No Time Like the Present: A Novel (6 page)

This is no alma mater, the university where he had somehow graduated with his industrial chemistry degree while acquiring the alchemy to sabotage the regime in which higher education was an exclusive facility. The new student ‘body’ was beginning to be many-limbed. Among the white students whose parents were paying tuition and hostel fees there were rising numbers of young blacks with confidence in their right to knowledge that would lift them out of the level of skills, money, dignity their parents had been dumped at.

The place of higher learning is open. The undenominational bible (want of a better title for secular faith), the Constitution, decrees this. But like most decrees it doesn’t, can’t ensure what’s called ‘capacity’ to benefit by them. Young men—so far, fewer women with that nerve half-grown Jabu had had abundantly—are registered on scholarships or sponsorships of some kind, there are even white employers who hand out a bonsella chance these times, to a servant’s bright son. The ‘bridging classes’ Senior Lecturer from the Science Faculty gives voluntary hours to: a band-aid. He knows it doesn’t deal with the chasm of poor schooling the students claw up from.

The Struggle’s not over.

There are still some professors of the past on the faculties along with the intake of comrades like himself known as the Left by academics not wishing to question themselves too exigently whether as an acceptable political category this can be taken to include, in support of just ends, power stations that were blown up.

The comrades, the Left or however they’re seen, are aware they have to re-educate themselves somewhat. The immediacy of uncompromising back-and-forth in the bush, guns and cell walls instead of theses and coffee-vending machines in a faculty room—their kind of blunt confrontation will be misinterpreted by people who haven’t known they may be dead in the dirt next day.—If something new is going to be made of the university we’ll have to start with what we’ve got. We have to get on with the old guard on the principle that we don’t accept they’re guarding the same education any more, doors closed. That we trust they know this.—

—Even if they don’t?—

—Even if they don’t.—

—Exactly.—

—They should take early retirement—it’s late.—

He’s stirring his coffee as if repeating the sequence of those words heard.—No, no. Hang on. Most of them are good teachers. Some better than we are. They have the broad, worldly—sophisticated—general knowledge the students need to be given real access to. Grant that. Who’s out there to replace them right now.—

Shudula Shoba’s Struggle record isn’t known, maybe it’s enough he rescued himself out of the ghetto to earn a Masters, but he’s one of the new appointments at lecturer level, under distinguished professors, novelists and poets.—Mphahlele, Ndebele, Kgositsile.—

He’s too new to the faculty to ignore voices over his informing what he ought to know, they’re already professors in other universities.—Sharp sharp—but some of the other big names, they’re in rural colleges, just one step above high school, wasted there in the backveld.—

—You’re going to poach them away from the people?—

The exchange isn’t abandoned even as a few establishment professors come in with greetings all round. Coffee-vendor bonhomie. He puts his words into practice at once:—What we’ve got is with us.—Steve’s remark is for professors all, against a clink of cups and the derogatory hiss of the coffee dispenser.—Don’t you find our bridging efforts inadequate. Band-aid.—

—Here we go talking end results when we ought to be doing something about the beginning, I’ve got students in African Studies who don’t know how to write, spell in their own language, mother tongue, they have the TV black sitcom vocabulary, that’s all.—Lesego Moloi, survivor not only of the Struggle but by the old-time academic favour whereby a black would be hired as an exception by a white university only for that branch of learning, no matter what other post he may qualify for. He lifts and drops the soles of his heavy shoes in accompaniment to his words.

—So what should we be doing? The Convocation of the university doesn’t run the education department’s schools.—Professor Nielson still wears a suit, shirt and tie as the undergarments of the academic gown although there is a relaxed standard of suitability started with the example of Mandela’s tunics. Professor Nielson cannot avoid having the tone of enlightenment dispensed even when not teaching. He’s what father Andrew’s generation calls a stuffed shirt, the starched shield once required as evening dress.—You’re not proposing we lower university entrance standards further. Is that what a university is, not an advancement of knowledge but a descent.—

What Steve’s question is—whether a token of coaching in hopes of bringing them up to university standards can achieve recovery from ten years of hopelessly poor schooling.

—We’re simply to make the scientists, engineers, economists—you name them—out of its product.—

So what came of it, she wants to know.

