Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The half-and-half cop-out.

They’ve never talked about it, but there’s no question there’ll be a change of communication. Nothing foreign as there so often is in a decision such as theirs. English. Their language, except for her for whom it was once a second language, and there’s family usage of what was her first, passed on as some sort of accomplishment inheritance to Sindiswa and Gary Elias. There is indirect allusion, for him, when the talk around the coffee machine is of frustration of teaching in English while the student’s home language is one of the African nine. — I find I’m resorting to pidgin concocted by putting together with a first-year student a common concept, just differently expressed, he may have in his own tongue.—

The Leftist refusing to face facts. — Couldn’t just be the student’s lack of intelligence you’re finding.—

— That’s not what Steve’s saying, it’s the chaotic failure of the schools—

— The ‘learner’ has been ‘learned’ way below the level of literacy where scientific terms and processes have to be acquired as part of whatever world language is to be used—

— Because you have to have one—

— Is English as our entry to the world a survival of colonialism? Many of us blacks see it like that—

— And French, Portuguese the same, the old masters—

— Should a country that’s got rid of them demand world entry for an indigenous language — let them understand us .—

— So which among the nine that were here before the Europeans came—

Christina van Niekerk is such a quiet woman, usually it’s not noticed if she’s there (why isn’t she in an Afrikaans university) — stands sounding her Afrikaans rounded vowels. — Some among those whites evolved a language that mixed something of their Dutch with the words of Malay slaves they brought from countries they’d invaded in Malaysia, but without inclusion of languages of the indigenous San and Khoi, except for words that describe what the Dutch didn’t know, animals, customs, landscape of the natives. So we claim the taal , Afrikaans is an African not a European language.—

— And our English? Such a taal of cockney, Oxbridge posh, tribal Scots, Liverpudlian, mispronounced names of Huguenot origin, turns of phrase ‘you should be so lucky’—translated from Yiddish of grandfather immigrant Jews — we can’t claim it to be an African language? Just a relic of colonisation?—

Hominids have lived in South Africa for nearly two million years. Australia inhabited less than 60,000 years ago. He’s been reading that like the San and the Khoi, the indigenous Down Under had languages of communication between themselves and the reality of their environment before the English came to colonise, first with convicts exported. But there’s no question — Australians recognise as their language and lingua franca, English. Their created taal is known as Kriol: it’s not a mix of settlers’ tongues from Europe, but the indigenous people’s language with some English, the need to make themselves understood, by the masters.

— Whites don’t speak indigenous languages, even Kriol. — Professor Rouse invited to the coffee room from Linguistic Studies (Lesego trawls people from various faculties in eagerness to bring exchange between what he calls another apartheid). — Maybe not in Australia, but come on, you can’t say that of us — many whites, particularly males brought up on farms, they played with the farm workers’ boys, they’ve grown up isiZulu or isiXhosa or Sepedi speaking along with their parental English or Afrikaans.—

There’s another way to have your English language boy speaking an African language; this time a mother tongue since the boy’s mother is Baba’s daughter. But it isn’t appropriate to bring that up — Lesego and others who know this is their colleague’s last year among them — would be thinking, much use isiZulu will be to the boy where there are no Zulus.

She’s the one to bring up what they have taken for granted. The co-educational school they’ve decided on for Sindi (of course) and Gary Elias, his strong reservations dealt with by the promise he will be taken to look it over while in November there’s still time to make a change.

— Is the school for anyone, we’ve never asked, really. The black children.—

His reading doesn’t give an answer to a question no need of asking. The emigration people haven’t for one moment in all the to-and-fro of acceptance as desirable citizens shown any reservations (For Christ’s sake! As father Reed would say of the preposterous presented) about a black wife, she’s been there before them, the lawyer but in all her assertion of formal African dress, regal adorned head, from that first day at the seminar — what could the children be but black and white, an identity, not a ‘mixture’.

He’ll ask, although there cannot be any question on what Jabu really is raising, which is about those Australians known just as indigenes rather than black in any degree or variation. The young woman at the emigration agency is a South African employee who makes an assumption on necessity to reassure a white, like herself — Schools are open to all races, of course…it’ll depend where the schools are, if it’s not a school near where most blacks live, there’ll probably be only a few…you know, the ones whose parents…you know, can afford private schools—

He relates this to her like a feeble racist joke.

Julius Malema is in a bid to be taken seriously these last weeks before the election, his child prodigy leadership of the Youth celebrating Zuma in triumph they’ll be voting to bring about for him. Malema’s reinventing himself again, new avatar as peace envoy. He’s getting a good press now (although it was the bad capitalist — colonialist press that ridiculed, demonised — and thereby first, made him) since he’s gagged his cry ‘We’ll kill for Zuma’. His arrogation of leaders’ right to make promises there’ll be a new, functional country run by an ANC united (forget COPE): the Party has the Youth vigorously empowered with testosterone, alongside or ahead of it. A count of potency to match Zuma’s own, sexual and political.

You have to be young to ignore or be unaware of what that future may look like. A schoolfriend of Sindiswa has asked, — You’ll be coming back? — Sindi answers in a variation of emigrants’ assumption of reassurance. — Oh in the holidays — not this Christmas we’ll only just have moved there — but next year, oh sure, maybe — they have the same winter and summer as here, I think the same school holidays.—

She hasn’t told Gary of this question. But as the family eats Sunday evening takeaways he asks — Are we going back home, I mean, to see everyone, sometimes. — His father gives a gentle lesson in realities children must be trusted to understand — It’s very expensive, the flight for all of us — You can send me. I can stay with BabaMkhulu.—

— Are elections the same everywhere, other countries? — For Peter Mkize the choice of a government is a right he, Jabu, and everyone else tanned with a black DNA have experienced only twice before. The first, the euphoric freedom one, Mandela from Robben Island, prisoner to President. The second his successor Thabo Mbeki also a Struggle man despite being an intellectual who forgot that a man of the people doesn’t quote Yeats to comrade voters who are half-literate, have had poor schooling even in their own languages — and then he’s President betrayed by his brain in refusing scientific evidence that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus.

— Comrade — elections are about rivalry. For power. That’s all.—