There are buds under the leaves, they call this autumn, notes the lyric poet from Cologne, Hilde Domin, although what she actually writes is that ‘[e]s knospt unter den Blättern, das nennen sie Herbst’ (Scheidgen, 2015, p. 142). An indefinite number of years have passed since these words were penned, and I am tearing along beneath the shifting, fading autumn branches of Cologne toward the central station, when I catch a glimpse of my fellow traveller Anne waving and smiling: the first leg of an onward journey to a university-run ‘Spring Colloquium on Land’ on
the other side of the globe. Could Ricoeur's observation of a similarly busy scene and its incumbent lapses of oblivion have led to his wondering what happens if the past is no more, the future is not there yet, and the present does not stick around (1990), and could a suitable response perhaps come from Blue (2006, p. 194), who, noticing the harried ‘arrivals and departures of people in some big London Station’ says that it simply ‘makes you want to go up to them and cuddle them’. If time was tied to a composition of events, to the planting of seasons and to the harvest, then we would be landing in Johannesburg's Oliver Tambo International Airport just after milking time.
On arrival, Anne and I are invited to stay with my family, before heading off further to discuss land issues. Genevieve prepares snoek and on the following day bunny chow. That means I love you in the language of curry. She knows my penchant for the distinctive taste of this West Coast fish. Eat it while it's hot, and as an aside, I didn't add garlic. The children have twirled themselves up in the curtain, while Juno is barking at and chasing a hadeda under the avocado tree, and I recall the last two lines of Kirsch's poem in Afrikaans; a matter-of-fact assertion of it not being death that she fears, but rather having no-one to turn to: ‘Dood is maar dood. Net eensaam-wees is vreeslik’ (1972, p. 7). A sudden glow of expansive reassurance across the dinner table. Baie dankie, Genevieve. Thank you.
Welcome to the Eastern Cape's Hogsback. Please set your metronomes in rewind. Some days have passed, engaged in the multiple meanings of land, and the original purpose for our visit is drawing to a close. After conversing with clay-hog-makers and discovering the ‘Garden of Time’, its graves interspersed with daisies and Nguni cattle, Anne walks down the main road with me. ‘Penelope, you'd like to join me for breakfast?’ ‘Yes, shall we go here? It looks like the tables are arranged outside in the morning sunshine.’ One of the ways by which to enquire about another's health in Xhosa, is to ask are you still seated – usahleli? – the
implication being that if you are not well, you will not be sitting up. The expected reply is ndihleli – I am seated – I am fine. We take our seats and peruse the menu, instantly picking up on the derogatory wording used to describe the restaurant staff in the menu's ‘history and philosophy of the restaurant’. The choice of words in the menu brings on light-headedness and pronounced stomach discomfort, and I excuse myself for a moment to the grass slope beyond, where my attention shifts to the great trek of red ants from veranda to playground, winding their way in tune to the Tin Drum, in beat to the blades of Grass ([1959] 1993). Momentarily suspended in time, I follow the ants' trail alongside that of a small snail. A trail in buffalo grass. Still suspended in time, my thoughts wander: How long does it take for these mushrooms with their golden shimmer to appear out of the dung after the rains?
