What Steve’s question is — whether a token of coaching in hopes of bringing them up to university standards can achieve recovery from ten years of hopelessly poor schooling.
— We’re simply to make the scientists, engineers, economists — you name them — out of its product.—
So what came of it, she wants to know.
What would there be to tell that wasn’t an excuse.
Well, it was time for everyone to get back to the lecture halls, seminars. Or those declared hours when students could come to them in the small rooms that have their names on the door, bringing requests disguised as problems. That’s what’s come of it. Band-aid. He brought it up before Jake, Isa, the Mkizes grilling sausages and chops on a Sunday (as the former inhabitants of the suburb did). Their children inventing wild games, wrestling and tumbling, limbs mingled as those of their parents never could. He thinks he knows what should come of it. But he’s telling the comrades, not the academic colleagues. University’s Convocation, student organisation — the vice chancellors! — they ought to be demanding meetings with the minister responsible for education in schools. Breaking down his bloody door! It’s our business. Education can’t be lopped off in two, it’s a contiguous process, our Moloi in African Studies gets students who can’t read and write in command of their own languages, I have some — maths is a foreign language they haven’t had the teaching to grasp, just enough, functionally, to scrape through the final school paper.—
— So what are you and your profs doing about the get-together? — Jake mimics an empty hand signalling Isa to offer more bread.
— That’s what I said. — Jabu turns her shoulders and breasts, one of her unconscious physical reactions of differing opinion that made her individual to Steve from the beginning of clandestinity. Since way back in Swaziland they had taken it as part of freedom to be gained that they can imply criticism without breaching love.
The same applies to friendship; Peter Mkize takes up from comrade Jake. — Why don’t you start it going? Get together lecturers, profs, approach the vice chancellor and have an appointment, whatever, meet the minister up there in the parliament, tell him what he doesn’t want to hear.—
The children are asserting their rights, clamouring for ice cream. — It’s not time yet. — The mothers clamour in rivalry. Everyone is laughing, biting into the meat that must first be eaten. The choir starts up again, ice cream ice cream.
One of the many things you learn in a liberation movement is take heed of what comrades challenge you in. A week or two after, he began to broach to colleagues, first those already grouped as on the Left, what was the teaching profession’s responsibility in the situations of freedom, and then, on the same principle to the old guard, the proposal that there be a discussion whether a delegation of academics should meet with the minister to face the facts of two educational processes that should be one and are not. The discussion took place in the faculty room for an informal start. Opinions were hesitantly if not reluctantly expressed. The coffee machine again resorted to; this sort of meddling academia in government was heard as (of course) in conformation with the Left, citizens of the university unite, that stuff, update variation of an old rallying shibboleth that recruited whites against the swart gevaar. But it was one of the Lefties who came up with the irrefutable the minister would put on the table: there is not enough money to fund school education of a standard to pass seamlessly to universities, less than a generation after the end of hundreds of years when resources for education were spent overwhelmingly on the minority of the vast population. — Education. Funds in the exchequer are to be shared with health, housing, transport, everything that is social need. (Doesn’t mention Big Brother Defence.) To ask for more?—
It’s not time yet, for ice cream.
She listens to his account of the academic meeting while folding clothes Wethu has washed and ironed, and continuing a process, placing his shirts and socks in one pile, Sindiswa’s dresses, jeans, Gary Elias’s shorts and shirts in others.
Why does he give up.
If you’re used to rejection you just go on for what you need, working at it. How could we have got to vote in ’94 if we hadn’t followed the banned Freedom Charter. How’d I have got to school ahead of my brother and then away from ‘Bantu Education’ to Swaziland, if my Baba had accepted that at Home females come second, for a black daughter education comes last. Hopeless. Why doesn’t he just carry on. If that first lot is left hands-down there will be others in the university and even outside who’ll act differently. You only decide it’s hopeless if you’re used to having everything. If you’ve been white.
Ashamed to be thinking that. Of him.
Life intervenes. Coincides with the group putting an approach to the minister on the back burner. The time for death of a parent; parents are always older and closer to this than a son realises, the main relationship was in childhood, boyhood. The Struggle brought other fundamental bonds in its place; if it’s something for regret. Wasn’t there a time once for the good son to have joined the father’s cricket club. He’s going to be cremated, as stated by him in his will. The son’s moment of presentiment…Jonathan’s not going to turn up with a rabbi? How ignorant of part of your inheritance can you be! Jews are forbidden cremation. Don’t worry.
Pauline somehow persuaded their father to have their sons snipped. But seems to have recognised. Andrew’s non-observant Christianity. Andrew’s will also specifies — no religious service. Several of his friends and business associates are invited or appoint themselves to speak of him before his coffin in the hall of the crematorium, its seating suggesting a place of worship of some kind. Strange for a son to hear his father summed up in eulogy, oratory. Jonathan (no rabbi) as the eldest son speaks for the family.
It’s over, people are tentatively about to stir, as Jabu does beside him, but she rises to sing. Unselfconscious, she rises to sing for him, Steve’s father. She is in her full African dress as the understanding of the import of the final occasion in life. As the nanny-relative understood it first, at the presentation of a newborn son. No one moves, arrested.
Some potent substance is being generated in his body by the voice. He knows now that his father has left him, has always been within, with him, and is gone. At the last note, there’s a susurration of admiration, movement urged by emotion, Jonathan’s Brenda is propelled to shackle Jabu’s robe in embrace, weeping proudly. She takes Jabu’s hand through people making for the doors, as if Jabu is her own production. Brenda’s changed the admiration, appreciation of some special tribute, into embarrassment, for some, at their own emotion; if it transcended something, it’s true that one of the characteristics of being black is that peasant or lawyer, they certainly can sing.
The years are identified by event not date. The year of the third election in freedom was the year Sindiswa was of an age to have her education considered seriously. He had taken for granted, Pauline and Andrew’s son, that when the time came they must have chosen, for him, a school from where they believed he would be prepared at a university for some career. For the Headmaster of the boys’ school and Elder of the Methodist Church in the ‘location’ outside the coal-mine town, seriousness about his daughter’s education was a strategy against a social abnormality and — eventually, contriving to have her continue the learning process over the border — a political defiance?