Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— You know what one sane man among us says and nobody wants to listen. — Jake is standing as if before not just the Suburb: the city, the country. — ‘It’s time to accept that migrants have been the lifeblood of this city since it was founded’. That’s the black mayor of Johannesburg. — Lifeblood of the country. The tribes who came down from the north of Africa to conquer the San and the Khoi Khoi, the Dutch and the English, Scots Irish landing from ships. — He’s propounding. Will he get to the Jews who came from Latvian shtetl , made African, eish , at last, a descendant of the colonialist Christian father and the Jewish great-grandmother while another descendant brother, Jonathan, turns from the man on the cross back to the scroll in the synagogue.

Blessing as one who provides, no matter what, the comfort of good cooking has her confident interruption of Jake — We’ve got the World Cup next year, already such a thrill…the stadiums going up, people—

— Buying the logo T-shirts made by slave labour in China, dirt cheap compared with those made by our garment workers who’re underpaid — on strike…People need bread and circuses, this binge is the big circus that’s going to take bread off the mind of our population that’s supposed to exist on two dollars a day — why anyway does the world use that currency as the standard for survival everywhere. Tell me? And for how many millions that’s not pay it’s handout to the unemployed, the destitute, and here’s where what’s surely the lowest form of our shit-art of corruption — it’s not only the fat cats finagling the profits of tenders, it’s the small fry who pay our old-age pensions, grants to feed children — they have their level, faking grants for themselves, Social Security just closes one eye… Do you hear me? Their loot from the poor has been more than a hundred million between last year and just so far this one! — Stricture in Jake’s face. Fury. — UBUNTU. One of the African words everyone, all of us, any colour, we know — we know it means something like we are all each other — shouting — Say it! Say it! Say it for what it is. Turned out to be! What we’ve produced! What we’re producing! Corruption’s our culture. The Spirit of The Nation. U BU U N TU UBUNTU U U

They sit alone together, in this company of comrades.

— UBUNTU UBUN-TU UBUNTU-U U U—

Suddenly — facing this comrade Steve:

Jake’s gut, stomach, lungs, sucked back to the spine under his Mandela shirt, spews, — You lucky bastard— you’re out of it —

The moment holding a life.

— I’m not going.—

Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Conservationist , joint winner of the Booker Prize; Get a Life; Burger’s Daughter; July’s People; My Son’s Story ; and The Pickup . Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot , and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black . She has also collected and edited Telling Tales , a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times . Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.