With what anticipation did they sift through the options open to choose a school for Sindiswa after the one she’s graduated to from day care. On their principles, she should go to a state school. Those that had been white schools, at last open to all children, were well equipped but deteriorated by lack of funding for maintenance, and teaching standards lowered by overcrowded classrooms.
They could afford to give her something better.
Privilege? Come on; admit it!
He’s the one who challenges himself and her; she reacts to this as absurd, a convention craven to dogma even if it’s their own. Her Baba didn’t betray the black freedom movement in sending his daughter to a training college over a border, the result of which she has qualified to work for the advance of justice!
He hears this as specious, something never to be expected from her. That was entirely different, another time.
But now the child. All right. Not to be argued over; the child must have the right to come first, beyond orthodoxy of comrade principles.
A different time.
There is only one time, all time, for principles you live by.
The Senior Counsel who had found a moment to put in a word for her employment at the Justice Centre was a descendant of immigration from a natal country once occupied by others: the Nazi army. He had escaped to a distant mirage Africa as a child with his father. They were poor and without a word of any language but Greek, but they were white. Acceptable. He grew up eking from whatever opportunities he could grasp an education which had culminated in his apocryphal appearances as defence of the accused in apartheid trials of liberation leaders, at risk of landing up in prison himself, and in the aftermath he is equally preoccupied with the process of justice in unforeseen occurrences of its transgressions in a free country. But he had never forgotten that as a South African — African who had earned that one-word identity — he also was Greek. When he became well enough known, which means recognised in the outside world for his standing in the annals of the legal profession, and was able to raise money among the diaspora Greeks who had either feared or admired him, he brought them into the founding of an open school where Greek would be a compulsory subject along with the usual curriculum. From something rather in the category of the sports and cultural clubs of Italians, Scots, Germans, and the eternal diaspora of Jews, the school had responded to the country’s freedom by expanding with the energetic promotion of admission of black children, any mix of colour on the population palette, the only stipulation that they learn Greek among their other subjects. The privilege of a classical education thrown in.
A fee-paying school. It’s not an innovation to deal with illiteracy, but there are a number of bursaries endowed; any child with proven ability could come from a makeshift rural school without toilets or electricity among the shacks.
She should see it for herself; naturally her mentor says it is the right, the only place for a child. But no, a father’s responsibility as much as hers, he must come although this child is a girl and back where her mother lived she’d — still, maybe — be last in line for school. Unless she had an exceptional Baba.
So as they had taken up Jake’s invitation to look at the house which was their first home together (for him: she might not agree) they went on Senior Counsel’s invitation to visit the school. He toured them round classrooms, art studio, music section, library and Internet facilities, swimming pool, sports fields, botanical garden, with a volunteer entourage of eager pupils to whom he turned aside, interrupting his accounts of the values by which the school was directed, to chat and chaff.
Each saw the other was picturing Sindiswa in these settings.
On their terrace that early evening, with the subject, Sindiswa, there, as they had sat alone with her as a baby that evening in Glengrove when the street sky was ripped apart; a decision was made. But this time there was quiet.
Only Gary busy building and then gleefully attacking his Lego fortresses.
It distracted her father’s attention from Sindiswa. There was only the caveat from him, in his mind; the school uniforms are too elaborate. — Those sports team blazers, white with braid and gold. Waste of money enriching some outfitter. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ crap. — He pulls a face at himself in admonition of this pious old tag of political correctness.
The academic indecision to approach the minister, pussy-footing, brought about irritation of frustration which affected all his responses. Even Jabu’s constancy irked — Just call them together again. Don’t let them off. — It’s her variation of a woman’s nagging.
— I put notices on the staff board, I pushed messages under their doors. Three turned up yesterday, no sign of the others.—
— The old profs.—
— Not only…but I begin to smell there’s this idea — excuse, pretext, who the hell do I think I am?—
She jerks her head at them.
But it’s not as irrelevant a question as she dismisses.
— An upstart from ‘The Struggle’ who doesn’t know he’s under a different command now?—
She sweeps decisively into cupped hands bits of Gary’s plastic building units that have scattered. — Speak to them, one by one, each one. Khuluma nabo, ngamanye, emanye!—
— A kick in the butt. — He supplies what he thinks is more or less the meaning of the expletive-sounding one in her own language. It hasn’t been part of the coaching she’s given him.
Before he could take up the conviction he has of his own strength of character an event on campus, of the campus, not of the faculty room, made a kick in the butt too late. The students commanded possession of the university with an authority that made their previous protests mere tantrums which had been, could be contained in toleration, freedom of expression after all. The organisers — if such spontaneity can be attributed to a Student Council — were far outnumbered by other groups and factions, sects, political and religious, Gay and Lesbian. Gatherings that began before this faculty building and that, the library, the colonial-classical façade of the Great Hall where graduation ceremonies take place, were encompassed, overflowed and became one uproar on a venue generally regarded as too dispersed to demand attention for protests: the sports fields, football, cricket, invaded like the angry spectators who can’t be kept off when they reject a referee’s decision. The speakers were empty mouthings under the thunder of drummers and bellow in song, jetting as the crush surged; it didn’t matter, all knew what their issues were, on placards, T-shirts, home-contrived banners even if some were ancillary GAY BASHING CRIMINAL UNDER THE CONSTITUTION to the overall purpose NO TUITION FEES EDUCATION OUR RIGHT WHAT ABOUT THE BETTER LIFE — election promises hurled back at the other all-powerful referee, the government. Self-destruction that had seen people of their ghettos burn down the scrapheap of living begrudged to them, the ramshackle cinema, the school without books, the clinic without water — this irrational impulse of reality. Trash is vomited from bins, lecterns are crushed like matchboxes, files rifled from the admission offices are danced round as they burn, on the sports fields the goalpost altars of the games the rioters themselves worship, are dragged up, tossed over.
The students who come as friends, familiars of the house, Jabu and the children — Sindiswa has a favourite whom she tells boastfully about her school — they must be among the spore of heads covering the space he looks down upon from his room in the science faculty. It would be unlikely to come across them there, find them in the anonymity that erases all personal features of the crowd. Yet they are some sort of recognition to be claimed; allow him, member of the academic faculty, to go out into it?