The Professor is with us for dinner. Unsurprisingly, I am all aquiver. Why I feel both weak at the knees and hollow in my tum when he arrives is beyond me. Is it his beautiful figure, elegant gait, his silky voice, his luminous intelligence, his gracious manner or, perhaps, last but all best, the soulful eyes which sparkle in their sockets in his finely chiselled, ripe-plum black visage?
‘Visage?’, you ask. (Well, you don’t, but you might.) It’s a visage. I insist, it’s a visage – to call it a ‘face’ would be to trivialise it. It presents as the figurehead of a galleon that would vanquish every gal. It certainly has this effect on me. Were I more vulgar, I might confess to wanting to put my slippers under his bed, but I am not. The most déclassé thing I am prepared to say is that his presence makes me ‘pant quite awful’.
Naturally, I have no intention of confessing at all. Certainly not to him – such mouthings would be humiliating. Nor, obviously, to Noah. Being a lawyer, he rejects any notion that competition might make him jealous, but I know better. He is a real man, and men are simple creatures.
The Professor’s presence has a corresponding, but qualitatively very different, effect on Noah. It stimulates his intellect, sharpens his tongue, and converts him into a faux 24-hour presenter. A bit like Jesting Pilate, he tends to ask questions but fails to stay for an answer. The failing is ubiquitous in people whose intellect outstrips their manners.
Noah has opened up the fuss over race prompted by the Arday fracas. “I suppose you probe me,” says my adorable prof, “because you assume that, being black, I will speak without hypocrisy and, being an academic, will speak conceptually.”
“Erm … um.” Unusually for a lawyer, Noah is at a loss for words. If I had the inclination, I might help him find them, but I don’t. My energies are otherwise engaged.
“Well, I caution you against any such assumption. I am a mere mortal, no better and no worse than you.” In saying this, he misspeaks, of course, and terribly so. The prof is superior, sublime, surreal. If not a god, then at least a demi.
Oh, hell, this won’t do, I say to myself. I really must concentrate, I say to me. Upbraided, I start to listen.
“Bedevilled”
“Wherever we go,” says the Professor, “we are continuously watched, beset, and bedevilled by race. I don’t, of course, mean the human race, which I can stomach, at least conceptually. I mean ‘race race’ – ‘black this’ and ‘white that’ in an endless farrago of moans and groans. Oh, and lest we forget, ‘coloured’ too. Sarah Gertrude Millin may have called them ‘God’s stepchildren’, but we should not treat them as such. They too are in the mix, and a very tedious mix it is.”
“How can you say that? Surely race and its ramifications are important.” So says Noah, who believes every social truism deserves a stout defence.
“Are they? Imagine if we never took race into account. We could still have affirmative action and economic empowerment, only now they would be based on genuine disadvantage. We would never have to invoke Apartheid and the suffering it caused. All we would need to do is register the fact of the suffering and, bringing it into account, decide accordingly.”
“Can every case be dealt with on so individuated a basis?” I ask. I have recovered my wits, you will observe.
“Good question. I concede, not always. There are rare circumstances in which using race as a proxy is unavoidable.”
“Such as?” Noah enquires.
“Most obviously, where conducting the enquiry would entail unnecessary expense. For instance, if funds were too limited to give all school kids a free breakfast, depleting them by costly tests to determine who was truly malnourished seems a counter-productive way to proceed. In cases such as this, casting around for a proxy is sensible, and race might be it. But, as I say, such cases are rare.”
“Scrutinising the proper implementation of social programmes based on, what do you call it, class or disadvantage or detriment would be hard, wouldn’t it? Isn’t race an easy measure for the purpose?” Noah asks.
“Species of disablement”
“Well, yes, a bit more effort is required, to be sure. But it is far from being beyond the bureaucratic reach of a modern, properly functioning democracy. After all, they can assess whether the disabled are being properly preferred, and disadvantage is but a species of disablement, economic and social in form.”
“Harrumph!” I say. I am unable to conceive of our bureaucracy ever satisfying that condition.
“Even our own bureaucracy might make a passing stab at this. They collect our taxes well enough, after all. However, if efficiency does have to suffer, at least we will be spared the prospect of tenderpreneurs justifying their ill-gotten gains by pointing to race.”
“The scheme would never fly. Black people and their representatives like the notion that blacks are to be preferred. They won’t lightly surrender it.”
“You’re tempting me to say that I am black and I don’t like it. Sorry, I won’t go down that road. My identity as a black person gives me no better right to consider their plight than you.”
Well said, prof, I think. But I have my doubts. You grew up in Soweto, Noah in Sandton. In the perceptions they engender, they are worlds apart. But I see this is off topic, and I keep my reflections to myself.
“But you are quite right,” the prof continues. “The true issue is not one of past disadvantage, but of political expediency. If there had been no apartheid, no past discrimination, black politicians would still be invoking race to give leg-ups and preferences to blacks. What counts is not how ‘our people’ fared yesterday, but how they should profit tomorrow. Apartheid is just an excuse.”
“You are too cynical. If they had not suffered in the past, they would need no preferment going into tomorrow. They would be on an even plane.” Noah is in full flood.
“Mr Cofnas, Arday’s nemesis, would disagree. He thinks blacks as a whole lack the ability to compete. Without preferences, they will be nowhere, and IQ results, supposing they are both valid and relevant, bear him out.”
“Irrelevant”
“But I repeat, how they would cope is ultimately irrelevant. Politicians in SA, seeing blacks as decisive voting fodder given their overwhelming majority, profit from playing the race card. Dividing blacks from whites is a winning strategy. By means of it, you can cloak your failures in delivery.”
“Enough, enough,” I cry.
“Remind me, prof, do you prefer white or red?” On such matters of colour, a preference is excusable.
When we prepare for bed, I say to Noah, “I hope he doesn’t speak this way in faculty meetings.”
“Don’t worry, my dear, he lectures in astronomy, where only black holes matter, and black isn’t even a colour.”
I titter. Noah can be a wag if he puts his mind to it. A sort of Merry Mason, in other words.
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