Love at the End of Time

By Vincent Gray

This novel is the sequel to Jo'burg: Sex, Love and Marx. The protagonist Josh bids farewell to his wife Millicent who is immigrating to Canada. After Millicent leaves, a love affair develops between him and Gazala, his post-doc student. Following the successive waves of the Covid pandemic, South Africa undergoes an apocalyptic collapse due to the exorable processes of what Josh refers to as zombification.

Excerpt:'…. Like in John Updike's book "Toward the End of Time," in which we could imagine a quantum mechanical universe unfolding in an endless series of bifurcating, branching, or forking processes with respect to alternative realities, splitting at each branching point into alternate binary versions of possible realities. We could imagine the following bifurcation of reality: the permeability of racial boundaries versus the hardening of racial boundaries and identity. Yet we live in a world divided by binaries of separation and difference, such as settler and native, colonizer and colonized, Black and White, foreign migrant and citizen, poverty and privilege, segregation and integration, apartheid and post-apartheid, past and present, and present and future. Would post-colonial Africa have had a better chance of flourishing socially and economically, if there had been no great heroes or gigantic personalities or big men or charismatic leaders or supreme liberators dominating the stage of political power, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Keita, Sylvanus Epiphanio Olympio, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, Idi Amin, José Eduardo dos Santos, Robert Mugabe, Jaalle Mohamed Siad Barre, Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi, Ian Smith, Daniel François Malan, Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, Balthazar Johannes 'B. J.' Vorster, Pieter Willem Botha, and so on. The last four men who were White presided over the social, economic, and political institutionalization of apartheid. Like the White leaders (Smith, Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd, and Vorster), all the other African big men, had also to varying degrees displayed contempt for any kind of constitutionality based on checks and balances and the rule of law. Above all else, they preferred exercising unrestricted personalized and centralized political control through the vehicle of the single-party state and democratic centralism. Starting as populist-nationalist leaders with mass support, having won the battle for political supremacy, they institutionalized the neo-patrimonial state and mode of governance, through the development of vast systems of patronage to accumulate and preserve absolute personal political power and entitlements, mostly for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the masses. Ruling as powerful oligarchs over a hierarchy of political and social domination they controlled the lines of patronage that radiated out from the centre to regions, districts, cities, towns, and villages, exercising control and power through the distribution of rewards, resources, entitlements, favours, jobs, contracts, and benefits to a vast and intricate web of smaller 'big men' at every level who in turn become politically beholden to the Big Man sitting at the top of the pyramid. The Big Man rules as a sovereign over a state, which has been re-purposed or re-geared solely for the extraction of wealth through corruption, looting, fraud, and theft, for the benefit and self-enrichment of an entrenched political elite. Post-colonial Africa has fulfilled the negative prophecies of Franz Fanon. Old social hierarchies have been replaced by new social hierarchies. Nothing changes, always the repetition of the same, the eternal return of the same old patterns, the same ordering of things, the same discourse of power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201230067

Book preview

Chapter 1

Farewell to Millicent

1.

When Millicent crossed the threshold of no return at OR Tambo International Airport, she did not cease to be Millicent Rosen. She continued to be Millicent Rosen. Before crossing that threshold, she waved her final farewell before disappearing through the entrance for international departures. Beyond that threshold, her horizons expanded, the possibilities of her life multiplied without end. The same happened with Rafi Langermann when he left Zimbabwe in utter disgust. He did not cease to be Rafi Langermann. As a settler on the West Bank, he became a more genuine and authentic version of Rafi Langermann. If I had left with Millicent, I would have ceased to be Josh Swift. In the end, I chose to stay.

2.

