No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Comrade—elections are about rivalry. For power. That’s all.—

  Marc takes on Jake. —How can you be so cynical. Where’d that get us. This party has its policy, that one has another, we choose between how we think our country should be run, develop.—

  —Democracy’s only about power? Well, democratic Zimbabwe’s one that proves it.— She speaks and Peter’s reminded —Jabu, what’s happening—the refugees—we’re all so busy with this election—they’ll still be pouring in when that’s all over. Or if the new government gets the door shut at the borders we’ll still have how many thousand already—how long now. The church guy, is he still running that shelter or has the city council got onto him again.—

  —They’re there, on the pavement and the street, he still has his church full. And soon it’ll be winter. There was a move to take them to some abandoned building but they came back to where they get food, and some sort of pickings from street trading. And it seems the camp at the main border point people enter, Messina, it has been closed, it was supposed to prevent the drift to the cities. We’re acting for the church, our Centre lawyers. But I’ll take you down to see—right beside the Magistrates’ Courts the city’s had to put up portable toilets, the kind at sports events. And now the local shopkeepers have gone to court against this.—

  —Choice. Did you see? One of the columnists has guts to write: we’ve the choice of a balance of thieves to vote for—

  Isa claps her palm a moment over her lips as if this is what she’s really doing over Jake’s. —Why’s my man such a bad-mouth, he’ll be first in the queue to make his cross—

  —Because . . . my love, ay—you have to face the facts.—

  —At least you don’t say ‘the truth’.—

  —Let me finish? The journalist says there are some good ones thrown in, sharp, sharp, aih Peter. Our ANC has luxury German cars as canvassing fleet, where we’re getting our funding—shhhh—no one knows he says, how many millions from the dictators of Libya and Equatorial Guinea. Can’t call these bribes can we, no, just sweeteners to be sure our foreign policies will support the sugar daddy donors to our democracy when their totalitarian states get hauled over the coals by International Human Rights. The opposition? The Independent Democrats have a murderer on their list, the Zulus’ IFP has a convicted fraudster, another has a churchman—not Dandala!—convicted and then pardoned. Well, can’t complain things are dull. The Trade Union S.G. tells workers Malema may become the next Mandela. Malema’s now called Helen Zille a colonialist, that’s much worse than when he called her a whore. She comes back at him—do I pronounce it right—inkwenkwe, whatever that insult is.—

  Blessing blurts cheeringly —Stevie, it’s my language, isiXhosa, ‘uncircumcised boy’.— Her man Peter to the comrades —You don’t know our insults, that’s about the worst thing you can call a black man.—

  Malema’s repartee allows election-mode freedom of speech become general. —The shit hits the fan— And Isa leads the laughter, as Steve ejects the words.

  She has insider reflections to bring back from the company she keeps at the Centre. The advocates in their exchanges pronounce, the Zuma corruption indictment hasn’t safely blown away. And what she confides isn’t legal gossip, that’s not her responsible nature. However the provisions of Constitutional law brought this about, right to appeal is upheld, and the withdrawal of the charge is judged as invalid—overturned. For complex procedural defections you need a lawyer in-house, to follow.

  Jacob Zuma goes to the polls with charges reinstated against him, to be heard again after 22 April.

  —When he’ll be President.—

  He says it for her and for him, as if already an event in their past.

  22 April.

  She often is kept late at chambers when a client has to consult after hours and she must be there with the advocate leading the case. Wethu has microwaved the lamb stew taken out of the freezer, so he and the children with Wethu are at the table when she comes in tossing her briefcase to a chair and running a hand along her tailed locks.

  —There was such a crowd queued up.—

  That is how she is telling.

  His eyes hold hers, question—and answer: she—Jabu—has come from a polling station. She kisses each child and him, flutter of a passing moth come in to the light as if her apology for being late, before serving herself and sitting down to eat with them. Gary Elias mocking his mother’s own admonition—You didn’t wash your hands—while holding out his plate for a second helping.

  The bedroom—that non-conformist confessional. So she cast a vote, well that’s her right, it was withheld over so many generations from her people she’s entitled to use it for them, even on her way out.

  She has another choice to admit. —I voted COPE.—

  There are too many confusions to be questioned between them in the process of packing oneself up, each must trust the other. The accord in the Struggle—that was another time.

  Baba taught her to have her conviction, duty (among many others to be observed and of which, turning away from the poster on the fence, she is in default in respect of her father). To face for herself what others expect of her. But she has no obligation to tell the gathering of Suburb comrades Isa has insisted must receive together at the Anderson house twenty-four hours later the final results of the day, 22 April. The mood—rueful, it’s Zuma—congratulatory, the Party has anyway defeated the lucky dip of rivals; of course whatever their doubts the comrades of the Suburb have all voted for the Party. It’s as if in the emotion of the day the coming final defection of two among them is forgotten. It is—understood?—Steve and Jabu did not vote.

  There is no surprise in the televised announcement above blare of crowd, ululating women, farting vuvuzelas—a sound majority.

