A Sport of Nature (56 page)

This year, the President is Chairman of the OAU. It is an honour at which some say he (and his ambitious wife) set his braided cap and his black, leather-bound beret from the beginning of his second regime. The fact is that he was an almost unanimous choice of a body known for its dissension: thrice-over victor in the anti-colonialist struggle, first against the colonial occupation, then in his coup against the government that colluded with the former colonial power, and finally against Europe's and America's covert backing of his usurpers; a professed socialist with a mixed economy in his own country, a man of high intelligence whose emotional style makes him popular in Africa and the Eastern bloc, and whose humour and sophistication do the same for him with the West.

One of his first official duties is to attend the proclamation of the new African state that used to be South Africa. It is fitting that this should have come about during his year of office, because he was part of the negotiations that continued outside the country concurrently with undeclared civil war there even when the black leaders were finally released from prison and brought back from exile, the liberation movements unbanned, and apart-heid legislation abolished (a formality, the country had become ungovernable under it), but a section of whites, led by the white military command and a portion of the army, tried to retain a power base—they called it the white homeland—in the Orange Free State and part of the Transvaal. The role of the Frontline States in the independence of Namibia some years before was revived to facilitate the establishment of black liberation in the last and most important of the southern African countries ruled by white power, and the composition of the Frontline States was enlarged accordingly by greater representation of the black power of the continent. The white corporations who owned the mineral wealth of the country have been eager, ever since they saw that the whites were going to lose political power, to ensure
that they will have some future—say, 49%?—under black rule. The present incumbent of the OAU chairmanship has been an extremely useful adviser to the black liberation leaders in their determination to make use of the executive and managerial skills of the corporations in order to maintain the economy while nationalizing the mining industry: his experience in driving such hard bargains has been invaluable. So, in many ways, he can be regarded as a brother who has been part of the South African liberation struggle in accordance with the old Pan-African ideal that sometimes seems forgotten.

There will be many ceremonies to mark the birth of an African republic where there have been a number of kinds of colonial occupation disguised as republics: the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, the Republic of South Africa. There are many historic sites sacred to the black people that were trampled over by white interests and now will be restored to honour by the celebrations to be held on this ground. These sites are everywhere; in the Cape, in Natal, in the Orange Free State, in the Transvaal—and it is all one country now, there are no homelands but only a homeland. (Some observers speculate it may be difficult to keep it that way; there are former ‘national state' and ‘independent state' leaders whose addiction to sectional power won't be easily cured or accommodated.) But the actual ceremony of declaration can take place, it has been decided, only where white power sat immoveably and apparently unassailable for so long: in Cape Town. The House of Parliament is too small; it never was enlarged to take in representatives of the whole population, merely provided with Outhouses to accommodate the failed experiment of annexing the Indian and ‘Coloured' people to save apartheid. The Gardens adjoining parliament could have provided the site to become the most sacred of all, the one on which the ancestral country itself will be returned to its people; van Riebeeck's gardens where the first fence was put up,
centuries ago, to keep out the indigenous people. But that would have meant destroying the old trees and flowering groves—as in Harare, that was once Salisbury, the public gardens are a relic of the colonial style worth keeping.

A stadium has been built, or rather an existing one has been greatly enlarged and completely refurbished. It has been surrounded, since early last evening, from the foreshore to its six gates of access, as if the ocean itself has flooded up from Table Bay, as if the flanks of Table Mountain itself have crumbled down in a moving mass to the city, by hundreds of thousands of people wanting to get in to occupy the stands open to the public. A cordon of police and the liberation army keeps out the huge crowd for whom there is not room within; the stadium was filled as soon as the gates were opened at ten in the morning for the ceremony that is to take place at noon. There is a sense that the liberation army is protecting the police from the crowd; for many years these black policemen took part in the raids upon these people's homes and on migrant workers' hostels, broke down squatters' shacks, sjambokked schoolchildren and manhandled strikers: every now and then they cannot avoid meeting a certain gaze from eyes in the crowd that once burned with tear gas.

The enormous faces of those who have not lived to see this day sway, honoured on lofty placards. Special contingents overflow the stands packed with those of the liberation organizations and the trade unions. There are student, church and women's groups, all with their uniforms, T-shirts and banners, there are choirs, musicians with traditional instruments and dancers in the national dress of the amaXhosa, amaZulu, Bapedi, Basotho, VhaVenda, amaPondo, Batswana. Gold, green and black bunting swathes every stand, dais, barrier and pole. The flags of many countries clap at the air in the force of the southeaster blowing. The blue, white and orange flag of the white
Republic of South Africa was on the flag-pole in the middle of the arena ready, according to the instructions of some stickler for procedure, to be ceremonially lowered for ever, but during the night someone has got into the stadium despite the heavy guard maintained, and hauled it down. It lies, ripped by a knife, wrapped by the wind round the base of its pole. The television crews from all over the world are filming this image with the same idea in mind: it will provide a striking opening shot for their coverage.

