Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

In the entrance to the enclave between the pharmacy and the liquor store, where there is an ATM dispensing cash, someone has been granted shelter to set up her one-woman craft accommodated on her ample lap. She sits threading necklaces and beading badges, safety-pin backed, which display the red twist emblem of support for people living with HIV Aids.

These are enterprises of the Informal Sector, now a category in the new theory of the economic structure of the country, which declares that the price of the privilege of recognition is a share of the responsibility in reducing unemployment. The unemployed must rouse — not arise, in protest against their condition — and do something for themselves. The shoe repairer’s premises are a Small Business venture as defined within this initiative. The bank belongs to an international consortium which gives modest grants, get-started cash, to encourage such entrepreneurs. He was supplied with his awl, glue and plastic material. The hair artist, with a sum to purchase, as she must know where, from people who grow their hair as a crop. The man in his shed, its array spread on the ground before it, is aware from his own streetwise experience as a customer, what will sell and has had a one-off provision to begin his stock.

The men and women who sleep in the toilet block at the park nearby meant for people who walk their dogs and gays who cruise there, have made it disgustingly unusable, can’t be regarded as part of the Informal Sector. Many are illegal immigrants, refugees from the civil wars in neighbouring countries, they’re just an inflation of unemployment figures, uncounted, rivals for any work to be come upon.

There are other initiatives that if they may be minimally self-supporting don’t seem to qualify for the Informal Sector standard. There’s the man who attempts to sell greeting cards mostly for occasions already outdated, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, from a tray suspended round his neck. Perhaps people might buy them and paste an Easter message over the greetings? The cards may be charity dumping from the stationer’s. Anyway, he is at least in the class of economic activity above the one who has no set stand but hawks brooms made of dried grass-stalks up and down the street.

Beggars have no status whatsoever.

Responsibility, when you operate among others practising the same initiative, implies leadership if you mean to qualify for the collective challenge of the Sector’s recognition; that first indication that you’re going to be let in to the Formal Economy. Some time. But a leader must have an organisation, and here, coming up with a self-invented occupation, what high-ups call initiative, is the personal property of each one alone; to share it is to risk having it seized away from you. In place of leadership there can only be domination. And that’s a matter of discovering something which is inside you. Politicians have it, or they couldn’t win elections and recognise, at last, whether for their own purposes or something better, an Informal Sector.

The man who found the something in himself was one of those who wave in a car’s path to a vacant parking space, arms wing-wide, and then perform a repertoire of gestures, warnings, encouragements to the driver successfully to occupy it. Some driver-clients dub the process Parking Tax along with all the other taxes of the Formal Sector they occupy. It’s surely some sort of recognition above the patronage of a tip, when they give the Parking Tax man some coins as they drive away.

He is a little older and a little less black than other Parking Tax collectors fulfilling their inventive responsibilities. He probably came from a region of the country where the aboriginal inhabitants, wiped out by darker peoples descended upon them from the west of the African continent, and whites from Europe, have left ancient traces in the brew of DNA. The shopping street is in an old suburb, prosperous, not wealthy; not a mall in the suburbs where blacks of the new Formal Sector live in class solidarity with their white equals. The residents of the old suburb, some young, speak of their shopping street as the village.

He’s a rather small man with limbs and body appearing to be strung taut on wire rather than bone. His voice and movements spark, as that of men of his morphology often do for the lack of the stodgy physical superiority of others, whether Parking Tax brothers or members of the bank’s board. His manner of speaking, a personal mixture of the many languages of which one is his mother tongue, makes his communication easy, better than that of some others on the street. He’s never bothered to take part in the angry rivalry between his fellow Parking Tax collectors for the right to command this or that vehicle into this or that space, although a youngster among them would always know to step back if the two hailed at the same time the hesitancy of a driver seeking a bay. It was he who decided that this random situation was nonsense, no good to anyone. The others accepted his capability instinctively, although not proven in any way. It was he who organised them; each man to have his own pitch, reserved in this block or that, so many bays this side or that. Brothers, not street people.

There was some grumbling among themselves after the allocation had been made mutually, but no violence the way things used to be settled. If there was resentment against his taking for himself the pitch he did, no one would challenge him. Not just because of authority; he was so popular.

He chose what he saw had a number of advantages. The pitch begins at a corner, so there are vehicles coming both from the shopping street and from the connecting one. It is close to the supermarket — better than directly in front, where there is a loading space kept clear for delivery trucks and vans. His pitch is before the church, and not only do the Sunday devout come from the service with a conscience towards the less fortunate than themselves that makes them generous, the departing entourages of wedding ceremonies are even more so. The minister allows certain privileges to one of the children of the Lord, not a member of the congregation, who watches over their material possessions — their cars.

The man has a wife along with him at his pitch. She sits not on a fruit box but a small sturdy crate from the liquor store. There is no purpose in her being there. She doesn’t thread beads, sell cigarettes or plait hair, somehow incapacitated not by illness but by the natural haze of being at one level or another, drunk. No one objects to her presence, it is part of the privilege he took to himself. She has a kind of clientele of her own for her chaffing and laughter, mostly the homeless of the park, when her level is mild, which he tolerates, the Parking Tax brothers jeer at only privately, and even the white shoppers ignore as at a dinner party one didn’t embarrass a man whose wife was a known lush. The church’s compassion allows her, an invalid of sorts, to use the church lavatory in its grounds and her husband to draw water at the garden tap, which permission he has extended for himself to pull off his shirt and take a wash in hot weather. When her level is high and she sags from her seat, someone, usually a woman among her cronies, will support her a short way up the pavement where the grass has overgrown the paving, and she collapses there as if she’s put to bed. He takes no part. On the other hand, he isn’t seen to reproach her, beat her up. Simply keeps his busy professional front, as any corporate official must in the event of a problem with a woman. She lies, passing people taking suitable avoidance round her, until sobered enough to get herself up, smiling, and totter back to her crate.

Other Parking Tax men either pocket their dues silently or have obeisant gestures to go with thanks. He takes the right of starting up an exchange, based on his observation and memory of his clients. He’d given them his name (or rather a version of it, Lucas, because his African name was too complex) and while accepting they wouldn’t be likely to offer theirs, addresses them personally the way he assesses them. An elderly white man will be greeted as ‘Oupa’ while he locks his car doors behind him — ‘Old Papa’ in one of the whites’ languages — and a distinguished-looking woman with the widow’s companion, groomed dog on a lead, is met with the feminine equivalent, ‘Hi Ouma, so how’s it going today?’ Young white men are flattered with male bondage in tributes to their prowess: ‘Cool, my man! Sharp! You look you dressed for a big night this weekend.’ Every young woman, black or white, is indiscriminately ‘Sweetie’ — a driver as she hits the kerb or is nervous about reversing: ‘No sweat, Sweetie, I’m looking out for you.’ His evident sense of self makes any offence taken, outdated. The familiarity transposes what might have seemed charitable tolerance on these individuals’ part, to an obligation of recognition; equality, even of gender as well as race, simply assuming colloquial intimacy of usage in mutual possession.