—Yes, you’re right, that’s archaeology, anthropology . . . the restitution of land doesn’t include the city suburbs, that’s for sure . . . aren’t we lucky.—
He so often comes out with contradictions of himself that bring her to laughter, it’s one of the things that make him unique, her lover.
The gentle laugh draws him in; together under the cicadas rasping their legs to give voice after rain. Jabu comes from the dispossessed, she doesn’t have to feel guilty, even of betraying any revolutionary principle that property is theft. Maybe she’s right again, that’s archaeological too, by now. To live with someone her kind is, for a white, a reassurance that’s safely out of reach of analysis. She is. We are. Us.
Personal and public situations have been a synthesis in them since they happened to meet in Swaziland and this doesn’t change in freedom. Before the interlude, London, there had been rumours trailing after allegations that arms deals for the country’s defence force were ‘subject to possible irregularities and offences’. An addition to Steve’s collection of euphemisms: these for corruption. Names involved included the brothers Shaik among comrades who were not black. These Shaiks were just unfamiliar names. Of course many people had names other than their own during the Struggle, a resort against identification. Accusations fall protracted thick and thorny hooking one to another. A key finding is that no irregularities could be laid at the door of Mandela’s successor President Thabo Mbeki and ministers: the National Prosecuting Authority had issued more than a hundred summonses obtained statements from witnesses, numerous documents, searched premises in France, Mauritius as well as conducting raids in South Africa—a French company in the Thomson-CSF group with a German frigate consortium were contractors for the arms deals.
These become part of daily chronicle when the circle of the Suburb rounds. Peter Mkize bitterly despondent. —Who’d believe it. This what we fought for? Tell me? This is why we were burned and chucked in the Komati River?— Everybody understands his authority to say this.
Translate every statement as if it were in a foreign language: a Shaik is go-between of the arms dealers, whom he claimed gave their bribes to Zuma.
Steve feels for and with Peter Mkize the shamefulness of the human race, not personal, worse than that. —Why do we expect to be different. Mexico after their revolutions. Russia after the revolution, and after the end of the Soviet Union, revolutionised this time by capitalism.—
Marc is the one among the Dolphins who is passionate about justice beyond discrimination against men and women who don’t fit emotional conventions. —The fat cats are always with us. Just have to get on with it. Ubuntu!—
—We must expect—we must be different! What are you all saying? Ubuntu—you know what that is? Do you? What is happening to it, why it comes to mean that because those comrades were in the Struggle they can drive their Mercedes and buy palaces for their wives with bribe millions from foreign crooks! Sell us out! How can you take it like that!— Jabu’s whole body restless with outrage.
Who can respond.
Jake will make an effort; she’s got guts, that woman of Steve’s. —Can somebody tell us? One of us say? Shit. Ubuntu—we’re all one, I am you, you are me! What power do we have. We thought we would have, that’s what getting rid of apartheid and all the props meant. International finance cartels neo-colonialism call it what you like. The arms trade. Bribes are its accounting system. Crooking the books for customers, with money in exchange for tenders. This isn’t selling pizzas across the counter! So come on, what can ordinary guys like us ex-combatants do? It’s the Shaiks hand in pocket with the Zumas who inherit the earth in dollars sterling euros, whatever the currency up for the deal.—
Well, it’s not a response.
It’s too feeble to say what some are thinking: wait for the next election and the next. And according to what has come out of this meeting of minds: there will be a change of personnel, maybe, but the same world accounting system, Left or Right.
She went home, that unchanging destination, to the Methodist Church Elder’s, headmaster’s village, to KwaZulu at intervals as unthinking as change of season. It’s not expected, perhaps not even particularly wanted, that her husband would always come, with the exception of a Christmas visit or a funeral—there respect was obligatory whereas weddings were more women’s affair. Sindiswa was entering the phase when school friends were closer than family, and usually elected to spend time with them instead. But Gary Elias jumped into the car beside his mother in eager anticipation of the enthusiasm with which he would be received by boys who seemed all to be his cousins or at least in some way part of him. Jabu was pleased because she wanted her father, the man who could read the being of male children, to cast an eye over him, his development, from time to time. If grandfatherly it was dispassionate, professional, experience; Steve, though an educationalist, one must admit knew more about young adults the university age, his son he saw relived as in his own boyhood which was happy. The behaviour of rejection—in his situation necessary because of the imprint of his white hands conceived in privilege—had come only with adolescence. Gary Elias would not have to ‘grow out of’ a false situation into the real; he was born into reality.
Her father had called to invite her son to spend Easter school holidays at the KwaZulu family complex of which by his mother’s birth he was a member. —Baba, but wouldn’t it be better in the winter holidays, you’ll be so busy with the church over Easter.—
He dismissed delay with his old adage from a school primer. —No time like the present.—
She takes it that in her father’s wisdom he’s judged the boy is ready to bring ceremonies of the two experiences of living, which are his heritage, together in full self-confidence.