Millicent firmly believed I could start over again in Canada. However, to be honest, I couldn’t. I did not have the strength, energy, or will to climb the career mountain a second time. Metaphorically speaking, I could not envisage rolling that rock up to the summit of the mountain once more, not at 55 years of age. I was not a Sisyphean hero. It would be absurd. I had already reached the peak in my career as a scientist and academic. I was at the very top of the game. It was a good place to be, even considering that I was ten years away from retirement. Time was not on my side. My time horizon with shrinking. I was still prepared to start my life over again by doing something else in another country, but not in Canada. I could seriously entertain doing something really radical, but only if South Africa collapsed totally into economic ruin like Zimbabwe, only then would I consider attempting that second ascent, an ascent that metaphorically meant crossing the Jordan River and settling on the West Bank with the likes of the Rafi Langermanns. Only in the event of South Africa’s complete self-destruction, would I consider making aliyah. In that event, I would even consider marrying an Israeli woman and having more children. By chance, I had watched the Al Jazeera documentary entitled Israel’s Hilltop Youth. When it was repeated in the Al Jazeera documentary programme slot, I called Millicent. The young Israeli West Bank occupiers disgusted her. However, I could not purge myself of the feelings of solidarity I felt for the Hilltop Youth. I did not dare confess these sentiments to Millicent.

3.

Millicent: If they (the government) have failed to be a catalyst for economic growth for the past 25 years, what makes you believe that they will not also fail for the next 25 years? The way she spoke, I felt that I was also responsible for this failure. I have never defended the government! She never accused me of defending the government, but in her own mind, the government embodied all the evils that the Left could wish on humanity. She made me feel like one of these leftist or liberal self-hating Jews. Millicent said: It is not only Whites who feel that they have no future in South Africa; many Indians, Coloureds, and even many Blacks share the same sentiments. Two attorneys in her firm, both Black, had left the country for greener pastures. Brian Sithole (a convert to Judaism) has made aliyah, having left South Africa for good, to become a settler on the West Bank with a bunch of Afrikaans-speaking converts. Carol Xabanisa had immigrated to New Zealand with her husband, a medical doctor, and two kids. The African diaspora was growing by the day. Those who could, were leaving Africa for a better life in what we call the Global North. No one could make a life anymore in Zimbabwe, which had become the second poorest country on the planet.

4.

My situation is unique. I live in a parallel universe, or to be more specific, I lived between parallel universes, which entails switching between universes. Let me explain. The only White people I socialize with are Jews, who are either cousins or friends of Millicent. On a day-to-day basis, I have very limited, and only superficial dealings, with only a handful of White people, who are mainly my colleagues and students at Wits. During my working day over the past 20 years, I have interacted mainly with Black students and Black colleagues. The demographics of the undergraduate classes I have taught have changed completely. They are now 90% Black in racial composition. Furthermore, all my postgraduates over the past 20 years have been predominantly Black, Indian, or Coloured. I cannot remember precisely when I last had a White postgraduate student in my lab. In terms of student numbers, Wits is predominantly a Black or African campus. Currently, while all the postgraduates and postdoctoral fellows working in my lab are Black, not one of them is South African. I have gotten to the stage where I feel uncomfortable when immersed in a crowd of White people. What does this mean? It means I have changed. Something has been going on behind my back, changing my social consciousness, affecting how I perceive the world socially.

5.

After taking leave of Millicent, I realized once more that everything was now up in the air. The mental image of having reached a fork in the road became stuck in my mind. At the parkade pay station, I searched frantically for the parking ticket. Eventually, I found it hidden amongst the notes in my wallet. Our separation had been amicable. Thank the Lord for that. It was thirty years ago that I bumped into Millicent in Exclusive Bookshop in Hillbrow and fell in love with her. It was in February 1990, my parents had passed away, I was alone in the world with no family or relatives. I had just moved into Monis Mansions. I took cognizance of the fact that once again, I was on the brink of the great unknown, as I drove slowly down the spiralling concrete ramp of the multi-storeyed parkade at OR Tambo International Airport. At the exit, I took the R24 to Johannesburg (Jo’burg), joining the congested bumper-to-bumper stream of slow-moving late afternoon traffic on the highway as it curved past the industrial township of Isando. After the passing of thirty years, the surrounding urbanscape was almost unrecognizable. The Isando of the late 1970s and early 1980s no longer existed. For example, the row of pharmaceutical companies that once populated Electron Road in the 1960s, when OR Tambo International Airport was still known as Jan Smuts Airport, had all but disappeared. This historical process, which I was cognizant of, put me in a reflective mood. These changes were deeply unsettling, mainly because they were irrevocable. A lot had been lost in the process. Everything remains subject to the laws of thermodynamics and entropy reigns supreme. Everything ends in the state of maximum disorder. This is the only real certainty that we possess regarding the precise nature of the future. Entropy governs the fate all existence, and in this sense, it is the only non-mythological conception of telos. The second law of thermodynamics deals specifically with the phenomenon of entropy. Unlike Aristotle’s acorn seed, entropy possesses no intrinsic purposeful telos. To repeat, entropy, which governs all processes in the universe, serves no purpose or end. Its destination is the chaos of random, directionless, and disordered motion. But nothing can happen without an increase in entropy.