  —The scary shift to the Left that might have put some crosses in the wrong place—

  —Who would have?—

  —The whites who’re afraid of Zuma, the rival blacks, House of Traditional leaders—

  —Didn’t happen.— —Oh it probably did, but Zuma had Malema herding the Youth!—

  Then amazement. Final analysis: COPE gets 8 per cent of the vote—they’ve been in existence how long, three months?— —Two months, for God’s sake!—Terror must be dancing as well as our Zuma.—

  Her vote in the count, that is as clandestine love once had to be.

  The doubts the comrades had about Zuma as their Party’s choice—there were preferred names of those not potentially damaging to the country, less compromised by corruption and sexual shenanigans, although no one knows what the power virus may manifest against the antibodies of trust—are overcome by evidence that the Party of liberation, Mandela’s, Tambo’s, Sisulu’s—it’s still in charge! The loyalty of intelligent people, some battle-scarred, isn’t the uncritical slogan fealty. All the better for that. Viva ANC if not Viva Zuma! There is zest in the fact of victory, third time, over sham elections of the past, whites only, same as the signs on the public lavatories. Jake and Isa brought out wine, beer, and the whisky bottle for those who had advanced to it in the present. The children—except for attentive Sindi who played Antigone in her school’s curriculum which naturally includes politics as an element of everyday history from ancient times—had only gusted in and out, irritatedly gestured away by Jake during the result announcements that will affect their lives if not determine them. They burst back along with Blessing’s contributed snacks. Jake and Isa’s Nick slid a CD to play what his parent liked from the unimaginable distance when they were young, a Miriam Makeba, and the folks, he knew, wouldn’t resist it. While the boys finished Blessing’s curried chicken wings Peter took Sindiswa by the elbow, up to dance. Marc, swinging sexy gyrations round his serious choice of a new gender partner, wife Claire; Jake and Blessing circling Isa’s hip-shrugging solo.

  They see Sindi their schoolgirl; dancing as a grown woman does with a man.

  Sindiswa in Glengrove Place, proof of clandestine revealed: forbidd
en intimacy. Growing up in a second freedom, in another country, from burden of the past.

  They dance wildly as they had in their beginnings in the Struggle, Swaziland, Baba’s girl and her white boyfriend.

  A week or two later President Zuma’s multi-million celebration is a bash, the press didn’t hesitate to remind, on taxpayers’ money. Wethu had gone home to vote where she was registered, KwaZulu. She came back—Happy Happy! Her refrain as she unloaded the gifts of emerald swatches of spinach you don’t see frozen in supermarket packs, woven shoulder bags, straw and reed origin of the plastic version city women wear, and for Gary Elias a little clay figure of a boy clutching a calabash as a football, modelled by one of his holiday pals. He laughed with pleasure and scorn at the arms without hands; his father challenged, —You couldn’t make anything like this out of mud, could you?—

  Wethu brought greetings and what must be a message rehearsed with school principal Elias Siphiwe Gumede. She paused between chatter about and for nobody in particular to recall to his daughter faithfully —Baba says we must thank God the country he said it’s in good hands—how was it—oh for us, our country. And we—we can be—proud amaZulu.— This was a translation, polite in a house where English was familiarly spoken. She gave the message again in its original isiZulu with the gravity in which Jabu’s Baba had spoken it.

  The Justice Centre is preoccupied with the immediate. Situations in which its lawyers are likely to have to take on defence for individuals singled out by the police among mass protesters from ‘informal settlements’ outside this town or that where there’s rioting over that colloquialism for bucket toilets, water supply, electricity . . . ‘service delivery’.

  —A car burnt, shops stoned, the clinic set alight, a local government official seriously injured. The Minister of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs who’s been making speeches condemning violence was supposed to go to the settlement to calm people, hasn’t come. Instead he’s threatened to crack down on what he says are instigators and perpetrators. Three arrested, who knows whether they shouted louder than others or actually got there first in the attack on the official. We’re going to apply for bail on Monday.—

  He turns to her perspective they’re living with just as before the election victory euphoria. (Morning after: still babelas from the first in 1994.) —But let’s give your Zulu countryman a chance, he hasn’t even had a month, never mind the American President’s hundred days.—

  She looks at him, half-smile down the corner of her mouth. So fair-minded he ought to be a judge. There’s irony that didn’t exist in the clarity of cadres, you were for or against, simply a matter of life or death, apartheid the death-in-life.

  For him the immediate that was preoccupying the university was happening not in this university but can’t be ruled out as not to happen. The university at which it was, is where students in the Young Communist League threaten to make the university ungovernable by mass action until the principal agrees to step down. —So it’s not Black Empowerment issue, that vice chancellor principal’s as black as ours.— Lesego has come to the Science Faculty to talk.

  —Not much in that—well, shows we’ve moved on. It doesn’t matter whether the man’s black or white he’s responsible for what’s wrong at his university even if he says it’s due to government underfunding.—

  —What can the university do to stop the Young Communists from disrupting mid-term exams. Mass action, bring in the National Students Congress, that’ll mean some of ours joining. Eish! You know what they say, ‘We usually sing loud as possible to ensure our demands are heard’. Call in the police to beat them up?—

  At home Sindi asks —What are the guys protesting about, what do they want?—

  —Twenty thousand have been refused permission to write exams because they couldn’t pay their tuition fees this year— her mother explains.

