretchedly degraded in poverty, the freedom transformation of the country to which they belong more than any others in the population.

So it’s not emigration. What’s left behind? It’s not another country, if you’re an aborigine, over there.

At home in their living room, he has the information at hand to show her. She’s worked late at the Centre, it has taken on a case against mining companies which have for years dismissed with token or no compensation workers who contract asbestos poisoning and develop TB due to conditions breathed in underground.

She gives it back in the gesture for later.

— Not going well? — The case, he’s aware, has been lost in two lower courts, now it is for the Constitution height.

Doesn’t seem to have accepted the question. She’s telling him something, nothing to do with the day’s work. — I stopped by the supermarket for grapes Sindi wants and one of the men who hawk brooms in the street came up to me, now, as I was leaving. I gave the usual sorry, don’t need, and he said Headmaster Gumede’s daughter, I know you — recognised me from home, even my name. He’s one of Baba’s schoolboys but he hasn’t found a job since he finished school two years ago. Come out of Baba’s school really literate, numerate…all he can do to feed himself is try to sell straw brooms he says Zimbabwe refugee women make.—

She has an aspect of being unreachable. How say to her, give her the other handout, the man’s one of thousands. But this is one of Baba’s charges, educated by Baba for the new opportunities. She’s describing exactly how the man approached, the mask of the beggar’s confronting face that comes with the calling as that of the preacher or the judge comes with theirs. What he is seeing is that what she, Jabu, is experiencing is guilt. Why? She’s guilty of belonging to the new black class that is not out on the streets. Not a cadre along with a Home-Boy whom Baba hasn’t been able to give freedom as he gave it to her to pursue. Guilty of false pretences.

That’s what this country is doing to its people. Guilt for the better life for all not being delivered by themselves. If you stay put long enough perhaps that will just go away, away, a court case not heard. Only Jabu giving judgement on herself.

So long as she lives here.

He’s taking cuttings from newspapers and printouts from Internet not only on Australia; about here and now. She doesn’t ask for explanation of this, she has it in herself — surely he’s also realised it has no purpose. He is in negotiations with universities Over There.

Unless — will we still follow. What happens, is going to happen not just to our own we’ve left, Baba KwaZulu; and even his Reed family he isn’t close to. The transformation; it is going to come now. The date of the national election this year is soon to be announced, already there are the promises from those hoping to stand for parliament. Shifting alliances of politicians’ bargaining, power patterns; the new kind of Struggle. What changes are coming, inevitable. At the Justice Centre, it’s the judiciary in debate.

— Too many white backsides seated on the Bench and too few blacks, that’s the first contention—

— Judgments affecting government ministers and high-rank public servants influenced in their favour by government—

— Hold on — perceived to be, ay—

— And if there is — must be — democratic balance in proper proportion to the black majority — that’s going to change pardons for pals—

— Conclusion. Don’t clean up connivances, call corruption what it is. — One of the advocates from whom she has learned so much has the right to reproach her.

— What’s the future of the Judicial Commission? Who’ll survive. Will the Commission continue to be the independent body to appoint judges, with the president-whoever-he-is — The colleague is interrupted — What d’you mean, whoever — (someone barks a laugh, they all know it will be Zuma.) — The President putting up his chosen four along with rubber-stamping the Commission’s choices — won’t he simply disband the J.C., make all appointees to the Branch himself.—

— Himself! Zuma he’s been on the wrong side of the law. So that’s his qualification for knowledge of who is and who’s not fit to be a judge. — At once names of some come up who’ll understand the obligation to keep the President’s men out of jail. She brings this insider disquiet back to the Suburb, the bedroom night talks, and to exchanges with the comrades whose concerns these are going to be. He has for her a cutting from the night’s newspaper in his hand, not yet added to the storage box he’s keeping on the shelf the Australian immigration ones fell from. Nine million illiterates out of a population of 48 million. That’s a figure to sleep on before you begin to think about her KwaZulu Home-Boy wandering the street with straw brooms hitched against his shoulders.