Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Steve brought students to the house. There would be peanuts and cartons of fruit juice dumped on the small terrace for hospitality, although they might have preferred beer and good pot. These were not seminars, their prof (as they called him although he was still only a senior lecturer) invited them as young friends. That most of them were in what used to be called the ‘non’ category, non-European: African Black, African Indian, African-God-knows-mixture-white, something new to the science faculty at the university, as company was nothing new to Jabu and him as it was for many who might receive them in their homes as people other than servants. Struggle had no non-categories among identities of comrades. There was no sense of inadequacy of a white comrade in that he didn’t know the languages of the cadres where he was minority with communication only in his native English. The few friendly colloquialisms of African tongues he had picked up as every kind of collective with shared aims, activity, conditions, has its own jargon, made do; after all, there were the Cuban cadres most of whom didn’t even know two words of lingua franca English, brothers though they proved themselves, coming from vast distance other than that between the black and white cadres when they were boys.

That was then. Now the allowance made — to himself, and by his black friends, Mkize and others, the students attracted to the subjects he had taught — it belonged to the dead and the buried. He was an African although he didn’t understand, couldn’t communicate in any African language — allowance made by his lover, mother of their child, Jabulile herself? Had never spoken to her those intimate words that must be known to her more committing than darling my love etc., the second-hand.

And Jabu was a teacher.

She was surprised, curious when he announced: You’re going to start teaching me Zulu. What other tongue should he learn; it was her own. She lightly used the everyday English endearment — Darling what’s it with you?—

A new thought. — You talk to Sindiswa in Zulu. Already she’s able to say quite a lot. Demanding what she wants…I don’t understand her. She won’t understand me.—

Jabu laughed. — I talk to her in English too, and you do.—

— She’ll grow up talking to me in a language she and I share, and I won’t be able to speak to her in a language that’s also hers but we don’t share.—

— Is that so bad. Many people have one parent who doesn’t know the language of the other, that’s passed on to the child.—

— I’m not a foreigner.—

To have the need to bring up again, now to her — he’s a white who has earned his identity, not non-black: African.

— So when do we begin? It’s going to be fun. I’m strict you know. What about tonight. No, we’re due at the Mkizes’, her sister’s back with the Ghanaian she’s married, big excitement. He’s some kind of special surgeon, hoping he’s going to get a post at the medical school, wants to talk to you about the university.—

— Oh there’s no hurry, I’ve remained dumb so long, whenever you can take me on as another one of your Holy Father’s school kids.—

So one of her father’s maxims comes back from childhood. — No time like the present. Say with me Ngingumfana ohlankiphile eckasini lika thishela uJabu? —

— Which means…—

— How are you going to pay me for my after-school classes.—

— Only if you stop sniggering at my pronunciation. — Hugging her, which led him to her mouth and the deep kiss that belonged in another time of day, or rather, night.

There was nothing playful about the lessons, however. Over the weekend he wrote grammar exercises she set, and learnt vocabulary, her selected dictionary of spoken words she judged should be the most apt for, example, interchange with his students when he brought them home; it became also a rather enjoyable exchange of roles, lecturer turned pupil. Jabu never corrected him in the students’ presence, left it to them to slap their jean-armoured thighs in applause as they could coach him, throwing in some useful near-obscenities that she vetoed, sharing laughter. This did not affect his authority as their lecturer, a kind of authority other than that of her father, which had done so much in the past for her to be equal to the present. Surely it was in her Baba’s tradition, smuggling books to her when she was imprisoned without trial, an after-hours class of headmastership and spiritual duties as an Elder in the church, that she was furthering her husband’s emancipation by giving him the ability to express himself as an African, not only by a European tongue. Once her father had spelled out for her to read, by making sequence of the words underlined in the pages of textbooks he somehow managed to get to her in detention, another maxim. ‘It is unfortunate that we use the language of the oppressor to speak for our freedom.’ She learnt afterwards those were the words of Gandhi.

Steve was right about the ‘Alertwatch’ company whose fees the Suburb subscribed to every month; there would be among them impimpis , black traitors who worked with the apartheid army. There are not many skills of guerrilla warfare of much use in the aftermath known as peace. The only aptitude that might be useful is that for violence, and it has been taken up by the defeated army’s rank and file. Join the present version of the country’s army, but because of your past there’s no place for you there — be employed by the new industry, the security companies. You’ll have at least familiar guns in your hands with a different licence to use them, not to defend apartheid but to defend private possessions. At Christmas Jabu had the Alertwatch patrol on the list, postman, municipal street cleaners, to whom it was apparently the suburban custom to give a small cash gift; poor devils, what chance did they have of training for anything else, coming from the poorest of the poor who were her people; his people too, God’s people. It is not often she shows a remnant of what it must have been to be a pastor’s granddaughter, church elder’s daughter; he assumed that like him, being a ‘Christian’ was something of an ethnic label long come unstuck in the only dedication they knew, under that other rubric, justice. But in the chances of change, many labels, Blankes Alleen off benches, Whites Only off public toilets, people seemed to be looking for a hand-up to some authority beyond, no, outside the common condition won by revolution, although such other kinds of authority had proved useless in the past. The Dolphin boys were seen in well-pressed pants actually going to the neighbouring church (though Alan and lover still had been turned away from one elsewhere), what need was there of baptism other than splashing benediction in the pool? Some genuflection of thankfulness that the law had recognised their gender. Thank God. Comrades were dispersed among a sometimes unpredictable range of activities and professions. Some were qualified to return to the professions and enterprises they had abandoned for battle camps of bush and desert. There were lawyers and doctors the beginning of whose youthful careers was interrupted for those years, the demand beyond making your way. Most took up the career rather differently than what might have been if the Struggle hadn’t taken first place from the child’s ambition of what it wanted to be, or precepts social as well as intellectual expected. There were white doctors who chose to treat, along with black doctors the days-long queues in urban squatter camps instead of setting up private practice in city complexes of the latest architectural design. What is Roly doing? Where’s Terence these days? Somewhere in industry, perhaps disappeared into big business, one back in the fold, family supermarket chain, another had found his place in a vast mining consortium and — perhaps seen as useful — representing for the times its conscience, he was promoting policies of better living conditions for the black miners as poorly paid as poorly housed in compounds. Some black heroes of the Struggle with the spirit of high political intelligence, leadership, powerful personality, had been seated at once in Mandela’s government; some survived into his successor’s, others opted for the other power, at last attainable, in the financial institutions of the old days which still own natural resources of the country below ground and the means above to convert them into wealth. But this is all official report language stuff. He and Jabu know another that creates things as they are. The normal life. The one that never was. Among their friends are comrades who are writers and actors. Poetry was written on paper meant to wipe your backside, in the years in prison. From the one everybody in the world knows about, Robben Island, the manuscript of an entire book was smuggled out in the reckless ingenuity that’s devised only within circumstances of impossibility as a factor stimulating an unknown faculty in the brain. Men who had within themselves the third sense of entering the identity of other people, places and times relevant to their own — actors who had never been on a stage — performed Antigone , known to a reader from a smuggled book among them, in their hour in the prison exercise yard. Meanwhile, during those years in the segregated cities there were blacks and whites who wrote and performed plays which enacted the relationships of the apartheid country in all their racist contortions, boldly and usually getting away with this because there were no theatres in the small white towns, in the black ghettos, the squatter camps, where the general population could be corrupted. For the same reasoning the Censorship Board rarely bothered to give any credence to these plays by forbidding them and closing the performances before colour-mixed audiences in a theatre declared for whites only.