Notions of Time in South Africa

Benjy Mercer-Golden

17.3.14

One of my observations from my time here in Cape Town is that I think South Africans have developed a fundamentally contradictory relationship with time, one that is at once about patience and hope and about anger and urgency.We’ve all heard South Africans say “I’m coming now, or now now, or now now now.” What does this expression say about South Africans – why have they developed this phrase? To me, I think it’s rather clearly about a legacy of consistent failures to meet expectations around deadlines, leading to the devaluation of the word “now”; it’s thus demanded the creation of new terms for immediacy. In the U.S., protesters use the following structure for many of their chants: “What do we want / when do we want it?” The answer to the second question is, of course, “now.” Would South Africans have to say “we want it now now” to express their desire for immediacy?

I mean this playfully, but I think it says more about the agony and the ecstasy of progress over time in this country. There have been at once moments of incredible triumph and, for so many, periods of agonizing waiting. As South Africans look ahead, change may take another 50 years to come, or it may never arrive.

As a history student, I’ve been taught to obsess over the competing forces of contingency and inevitability. In my history class on modern Southern African liberation struggles with Professor Saunders, a question that I’ve become interested in is this: when did the majority of South Africans, black or white, think the fall of apartheid was inevitable? 1948? 1976? 1986? 1994?

It’s an interesting question, one that I don’t necessarily have the answer to. But a related issue—one having to do with the intersection of time and justice during The Struggle years—on which I can comment with more authority is this: that the view of many involved in The Struggle was that, because they knew justice and truth was on their side, they were prepared to wait a lifetime (or to die) for freedom. This is embodied in Nelson Mandela’s very famous statement from the Rivonia Trial: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Many in The Struggle knew that they wouldn’t live long enough to see the realization of their goals, and certainly many generations didn’t. Many of Mandela’s comrades died before 1994, and indeed Mandela died before “all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities” in South Africa. But for those who did witness this incredible moment of ecstasy and triumph in South Africa that took place in 1994, it was an occasion that demanded yet more patience: "I watched, along with all of you, as the tens of thousands of our people stood patiently in long queues for many hours. Some sleeping on the open ground overnight waiting to cast this momentous vote,” Mandela said in his speech announcing the ANC victory in the country’s first democratic elections.

But what about now, 20 years later— is this an occasion that demands patience? I think today, in the new South Africa, people have developed a more complicated relationship with the intersection of time and justice. To some, the achievements of the past 20 years are a triumph: 3 million houses built, three-quarters of the population with running water and 85% with electricity… For others, they believe that they are no better off than under apartheid.

I’ve also had a number of realizations about the contradictions of time during my service placement at U-Turn, the homeless nonprofit based in the southern suburbs. Working with the homeless is at once about rapidity and patience. It is at once about a never-ending struggle against the forces that may lead people to the streets, and also about making an intervention the day before someone is addicted to drugs or robbed or raped. At U-Turn, we talk often about how much easier it is to rehabilitate someone who has been on the streets for a few months than someone who has been on them for a few decades, demanding a real sense of urgency for early intervention.

But patience is essential too. Working with the homeless is about holding someone’s hand for the 5 or 10 years it may take someone to go from addicted to drugs and on the streets to a happy, healthy, employed person. 

And it’s about urgency: Working with the homeless is about throwing everything you can at them—rehab, counseling— for the 3 or 6 months they may be able to stay in a shelter, given the premium on spaces, before they must move on, either to a new life or back to the streets.  

Working with the homeless is about fighting the structural battles that need to be fought in South Africa: inequality, lack of education, drugs, crime, etc. – this is the 100 or 1000 year fight. But working with the homeless is also about serving one bowl of soup at a time to a hungry client.

And so this is my concluding wish for South Africa: What South Africa needs is at once patience and impatience, hope and fierce criticism. It’s going to be a battle as much against apathy as it will be against reactionaries.  My hope for South Africa is that, over the next 20 years of democratic struggle, people cultivate at once a kind of constrained rage at the deep poverty and inequality and injustice that is pervasive here, as well as a sense of pride of the triumphs of the past and hope for those to come.