Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

Splendid, triumphant. Wola! Cho! Jabula! Phambili! Only the exclamations picked up from Thapelo's languages are adequate. The Okavango 's revenge. Originating hundreds of kilometres away, every year with the spring rains the rivers Cuebe, Longa, Custi, Cichi, Cubango – Africa-named before the white men dubbed them with that other reality, discovery for Europe – send a pulse of water, no, now a magnificent flood, the perennial wetland becomes a high waterland (what does it look like from Space!). Drowns projects, obliterates the idea of ten dams. And carries its own knowledge of dispersal, subsidence, knowledge of its own means of renewal in time.

Read on. However there is a problem against which the living swamp has not had time to develop a defence: humans.

The intention to build ten dams is not submerged.

So what is the reality. The human reality, Chief, Bra, however you're seen or you see yourself, the immediate, market reality – that's what counts in what you learn from the mother of your children, one in the womb, is the real world. Okavango left to itself will renew eternally. That is: woah! – eternity also has to be defined: as long as the earth is not ended by explosions of irreversible radiance. People don't live eternity; they live a finite Now. The mining of the dunes. Now the Australians have made a deal with a fifty-one percent black-owned company. The blacks are to have a fifteen percent share in the dunes mining project. While we were busy working with the International Rivers Network, the World Conservation Union, the Wild Life and Environmental Society, all our good acronym partners, the Aussies were spending nine months, same gestation period as the human ovum fertilised by a radiance survivor's sperm, negotiating this agreement which – confidently – now will allow to be granted from the Government a prospecting permit for the eighty-nine million rands, around eight million pounds, international enterprises may be quoted in many currencies, to proceed. That's the official-speak to express it, 'Allow to be granted'. A worthy incentive isn't a bribe, my Bra. No-one can disagree with the necessity for blacks to enter the development economy at a major level, fifteen percent is a good start? Thapelo gives a grand fanfaring laugh, for celebration or derision: is it yona ke yona or shaya-shaya, this bit of black empowerment? There's also the concomitant reality that a toll highway carrying the derived minerals and ilmenite (used in the fabric and the beauty business, cosmetic industries) to a smelter and processor in the city centuries ago named by homesick Europeans 'East London', might bring a weekly wage to replace the sacrifice, God's gift of a few crop fields, unique endemism, and twenty-two kilometres of sand dunes which used to be fished from instead of mined. Bring hi-fi systems and cars. Yes! Easy to sneer at materialism and its Agency seductions while existence within it has the luxury of dissatisfaction, the wilderness to oppose it.

Who's to decide.

This kind of research has no place in this room with two mates – we just happen to be earth-brothers if not blood-brothers – Thapelo and Derek with whom is shared what the self pursues as reality. She. Benni, it must be allowed, is the other reality. Berenice. Hers, chosen, or advised by its effectiveness in the finite. Get a life! The Agency admonishment.

This kind of subject is left in the garden.

In quarantine.

Thapelo tips his chair, boots lifted, rights it with the flourish of impact to the floor loud before them.

A summons. He senses danger; distraction.

Benni's soft hand on his cheek against the prickle of morning's beard wakes him, her Berenice voice coaxingly calls his name. Half-returned, half in the other world of sleep, can't help receiving the calm purpose with which the female, like any in the wild, approaches what must be a cataleptic ordeal; the reverse of the invasion of the body by demonic light, the contrary, a desertion by what has been tenderly part of it, feeding from a common life-blood. She slides the African robe over her belly, ready to go to a birth-place here in the city, a clinic not a hide under bushes, but the purpose of shelter for the event is the same. It's something that cannot be shared. At least she understands he is not one to be a spectator, present. He's not the man who massaged her feet at the event of the first child.

In the meantime.

The floods have subsided. During the waiting period Queen MaSobhuza Sigcau of Pondoland has told the press that employees of the sand dunes mining project were ordering people in the area to 'vacate' their homes because preparations to mine were beginning. They were given documents of agreement to sign; many are illiterate and some lost their cattle and sheep as a result of being forced to move. There have been different commands for this kind of thing. Judenheraus . Take your choice. And our country's signed, ratified the International Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan (what a mouthful, nearly as difficult to spit out as to carry out) – how's the Minister heading off to tell the World Convention we're going to allow a four-lane highway through one of the named hotspots of global diversity? You answer that one! The answer comes. Vuka Mister Minister! Get a life!… Well, at least we have to admit they've had to back down and allow an appeal against their go-ahead for it… Haai! – delaying tactics. Let the protestors get tired and fall asleep. Meanwhile. The ten dams? All quiet right now but such cosmic plans get shelved, not torn up. And the Australians? Still happy they're going to get the rubber stamp to take sixteen million tons of titanium minerals plus eight millions of ilmenite out of the dunes; sure-sure prepared to hang in there for it. The pebble-bed reactor? Needs something like ten billions – what's that in dollars, pounds, euros – from foreign investors to help out if it's to be built, but it's not abandoned – No way, my man! – - The 'feasibility' and 'safety' of it are being 'conitinuously evaluated by the relevant Government Department'. Voetsek, we don't want you . Read it aloud from the Stop Press edition. 'These were the harsh words from environmental supporters, a delegation of the Nuclear Energy Costs and the Earth Campaign gathered outside the British Trade Investment offices in Johannesburg today to hand over a memorandum denouncing British Nuclear Fuels as a "nightmare" investor in partnership with Eskom and the South African state-owned Industrial Development Corporation, a consortium to oversee commercialising of the pebble-bed modular reactor.' Meanwhile. The lapse of time medically decreed before the scan which would decide whether the body should again be irradiated, passed. All clear for the present; another scan, maybe, delayed for another decision.

The son has emerged to take on the world with all the necessary equipment, weapons – two arms, two hands, ten prehensile fingers, two legs, feet and toes (verify ten), the genitals which were already evident in the foetal scan, a shapely head and open eyes of profound indeterminate colour that are already reacting with the capacity of sight. The sperm of the radiant progenitor-survivor has achieved no distorting or crippling of the creation.

Destruction takes on many states of existence; on this one the predatory stare has gone out. Must invite Thapelo and Derek again for a couple of beers where there's new life confirmed.

Thapelo is first with exuberant confirmation of other news that had given off smoke signals to the waiting three, through their eavesdropping connections. Minister of Environmental Affairs, van Schalkwyk, has set aside (abandoned? a for real no-no? maybe) a decision made a year before this month of birth to construct the Pondoland Wild Coast toll road. And the Minister of Minerals and Energy, she's announced that the pebble-bed nuclear reactor is halted. 'Pending further environmental assessment'; yes – oh of course.