Cokcraco. Paul Williams
let you speak yet. You put it off as long as possible, rehearsing the words, slowing your breathing down. The sweat has dried sticky and cold on your skin in the arctic air-conditioning in the room.
‘Sit, sit. You must be tired. How was the trip?’
You sit. Consider. Should you tell them about the sixteen-hour flight, the Durban hotel you stayed in the night before adjacent to a shebeen that played loud music to the early hours of the morning, the air-conditioning in your overpriced rental car that didn’t work, the last few minutes of terror when you were sure you’d be dead?
‘It was fine. No worries.’
‘No worries? I like that.’
‘He’s Australian. Australians don’t have worries.’
‘Australians have a sense of humour.’
‘You’ll need a sense of humour to work here, Dr Turner.’
‘Tim. Call me Tim. Or Timothy.’
A suit does wonders. Paste a self onto your shimmering non-being, and people believe you to be solid.
‘You’re replacing a man who has been suspended from office,’ says Mpofu.
‘It’s been a terrible business.’
‘As we Zulus say, Umlomo, ishoba lokuziphungela.’ He offers no translation this time, but you nod anyway. You do a lot of nodding. The puppeteer up there in your brain jerks the head string way too often. But that is what humouring is.
The differAnce between pretending to be what people wAnt you to be and humouring them by Acting in a certain way is quite indistinguishable. Always mAsk; AlwAys pretend; AlwAys protect yourself. But don’t inhabit the mAsk. Don’t feel inferior: only Act as if you Are inferior. Be deferentiAl, but don’t yield.
– Sizwe Bantu, AfriKan Metaphysics, 2007
Zimmerlie sighs. ‘He’s fighting the case, of course. Suing the department, the university, has even made a personal case against each of us.’
‘The case could go on for months, years …’
‘A delicate issue,’ says Zimmerlie. ‘We shouldn’t talk much about it.’
‘The less said the better.’
‘There’s a trial, an inquiry, an investigation.’
You have to ask. ‘Who … ? Who are you talking about?’
‘Makaya.’
‘A horrible man.’ Zimmerlie holds up an enormous weight of air with his hands to measure, you guess, the enormity of the horror. ‘It may be a semester, or perhaps longer—we just don’t know—because now he’s refused to accept dismissal and there’s a board of enquiry—and he’s taking us all to court …’
‘Dr Turner, if he is fired, there’ll be a permanent post here and there’s a good chance you’ll get it—we didn’t want to bring you all the way from Australia for nothing.’
‘What’s this?’ Mpofu takes the blue-bound thesis from your hands. ‘The novels of Sizwe Bantu?’
‘My doctoral thesis, in case you’re interested, is on the novels of Sizwe Bantu.’
They don’t seem to be, so you offer more: ‘You know, the author who made himself famous venerating the cockroach.’
Blank, unreadable faces. Zimmerlie’s furrowed eyebrows. Mpofu licking his lips. Go on, prod their memories. ‘African International Book Prize. Nova Award?’
Zimmerlie takes the thesis from Mpofu and riffles through the two hundred pages as if it is an animation flick book. ‘Interesting.’ He hands it back without reading a word.
Mpofu speaks in a tone that can only be interpreted as patronising. ‘He’s a rather contentious writer around here.’
Don’t react. Don’t. Don’t gawp in amazed disbelief. Grit your teeth. Smile. ‘Oh, really? Contentious?’ Don’t say: Sizwe Bantu is the Greatest African Writer of All Time.
‘Not very well thought of around here,’ adds Zimmerlie.
Don’t say: he lives around here. Surely you know him, honour him revere him, even just as a local writer?
Surely Bantu?
For this is Bantu territory. The hills you can see through the window are the hills pictured on the cover of Bantu’s third novel, Seven Invisible Selves.
But of course—and you should know this—people are blind to talent in their own backyard, and a prophet is never recognised in his own country.
An embarrassing unpleasantness hovers over you, like the smell of a gutted office and burnt rubber. Silence. The swallowing of thick Adam’s apples.
Zimmerlie claps his hands together to banish whatever bad spirits have entered the room. ‘Well, Timothy, Thami and I have some business to attend to with Admin regarding your appointment. Why don’t you stroll around campus and get a feel for it, and return in, say, half an hour?’
* * *
The idea of a quick campus tour is quashed the second you step out of the air-conditioned English Department. The air blasts your face like a furnace, and the sour humidity curdles your stomach. Have you forgotten so quickly where you are? The sun dazzles every reflective surface; you swear that the tar under your feet is melting. And there is not a soul out of doors. The air-conditioning units on every corner of every building roar; what must be cicadas compete from low grey bushes. It is not a place to be outside at midday.
And—an aside—why the colonisers named this the Dark Continent must have been some kind of joke. It is full of light everywhere, refracting off all surfaces. It is drenched in sunlight. And the land is green. Fertile. Fecund. Fruitful. The jacarandas here are really purple, not like the insipid pastels back in Victoria. And the poincianas are magnificent trees with blood-red dripping leaves.6
6 Footnotes are tiresome things, interrupting the reader’s ‘jouissance of the text’ (if any) and plunging his or her eyes down to the bottom of the page to read some unnecessary and distracting, often self-consciously arrogant ‘extra’ but vital information added by the author. Look at me, they (the words) shout, or worse, look at ME (the author). Even more annoying is when they spill onto the next page. Ironically those who argue for the use of footnotes are those who maintain that they (the footnotes, not the people) are there to avoid disruption of the flow of the main narrative. They are most common in academic works, where terms need to be explained, or outrageous claims need to be justified, or irate or confused readers need help. The idea is that they can be ignored. Ha! Just try to read past one of those little numbers, and you are distracted, the flow of your narrative jouissance is stopped in its tracks, and you have to see what it is that the author has deemed so important that you have to halt your reading and find the corresponding number at the bottom of the page. Thank god, you say, these are not end notes, or hyperlinks.
You pace the sparkling cinder-paths, determined to get a perspective on the place. Each building—science faculty, arts block, Admin, each lecture hall—has been magnificently designed. The Admin block even has turrets, towers and flying buttresses. The science block is a cool, modern green—enormous slabs of concrete and sweeping open stairs lead up to large sliding glass doors. But each window, each glass-fronted door, is obscured by an intricate brick breeze-block pattern, as if to stop people looking in or out.
You savour the idea: this is a university, a place of the mind, and more, it is an African university, twelve thousand kilometres away from everything you were not, and twelve thousand kilometres closer to someone