What would there be to tell that wasn’t an excuse.

Well, it was time for everyone to get back to the lecture halls, seminars. Or those declared hours when students could come to them in the small rooms that have their names on the door, bringing requests disguised as problems. That’s what’s come of it. Band-aid. He brought it up before Jake, Isa, the Mkizes grilling sausages and chops on a Sunday (as the former inhabitants of the suburb did). Their children inventing wild games, wrestling and tumbling, limbs mingled as those of their parents never could. He thinks he knows what should come of it. But he’s telling the comrades, not the academic colleagues. University’s Convocation, student organisation—the vice chancellors!—they ought to be demanding meetings with the minister responsible for education in schools. Breaking down his bloody door! It’s
our
business. Education can’t be lopped off in two, it’s a contiguous process, our Moloi in African Studies gets students who can’t read and write in command of their own languages, I have some—maths is a foreign language they haven’t had the teaching to grasp, just enough, functionally, to scrape through the final school paper.—

—So what are you and your profs doing about the get-together?—Jake mimics an empty hand signalling Isa to offer more bread.

—That’s what I said.—Jabu turns her shoulders and breasts, one of her unconscious physical reactions of differing opinion that made her individual to Steve from the beginning of clandestinity. Since way back in Swaziland they had taken it as part of freedom to be gained that they can imply criticism without breaching love.

The same applies to friendship; Peter Mkize takes up from comrade Jake.—Why don’t you start it going? Get together lecturers, profs, approach the vice chancellor and have an appointment, whatever, meet the minister up there in the parliament, tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.—

The children are asserting their rights, clamouring for ice cream.—It’s not time yet.—The mothers clamour in rivalry. Everyone is laughing, biting into the meat that must first be eaten. The choir starts up again, ice cream ice cream.

One of the many things you learn in a liberation movement is take heed of what comrades challenge you in. A week or two after, he began to broach to colleagues, first those already grouped as on the Left, what was the teaching profession’s responsibility in the situations of freedom, and then, on the same principle to the old guard, the proposal that there be a discussion whether a delegation of academics should meet with the minister to face the facts of two educational processes that should be one and are not. The discussion took place in the faculty room for an informal start. Opinions were hesitantly if not reluctantly expressed. The coffee machine again resorted to; this sort of meddling academia in government was heard as (of course) in conformation with the Left, citizens of the university unite, that stuff, update variation of an old rallying shibboleth that recruited whites against the
swart gevaar
. But it was one of the Lefties who came up with the irrefutable the minister would put on the table: there is not enough money to fund school education of a standard to pass seamlessly to universities, less than a generation after the end of hundreds of years when resources for education were spent overwhelmingly on the minority of the vast population.—Education. Funds in the exchequer are to be shared with health, housing, transport, everything that is social need. (Doesn’t mention Big Brother Defence.) To ask for more?—

It’s not time yet, for ice cream.

She listens to his account of the academic meeting while folding clothes Wethu has washed and ironed, and continuing a process, placing his shirts and socks in one pile, Sindiswa’s dresses, jeans, Gary Elias’s shorts and shirts in others.

Why does he give up.

If you’re used to rejection you just go on for what you need, working at it. How could we have got to vote in ’94 if we hadn’t followed the banned Freedom Charter. How’d I have got to school ahead of my brother and then away from ‘Bantu Education’ to Swaziland, if my Baba had accepted that at Home females come second, for a black daughter education comes last. Hopeless. Why doesn’t he just carry on. If that first lot is left hands-down there will be others in the university and even outside who’ll act differently. You only decide it’s hopeless if you’re used to having everything. If you’ve been white.

Ashamed to be thinking that. Of him.

Life intervenes. Coincides with the group putting an approach to the minister on the back burner. The time for death of a parent; parents are always older and closer to this than a son realises, the main relationship was in childhood, boyhood. The Struggle brought other fundamental bonds in its place; if it’s something for regret. Wasn’t there a time once for the good son to have joined the father’s cricket club. He’s going to be cremated, as stated by him in his will. The son’s moment of presentiment…Jonathan’s not going to turn up with a rabbi? How ignorant of part of your inheritance can you be! Jews are forbidden cremation. Don’t worry.