What time do alpaca babies get born? Always at 10am? How long does it take to pick someone up out of a slippery soap-studded bathtub? A deadweight. Or for her to burn her painstakingly self-made Renoir tapestry – could it have taken about three and a half minutes? How long, and how on earth does the pink-flowered spekboom manage to grow in such profusion out of the rocks, in places where the goats clearly can't get at it? Are not different times overlapping all at once, I think, as I become aware of the Aznavourian classics ringing through from the restaurant kitchen. Charles Aznavour also played his part in beating time to the 1979 film version of the Tin Drum, or Die Blechtrommel (Grass [1959] 1993). Erasure, what power it holds. And it is not only about the place, but also about the journey and the individual stories. Each person has their own story woven into the place. We need to speak to time. A conference hosted at the Freud Museum London in 2018 comes back to me, or rather it is Françoise Davoine's words at the conference on the need to address time. ‘Listen to the stories’, I hear her say, returning to the table where my breakfast and Anne are waiting. The guests from up the N6 north of Cathcart, south of Queenstown, now at our neighbouring table, are eagerly relating bits and bobs of Hottentot History to each other: miscellanea, keepsakes picked up in the pamphlet printed in ye olde yesteryear, i.e. just last month, ‘Did you know that Hottentot was a missionary term for what sounded like half-witted stuttering?’ ‘No kidding, wow! How awesome!’ A splattering of semi-colons ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; wind across the pamphlet. Time has again jolted to an abrupt stop. I'm fed up now. The everyday clock halts, takes stock of something much larger, something more all-prevailing. And with a knick-knack, paddy-whack, give a dog a bone, I wait for the inevitable shattering of glass to start competing with the Best Of melodies from the kitchen. Bloody glass shards which will surely shake things into accordance with another pulse, why not from Beckett's neither this time:
to and from in shadow from inner to outer shadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither as
Page 99between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once away turned from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other unheard footfalls only sound till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other then no sound then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither unspeakable home.
i. Ndidlule kuye njengenja ibona imali is one way of referring to the perceived inconsideration of another, the English translation of this Xhosa saying being ‘I pass by just like a dog which sees money.’ Dogs may not eat money in Xhosa but they do eat time: ‘Time has been eaten by a dog’ is another expression, this time of disbelief at how time has flown by. Anne and I travel on from Hogsback to Alice, the latter being the official name for the university town of Fort Hare. We are going in other words to eDikeni – Alice's Xhosa name. On the way there, we pass through what is usually known as Qonce, although its official name remains, perhaps until the next British sovereign comes and goes and comes again, King William's Town. The unchangeable within a process. It is a bustling Friday late afternoon at month end, with long Sassa queues in front of the ATMs. A young man is in a hurry to pick up his girlfriend, and has an accidental run-in with the left bumper of our rental car at the traffic lights. We exchange each other's details; he is mortified, as his own vehicle is not insured. Two passers-by, following the muezzin's call to the Friday prayers, stop and ask how they can be of assistance. Are we sure we are not hurt? Do we know how to get to the police station? No worries, we will accompany you. We have time, they say, not that you get lost.
During our talk on interpreting the various meanings of land, Anne has made reference to people who lose their way in the Sahara while journeying through Africa. The desert is an entirely different veld type to that of the police station at 28 Amatola Row, where here there is an abundance of grass and also of aloes. And just see over there, another
snail on the counter in the police station waiting room, sticky trail and all. Their shells are a valuable asset for local traditional healers and are used for storing or measuring out small quantities of medicine. A blend of its liquid with the powdered skin of the snakehead fish can be applied to one's face, making one unrecognisable. But what could this little Prestonella be doing on the police station waiting room counter?
inkumba (ii-) – snail
inkumbulo – recollection
If you are patient, it is said, you see the eyes of a snail. We are seated and wait our turn.
ii. Can pace be understood as a controlled commodity, and in what capacity can temporal reform be interlinked with moral reform? An elderly woman seated beside me in the police station waiting room asks me where we are from, what we have visited, whether we have heard of the Lovedale Press. She inspires me to make my way there a week later, where I discover the Ruthven printing press brought to Alice by a Scottish missionary in 1823. The Lovedale News and the missionary-led Lovedale College were decisive tools used to spread capitalist, Protestant values in the Eastern Cape and further inland, maintains Nanni (2013) in The Colonisation of Time, whereby ‘the outward regimentation of time is accompanied by an internal recoding of time-consciousness, affecting one's habits’ (p. 198). ‘Play should be continued only so long as it can be done without fatigue or discomfort […] and [s]ome, I am sorry to say, lie in bed till very nearly breakfast time’ (pp. 201–202).
New meaning was given by these nineteenth-century missionaries to ‘passing time’ or ‘productive amusement’, and the ‘moral crime of wasting time’ was promptly imposed on the pupils of Lovedale College by methods of naming and shaming. As the seasonal activity of pre-colonial society did not serve to satisfy the colony's need for manual
labour, Nanni argues, the notion of time was soon turned into a commodity which could be saved, wasted, spent or stolen. In other words, temporal deviance was to be viewed as a criminal act, and the Lovedale News became a tool with which to enforce the prescribed time regime, the back page of each issue listing the names of those guilty of ‘stealing’ time through their usual work rhythms.
