Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Comrades are not accustomed to being onlookers. He gestures — enough! — the control in hand. She frowns no, stoical. If they’re not there, they’re part of the Party constituency, share responsibility for it as they did in action. There are going to be plenty of other gatherings of the Party in its election campaign, and not all a pop praise song.

She assumes the Mkizes, Jake and Isa, will be coming with Steve and her to the one in the city. Jake’s low voice — is it poor reception on a cell phone. — I don’t want to hear him sing, I want to hear him in court. — Isa is laughing in the background and her message passed on, of course they’ll be there…

It’s what was a depot for tramcars way back when the city had tramways — for Whites Only. Must have been long before this distinction was named apartheid, that term that’s even used — comrade Jake, not a Jew, often insists, to characterise mistakenly the situation between Israelis and Palestinians. Nothing to do with the justice of returning the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Palestine. Both peoples with ancient claims of origin to the same territory, whereas we whites in South Africa have no such claim, no common origin with local aborigines — unless you accept the palaeoanthropologist discovery of the origin of all hominids in The Cradle of Man, the site in this African country.

A huge skeleton shed is crowded to standing crush at the entrance. Way is made for the mixed group, either in amused recognition of the novelty among them or as a small sign of reconciliation that’s supposed to exist. A woman buffeted, answers Isa’s apology. — Welcome, my sister — this electioneering event is in one of the ‘safe’ areas of the country, confident of Party votes. ‘Kill for Zuma!’—some youths have declared — Isa looks about, quoting in mumble. Jake prods her along by the elbow — Well, suppose Zuma’s ‘Bring Me My Machine Gun’ is heard as permission.—

— See any AKs. — Peter is gazing around from where the comrades from the Suburb have found a bench and people in possession have shifted to make cramped space. There’s nothing to signify in appearances, anyone who isn’t too fat is like the Suburbans, in jeans; there are the usual hair constructions, more spiky than Jabu’s, some Afro-bushes dyed redhead, nose-rings and shackling ear-baubles. Isa’s appreciative of political participation. — That’s how we are…you can’t tell which is pop group and which is Youth League showing signals of having outgrown wisdom from Party leaders—

— Heritage isn’t a grand old pile out of which nothing new must come.—

— Stevie — Blessing, head on side. — Shame, they mustn’t rubbish it.—

— Mandela and Tambo, the young ones, changed Luthuli’s ANC, the great man for the reality of his time — for what they’d say, ‘knocking on the back door’—youth came up, eh, and brought the Party to Umkhonto .—

— That’s it! That’s it! We need a youth group, wild to keep us awake, know it’s now — a luta continua —but it’s a new one at home and globalised, Internet, blog. — Peter repeats in a mix of isiZulu and isiXhosa, for the benefit of the sharers on the bench he hears speaking in their tongues.

— So we’ve got to take up the AK to fight a free and fair election? — He hasn’t waited for Peter to finish the translation amid the delighted attention of the beneficiaries.

His own vehemence registered by Isa; he’s aware of the questioning blankness turned on him: her usually expressive face.

Zuma has not come to address this gathering. Kgalema Motlanthe, interim President of the country since Thabo Mbeki was dismissed, is up there. Jabu, just loud enough to be heard — He was under pressure to appoint an inquiry into the arms deals.—

Motlanthe repeats Party promises, he doesn’t charm, sing or dance. Speeches have had their place, electioneering is taken over by the crowd. A man has heaved to the vacated stage a bulbous street-shiny successor to the cowhide drum and stretches a crane of arm to haul beside him a small boy clutched round an example of the old kind. The man performs, with all fury of a star preacher, angry hysteria of victory to bring about an event to come, and turns a gasp for breath into command for the boy to lift his child’s head too big for the body, and flail tiny hands expertly over his drum. Out of the battle-song chorus of the crowd all the women have risen and are wending widely round and round, up and down, they are the breasts and belly foremost of an anti-privatisation movement’s expectation, government takeover of the mines, gold, platinum, uranium, coal. The stark echo of the tram shelter becomes itself their voice.

Jabu beside him sings with her sisters, from where she sits; one of the men sharing the bench legs up over it to cheer AMANDLA! brotherhood granted he leans to put an arm either side on Peter Mkize and the academic who has the promise of professorship in Australia. AMANDLA! It comes out of this one along with the Brother, Jake, Peter and Isa. But not Jabu; as if now she hasn’t the right? Although she cannot help singing. AWETHU! the others respond with the call from the crowd, power to the people.

Was Isa bewildered, after all, by his presence; was that what had come to him from her moment of blankness, earlier. What do hopes in this election have to do with Steve and Jabu, now.

Life goes on. Whether or not there is a future in common. It’s a life of contentions when national elections announced for 22 April may bring personal as well as social change some will receive as justice and progress, others as defeat and danger to these.

The trade unions in ANC’s Congress Alliance produce a booklet attack on COPE. There’s accusation of Struggle Heroes, COPE President Mosiuoa (Terror) Lekota and his Deputy President Mbhazima Shilowa having deserted the African National Congress to ‘pursue an agenda of the capitalist class’.

And there’s some sort of division already in the breakaway party itself: a pastor nobody but his congregation seems to have heard of, a Reverend Dandala — his face is the one that’s appearing instead of Lekota’s on COPE election posters. So is this the leader of the party now?

— How can Terror be ditched, what for! It’s mad.—

He has the answer for her, she ought to have known. — To capture from Zuma a big haul — rural Christians who’ll follow a man of the Church, God’s will, ei-heh .—

Election time. The ANC in the Free State finds it a time to decide the other kind of initiative, the students’ ‘initiation’ in that province hasn’t quite gone away: it’s time for a black principal to ‘undo the damage’ at the university. Political pressure is now on to find one. The racist nightmare of last year will shudder back — no excuses. Principal Fourie, white, must be replaced; but the ANC complains there’s not much effort by the university to attract a ‘progressive’ candidate. The four students about whom headlines of the urination into a pot of stew for blacks went around the world will go on trial — later — in August this year, charged with crimen injuria .

August. The same month. Jacob Zuma’s lawyers have formally proposed the date 12 August for his application for his corruption prosecution to be permanently quashed. He has promised his application will detail a political conspiracy behind the corruption, racketeering, money laundering and fraud charges against him.

The precedent in other countries is that the President cannot be charged with alleged offences committed before his election to Presidency. The election of the new government and a new President will be on 22 April.

August: four more months later. This charge really will go away.