There was the unaccountable doubt of Joe to set Pauline’s hands raking up through the electric crackle of her hair.
— But what are you talking about? Who will suffer? People who work in towns and have shoes on their feet and drink bottled beer and spray their armpits with deodorants? Or the ones on the farms and in the ‘homelands’ who live on dry mealie-meal? How much more can they suffer than they do already? What will boycotts deprive them of they don’t already lack? What’ve we got we couldn’t do without if it means bringing down this government — if we really mean we’re ready to sacrifice these wonderful privileges everyone’s afraid we’ll miss so much—
— And what do those rural people use to buy that bit of mealie-meal? Money sent home by the labourers in the mines and the factories, the construction workers. And if — if — what an hypothesis that is, when has economic boycott ever been fully imposed — and if American and European investment were to dry up, what would happen to those mines, factories, building projects? What happens to the men they employed, the men who sent back the money for mealie-meal?—
— You sound like a member of the Chamber of Commerce. I can’t believe it. As if you were trying to explain economics to a five-year-old. For Christ’ sake! I know the consequences as well as you do. They’ve made the calculation because there’s nothing else left to do — except kill. Don’t you see? They’ve made the decision — one generation more to suffer, but if it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been, it’ll be for something.—
— Pauline … you can’t even pass a starving cat in the street.—
— I’ll leam. I’ll learn.—
— No, my girl. Against your own good sense and reason, you actually imagine it quite differently. You dream the American bankers will all band together in the name of FREE-DOM for South African blacks and the boys in Pretoria will take down the flag and tear up the statute book.—
Pauline’s hair fell across her cheeks, flew back. — Hah, you’re the one who doesn’t face facts. Everything’s going to come right through the loopholes you manage to find in disgusting laws. The government stops up one mouse-hole, you find another. You work yourself to death, but what’s changed? What will you be at our Nuremberg? — In her face was the cruel pleasure, already distressing her while indulged, of turning her fears for Joe into hurt inflicted on him. — The one who tried to serve justice through the rule of law, or the one who betrayed justice by trying to serve it through the rule of unjust laws?—
Yet soon the controller of the four winds in that house was back in self-conflict again, a state felt by others in the house as a change in atmospheric pressure, in diet, rather than understood. The Swazi fruit bowl was often empty; Bettie borrowed the girls’ pocket-money to buy soap flakes on Rebecca’s ‘day’ because she had told Pauline ‘two time’, without result, that the supply had run out. Another sign had come from the Underground. It was a spear; the shape of the object itself, its clear and familiar associations (the dates of Kaffir Wars to be memorised, the mascot shields and assegais sold along Len’s roads in Rhodesia) pierced the half-attention with which the new phase of the Pauline-Joe dialogue was registered by the children. Umkhonto we Sizwe: translated for whites as ‘The Spear of the Nation’; the voice from nowhere and everywhere — Mandela’s — announced it.
— Why should whites be told they can join Umkhonto when we couldn’t be members of the ANC? I mean, if there’s been a change of policy, why doesn’t it apply to ANC as well?—
Joe had a special, almost sorrowful tone for use in court when it was necessary to suggest to an evasive witness that he was in fact well aware of circumstances of which he claimed ignorance. — But, Pauline, isn’t it just exactly in order that no-one will be able to say there’s been a change of policy. Controlled, symbolic violence — that’s the business of Umkhonto. ANC doesn’t change; it retains its principles—
— Yes, yes, non-violence, that’s all the difference is. He was talking about its stand against violence—
— Wait a minute. If it were to retain its non-violent principles but yield another, it would be impossible to deny officially that it had not changed at all, impossible to refute the charge that Umkhonto or the Spear of the Nation or whatever you like to call it is proof that the ANC has abandoned non-violent tactics. ANC hasn’t changed, can’t, won’t change; not at this stage. ANC is what it always was, the classic non-violent, non-racial liberation movement. Its claim for support from the West depends on its clean record — victim of but not prepetrator of violence. Credibility with black Africa and black Americans depends on its clean record — a revolutionary movement by blacks for blacks. These two principles are the moral basis. If you accept the need for violence, you lose credibility with the West from which, though god knows why, help is still expected to come. If you let in whites, you lose credibility with the blacks outside — and some inside, as we know.—
The exchange is suspended by the disruption of the end of a meal, the need for sleep (the fire crumbling down; Carole and Hillela sauntering off to bed) or the time come for a return to Joe’s office. But the preoccupation continues, present as the creak of floorboards in the night, and sounds now from here, now from there, in the house and from the garden where, on Saturdays, Alpheus earns his lodging by the token of weeding the grass or burning leaves.
If Olga had seen Pauline during that winter she would have noticed with concern the skin, darkened like bruised rose petals, and the minute cysts, grains of waste her body was not eliminating, under Pauline’s eyes; the impatient flick of the lids with which she monitored thoughts she did not want to have.
— So we are invited to join in the dirty work.—
— No. On the contrary. It’s a recognition that you don’t have to be black to have the revolutionary temperament.—
— That’s fine. But blacks who don’t have the revolutionary temperament may still say ‘I support the ANC but I won’t join a violent movement’—and keep their self-respect.—
When friends were present, voices rose and clashed. Lying on her bed in the room filled with all the sentimental sexual totems of young girls who go to good schools, Hillela heard the drum-roll and piercing notes of adult ritual, produced by a preoccupation and passion remote from the yearnings, wild anticipations and dreads that do not come from outside but grow like the bones and flesh, the tree of self.