6.

Every act or action increases the net entropy of the universe. Every action increases the extent of disorder in the universe. Even the changing of the name of a street, place, or space results in the creation of entropy and an increase in disorder. Everything contained within the bounds of the universe, including cities, states, and political economies, is subject to irreversible change in a downhill direction. This is the ultimate non-teleological grand narrative that applies to everything or the whole of reality, and it circumscribes the whole of reality. Nothing can escape the disintegrative ravages and heat death of entropy. It is the only grand narrative that encompasses the truth of everything and which is simultaneously devoid of all telos, and being a story without any meaning, it serves no mythology and is thus devoid of all mythos. In the end, entropy rules over everything that has ever existed in the material universe. It is a story about everything. It is the plot about the end of everything that has ever existed in the universe, whether it be galaxies, stars, solar systems, planets, continents, mountains, ecosystems, cities, states, societies, and economies. Nothing can escape destruction. Everything eventually turns to dust. Entropy is the price of an order and the debt that any form of order incurs, a debt that can never be fully amortized.

7.

After submitting my PhD thesis for examination in January 1989, I ended up filling the remainder of that year as a sales representative for Alpha-Omega Chemicals, suppliers of fine laboratory chemicals, before taking up a lecturing position at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). In Isando, some of the companies that I regularly visited included Lederle, Beecham, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bayer, Roche, Scherag Pharmaceuticals, SA Breweries, Total Oil, and Epic Oil, driving down roads bearing names such as Anvil, Atom, Brewery, Electron, Industries, and Wrench. The noun isando means hammer in isiZulu. On the right, to the north, across the highway, lay the industrial township of Sebenza. The word sebenza means work in isiZulu. During my very short sales rep stint, while on the road, when I got tired of listening to my tapes, which at the time included Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Johnny Clegg, Paul Clingman, Joan Armatrading, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and so on and so forth, I would start switching from one radio station to the next. Some days I would become completely fixated on a particular lyric or song, and I would rewind the tape and replay that particular lyric again and again. Examples would be: Ramble On (Led Zeppelin). As a teenager in high school at Damelin College, our English teacher would regale us with stories about what it was like to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s. Apparently, during the sixties, transistor radios would be constantly tuned into the short-wave broadcasts of LM Radio. The radio signal was beamed from Lourenço Marques, a romantic-colonial coastal city across the border in Mozambique. The elevated perches of hotels provided holidaymakers with a panoramic view of the Indian Ocean. While she was a teenager, my first-born daughter, Veronica, jokingly used to refer to my own musical preferences, which happened to be rock music, chiefly from the 1960s to the 1980s, as dad’s version of classical music. As I drove westwards, away from OR Tambo towards Edenvale, the default radio station in the Tucson was Jacaranda FM, and I was listening with half an ear to the Scenic Drive with Riaan show. I felt strongly that the music that hit the top of the pop charts partially owed its popularity to the moods it managed to evoke in the listener. Moods that could be relived to some degree, especially if music resonated uniquely and memorably to the milieu, events, love relations, and life experiences that were specific to a given period within the timeframe of one’s personal history. The replaying of a tune or melody or lyric of some hit from the past often exerts its magical power on the psyche, resuscitating the ghosts of the past and stirring up all those latent feelings or emotions or thoughts or memories long forgotten. Often, in the wake of such an auditory experience, the resuscitation of ephemeral feelings of melancholy, nostalgia, forlornness, yearning, and longing would linger momentarily in one’s soul like the uncertain flame of a flickering candle. Unless you are prone to depression, they endure for only a brief, bitter-sweet moment before evaporating away like the shadow of a moving cloud.

8.