[l]earn to work […] by a regular trade, rather than from intermittent fits of work in the cultivation of a little bit of land […]. Nothing will lead you to equality with other nations except that which most of you do not like, namely hard work, persevering effort, continuous exertion […] not just hard work but hard work all year round. By that road you may rise and by no other.
Interestingly, the number of pupils listed on the back pages of the Lovedale News demonstrates the resistance toward this control of space and time (Nanni 2013, p. 209), while settler farmers and missionaries alike lamented their inability to establish a reform of what they saw as an intermittent rhythm of labour. What was overseen, suggests Nanni, was that the so-called relapse of the students was rather an astute means of using the coloniser's master language, Christian doctrine and a capitalist attitude toward time to their own advantage (Nanni 2013, p. 209). Nanni shows how schools such as Lovedale and Fort Hare, conceived of as a means of enforcing conformity, had the unanticipated effect of producing not only writers like John Tengo Jabavu and S.E.K. Mqhayi, but also those in the forefront of the freedom struggle, who had in fact internalised the temporal consciousness of the colonisers. Time, in this sense, ‘acts as a double-edged sword between empowerment and acculturation, resistance and negotiation’ (Nanni 2013, p. 212).
iii. The March Hare and the Mad Hatter are having tea, while the Dormouse sits between them, fast asleep. Presently shouting ‘No room! No room!‘ at the sight of Alice's approach, they soon strike up a conversation on the crime of wasting time:
‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him!’ ‘I don't know what you mean,’ said Alice. ‘But I do know I have to beat time when I learn music.’ ‘Ah! That accounts for it, he won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock.’
Anne takes her leave and I travel on further to Bedford, another Eastern Cape town, to conduct some interviews for my research on land reform, only to chance upon the ‘Girl with the Fish in her Hair’. She hung in our drawing room at home, and as youngsters we called this fish-hair-girl, or fisher-girl, Alice, though to others she is Renoir's (1880) La Petite Irene. Apparently lost, but not in the desert, here she is again, a hand-me-down found in a corner now of his home by my childhood friend's son Athenkosi (Athi) Jack, who, brushing the cobwebs off her auburn locks, presents her to me all this time later; yes, all this time leyitha.
What do we recollect, what is stored in our shells, and what is just beyond our grasp, in this play with light, an oversight? Dream-time's broken stopwatch. I recall only too well how the other tapestries, having been meticulously created, woven into pictures, were afterwards set on fire as a form of sacrificial offering. But now, look at this tapestry of Irene alias Alice alias Irene, how it has been stitched anew, ‘[n]ot in classical linear time [but in] the sort of cyclical time operative in music [where] things return, repeat themselves, rhyme, disappear, reappear, become reversed, are played in a different key’ (Leader 2000, pp. 113–14). And might this Alice then follow the lead of a more rebellious Alice, so vividly portrayed
in Art/Violence, the 2013 documentary by Aloni, Khaled and Taleb, a bold example of creativity being put to use in a callous environment. A filtered pool of tears.
Would you like some tea? Athi asks me, wryly amused, hanging the tapestry of Alice up on the wall. It is not perpetually tea-time in Bedford, and I also see no little bottles labelled drink me or eat me, but I do have time, as I fetch water from the tap in the yard, to wonder whether the Spaza Shop down the road stocks the jars of orange marmalade I noticed beside the tea set in Athi's home. I also question, with reservation, just how long the posters on the table have lain there, adorned with the 1990s then newly democratic slogan sekunjalo ke nako – now is the time – aluta continua – the struggle continues. And then a stranger makes his approach from around the corner to shake me from my daydreams. ‘Good morning, Sir, and how are you this morning?’ ‘Thank you, I am well, and how are you, Sisi?’ ‘No, fine thanks.’ I go on to fetch the water from the communal tap so that Athi and I can have our tea, and we allow time to resonate. Isigwebo esirhoxiweyo, or in other words, our misgivings set aside for the time being.