Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— That’s why our South Africans turn violent. — Lesego’s angry saliva shines at the corners of his lips as he has the figures coming. — Twenty-three per cent national unemployment, and this when guys whose employment is to wave you into parking space aren’t counted, up to half the children in shacks don’t go to school, parents can’t pay, provide more than a plate of pap a day — it’s poverty, the cause of this violence.—

— What’re any of us, veterans of the Struggle, eh, going to do about it? Zuma was our Head of Intelligence — the President , what’s he doing about it. Why don’t you come with me, see ‘on the ground’ one of the settlements where people were beaten up, kicked out — two killed — last week.—

— Jabu and I’ve seen, months ago, the people who had to get out of Alexandra, they’ve made some kind of slum camp for themselves on open ground just across the street from houses of the old and new rich in a security-tight suburb — great indignation from the residents black and white.—

— And what was done about it.—

— I suppose the residents got them cleared out. A threat to safety, the value of property reduced by what was on their doorstep.—

— So Steve we’re sitting around talking… shocked … Eish! — Lesego dismisses, he’s forgotten for the moment, that Australia is the response for not going to do anything about it.

—‘Xenophobia’, a future no one in the bush the desert thought of.—

— Just a minute, hold, my brother — how could we know then our countries round us would turn their liberation into dirty power struggles with their own people, the Amins the Mobutos and now Mugabe, so their refugees would flood in on us.—

Seen it all before.

In Lesego’s car, it occurs. — Isn’t umlungu going to be unwelcome whitey. I don’t want to make them suspicious of you.—

Lesego doesn’t so much as consider this. — They know me, their non-racial frontman. At least I’m a black prof of African Studies at a university where white profs used to study us. They’ll think you’re a journalist I’ve brought to write about what happened to them back home. Not to worry.—

Wasn’t worried about the possibility of being abused, harsh words, anger that might spill over an emigrant from his local white world no, but that people could be offended at being a spectacle for him.

Once Lesego left the highway there was a jumble of burned tyres on a road to be manoeuvred through. It seems from newspaper pictures and TV coverage there’s an endless source of these, they are the flags, the logos of protest. Lesego, as if remarking on a passing foreign landscape — Must have been cleared from where they barricaded the highway. — The road was a ploughed track of swerving levels, boulders washed up exposed from past rainy seasons, holes to be avoided or if too deep and wide, bumped through in low gear. Taxi buses taking their right of first way somehow missed hitting the car as they aimed for it: Lesego’s experienced with these conditions. There were the remains of vehicle skeletons. A couple of stick-limbed and a lumbering fat boy yelled from the game they were busy with in one of them. (Can paediatricians explain why undernourished children can be either painfully thin or somehow blown up like empty bags.) Now there was the beginning rather than entrance to the place. Men stood about talking each other down and an old woman sat on a packing case before what might have been a house was someone’s life exposed, three walls of the same kind of cardboard she was seated on, one buckled sheet left of a tin roof, the fourth wall missing or never existent, a neatly made bed there with a bright floral cover, shoes, pots, some shirts hanging on a wire, a tin bath, a poster of a football star.

Some man who recognised Lesego gathered him among men telepathic awareness brought from behind what was left of shacks and houses. Nothing appeared intact, not as if explosives had fallen indiscriminately but wrecked by individual intention. This place, invaders have simply moved in on local people living there perhaps years and somehow become settled enough to acquire possessions. Probably gleaned stuff dumped by white suburbans who have too much clutter, or stolen by the jobless turned housebreakers — no refugee could have brought with him the old upright piano lying among its torn-out white keys, a creature that has lost its teeth. A spaza shop which had the enterprise of displaying special offers with grinning client posters as in the supermarkets gaped on empty shelves and the spilling of loot, trampled, apparently not worth taking. Someone was picking over the remains of a TV — no electricity here, but television can be run on a car battery — the few cars were not more damaged than they normally would have been — windscreens one-eyed with patches, autograph dents from daily encounters on that single road; the owners must have driven them off to a safer place when violence began brewing potently.

The Zimbabweans didn’t flee, this time, this place, they resisted the violence of rejection with violence. The men about Lesego indeed must think he’s brought someone who’ll make the world hear their story of invasion, so it has to be told in a language the white man with him will understand; what’s vehement must be sent out in English. The voice fired from the coming and going babble of the group. — Who is give them pangas and guns, where they do get, who give them knives from butcher shop, who paying those people come to kill us, they want this our place. — A woman lifted a wail that drew theirs from under the black shawls of her old women companions. And suddenly a note with the cadence of Afrosoul soared somewhere on the low horizons of destruction. Whose voice. She’s just one of those who’re growing up in this place; an inspiration not interruption — Where’re our jobs they take. There’s jobs at the paint factory, the building going on over there-there Jeppe Street, the cleaners for the hotel — those people they take our jobs, they take any small pay, the bosses don’t want our wages they must pay us the union says—

Lesego breaks away with one of the men and signals. — He asks us to go with him. — The shrug for the man’s privacy. He questions him under his breath.

Too difficult to follow the gist of the isiZulu that follows; so without being able to make out the purpose, just be an appendage of Lesego. Seeing more ‘on the ground’. Women have three-legged pots standing in fires, children are bowling, quarrelling over turns with the wheels of a bicycle corpse. Another woman, backside assertive, is stirring cement rather than food alongside a man patching bricks to close gaps broken in a house that had a luxury of a wall instead of corrugated tin and cardboard. There’s an instinct in human settlement to be aligned as if you were in streets but some shacks are faced away, at the choice of the individual, from what is the rough conformation of a line of occupation; that’s the freedom of destitution. Lesego calls his greeting to men swinging rhythmical hammer blows on what’s left of a scrap-metal roof and they call back cheerful with the acknowledgement. There are everywhere underfoot — kick aside to get along — the twisted plastic containers of whatever, cigarette stubs, crumpled publicity handouts, beer cans — only in greater accumulation than what is shed to the gutters of formal living in the city.

Here at the shacks there’s no municipal service to pick it up. Why should the parents of kids teach them not to throw away trash when their home is made of trash. — So they’re not to be allowed to learn self-respect? — Not even that. She’s not there with him but often when he’s with others it’s as if she’s presenting him with unexpected aspects of himself. And sometimes he’s giving her some of herself she’s not aware of.