No Time like the Present.

That’s the title of Nadine Gordimer’s last novel. Sometimes I wonder what was she thinking when she decided to title her book. Something about the title bothers me greatly – I just can’t put a finger on what that is though.

First things first, who is Nadine Gordimer? (I’m sure some of you were wondering). One article on the internet describes her as a ‘Nobel-prize-winning chronicler of apartheid…” She was one of handful South African writers who had international acclaim during the apartheid era. I like to think of her as a ‘political novelist’ or a ‘protest writer’. Of course, the government of the time gave her a lot of flak for her “political writings” as they challenged the idea of segregation between the races.

In fact, two of her books ¬– The Late Bourgeois World and A World of Strangers – were banned for something more than 10 years in South Africa. But even that didn’t stop her from writing. She lived to see a democratic South Africa and she won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

But this blog entry is not a review of her books nor is it about her. It is instead about a phrase she used as a title for her book published in 2012. No Time like the Present. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know what it is about. I’ve read a review of it on the internet and found out that it’s about post-democratic South Africa and its race politics – with an interracial couple as the main characters that drive the story.

But what amazes me most is the bold statement that there is ‘no time like the present’. As much as I love her I think she was wrong. Her “Present” of 2012 is nothing compared to our “Present” of 2015. I think we, the ones who are living in South Africa in 2015, have the legitimacy to say that ‘there is ABSOLUTELY no time like the present’.

I’m not a political scientist or analyst but I think the year 2015 has been a revealing year, especially with regards to how blacks and whites co-exist in this country.

The reviewer in one of the article’s I found on the internet argued that Malema’s expulsion from the ANC is “a moment in South Africa’s contemporary history that would surely have made it into Nadine Gordimer’s new novel had Malema’s expulsion not happened after her book was finished”.

That got me thinking. “What else would have made it into the book?” I asked myself.

Do you remember the fight between EFF MPs and Police in parliament? The SRC president who earned South Africa’s heart when he spearheaded a campaign to raise one million only to lose those hearts again when he proclaimed his love for Hitler?

The Rhodes Must Fall furore that sparked the transformation debates in universities around the country? Thando Mgqolozana’s utterances in Franschhoek about how transformation in the South African literary scene was necessary? The ANCYL elections that were marred by violence?

All of these and many other things would have been in the book! Sadly Nadine Gordimer passed on last year so there won’t be a sequel for the book. I wish I could write like her about our present too. There is no time like the present…maybe I should write a book about it, what do you think?

ZZ xxx

Dish it: have you read anything written by Nadine Gordimer?