Pauline somehow persuaded their father to have their sons snipped. But seems to have recognised. Andrew’s non-observant Christianity. Andrew’s will also specifies—no religious service. Several of his friends and business associates are invited or appoint themselves to speak of him before his coffin in the hall of the crematorium, its seating suggesting a place of worship of some kind. Strange for a son to hear his father summed up in eulogy, oratory. Jonathan (no rabbi) as the eldest son speaks for the family.

It’s over, people are tentatively about to stir, as Jabu does beside him, but she rises to sing. Unselfconscious, she rises to sing for him, Steve’s father. She is in her full African dress as the understanding of the import of the final occasion in life. As the nanny-relative understood it first, at the presentation of a newborn son. No one moves, arrested.

Some potent substance is being generated in his body by the voice. He knows now that his father has left him, has always been within, with him, and is gone. At the last note, there’s a susurration of admiration, movement urged by emotion, Jonathan’s Brenda is propelled to shackle Jabu’s robe in embrace, weeping proudly. She takes Jabu’s hand through people making for the doors, as if Jabu is her own production. Brenda’s changed the admiration, appreciation of some special tribute, into embarrassment, for some, at their own emotion; if it transcended something, it’s true that one of the characteristics of being black is that peasant or lawyer, they certainly can sing.

The years are identified by event not date. The year of the third election in freedom was the year Sindiswa was of an age to have her education considered seriously. He had taken for granted, Pauline and Andrew’s son, that when the time came they must have chosen, for him, a school from where they believed he would be prepared at a university for some career. For the Headmaster of the boys’ school and Elder of the Methodist Church in the ‘location’ outside the coal-mine town, seriousness about his daughter’s education was a strategy against a social abnormality and—eventually, contriving to have her continue the learning process over the border—a political defiance?

With what anticipation did they sift through the options open to choose a school for Sindiswa after the one she’s graduated to from day care. On their principles, she should go to a state school. Those that had been white schools, at last open to all children, were well equipped but deteriorated by lack of funding for maintenance, and teaching standards lowered by overcrowded classrooms.

They could afford to give her something better.

Privilege? Come on; admit it!

He’s the one who challenges himself and her; she reacts to this as absurd, a convention craven to dogma even if it’s their own. Her Baba didn’t betray the black freedom movement in sending his daughter to a training college over a border, the result of which she has qualified to work for the advance of justice!

He hears this as specious, something never to be expected from her.
That
was entirely different, another time.

But now the child. All right. Not to be argued over; the child must have the right to come first, beyond orthodoxy of comrade principles.

A different time.

There is only one time, all time, for principles you live by.

The Senior Counsel who had found a moment to put in a word for her employment at the Justice Centre was a descendant of immigration from a natal country once occupied by others: the Nazi army. He had escaped to a distant mirage Africa as a child with his father. They were poor and without a word of any language but Greek, but they were white. Acceptable. He grew up eking from whatever opportunities he could grasp an education which had culminated in his apocryphal appearances as defence of the accused in apartheid trials of liberation leaders, at risk of landing up in prison himself, and in the aftermath he is equally preoccupied with the process of justice in unforeseen occurrences of its transgressions in a free country. But he had never forgotten that as a South African—African who had earned that one-word identity—he also was Greek. When he became well enough known, which means recognised in the outside world for his standing in the annals of the legal profession, and was able to raise money among the diaspora Greeks who had either feared or admired him, he brought them into the founding of an open school where Greek would be a compulsory subject along with the usual curriculum. From something rather in the category of the sports and cultural clubs of Italians, Scots, Germans, and the eternal diaspora of Jews, the school had responded to the country’s freedom by expanding with the energetic promotion of admission of black children, any mix of colour on the population palette, the only stipulation that they learn Greek among their other subjects. The privilege of a classical education thrown in.

A fee-paying school. It’s not an innovation to deal with illiteracy, but there are a number of bursaries endowed; any child with proven ability could come from a makeshift rural school without toilets or electricity among the shacks.

She should see it for herself; naturally her mentor says it is the right, the only place for a child. But no, a father’s responsibility as much as hers, he must come although this child is a girl and back where her mother lived she’d—still, maybe—be last in line for school. Unless she had an exceptional Baba.

