No Time Like the Present by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

What are you doing about it.

Again.

This time the country’s share of the world’s refugees sleeping in doorways and fouling neighbourhoods; it’s climate change like the carbon monoxide that is everywhere, it’s the atmosphere, in greater or lesser degree. Just keep breathing. What can universities do but study, research the phenomenon in the Department of Social Science, Politics, History, Humanitarian Studies—the law of human rights eternal above its distortions in the codes of differing countries, societies, circumstances. A seminar in the appropriate department, which a good number of lecturers from other faculties attend, addressed by the Nigerian Vice Chancellor Principal with the firm intellectual decorum broken only here and there by a slip, emotional anger in the African phrasing of his voice.

And a lunchtime meeting of students and some faculty members in a half-filled hall.

Again. Persuaded by students from the bridging classes now become voluntary coaching also for those in their second year, he’s one of the academics sitting at a table, each tapping a microphone like the clearing of a throat before giving a view on the subject. Xenophobia. That’s the identification, one word, on the Students Council posters hung on the railings outside. Is he the only one among the Professors Jean McDonald of economics, Lesego, African Studies, and the two elected final-year undergraduates, who will question it as glib.

In the audience the students sprawl attentively, there’s a girl in a chador gracefully upright in the front row and a male at the far end eating from a takeaway, it’s democratically correct, the people must not go hungry. He can’t point this out (tempting)—there’d be laughter making a spectacle of their fellow student—the simple presence of a basic need being followed inappropriately is an example of that need as what’s being evaded under the poster rubric.

—‘Xenophobia’—it’s our distancing from the fact that our people right here in our own country, at home (his hand unconsciously knotting itself, a fist) an existence as refugees from our economy, unemployed, unhoused, surviving by ingenuities of begging, waving cars into parking space for the small change (all of us who have cars drop this handout), standing at traffic lights with packets of fruit to sell through driver’s windows, if you’re female standing with a baby or one that can propel itself playing in the gutter. It’s easy—to call them, our own people xenophobic when they resort to violence to defend the only space, the only means of survival against competitors for this almost nothing. It’s not hatred of foreigners. The name for the violence is xenophobia?—

There’s some sort of applause, the confusion of palms smacking together, a couple of feet whose impact with the floor is muffled because the obese soles of canvas sports shoes don’t have the force of leather, contesting voices are thrown like paper darts. Jean McDonald is informally chairperson. She takes full advantage of her microphone. —You are pointing out the fact that we are not succeeding in meeting the rights of disadvantaged citizens of our own country—if we

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