I was feeling depressed after taking leave from Millicent. I was experiencing an overwhelming feeling of inexplicable loss. It felt like my life had added up to nothing. I knew that things were never going to be the same again without Millicent. I was now alone, as I had never been alone before. A parting of the ways had occurred. To repeat the metaphor, I had now taken one of the turns in the fork of the road. Millicent will remain a whole person. She has made the right decision. Thankfully, our separation was harmonious. We spoke almost the whole night before her departure. There were tears. She did not want to be torn away from her family, nor did she want to lose me. I understood. She often said at dinner parties that she had fallen in love with my mind. I was always embarrassed by Millicent’s confession. My riposte: I had also fallen in love with her mind. I had grown up believing that I was clever. My parents never grew tired of informing me of the fact that I was extremely clever and that I would go far in life, and I basked in the golden sunlight of their praise, and also took comfort in their confidence regarding my future prospects.

9.

There was never any slacking in the parental refrain: that if I steadfastly continued to work diligently at my schoolwork, always achieving the top marks in the class, then it was guaranteed that the world would become my oyster. Like my mom and dad, I was also an avid reader. Hence my cleverness. Our home was filled with books on every topic under the sun, fiction and non-fiction, which my dad had collected over the years. They also subscribed to Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and Reader’s Digest. We also acquired, over the years, a substantial collection of Reader’s Digest books. My father was a compulsive autodidact who believed in continuous self-improvement through self-study. We were both members of the Johannesburg City Library. He read both fiction and non-fiction books, which he borrowed from the library. I spent many afternoons in the Johannesburg City Library doing school homework. On those days, he would meet me at the library after work and we would walk together to Johannesburg Park Station to catch the train back to Boksburg. The Johannesburg City Library first opened in 1935. My father, Clifford Swift, appeared outwardly in public spaces as an invisible and insignificant person. In the company of strangers, he was always awkward and self-effacing. At work, he was unassuming, yet reliable, diligent, and extremely competent. He was the exemplary backroom boy, never taking credit for anything. Even though he only had a higher diploma in engineering, his technical and engineering knowledge and creative initiatives regarding the design of steel supportive and mechanical structures for every aspect of the mining industry was legendary. Towards his small family, he was gentle, caring, and loving, and in the secure, warm intimacy of our small home in Witfield, Boksburg, he was Cliffy to my mom and my dad to me. To us, he was our provider and protector, and with us in the privacy of our home, he was open and engaging and talkative, always full of surprises about what he knew, possessing the mind of an archivist. Regarding their social relationships with the rest of the world, my dad and mom stood apart. There was an element of alterity to their social state of being; they embodied an otherness, and because of this, there were always two sides to their being: the visible and invisible, the expressed, and the repressed. They were naturally reclusive. I was the only one who truly knew them in terms of the real or genuine people that they were. They were genuine. I don't know how else to put it. They were unpretentious. I was the only witness in the universe to the intimate and personal aspects of their lives.

10.

This person, who was my dad, was also a complete mystery, born out of wedlock in 1920 in Germiston and growing up in Boksburg, in a suburb known as Plantation. And this other person was my mom, a complete enigma, born in 1923 in Beira, an Indian Ocean port city, in what used to be called Portuguese East Africa and is now called Moçambique after the FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front, the Frente de Libertaço de Moçambique) won independence in 1975. Beira is a port city in the centrally located Sofala Province of Mozambique. My mother, of Spanish descent, was a fourth-generation Mozambican who was fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. She could also speak Sena. a language which she had learnt as a child and had not forgotten. Sena is an African language of the Sena people, who as a group have historically occupied the Zambezi River Valley, and who also share linguistic and cultural affinities with the Shona people of Zimbabwe. She spoke English with a heavy Portuguese accent. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Beira became the gateway for trade between the Indian Ocean and the landlocked colonies of Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and Central Africa. My mother’s great grandfather was possibly the first and only Spanish merchant and prazo-holder operating in the eighteenth century in the Zambezi region in the centre of Mozambique, where he owned a vast tract of land that had been granted to him by the Portuguese Crown. He might have been involved in the gold, ivory, and slave trade. I have my suspicions that my maternal ancestors, like many of the Portuguese prazo community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did engage in intermarriage with Africans. Her father ran an export and import business in Beira. In 1942, during the Second World War, my mother arrived at the age of 19 in Johannesburg under circumstances that remain a dark mystery. She started working as a presser before becoming a seamstress in the garment industry. At the end of the 1950s, as a single woman, she moved to Boksburg, where she stayed in a tiny flat close to Boksburg Station. Before moving to Boksburg, as you know, she had lived alone in a small flat in Malvern overlooking Jules Street.