So as they had taken up Jake’s invitation to look at the house which was their first home together (for him: she might not agree) they went on Senior Counsel’s invitation to visit the school. He toured them round classrooms, art studio, music section, library and Internet facilities, swimming pool, sports fields, botanical garden, with a volunteer entourage of eager pupils to whom he turned aside, interrupting his accounts of the values by which the school was directed, to chat and chaff.

Each saw the other was picturing Sindiswa in these settings.

On their terrace that early evening, with the subject, Sindiswa, there, as they had sat alone with her as a baby that evening in Glengrove when the street sky was ripped apart; a decision was made. But this time there was quiet.

Only Gary busy building and then gleefully attacking his Lego fortresses.

It distracted her father’s attention from Sindiswa. There was only the caveat from him, in his mind; the school uniforms are too elaborate.—Those sports team blazers, white with braid and gold. Waste of money enriching some outfitter. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ crap.—He pulls a face at himself in admonition of this pious old tag of political correctness.

The academic indecision to approach the minister, pussy-footing, brought about irritation of frustration which affected all his responses. Even Jabu’s constancy irked:—Just call them together again. Don’t let them off.—It’s her variation of a woman’s nagging.

—I put notices on the staff board, I pushed messages under their doors. Three turned up yesterday, no sign of the others.—

—The old profs.—

—Not only…but I begin to smell there’s this idea—excuse, pretext, who the hell do I think I am?—

She jerks her head at them.

But it’s not as irrelevant a question as she dismisses.

—An upstart from ‘The Struggle’ who doesn’t know he’s under a different command now?—

She sweeps decisively into cupped hands bits of Gary’s plastic building units that have scattered.—Speak to them, one by one, each one.
Khuluma nabo, ngamanye, emanye!
—

—A kick in the butt.—He supplies what he thinks is more or less the meaning of the expletive-sounding one in her own language. It hasn’t been part of the coaching she’s given him.

Before he could take up the conviction he has of his own strength of character an event on campus, of the campus, not of the faculty room, made a kick in the butt too late. The students commanded possession of the university with an authority that made their previous protests mere tantrums which had been, could be contained in toleration, freedom of expression after all. The organisers—if such spontaneity can be attributed to a Student Council—were far outnumbered by other groups and factions, sects, political and religious, Gay and Lesbian. Gatherings that began before this faculty building and that, the library, the colonial-classical façade of the Great Hall where graduation ceremonies take place, were encompassed, overflowed and became one uproar on a venue generally regarded as too dispersed to demand attention for protests: the sports fields, football, cricket, invaded like the angry spectators who can’t be kept off when they reject a referee’s decision. The speakers were empty mouthings under the thunder of drummers and bellow in song, jetting as the crush surged; it didn’t matter, all knew what their issues were, on placards, T-shirts, home-contrived banners even if some were ancillary GAY BASHING CRIMINAL UNDER THE CONSTITUTION to the overall purpose NO TUITION FEES EDUCATION OUR RIGHT WHAT ABOUT THE BETTER LIFE—election promises hurled back at the other all-powerful referee, the government. Self-destruction that had seen people of their ghettos burn down the scrapheap of living begrudged to them, the ramshackle cinema, the school without books, the clinic without water—this irrational impulse of reality. Trash is vomited from bins, lecterns are crushed like matchboxes, files rifled from the admission offices are danced round as they burn, on the sports fields the goalpost altars of the games the rioters themselves worship, are dragged up, tossed over.

The students who come as friends, familiars of the house, Jabu and the children—Sindiswa has a favourite whom she tells boastfully about her school—they must be among the spore of heads covering the space he looks down upon from his room in the science faculty. It would be unlikely to come across them there, find them in the anonymity that erases all personal features of the crowd. Yet they are some sort of recognition to be claimed; allow him, member of the academic faculty, to go out into it?

He can’t see far among the bodies pressed around him. There are white hands among those raised in the stomping, chanting, so he couldn’t be so noticeably there, the absorption in purpose is blindly fervent, he knows from political rallies. In the mass you have no direction of your own, he is carried along in a surge towards the main gates of the campus. Outside between the street and the gates, another gathering—a few pausing in curiosity before turning away, others, some black men and women literally throwing their yelling weight about. All cling to gates too wide, tall and strong to shake: they’ve joined the students’ action.