For hours the great swell of singing and chanting has been carried back and forth between the mountain and the sea by the south-easter. When the band in gold, green and black leads in the military escort and motorcade with the first black President and Prime Minister of the country, his wife and his cabinet—all people whose faces were for years not even permitted to be published in newspapers, whose words were banned, and who were banished to exile or prison—the swell rises to a roar that strikes the mountain, and jets above it to the domain of eagles, ululating shrills of ecstasy. The mountain may crack like a great dark glass shattered by a giant's note never sung before. The instruments of the band, continuing to play as dignitaries and foreign guests are seated on the dais covered with velvet in liberation colours, are obliterated by the human voice; no trumpet or flute can blow against that resonance from half a million breasts, and the Western-style military drums are shallow, beaten out by the tremendous blows of African drums.

Diplomats, white and black, white churchmen and individuals or representatives of organizations who actively supported the liberation Struggle sit among black dignitaries; there are one or two white industries representing the mining corporations. The Chairman of the OAU and his wife are in a place of honour. She is a white woman, but she is wearing African dress today, the striped, hand-woven robes and high-swathed headcloth that is
the national dress of the women of the President's country. Those who know about such things would recognize that the gold earrings suspended from the tip of each lobe that just shows, beneath the headdress, are not of the workmanship of that country, but probably of Ghana. She is a beautiful woman—at least, the splendid outfit makes her appear so; there are not many whites who could carry it off. She has imposing stature despite her lack of height—in the forties, one would say, and rounder than she must have been when she was a girl. Her very large, brilliant black eyes are made-up but unlined—the crease that appears as she smiles and greets people to whom she is being presented, at her husband's side, is to do with the structure of her face, her high, tight-fleshed cheekbones, which look scrubbed, without artifice. Not possible to see what the colour of her hair may be, now, because of the headcloth. She is embraced by and embraces the wife of the first black President of the country, whom she has never before met; a real beauty, that one once was, and the distinction is still to be discerned despite and perhaps because of the suffering that has aged her to fulfil a different title.

Sasha has not yet come back home. His Dutch wife has twins and she is nervous of going to an unfamiliar country with small children too soon after the long struggle down there has ended. She has been accustomed to the kind of health and welfare facilities taken for granted in Amsterdam. There is also the unsolved problem of Pauline. No longer comrades of war, she and her son have been unable not to resume their own congenital war, but she is certain to want to follow him if he returns. Olga's sons, Clive and Brian, are the only members of the sisters' family left in the country. Clive already has been approached by the new Ministry of Agriculture to serve in a consultative capacity on the adaptation of the wine industry to the new social order. He sees no reason to leave. There is no black man with his specialised knowledge in this field, not anywhere. Brian, as the Foreign Exchange
economist of one of the largest banks, has been appointed on a commission to review the activities of the Reserve Bank in consideration of the broadening of trade alliances with the world from which the old white regime was excluded, in particular the Afro-Asian and Eastern blocs. So he sees no reason—at present—to leave. Neither brother is in the crowd at the stadium, although there are thousands of whites among the blacks, some wearing the T-shirts that bear the face of the new President. (Clive, with a loan from the Afrikaner bank and in partnership with an Indian clothing manufacturer, was enterprising enough even as a very young man to have had a side-line in the production of such shirts for the liberation movements.) The brothers have always kept away from all that sort of thing, they wouldn't get mixed up in any mob. The struggle was not their struggle. The celebration is not their celebration.

Now the surface of the living mass has changed, instead of heads it has become fists waving like spores. The wife of the Chairman of the OAU has slowly risen alongside her husband, beside the first black President and Prime Minister, his wife and the other leaders of a new nation, and the Presidents, Prime Ministers, party and union leaders of many others, in practised observance of her training in attendance at great and solemn occasions. She takes a breath, perhaps to ease her shoulders in the robe, and her hands hang at her sides a moment and then are lightly enlaced in front of her thighs in the correct position. Her face is the public face assumed, along with appropriate dress, for exposure.

If it is true that the voice of a life is always addressing someone—for the religiously devout it is a god, for the politically devout it is the human mass—there is a stage in middle life, if that life is fully engaged with the world and the present, when there is no space or need for reflection. The past is not a haunting, but was a preparation, put into use.

It also may be true that a life is always moving—without being aware of this, or what the moment may be, and by a compass not available to others—towards a moment.

Cannons ejaculate from the Castle.

It is noon.

Hillela is watching a flag slowly climb, still in its pupa folds, a crumpled wing emerging, and—now!—it writhes one last time and flares wide in the wind, is smoothed taut by the fist of the wind, the flag of Whaila's country.

NADINE GORDIMER
's many novels include
The Conservationist
, joint winner of the Booker Prize,
Get A Life
,
Burger's Daughter
,
July's People
,
My Son's Story
,
The Pickup
and, most recently,
No Time Like the Present
. Her collections of short stories include
The Soft Voice of the Serpent
,
Something Out There
,
Jump
,
Loot
and, most recently,
Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
. She has also collected and edited
Telling Tales
, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in
Telling Times
and a substantial selection of her stories was published in
Life Times
. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.

NOVELS

The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving

The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour

The Conservationist / Burger's Daughter / July's People /

My Son's Story / None to Accompany Me

The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life /

No Time Like the Present

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country

Friday's Footprint / Not for Publication

Livingstone's Companions

A Soldier's Embrace / Something Out There

Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

Life Times: Stories 1952–2007

ESSAYS

The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (
with David Goldblatt
)

Lifetimes under Apartheid (
with David Goldblatt
)

The Essential Gesture – Writing, Politics and Places

(
edited by Stephen Clingman
)

Writing and Being