— The campus is really badly trashed? What’s the sense in that. They have to live with the mess, themselves. No, no what’m I saying, the black cleaners’ll have to come on… — Jabu still has in her the discipline of the Struggle: you must answer for your own actions…
Burnt documents trampled kicked about like dead leaves. A computer (whose from where) lying among broken shrubs. Who knows what, from bins in the women’s toilets. As someone offering knowledge, however mingy the access, one who’s accepted to be an academic, wouldn’t he be against students fouling their nest. If he believes in the purpose of a university existing however inadequate to circumstances it may be. If not, why be there? Teaching in the limitation of what you’re able and writing some fucking thesis so that you can pass on something more to those who need it, whose right it is.
Principal, Vice-Chancellor, faculty and representatives of the students were summoned to a meeting where the students succeeded in the university’s condemnation of brutal police action and arrests; and the principal and faculty succeeded in condemning the destruction by the students of campus facilities.
Sindiswa was born at a time when the new life of freedom was just three years old, child of change. She was even-tempered and happily responsive to everyone and everything. Her brother, Gary Elias, who had taken his first steps in the security of the suburban house was not, as Steve, while distrustful of fatherly judgements said, ‘easy’; would not go further than that. Jabu laughed — this was a naughty boy, as someone might say ‘tall for his age’. His primary schooling was at a local school, as Sindiswa’s had been before the Greek school, where she was reported by her teachers as top of her class. But the character of naughtiness the boy’s mother saw as usual began to be troubling. He punched a classmate, narrowly missing the eye — Steve and Jabu had to visit the parents to apologise. Gary ‘borrowed’ without her permission Sindiswa’s treasures (a conch in which she had been shown you could hear the sea, a carved box one of her Indian friends had given her) and damaged or, as he said, lost them. She was forgiving but hurt; and that seemed to annoy him. Jake told Steve he ought to take the kid along to watch football, the university games, join Jake and his rather older boys, giving him innocent male status. Gary listened to his father’s and Jake’s explanatory comments of what was happening on the field without reaction: tugged Steve’s shirt — When will it finish—
— I’m going to take Gary home over the long weekend.—
— That’s an idea. We’ll all enjoy a break.—
— Stevie, I want to take him to my father. He’s experienced with boys, he’s been head of that school, how many years…I’ll talk to my father. It’s better if I take him alone.—
There’s still — always — something distancing about Jabu’s bond with her father. For Steve, who did not know any such unique relation to his, only felt the loss for those few moments when his father was dead. He got up and folded his arms around her back, she turned not to release herself but so that they could kiss, their secular blessing, whatever happened to pass between them.
Jabu and the boy came back late on the Monday, last holiday night, she lively, not tired by the long drive and he bounding, in charge, out of the car with the usual spoils of her natal place, this time avocados and eggs — Gary brought them from my mother’s hens himself, she told. Steve cooked a second supper, some of the eggs with leftover meat and he and Sindiswa ate again with her and the boy, praising the taste of the bright golden yolks, Gary unusually talkative telling of the calf he had touched, just born, all wet, and the bird—inyoni, Jabu prompts with the Zulu name — that nearly hit the windscreen, these events in the sum of days he’d passed. — You lucky thing — Sindiswa presented him with her admiration.
In bed, before turning out the light above their pillows — Your father, what’d he say.—
— We’ll talk tomorrow. Lala now, masilake manje.—
Tomorrow was a working day, breakfast, Wethu demanding news from home, how-is-Baba-mama-auntie — all right, delivery of the children, routes divided by alternative maps drawn by traffic, Jabu in her car the Greek school, him to Gary’s primary before the science faculty, her destination Justice Centre. So it was night again when the children were in bed that there was time for her to tell him her father’s thoughts, advice about the naughty boy. The loyalty of her mother love to persist in seeing him as just that despite behaviour gone beyond the happily mischievous.
Boys will be boys. Yes, will be seen, lived with differently in KwaZulu her home (no other home will ever deny its status) than in the suburb of freedom. That’s really what there is to hear about.
Whenever she’s approaching that way back it’s a route inside her as well as a road taken, and it is her father, whose stance imaged above the road. Only when she slows the car for the safety of the children who recognise it, leap alongside calling out Jabulile Gary Elias, wozani! to be the first to announce her — does the entire familiarity of the place of origin come to her as if she were pinching peaches from the tree before they were ripe, being pulled along wild tumbling rides on the fruitbox sleds of the boys, sitting with the Church Ladies at their prayer meetings.
Her mother comes to greet her and the grandson in the usual attendant women, everyone embracing her as also a mother and not sparing the grandson, who presses his elbows tight against his body in attempt at evasion.
Her father stands on the red-polished cement steps of the headmaster’s European-style house, his stance that is there, imprint in her mind. She moves to him and he down to her in the respect with which the women back off. He and she, father and daughter, embrace, enfold in one another’s arms almost like some special wrestle, but do not kiss. She can’t remember Baba kissing her even when she was a little girl. He doesn’t have to; the way everybody’s father husband boyfriend does among comrades in the Suburb. He takes her palm and walks her away into the house after she’s made a brief halt for his grandson Gary Elias to be greeted with a grown-up grasp of hands, and to be released among the boys who have already claimed him, always taken up from where previous family visits left off.
Her father leads her to the cabin-of-a-room which is the only completely private space of the house except for the brief use of the combined bathroom-lavatory. Her mother hastens up with some half-reproach half-concern about tea and food, but the exchange with her father’s calm ends in his instruction that the grandson be fed and tea be sent to this room for his daughter and himself, Jabu will join the others later.
Until one of the young girls brings a buckling tin tray with tea and two slices of cake (the headmaster has a mobile phone and of course his daughter has told him she was coming over for the long weekend) they exchange the expected: how is everyone, was there too much holiday traffic on the roads. She reminds the headmaster of what he already has been told, his daughter’s husband has been appointed Assistant Professor as the result of his thesis on approaches to the transformation of education. Baba tells he believes he has succeeded in getting a Carnegie grant to set up a library and eventually an Internet facility at his school.
This opening somehow establishes his instinct — always intuitive of her — that this isn’t just a family visit. She speaks in their language without being aware of it when she is back home, but he as unconsciously often speaks to her in English, perhaps recall of the years when he was preparing her for the standard of the language that would be required when he sent her over the border for the education he was determined she should have. The synthesis of communication: cultural authority of the natal, and the other one taken of right, freed of the colonialism it signified, are an intimacy they have with no one else. Her lover Steve would never, in his valiant efforts to learn isiZulu from her, reach this. Their children: Gary Elias playing games where action not words matter, with cousins in whose blood he has a share, would have the language from them, a second language; never home tongue.