11.

When Britain declared war on Germany, my father was one of the many South Africans who volunteered for full-time military service in the South African Army to fight in the Great War against the Nazis. During the Second World War, he was a rifleman in the South African 1st Infantry Division. While he never spoke about the war, I know that he was engaged in combat in North Africa in 1941 and 1942, including the Battle of El Alamein. After the war, he became a member of the Memorial Order of the Tin Hats (MOTH) and throughout his life, he wore the little tin hat MOTH badge on the left lapel of his jacket. I have a vague recollection of MOTH ‘Christmas Tree’ functions for kids that I went to as a child at the MOTH building in De Villiers Street near Park Station. I also distinctively remember that Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry cartoon movies were shown. What was also undocumented, unshared, unknown, forgotten, invisible, and repressed, and which formed those large secretive lacunae in their private and personal history before they married and before I was born, haunted me long after they died. I loved them so much, and their departure left a huge, unfillable void in my own life. I also felt a deep sense of loss following their passing away because, historically speaking, they were the only family connection I knew of. Now more than ever, I needed to know more about them. I have managed to only piece together the barest fragments of my mother’s biography.

12.

With regard to my mother, I wanted to believe that there was some phylogenetic truth to her mixed blood being due to the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. In truth, there was a discernible lack of whiteness in the inner tranquil beauty of my mother. I imagined that my mother belonged to the mixed-race progeny of Gilberto Freyre’s Lusotropicalismo. I yearned to know their past and to learn more about their world and personal journeys from Germiston and Beira to our modest middle-class white lives in Witfield, Boksburg. As you already know, and because I also feel the need to repeat, my mom, as a young woman, began her career as a seamstress in the garment industry. During the time she worked as a seamstress, she had been a member of the Garment Workers Union. During her childhood and teenage years, Beira, her birthplace, was a small, remote, sandy port city situated in the Sofala Province, which in turn was located in the middle of the Mozambique map.

13.

In 1891, the urban and commercial settlement of Beira and the province of Sofala province were officially entrusted into the hands of a colonial chartered company known as the Companhia de Moçambique (Company of Mozambique). Beira itself was founded on what was once an ancient Arab Muslim settlement that had originally been established as a slave, ivory, and gold trading post, possibly from as far back as the 10th century. As one of many similar East African commercial and trading hubs and nodes within what was once the global Indian Oceanic World, Beira was hardly ever a city, then or now. The very first street and town plan were drawn up in 1899 for a strip of treeless terrain of shifting sands between the beach dunes and the left bank of the Chiveve River, which flowed into the large Pungwe River estuary, which formed a large sheltered natural harbour. The city started as a village which was first developed in an easterly direction towards the sea before growing on the right side, or west bank, of the Chiveve River. It was granted city status in 1907. The first main street was called António Enes Avenue, lying roughly in a south-to-north direction, which intersected with a series of streets running from the river to the sand dunes. The first houses were crude wooden structures.

14.

She never returned to Beira or Mozambique. My mother's photo albums of the streets, locations, and spaces of Beira, and the Sofala Province, of what was once Portuguese East Africa, compiled from a collection of photographs that she had stolen from her family, bears remarkable and detailed visual testimony to the existence of a fading imperial past that was deeply rooted in an ancient and mysterious tropical world, a world from which she had fled. They represented the only historical evidence that connected her with a Mozambican past. Every stage of her infant, adolescent, and teenage life had been captured in black and white against the backdrop of a world situated on the edge of the Indian Ocean. In her albums, there were also safari photographs of slain animals including lions, buffalo, rhino, elephants, and various species of antelope. Her presence was framed in many of these images of wildlife that had been shot by her father, uncles, and brothers. One remarkable photo captures her standing