So she’s sitting again in her father’s cubby-hole of privacy: the perfectly refolded and stacked newspapers—of course her Baba’s an assiduous follower of what is evolving of the country’s freedom to which he can allow he took his part, risked to direct his daughter. But they are too engaged by her father with the decision whether Gary Elias will sleep in Baba’s house or stay with one of his mother’s brothers who has boys around the same age—to speak of what her father must have read in those papers. Jacob Zuma, the Mtowethu Zulu who before he attained the second highest position in government, Deputy President to President Mbeki, was Umpathí Wesigungu Sakwazulu-Natal, the KwaZulu head of Executive Council, these days is suspected of collusion in bribery for arms deals.
She has delivered Gary Elias to Baba.
Driving back to the city, home and Suburb where arms are the subject of speculation and questioning preoccupation between comrades—herself among them; like a tap on the shoulder: I didn’t ask. My father. What he makes of this. The Brother Zulu was one of the old Freedom Fighters out there among the best, close to Mbeki, he served his years on Robben Island. What this means. In the present.
The talent-spotting eminence, Senior Counsel who in her first years at the Justice Centre moved on appointed as a judge, had not been mistaken in casually recognising her potential. Her quick capability in providing preparatory work for the Centre’s advocates became noticed in court and she was several times approached by lawyers from commercial firms whether perhaps she was available part-time to take on Assistant Defence in one of their Common Law cases. Whether this was influenced by the fact that she was black as well as a woman would show the adherence of the firm, Abdillah Mohamed, Brian McFarlane & Partners or Cohen, Hafferjee, Viljoen & Partners, to standards of transformation of the legal profession from whites only status, was of no account so long as it was being put into practice. What was of account was that the Justice Centre, knowing it was conviction to defend the exploited that kept this bright and conscientious attorney from going into commercial practice, gave her leave to take part in private legal work now and then. The earnings at a Constitutional Rights organisation are a matter of commitment in comparison with what a lawyer can earn in commercial practice.
She might have stayed on at t
he firm where she was articled after she abandoned teaching at the Catholic Fathers’ School; just when he left the paint business and went into education. Hers would have been a choice of money over what had decided her concept of being alive since her recruitment to freedom struggle, the induction through detention in a prison. As generations of uncles and brothers from Baba’s extended family had been imprisoned for walking the streets of the city without the passbook in their pocket. But the choice—chance—now to engage as a lawyer honestly enough, without depriving the Justice Centre or herself of dedication, meant some resources to meet the expenses, mouths gaping for money, of the nuclear family life in the Suburb. Steve and back-up Peter Mkize, who had once been a motor mechanic before Umkhonto we sizwe (and proved a usefully skilled cadre in the transport vehicle deficiencies of a guerrilla army) decided that her car was a write-off dangerously unreliable and selected for her to buy one that had safety features, fancy locks, she couldn’t be expected to think she’d have need of, was more pricey than she thought right for her limit of acquisition. But school fees were raised—that should be, she and Steve agreed if teachers are to be paid adequately in private schools even while those in state schools must be supported in their demands against miserable reward as if they were the least important factors in a ‘developing country’, United Nations-speak for one with no man’s land between the heights of the rich and the poverty swamps.
Education. That’s Steve’s department isn’t it, in the partnership of ideals with love and sexual fulfilment and the pledge of children, which is the mystery called marriage. There’s rock beneath their feet, below the different work each does; their common beliefs. He waves her off to test-drive with all this between them in his smiling confidence and in her recognition of his supervision for her safety. What is love? You learn only as you go along. It’s not what overwhelmed at the beginning . . . Any more than you would have thought of hijacking (everyday on the roads now) as part of freedom; but you should’ve because there could be consequences of freedom not succeeding—not possible to in less than one generation? Not accepting the revolutionary ways and means to achieve the closure, historically vast as Space itself, between the rich and poor in human span as opposed to eternity.
He knows. She’s said it fondly many times, he thinks too much. Better just get on with it. His thesis has been published in a scientific journal. He’s still the Lefty in the Faculty—yes Leftover from the Struggle in his attitudes towards the orientation of the university. Always arranging seminars interdisciplinary on this aspect or that, the relation of academics to students, some process of new learning for both; while some white academics have spent half a lifetime in research of one nature or another, both as students and in honoured posts at universities abroad in the world, École Normale, Universität Hamburg, Institute of Advanced Studies Boston, St John’s Oxford, Japan, God knows where else students haven’t heard of. Assistant Professor Reed and his Comrade coterie are surely encouraged by the appointment of a professor from another country on the African continent to the Chair of Economics—some sort of tentative towards recognising cultural interdependence not as customarily defined with Europe and the USA. The economist, with his Oxford degrees and accent, was in academic rank more on that of the old guard round coffee, even though in elaborate West African dress and embroidered cap. He warmed his manner of speech with expressions, slipped into locutions from his own people’s usage, and drank with the Steve coterie, initiated to the bar where they met. At Steve’s house he was jauntily delighted to find the man had a black wife—apparently the sexual mores if not the taboos of the past in this country were still in his mind. He immediately started addressing Jabu in his own African tongue as if somehow she must understand; a verbal embrace just between the two of them. It was a compliment to her. She looked round to the others crowded on the tiny terrace, the place of welcome, as if someone did, could understand—there was a burst of laughter from Peter Mkize —He’s making a praise song, how beautiful you are, your eyes, your—
—Don’t let’s go into details any further.— It was one of the Dolphins, cupping his palms and giving a curving thrust of the pectorals.
