Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Additions to the store of newspaper cuttings are continuing. In particular concerning education. At a university of technology students reported to be horrified at rubber bullets fired on the university’s workers who had rejected a wage increase. The university says ‘Trying to match wages with other human resources — the challenges are still primary’. Women living in a hostel where 800 people share four toilets in one of Johannesburg’s old ‘locations’ are demanding decent housing the way industrial workers use the streets for protest but in the higher register of women’s voices and the different spectacle of female bodies. Some group on a high have announced the launch of the Dagga Party to join the electioneering roster. Shabir Shaik, Zuma’s friend and financial adviser in the arms corruption case is released from prison on medical parole grounds of a state of approaching death and is seen driving his car around his city. At a university other than that of the initiation potjiekos the principal has aligned himself with COPE, making an impassioned speech of support at a COPE convention; as a result the Congress of South African Trade Unions, part of the ANC alliance, says it will campaign until the principal steps down from office. Study for Democracy at yet another university declares that the principals must be non-partisan; the Chair of a Parliamentary Education portfolio committee says there is no law against voicing one’s political affiliation.

Fallen leaves, paper sweepings on the shelf. Among hard news, the writer quotes from an open letter to Nelson Mandela by a poet long away in emigration, an Afrikaner freedom militant jailed for years during the apartheid regime. Breyten Breytenbach to Mandela. ‘I must tell you this terrible thing…if a young South African were to ask me whether he or she should stay or leave my bitter advice would be to go. For the seeable future now, if you want to live your life to the full with some satisfaction and usefulness, and if you can stand the loss, if you can amputate yourself, then go.’ A fellow Afrikaner Max du Preez answers in his newspaper column ‘It is not only possible to live a full and useful life in South Africa of today. It is indeed easier to do it here than in, say France or the US…or Australia, Canada or the United Kingdom, other favourites among white South Africans.’ And there are the last lines in the ragged cutting ‘Don’t allow bad politics to drive you out of the country of your heart.’

Election time. Among Suburb comrades there’s not much exchange of the usual parents’ talk about their children, except in the projection of what form of political perspective — no longer rising sun post-apartheid but the present freedom’s storms — will mean for the generation. Whether this child is showing aptitude for maths, that one is sulky, this is ignored, aside, when the determinants of coexistence are all-demanding.

But the private school for boys Gary Elias chose to be with his pal Njabulo Mkize has its news headline somewhere down among the heavy-type of the municipal workers’ strike leaving the streets turned slum with trash, the transport workers’ strikes leaving commuters stranded; darkness, lights out when power fails. (And it’s not due to Umkhonto homemade explosives placed in substations, now.) A group of seniors living in the youth hostel lined boys up against a wall for an initiation. They beat them with golf clubs and cricket bats until their buttocks bled; a mother has laid charges of assault against the school; her son was forced to rub a powerful substance, ‘Deep Heat’, used for the relief of muscle pain, on his genitals.

Njabulo and Gary Elias are not boarders in the school hostel. Of course they are back home safely in the Suburb with Blessing and Peter, Jabu and Steve, every night.

What kind of assurance is that.

Jake’s house is the tribunal for whatever affects the comrades, although the Anderson boys don’t attend the Mkize and Reed boys’ school. But as the calm survivor of peacetime violence, robbed of his car and dumped unconscious in a vacant lot, succoured by homeless people dossed down there for the night, Jake is the one who can be counted on to see situations objectively; what he has been able to come to in himself he can arrive at for others.

It’s Peter Mkize who has been to the school, walked in on the headmaster; been assured a teacher in charge of the hostel has been ‘suspended’, the head boy at the hostel has been ‘removed’.

— Where? — Jabu would have pursued: and does. — There’s only one hostel.—

— Is that enough. Everything’s OK. Finish and klaar . — It’s Marc who has no children. Marc and Claire (the shift to think ‘Marc and his wife’) have dropped in by chance after Jake called the Mkizes and the Reeds to come round without explanation needed.

The boys whose future is in question are out taking part in a cycling marathon the school arranged to raise money for the fund it has created to donate sports equipment to rural and shack settlement schools who can’t afford golf clubs and cricket bats.

— How come our hostel boys have golf clubs —we didn’t know private schools provide coaching for the future chairmen of boards—

— But Jabu, don’t forget comrade Thabo Mbeki, when he was president, he revolutionised the status of blacks on the golf course from caddy to player, taking up golf, low handicap he had, himself. — Jake gets his laugh.

— D’you think the leader should be expelled? — Isa seems unaccustomedly embarrassed by the Mkizes and the Reeds with whom until now so much has been shared. Anderson boys are not at that school, don’t risk being initiated or initiating others — so far as the Andersons are aware.

— What’d you do if it’d been your boy — The playwright, dramatic. — I mean how’d it feel for anyone to know your own kid had somehow become so brutal, where did it come from in his life, the decency he must get from you — you’d know, wouldn’t you — he wasn’t a kid you’d let torture a kitten.—

— It’s not just the one they’ve ‘removed’, there was a gang, can a school expel a group maybe most of them in that hostel have been through the ordeal, proud of it, expect others to be tested the way they were — one of these manhood rituals eih , isn’t what’s really behind it is that a male must be made killer enough to be conscripted to kill in some war your country decides on. Peter — blacks, you have your initiation, circumcision school whatever you call them, in the bush, and look at the cases when the job is botched, the victim suffers horribly to ‘become’ a man.—

— We Zulus don’t circumcise, Steve, don’t you know that—

Reproach: white ignorance.

A Christian father, yet ritually, as a baby, made a man, the Jewish way, was that really what my mother couldn’t have known: preparation for the Struggle…and finally a man for the contradictions of a decision.

— Violence is — cool — even if the hero wins in the end it’s also by violence — all this comes to our children on TV. We allow them to see hours of it — Peter’s head is jerking, his eyes squeezed, then wide. — What happened last year not in a school — a university? Right, not on TV, but d’you think those boys haven’t followed that shit, what’s to be done with the big brothers at schools whose filthy kind of initiation has been got away with — that’s manpower all right? They followed…—

— Subconsciously. — Marc supplies for Peter.

— Eish , I wouldn’t know how to explain it, perhaps someone else…? Something in the…what we breathe—

It’s Blessing, who listens more than she speaks. — We haven’t asked our boys. What they want us to do about — school. How they feel.—