Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The Dolphins and comrades continue to follow the electioneering but their counter-crossfire to the blast prevails at the touch of a remote control that drops the politicians into night.

Wherever Suburb comrades and comrades of the Struggle are together there is now an underlying strain felt almost in the juxtaposition of the familiar bodies, the known characteristics of crossed legs, cracking of knuckles — they may have become strangers. Since the split, breakaway in the party, each unbelievably — unacceptably — does not know how the other right there at the Dolphin pool, in the Mkizes’ house, on the Reed terrace, under the Jake and Isa garden umbrellas — is going to vote. It has become a fact of life in common, better left unsaid. Unasked.

This can’t mean there is no exchange of impressions, arguments over the tendencies, Left, Right, uneasy Centre — politics no longer simply white against black.

Peter Mkize, Umkhonto cadre, is a scornful descendant of tribal society, the — nevertheless legitimate? — base of the black Traditionalist party. — Are they Left, Right, Centre? What? If you sit yourself in a European model parliament, that’s what we’ve taken over from the colonialists, that’s what we’ve got, my Bras — you have to position yourself — see what I mean — in the way that House knows politics, like the way followers of the church see Catholic, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, so on, everybody knows the different kinds of Christians all expecting to be saved.—

— Sharp sharp! But no no no. — Lesego, all colloquial in defiance of being an academic, has come to the Mkize house with Steve, this time. — There’s nationalism, the African nation, wasn’t that how it was, early days of the ANC, Mandela, until the SACP brought the light of the Left, scared some people it might be kind of Outside: colonial. There’s nationalism in power in many countries on our continent, maybe under a different fancy African name. For them…The rest of the world can go to hell, not Brothers in the Underdog we still share.—

Jake looks to Steve for his concurrence. — We’re as a nation committed to switching away from the old North — South, South — North axis, yes we’re getting good trade and other connections, India, Brazil—

— China. — It’s Mkize again. — I’ll bet everyone here’s wearing jeans made in China. Including me. Our textile people can’t compete with the cheap price of slave-labour stuff. Has Zuma or Lekota said anything, what they will do about that. China coming. Already own twenty per cent in our biggest bank.—

At election time you question the intentions of those whose political eloquence is hooked for your vote. He can’t ask — but what if the Party whose human aims you share, even risked lives for, is snarling against itself, now in what is only the third election in freedom — which side, now, in the break has what you and she believe in?

Where you ‘belonged’.

Other political parties are of no account to members of the African National Congress although they’re disgusted — embarrassed? — by the behaviour of their own Youth League’s crude insults to a white woman, leader of a liberal party generally regarded as white with a growing tint from voters in its territorial majority of descendants of the indigenous San and Khoi aborigines, mixed with blacks and colonialist variety, the real people native to South Africa. Babyface Malema said the politician was a white whore who selected only white males for her provincial cabinet because she sleeps with them all. A political wily caper: at the same time he also claims respect for women’s rights. Anything goes in platform audacity.

The two halves of what was the unity of the comrades’ Party.

Zuma — of course — its Presidential candidate — his sacredly danced promises of integrity to the Party’s great vision, the mantra ‘Better Life For All’, is obsessively seen and heard.

Mosiuoa Terror Lekota shares his COPE platform with that Reverend Dandala who turns out to talk some sober sense on what could be done for the better life but hasn’t the flair of Terror to suggest COPE could achieve it. Terror has been joined by another deserter of the Party, Tokyo Sexwale, a stronger ally than the Reverend. But maybe a risk as a rival to head COPE?

Insecurity added to the great breach between Terror and Zuma, broken apart in this other Struggle — it’s Jake who’s said it, and repeats — Who could ever have thought. We’d come to this.—

What are we, Steven and Jabulile doing here, giving opinions like our comrades, about what the politicians actually are dealing with both when they declare their policies of government are those the people need and want, and when they attack (not with Malema’s obscenities but just within the limits of free speech) the hopelessness of other parties to meet these.

Comrades; about to vote. Each sees in the familiar aspect of the other — is it to be loyalty to the Party, Mandela’s, that brought freedom. That means: Zuma. For the purpose of power to the Party.

— Tales of corruption among his peers are being unearthed, tattered and dirty; who revealed state security information in exchange for how much.—

Zuma is the Party now. If its self-severed half is the alternative — and for the comrades there’s no third — has Terror Lekota taken the ethos of the Party in his pocket, rescued it. To keep it alive: a shift of the loyal vote. That means: Lekota.

The decision the comrades are having to make exists as a state somehow in common rather than as it is, irrelevant to the two among them who have taken the option of leaving behind the obligation — no, giving up the birthright, to vote for what kind of leaders, what government commitment to justice there’ll be in the fairy-tale slogan.

Jake can’t keep his mouth shut even to spare himself. — Who’re you going to vote for?—

Some sighs to reject the intrusion, others laugh at exposures that could threaten comradeship, and no one remarks that he and she laugh with them.

The bookshop and university library have few books by Australian writers compared with, say, literature of India, contemporaries from Satyajit Ray to Salman Rushdie, novels, poetry, within that country and its relation to the world. But the presence of India is historical. The population’s share of South Africans of Indian origin: indentured labourers in the nineteenth century, through the years of Gandhi’s presence and influence on the early liberation movement; the enterprise of a shopkeeper class despite segregation: the emergence of South African Indians beside Mandela in the Struggle and continuing prominently in freedom politics. Australia; that country to which people emigrate doesn’t have a pervading presence among local images. Online he can order Patrick White (whose early books he’d read long before there was any idea he’d ever live in the country they invoked), David Malouf, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally. Jake says he’d better not read Germaine Greer, and he’s therefore ordered a work with a kick in the butt title Whitefella Jump Up and the subtitle claim, ‘The Shortest Way to Nationhood’. It turns out to be a skilled tirade with some home truths about the attitudes of white Australians to the remnant of Australian aboriginal people. He comes to a page where she says ‘it was only when I was half a world away that I could suddenly see that what was operating in Australia was apartheid, the separation and alienation South Africa tried desperately and savagely to impose on their black majority…I want to see an end to the problemisation of aborigines. Blackfellas are not and never were a problem. They were the solution if only whitefellas had been able to see it.’

She once owned a rainforest property in Australia and for a time divided her life between professorship at a university in England and her home forest.