—How’d you know what he was saying—
—I don’t, we know she’s a beauty, don’t we, she’s got features.—
The brother from another part of the continent lowered his eyes on himself and moved his fine head in confirmation or sophisticated contrition. Everyone agreed he was an acquisition to the university; congratulatory, as if Steve had had something to do with the appointment. But it was most probable that it was through Professor Nduka that students from countries on the African continent were accepted for registration at the university; they can afford to pay the fees or are protégés of some international foundation that does, unlike the country’s own youth, who do not have enough either of money or scholarships; ‘the university is open to all’, Steve mouths the quote to Jabu. She will be thinking even if she doesn’t say as she did before, What are you going to do about it. Act. Act. He and the others of the group at the university who are again questioned: How do you promote the integrated culture of the institution in its identity as African with appointment of a Nigerian as head of a department—and march in protest with the men and women of our people who can’t afford to pay for a place in higher education.
If some churches still outcast homosexuals the theatre celebrated the opening night of Marc’s play, at last, having been rewritten by him in its successive versions, to his satisfaction. Like Jabu’s Baba, Marc has his philosophical clip to serve all circumstances: Tell it like it is.
The Developed World has been used to this probably since the Oscar Wilde trial (although he only said he had nothing to declare but his genius—not that he had nothing to declare but his love that dare not speak its name), but in the Developing World homosexuality has been a titillating subject for insinuating patter by stand-up comedians in sleazy night clubs, not a theme for the theatre.
Jabu is at the opening with one of the lawyers for whom she is what she calls ‘on loan’ from the Justice Centre in a child custody case; Steve was to be at a dinner for a visiting scientist that night. The play, which Steve and Jabu had been elected to read as a duty of their objectivity as well as privilege in its early versions, is very different in the dimension of performance, real voices and bodies. Live, it is seen to shirk the temptation of reverse claims, superiority above heterosexual relationships; if there are no wife-beatings and female ball-busting emasculation in this other sexual love relation, there is jealousy, betrayal and—a characteristic or irreverent teasing laughter, at one another, over all.
There was no interval so after the end the audience lingered in the foyer and bar to talk about the play and the full-frontal style of performance. Jabu felt a gentle tweak at one of her piled-up locks—Alan is there, behind her.
—Have you ditched my brother, who’s the guy?—
She’s worldly enough now to answer in kind. —Why should I do such a thing, a man from a family as distinguished as you Reeds.— She introduces him to her lawyer colleague. Like the temptation to mention a present malady to a doctor one meets, for a free consultation, Alan takes the opportunity to interrupt enthusiastic exchanges about the performance, in the spirit of Marc’s clip. —D’you think gay marriage is going to be legalised? What’s the talk among you male—and female—members of the profession.— An intimate cosy tip of the head acknowledges Jabu as among them.
—I should say it’s inevitable, but who can predict how soon.—
—Sooner or later, then.— That’s all the information you get for free: the unspoken, Alan feels he shares in amusement with Jabu. He won’t embarrass her by harassing the lawyer.
The performance perhaps creates a certain atmosphere along with the air-conditioning that allows frankness and wit. She asks playfully —You thinking of getting married?—
Alan gives her a little—hush there—hug.
Home, just past the church that
usually exudes light and the latest digital recording, dark and silent, the pool in reflected streetlight the only open eye.
Steve is already in bed, arrived before her. He wants to hear all that he’s missed. She has questions that come to her, she wants to ask—sits on the bed pushing his book out of the way and they talk as if she were an animated guest walked in. —I can’t explain—it hit so hard, I don’t think I was the only one who saw how there’re ways we don’t even know we show prejudice, hurt them, maybe friends, our friends—comrades . . . our own. The pool was shiny when I passed, just now . . . And how they laugh at everything that happens to them. It was so funny, the play. I didn’t realise how they do this, when we read it.—
—Laugh at themselves.—
—Yes! At themselves.—
—Look, if you can do it you’re safe from what others say about you, your jokes quash their jeers, you poke fun at yourself and make a tough hide of it, the disgust and disdain just blunt themselves against it.—
Later when she had shed the evening experience along with her clothes and was in bed, the place in life each shared with nobody else. —If your people— Somehow this was not an attribution of separateness that was ever used by them, neither in naming his mother Pauline, Andrew, Alan, Jonathan, Brenda—the Reeds—nor her father’s gathering of Gumede collaterals, the broods black and white recalled in their familial clan relationships. —If blacks sometimes could do the same . . . Now that the old law is on the rubbish heap. Take up the small arms, you get what I mean, instead of the cowhide shields the waving assegais, the traditional show of identity, dignity against the white crap that’s still thrown at them— But at once he catches himself out. A correcting groan. —How can anyone compare a situation where you and your people have been used as a blank to be filled in with another people’s notion of what a human being is. Compare with the ridiculous—who should give a damn about who does which with what and to whom. In bed.—
No Time Like the Present Page 11
