Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Except by the presence of rising unemployment around the enclave of a university and whatever residential suburb are part of what’s to be left behind. The finger pointed down the empty gullet, surely she won’t have that, pointing at her over there.

The bishop from the Methodist Church has applied for defence against a group of shopkeepers taking the church and city to court in demand of enforcement of by-laws, the removal of toilets set up along the street. The church is inundated with something like four thousand more refugee arrivals in the city since a refugee camp just this side of the Zimbabwe border has been closed. When this was being discussed, who from the Justice Centre should go to the street and church for first-hand evidence of the situation — I know it. I’ve been there, months ago.—

Since, it has become normal life of the city while the political parties make speeches and the Suburb argues about the hidden agendas for power and the rifts between party leadership. She’d sat with Steve and the Mkizes, Andersons, attending round TV a COPE rally where Terror Lekota and the good Reverend Dandala again appeared electioneering together. This time footage showing each had prepared separately with a walkabout among the people and prayer at different churches.

Jake. — God puts his money on nobody.—

The Terror he and she were familiar with was saying — Reverend Dandala and I are on the same track. — People like Dandala in the South African Council of Churches cared for his family when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. He vociferously denies the public appearance with the Reverend alongside has anything to do with — (camera on crowd in cock-crow debating among themselves).

— What was that, didn’t get it — Isa’s appeal.

Steve and Peter crossed-voicing — Mbeki, Mbeki, Dandala supposed to be linked with our ex-President — Mbeki’s maybe muscling into COPE against Zuma—

The track returned to, Terror and Dandala embrace. Holding hands, they dance together, now Zuma’s not the only one to do the traditional African high-kick for the voters’ pleasure and reassurance: one of them.

There’s a pair of wide pyjama pants hung over the branch of one of the shrubs that once were planted to dignify the street outside the magistrates’ court. The pants shelter from the sun a child asleep. She can’t see a face, it will be one of the faces of those playing in the gutters or hanging from a woman’s hand; the soles of the feet at drawn-up legs are not black but worn grey with the friction of paving and roads. All is just as it was, only twice as much so. A continuity which overturns what this word generally means, the ultimate of disconnection: chaos. There’s no longer space for the ingenious normalcy of an old man rolling cigarettes out of bits of newspaper round tobacco scavenged from cigarette butts, the woman dividing railway lines through hair, attaching false locks on heads. The defiant culture of poverty. Culture’s the term she’s come to use, like everyone else, for an activity that’s seen as an ethnic response — the politicians dancing — and it is missing around her walkabout, this time. These people — brothers and sisters — now too destitute even to make a culture out of nothing; or they’re others come, haven’t been in this situation, at this destination of the Methodist Church long enough yet to do more than overrun the ‘culture’ established there to the disgust of the city. Well what do I know. I’m not a refugee ‘problem’ in somebody else’s country. I’m here a lawyer following an advocate’s instruction to investigate a case — scene of crime, Jake said when she told the comrades that was what she was going to be doing. Jake always ready with a wry take. You can count on him.

One of the Suburb comrades who’s member of the Communist Party — not much volume of electioneering from their small ranks but at least a few of them in government, veterans of the Struggle and likely to be in a continuing government alliance — the comrade’s theme is that race, pigment, are going to be replaced post-Struggle by class struggle evidencing itself already with the new rich, the blacks, including, don’t ignore, the youth leader Malema in designer outfits, never mind the shares it’s said he has in some big engineering industry.

A member of the class of the legal profession in her home country; not like those Brothers and Sisters whose close bodies her own is gently pushing past through the church doors. Not now. The present. But the present doesn’t last — have tenure, the legal vocabulary comes to her although Baba, before, made sure she would have a constantly expanding contemporary one for her future — even books in detention. Some of these placeless people blacks like herself are educated, with professional skills; on the wrong side of the political palaces. Baba’s Zuma, what would follow Zuma’s time, tenure, would the Youth ready to kill for him now, is it not on the condition he shall make way for them — euphemism for overthrow, discard him and take the country for themselves. Suburb soapbox talk — Luthuli had to make way for the young, didn’t he? Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu breaking down the doors the old man was knocking at.—

— They weren’t Julius Malema ready to kill in time of freedom.—

Refugee Brothers and Sisters lying on the wrong side of political palace walls of Idi Amin, Mugabe, Malema. Sindiswa and Gary Elias on some Methodist Church pavement. But no neighbouring country available as refuge, refugees from those themselves seeking a pavement to sleep on.

Australia.

She is not the eagerly confiding, open young one, his girl in the Swaziland discovery of sexuality as a natural part of political discovery: you were not white, she black in the risk of prison, torture threat to both on your short-lived existence that was set fighting to end existing categories of power, custom, what-have-you and create in their country a human one out of all the divisions bedevilling the hideous past. Working with law, its sane obstinacy defending justice within the new varieties of injustice, she has come to act as determinedly.

Ah… I don’t want to go —no echo there also in the decision of their future? They don’t need even to suppress the subject, there’s no distance between them: she’s there for him, for departure; the leaving. They’re in it together. In their bathroom, taken off the bubble of her shower cap, with the other hand she’s lifted the stiff tumbled locks released, they are dancing wildly pointing the hair about her head. — Medea! — He’s amused. But the reference is unlikely to have visual meaning for Jabu, just as in Zulu image or metaphor often her reference has no meaning — match — for him. In Australia at least however they’ll both not have references to the local foreign images, metaphors. That in common.

But if references not known between them at home are sign of the intimately irreconcilable, coming from their different ‘cultures’, aren’t they, haven’t they been from the beginning the fascination of what’s called the Other!

The aspects of the election are divergent for the different concerns of groups each in its familiar enclosure: coffee-room focus is that in its last weeks before dissolution of parliament the government has made a farewell announcement. The Ministry of Education is to be split into two departments: ‘Primary’, for schools, and for universities and technical institutions, ‘Tertiary’—avoiding the old-style category ‘Higher Education’ with its suggestion of class distinction. Probably not coincidental that in this last month before the Day of the Vote the Education Minister visited the university to inspect improvements in progress. A bank has funded a building which will provide new lecture halls, a student centre and tutorial rooms. — He doesn’t know how the guys and the gals are going to miss the necessity to squeeze up close. — It’s old Professor Miller from Maths who enjoys showing he’s cool. A new appointee in the History department, Hafferjee, a thin gold earring winking in approval. — More Internet connections for students—