Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— She’ll find friends. — Sindiswa turns to challenge their discrimination. — If we are going to, why shouldn’t she.—

— She speaks hardly any English…It’s entirely different, we have the same language, we’ve led the same kind of life—

Does he, how can he explain to this exception, this child of—‘intimate integration’, love unknown to racism: the facts of life in this society aren’t the story of the bees and the birds…

Fact is. The Suburb is the bourgeoisie of the comrades. We’re not, even in our mix, like the old-style whites, but we’re not living the life of the people though some of us are black — the Mkizes and Jabu, our syntheses Sindiswa and Gary Elias. Out of the mouths not of babes and sucklings but adolescents from the privilege of progressive schools your own pretensions are brought to you.

— She’s got spirit, all right! — Jabu grants, Jabu exclaims.

— But our Antigone standing for the wrong cause, your Centre wouldn’t brief her.—

— Oh I think we would, not in this case, but for some other…—

Bed is their tribunal, so little privacy when handing over, packing up not only the furnishings at what is resolving as a stage of life (as he had to carry her from the clandestine hideout over a threshold to the first house) but the certainty — the Absolute of the Struggle, left behind along with a present: a liberation, in a form that could never have been believed could come about. Happen. Well. A signal of the new generation always comes to take over. Mandela and Tambo from Luthuli, and on and on, the next and the next, an insolent Antigone…The freedom-born generation and how they’ll deal with the travesty that’s being made of freedom. ‘A better life’ lyric of a pop song outdated, into the trash emptied on the street by workers paid a wage the price of a cabinet minister’s cigars. How to get to sleep. Only animals can sleep at will. But it’s possible to do so on authority of at least one conviction.

If the present could never have been foreseen you don’t therefore have the right to condemn Sindiswa and Gary Elias to grow up in it.

The groups of the Left — communists, Trotskyites, probably no old Stalinist survivors—’are hardly more than a curiosity’ (triumphal sneer wheezed by Professor Craig-Taylor in the coffee shelter) a luta continua having been taken over as a black national rhetoric by an innocent-faced young man with a resuscitated Munich Beer Hall delivery, Julius Malema — he may be the Antigone in the era of sex change (that’s Marc’s quip as one of the Dolphins who’s got himself married, to a woman).

There is a force which does not belong to the colonialist past that has asserted its rights in the African millennium: a political party. Traditional leaders in parliament, whether or not they are representative of all tribal origins with all nine languages, they support the customary rights of each. The amaZulu don’t circumcise, the AmaXhosa do. And this rite of entry to manhood has become money-making. — Like everything else. — Peter Mkize at a meeting in the city called under some acronym of human rights on the report that in the winter season of circumcision twenty boys are dead. — Why doesn’t our Minister of Health prosecute the crooks who butcher our young on the cheap, cut-price offered to parents who don’t want to pay the cost of the traditional practitioners in circumcision ‘schools’?—

As a Zulu comrade Peter better be careful about sticking his neck out like this on the subject of manhood rites…The amaZulu rite decrees that their young males kill a bull with their bare hands — including prodding out its eyes, slow torture of the huge animal. An animal isn’t human, of course, but there has been an outcry by animal rights groups since this year’s performance of the ritual, made public when cameras reproduced the agony of the death. Zuma himself must have taken part in the ritual long ago, and you don’t go around questioning the humanity, morality of how the President attained his proven manhood with many wives and other women. Although she is the one who wanted them to accompany Peter to the meeting — Baba, did her father fulfil the rite, too…before, along with the rites of the church? It’s not a thought to repeat to her.

In the coffee bar they turn to afterwards, restless with their reactions, a young man attached himself, confronting Peter where they sat along the counter. — Man, you one of those educated who want us to stay for ever doing what whites do, all the white shit, let men marry men that’s better custom not circumcision to make men, your brain from the old colonial time, it’s not Africa, for us, now.—

— My brother, that’s not what I said. We keep our ideas, what’s called customs. But we must also keep them right , way they were before, you know what that means, they weren’t a way of making money — you hear what I’m saying? Circumcision, always done by our special men — experts, you understand? They knew how to do it and nobody died, no boy had what he was going to be as a man’s body messed up for him? Now anybody with a kitchen knife tries to do it, it’s cheap, you don’t pay much and you’re finished , for life. — Peter made a slashing gesture between spread thighs.

— The AmaXhosa do it. If it’s done properly by people who know how, maybe it’s a good custom, helps against HIV and AIDS infection, never mind if or not it makes a man. But our amaZulu killing the bull with your bare hands, such pain, so cruel. Not because you’re hungry. To show you’re strong. And as you really grow up to be a man you’re going to find you have to show other ways to be strong for the trials that come. — The young man didn’t expect to hear from a woman, what do they have to do with male rituals.

Jabu had swung round her stool to recognise a mfowethu by his features or his home mannerisms of the language they share. So she takes the challenge rebelliously, personally. Would her Baba believe it had come to this: her sense of a right of leaving all this behind. What has all this to do with Baba — but everything was always to do with him — otherwise I wouldn’t be who I am; where I am. Where I’m going. To be.

He, the descendant of colonisation, wouldn’t be here beside her wouldn’t be taking her, no, going with her of her own volition to another country, as if he really understands the brutality. People need symbols.

Yes — oh yes, of their power over nature is it? Over other people or to please the gods? Yes. But they’ve changed since those times haven’t they, the Mexicans don’t sacrifice their people to the gods any more. The bull hasn’t done anything wrong. It hasn’t angered any gods, it’s only an animal. You’d think by now it’d be enough — as a symbol — at least slaughter the bull, eat it, not torture it to death.

Slaughter humanely. To be confronted by her with the obvious — they eat meat, he and she, and there are so many unspeakable happenings skin-to-skin close, human to human, real, not symbolic, around them.

The converted chicken-house isn’t empty.

Lesego is representative of the university’s African Studies in a national association exclusively of black South Africans which attempts no more successfully than Left, Christian or human rights organisations to condemn and halt violence against immigrants in recognition of African brothers. Lesego himself doesn’t accept that the African continent is extended family, for whom space everywhere in the continent must be made as the reason why they should not be rejected. Being Lesego, he goes to meetings of the association as his own-appointed representative of the living conditions of South African black communities so deprived, degraded that their last ragged hold on existence is broken by the invaders.