He tries to make a way to other parts of the campus but progress is against powerful currents as urge drives each limb of the great body to join that. He reaches only the science block from where he had set out.

Did any of his academic colleagues to whom he’d been advised to kick arse attempt to be along with the uprising against tuition fees most of their students couldn’t pay (so the cell phones worn like ear ornament, who pays for the serial calls). The faculty coffee room may say, factually, the university couldn’t exist without tuition fees to supplement the government’s inadequate grant; ‘funding free education is that government’s affair’. No dereliction of the university’s responsibility towards students?

Did he have a place down there (he’s back up at his window again). Claim it—claim on
him
—because of his part, his decision to get mixed up in providing scientific know-how and ingredients to make bombs, his Jabu, his children gestated in a black womb. There are bonfires signalling here, there, like the Guy Fawkes ones of his childhood commemorating a revolutionary arson he and his siblings had never heard of. One of the bundles of whatever was being fed smoking to the flames was very near the archeological museum where tooled stones are the reminder that young men rioting are the descendants of peoples who had skills before invaders brought others; he had a sudden fear not for himself but for what is an extension of self, the work, research that was in progress in the science faculty. What if they burst into the laboratories where climate change is being studied for solutions that would save their own existence on this planet.

Who the hell does he think he is.

What’s the difference between trashing a university that can provide knowledge only for money, and the street gangs who hijack and rob—ah, but
there’s
the difference, the hijack brings means to buy, own the advertised products the hijacker doesn’t have; there’s no gain in ransacking a university.

What if they come. Would he say comrades, it may be justice to let you into the laboratories to break the privilege others have to qualify for such work, tuition at a price your parents and grandparents, great-great-grandparents have earned down the mines, building the roads, digging the earth for the crops of masters.

This opposition within, clashing contradictions, it didn’t exist when you were closed away with yourself solitary in detention, and even in the bush tents where between action that seemed the answer then, immediate, which accounted to and for every contesting manifestation of living. There were discussions on what’s supposed could be called moral choices taken—made do with?—in the ‘situation’ of the old regime—everyone would be freed for good (in all senses of the two words) of all evasions once that regime was
finish and klaar
.

Who the hell do you think you are.

The answer is go back down into the body of the throng. But this time someone pressed against him in the strange intimacy of a peristaltic crush, twisted face round.—
Eish!
You Professor Reed from Science!—He’s not a professor yet, Senior Lecturer with a thesis to complete, but with this greeting he has a rank in the protest, if far back, in the combined push from the playing fields and the surrounded faculty buildings again to the main gates. There’s a backlash in the great body followed by a surge forward as common breath taken: the police are at the gates now the gates have given way, their dogs are barking against hysterical shouts in the theatrical effect of tear gas. Fight your way (as if that were possible) to the front and then, as a white man, the old authority that was the ultimate one, tell the police to lay off the assault? The students are throwing whatever they can pick up at the police, who are mostly black. Through tears and retching coughs they yell insults in many languages as batons strike them. As far as can be made out the leaders of the Student Council who were in the front line have been overcome and arrested, there are police vans swirling sirens in the street, and the other students are being dragged pell-mell random into vans.

Dispersal begins raggedly. Some small groups re-form with attempts at addressing the break-up, the campus is haggard with destruction.

His keys there in his pocket; he gets—escapes?—to the academic staff car park; few cars, no damage done to them—most of the academics have made off as soon as the protest grew. His book-bag and papers are on a table somewhere in his room and the door’s left unlocked—irresponsible. There’s one of the academics about to open his car.—You’re all right? You get caught up in that chaos?—

—Not caught up. I was there.—

Professor of Classics—yes it’s Anthony Demster—takes this as a philosophically sophisticated way of dealing with the disturbance.

—What went on at the university—the police—I tried and tried to call you after we heard at the office but you didn’t pick up!—

To put it to her; they were so familiar with each other’s reactions to the predictable or the unpredictable in their not far-off life on the wrong side of the law.