Jabu’s the one who wants a son. She has produced a reproduction of herself, the female who has to prove her own identities beside the sexual one. If it hadn’t been for her father she might never have done it; would never become an advocate (some day). A son doesn’t have predetermined by what’s between his legs, his function in any extended family, at Home or in that of the world. He’s born free. At least in this sense. She wants a son, everything she isn’t. It’s the Other, to complete the fulfilment of favourable court judgment. Looking to the ambitions Steve has for her — If I’m an advocate I can’t be a woman? — That’s all she’ll say of her reason.
He can only understand it differently. Reversed, as happens in pathways of the maze in which humans meet one another. — It’s that a woman can be an advocate now! — At least it’s understood mutually he doesn’t have to specify ‘black’.
Nothing is agreed to, as was the decision not to have children after Sindi. When he made love he had within the ecstatic ineffable there was perhaps something he was not, could not be aware of. She was the one who swallowed or didn’t — how would he know — a pill in place of God’s will some believed made the decision whether or not there was to be life.
Jabu had somewhere read or on Internet consulted learnt that conception of males was more likely in winter than summer (something to do with the body temperature, the semen stored in the testes?) and it must have been when winter came that she had not taken the pill. The son was conceived in the Southern Hemisphere’s African winter, and born nine months and three weeks later, in confirmation of the theory she’d accepted on the principle some of the Home women called book-learning.
The delight and power over the future in naming a child. Among comrades there were Fidels and Nelsons and Olivers taking their first steps. But these comrades didn’t want to choose for their infant who his heroes must be; he would be growing up in a time when there might be others. Then there’s the happy fact that race, colour are a synthesis in their children; African name, European name? The name for the son came from somewhere out of the short list in mind, by looking at him: he was Gary. (Some film-star name?) Jabu was trying it out on herself and Steve: Gary Reed, the G and R, the initials went well together. It was Steve who named the son also for her father: Elias.
How? Why Steve? She laughed, all tears, scooping up the baby. Elias. Steve knows her better than she knows herself. The Mkizes, Jake and Isa, the Dolphin boys come to celebrate their son. She carries him in, Wethu in Sunday church dress beside her, and presents — Gary Elias Reed.—
The Dolphins have brought along guitar and drums, they pluck and pound out Kwaito but also know older African music, and Wethu, although she hasn’t taken any of the wine that’s going down throats to the baby’s future, born in the Suburb won over from the past, she is roused as if summoned to ease forward in a kind of swaying genuflection and raise her voice clear of the chatter and laughter. She sings. The scale is low, high, ululating, up to the roof and out through the open terrace, claiming the Suburb. Nothing like it ever came from the choir of the Gereformeerde Kerk, in its day.
This is no alma mater, the university where he had somehow graduated with his industrial chemistry degree while acquiring the alchemy to sabotage the regime in which higher education was an exclusive facility. The new student ‘body’ was beginning to be many-limbed. Among the white students whose parents were paying tuition and hostel fees there were rising numbers of young blacks with confidence in their right to knowledge that would lift them out of the level of skills, money, dignity their parents had been dumped at.
The place of higher learning is open. The undenominational bible (want of a better title for secular faith), the Constitution, decrees this. But like most decrees it doesn’t, can’t ensure what’s called ‘capacity’ to benefit by them. Young men — so far, fewer women with that nerve half-grown Jabu had had abundantly — are registered on scholarships or sponsorships of some kind, there are even white employers who hand out a bonsella chance these times, to a servant’s bright son. The ‘bridging classes’ Senior Lecturer from the Science Faculty gives voluntary hours to: a band-aid. He knows it doesn’t deal with the chasm of poor schooling the students claw up from.
The Struggle’s not over.
There are still some professors of the past on the faculties along with the intake of comrades like himself known as the Left by academics not wishing to question themselves too exigently whether as an acceptable political category this can be taken to include, in support of just ends, power stations that were blown up.
The comrades, the Left or however they’re seen, are aware they have to re-educate themselves somewhat. The immediacy of uncompromising back-and-forth in the bush, guns and cell walls instead of theses and coffee-vending machines in a faculty room — their kind of blunt confrontation will be misinterpreted by people who haven’t known they may be dead in the dirt next day. — If something new is going to be made of the university we’ll have to start with what we’ve got. We have to get on with the old guard on the principle that we don’t accept they’re guarding the same education any more, doors closed. That we trust they know this.—
— Even if they don’t?—
— Even if they don’t.—
— Exactly.—
— They should take early retirement — it’s late.—
He’s stirring his coffee as if repeating the sequence of those words heard. — No, no. Hang on. Most of them are good teachers. Some better than we are. They have the broad, worldly — sophisticated — general knowledge the students need to be given real access to. Grant that. Who’s out there to replace them right now.—
Shudula Shoba’s Struggle record isn’t known, maybe it’s enough he rescued himself out of the ghetto to earn a Masters, but he’s one of the new appointments at lecturer level, under distinguished professors, novelists and poets. — Mphahlele, Ndebele, Kgositsile.—
He’s too new to the faculty to ignore voices over his informing what he ought to know, they’re already professors in other universities. — Sharp sharp — but some of the other big names, they’re in rural colleges, just one step above high school, wasted there in the backveld.—
— You’re going to poach them away from the people?—
The exchange isn’t abandoned even as a few establishment professors come in with greetings all round. Coffee-vendor bonhomie. He puts his words into practice at once — What we’ve got is with us. — Steve’s remark is for professors all, against a clink of cups and the derogatory hiss of the coffee dispenser. — Don’t you find our bridging efforts inadequate. Band-aid.—
— Here we go talking end results when we ought to be doing something about the beginning, I’ve got students in African Studies who don’t know how to write, spell in their own language, mother tongue, they have the TV black sitcom vocabulary, that’s all. — Lesego Moloi, survivor not only of the Struggle but by the old-time academic favour whereby a black would be hired as an exception by a white university only for that branch of learning, no matter what other post he may qualify for. He lifts and drops the soles of his heavy shoes in accompaniment to his words.
— So what should we be doing? The Convocation of the university doesn’t run the education department’s schools. — Professor Nielson still wears a suit, shirt and tie as the undergarments of the academic gown although there is a relaxed standard of suitability started with the example of Mandela’s tunics. Professor Nielson cannot avoid having the tone of enlightenment dispensed even when not teaching. He’s what father Andrew’s generation calls a stuffed shirt, the starched shield once required as evening dress. — You’re not proposing we lower university entrance standards further. Is that what a university is, not an advancement of knowledge but a descent.—