  Sindi’s clamped teeth and tightened shoulder blades. —When I’m at university, I’ve paid fees, I don’t want people stopping me from writing exams. I don’t want to be in it.— She has the—privilege?—they’ve paid for it, for her: the principle of Socratic argument not violence, for everybody.

  They don’t either of them remind. You will not be here.

  President Zuma has declared the African National Congress will rule until the Second Coming.

  Along the streets there are men and women thumbs-up for lifts, the bus drivers have been on strike for almost four weeks. Blacks in their locked cars don’t stop to pick up stranded workers any more than whites do; he’s a white among them. Class makes unity in consciousness of hijack danger. She does take on the signals, from men as well as women, swerving to the kerb. She hasn’t told him she picks up commuters along her way. He warned her against this, it’s risky, but there is no man other than Baba who has been able to tell her what not to do.

  City parks gardeners and cleaners, administrative staff in the municipalities, social workers, prison warders are ready to strike if pay packages agreed upon two years ago are not distributed within a week. ‘If it comes to the push we will bring the country to a standstill, we have no option.’

  While they are handing the Sunday papers between them she folds a double page down the middle and slides it over the one he’s reading—there’s a picture spread of black and white doctors picketing outside the hospital named to honour a white woman who spent years in prison in the Struggle, Helen Joseph. WE’RE LIFE SAVERS NOT SLAVES MY PLUMBER EARNS MORE THAN I DO.

  Round the first fire of the coming winter, at Jake and Isa’s, Peter Mkize repeats precisely the President’s assurances as if testing the vowel sounds for genuineness. —Corruption and nepotism will be fought under his administration.—

  Jake grants —You have to have the nerve with which the man doesn’t begin on himself. Anyway, there’s a new code of accountability to us, the nation. The Minister of Transport gets a million-rand present from transport contractors and dutifully asks the President if he should give it back.— Peter’s glass staggering its contents—Our President’s advice, no, man—keep the present after you declare according to whoever’s in charge of—who’s it—the government’s code of executive ethics.—

  Isa flips into the fire a skeleton twig claw from the bunch of dried grapes on her vine the birds have missed. —Box of wine, Gucci outfit—

  Jabu’s asking—Remember?—Zuma’s promise to stay in touch with the voters, people’s president. Someone from the Centre was at the Maponya shopping mall in Soweto last weekend when Zuma came from a church where he’d been to thank the congregation for praying for the ANC victory in the election that would make him President. Zuma Zuma people yelling ran to keep up with the electric golf cart he sat on going through the mall, the movies and fast food sections, kids went wild, and outside—a crowd waiting for him. He said he was there to thank them for voting for him, when we were campaigning we told you, we were coming to you not just for votes. Today’s the start of staying in touch . . . first stop Soweto because this is the place that symbolised the struggle of the people, I came here because this place tells a new story, here you can walk into world-class shops and buy what you want, you don’t have to go to town, this is a story of our freedom.—

  —To spend, spend, if you’re not unemployed— Jake hails with arms in the air.

  It’s as if she feels she must be the one to acknowledge between them, if he wants to spare her what might appear as reproach: it turns out the party she voted for, COPE has its own share of corruption. A huge parastatal fuel and other energy sources company (she reads to him from a document) has COPE strongly represented on the board. Bonuses of 1.8 million and 3.5 million rands have been awarded to top executives of the company. Lifestyle. Everyone has corporate membership of a golf estate which costs a princely initial fee and there are yearly fees on the matching scale. The company’s spokesperson says expansion plans require its executives to engage in networking initiatives with current and potential business partners, customers, investors.
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br />   At the eighteenth hole. Whatever he may have felt about her defection (said nothing of this at the time) both share a general outcome.

  President Zuma again declares the ANC will rule until the Second Coming. The Council of Churches has objected to his statement as sacrilege. (Jake evokes —Shades of the Mohammad cartoon in Denmark? Don’t demean our gods.—) In the confusion of public tightrope acts, while students riot because they can’t afford university registration fees, ‘Financial Exclusion from Education’ is the subject on the tacked-up posters’ call to a mass meeting at the university and among the discussants, student union leaders, heads of departments, known ‘activists’ Lesego and himself, are three-piece-suit Professor Neilson and his one or two other colleagues from various faculties who usually absolve themselves, now, from public protest. A Brother (or is it a Sister) university last year saw a 154 per cent increase in student enrolment. First-year maths students sit on the floor, have to share desks. Other ‘tertiary’ institutions: one failed in the last financial year to spend 142 million made available by the government for bursaries. What’s happened to the money? Nationally, mid-year marks of engineering students in a developing country short of engineers dropped to 35 per cent passes. Like the voice of authority unexpected from an opened tomb, it’s Professor Neilson speaking. —There is everywhere, among all of us, enormous—a staggering strain on teaching staff, on our possibility of educating, our dedication to disseminating knowledge on required levels for this country.—

  The Old Boy product of exclusive educated class, clubman, has never before been applauded at present gatherings.