She and he come from an era where the nuclear family was not, could not be, the defining human unit. This young comrade parent or that was in detention, who knew when she, he, would be released, this one had fathered only in the biological sense, he was somewhere in another country learning the tactics of guerrilla war or in the strange covert use of that elegantly conventional department of relations between countries, diplomacy to gain support for the overthrow of the regime by means of sanctions if not arms. Children were taken into care by whomever among the comrades was still available to do so, sometimes handed on from one possibility in this family of circumstance to another when the first surrogates were in turn detained or had to flee, take up the Spear from across borders and seas. The conception of family formed from when there was survival necessity, without religious edicts (the Methodist church of Jabu’s father, the synagogue for which Steve’s mother had declared herself with her insistence on the circumcision ritual for her baby sons) was like a discipline left over from the circumstances of a freedom struggle taken for granted, naturally, so that if a comrade had a career obligation to go abroad for a time, or there was the opportunity for a couple to enjoy a trip overseas, someone from the past would take in the children. Jake and Isa doubled up their children’s two bedrooms to add Sindiswa and Gary Elias to the cheerful occupancy of beds, cricket bats, skateboards, figures of space monsters in their boys’ quarters; of beauty queens, junk jewellery in the daughter’s den.
Where would anyone go, first time out of the African continent — far from Mozambique, Botswana where he had been deployed (never got as far as Ghana, let alone Moscow), Swaziland where they met and made love for that first time. Now you had a valid passport.
London it was. Of course. England, from where the missionaries had come who founded the school where her father gained along with religious devotion some knowledge of the world with which he had determined she, his daughter, should be armed. Missionaries, who Jabu learnt in her first kind of clandestinity talk with detention cell comrades under lights that stared the continuation of the day’s interrogations all night — had come with the Bible in one hand and the gun accompanying them in another, to take the people’s country from them. Drew it on maps under a geographical name: South Africa. The continent the shape of a great bunch of grapes dangling towards the South Pole, and the weight of territory at the bottom the country of the isiZulu, Sepedi, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, Sesotho, XiTsonga. The same England where one of these same Englishmen started a campaign that banished the slave trade which had made many of the English rich both as flesh merchants and as owners of sugar fields in other people’s countries, where slaves did the work remote from the small island which was England. These contradictions don’t seem so unlikely to an African — South African — in a country no longer anyone else’s claim, Dutch, English, French for a few years in one region — because the present of freedom has its contradictions. These were in the lives of the people who came to the Justice Centre for redress after employment dismissal, eviction from their homes, traditional or religious customary law against Constitutional law. These were before her every day as an attorney assisting one or other of the advocates who represented the right of citizens to be heard in the country’s court.
London not exotic, as arrival would be in China, say, even France, Germany. Descendants of those who lived as subjects of the overlord always know much about him, his habits. Both he and she had been ‘brought up’ with strong tea brewing in its pot; in Steve’s case, also Andrew’s bacon and egg breakfasts. London that her father had been taught was the heart of the mother country, the empire (‘wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set’ sung in school choir) of which his coal-mine village was part; London that was the ‘home’ elders in his father Reed’s family referred to when going on a visit, although several generations hadn’t been born or lived there. The famous parks legendary for soap-box speakers in tirades against this or that seemed to have fewer, and the shaven Hare Krishna, familiar from their place among black street hawkers on the pavements in Johannesburg, apparently had been succeeded by punks whose designer heads, ear- and nose-rings were reminiscent of ancient tribal distortion/decoration in her ancestry: a sign of one world, unbroken past and present, in contradiction (again) of the conflicts that were tearing life-fabric as a motorbike tore the street at Glengrove Place. But the lovers or would-be lovers — even in a permissive democracy you generally can fondle only so far in public — must be as they’ve always been. Here, always on the wet grass — Steve’s tolerant remark about the climate and stoicism of the British, that brought from Jabu the South African local exclamation that can express empathy rather than judgemental disapproval — Shame! — She ignored the summer rain and chill, wearing her high-heeled sandals. Steve had given her love-presents but never chosen and paid for her clothes; suddenly, here — wanted to buy her ‘things’. What? That wasn’t the kind of male/ female contract between them, theirs, comrades. He bought her a ski jacket, the warmest garment there is, the salesman assured him.
In a different place you become different people. Not that it isn’t pleasurable.
They stayed with comrades from home, emigrants who shared an old house in a working-class suburb with a West Indian couple and were looking for something affordable in Kensington (fat hope!) or somewhere else not too upmarket for them. Both couples were doctors, and three worked in the same hospital while the fourth was studying for a further degree in paediatrics at a specialist institution. The London comrades had little leisure, he and she were free as they were glad to be, about, alone. Within the separate circles of their careers, the lawyers, clients, court officials foremost in her consciousness, as was his among students and academics; the demands of children, practical distractions of a household, liens with comrades in the Suburb, they were often preoccupied, whether together alone, or together in company of others. Except for that blessed place, bed.
Here London was a twenty-four-hour exchange of self: theirs. They didn’t watch the changing of the guard but did follow others of foreign tourist itinerary, while selective of what was sometimes a discovery, now, of interests each did not know the other had. He wanted to wander through the famous hothouses in the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, she wanted to catch the last day of an exhibition of Mexican artefacts she’d seen advertised on the posters. They went to the British Museum because they felt they ought; and then spent three hours totally absorbed in all there was to learn, also of how a culture makes itself out of others — the glorious Parthenon frieze that a British ambassador took from Athens and which was displayed under his name as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. The National Gallery high on Steve’s list; in the Reed home there had been a book of reproductions from the Gallery he took to his room, becoming aware of the mystery of art maybe an answer to adolescent emotional confusion, as later he was to turn to science, and finally political revolution as the rationale for him to understand human existence. Even the private school for whites, to which he had been sent for the privilege-above-privilege beyond state schools for whites, had not taken pupils, as part of education, to art museums; any more than Jabu could have been. And in clandestinity days she was not admitted to the Municipal Art Gallery in Johannesburg; he wouldn’t go where she couldn’t. What they knew was the work of the black and white artists shown in small galleries that tightroped the fine line between what would pass as surreal licence (not much to do with anything, far as censors knew, eh) and defiance of apartheid law and religious taboo. No black-and-white lovers sur l’herbe. No Jesus on the cross other than a blond man whose pierced body is pale. Dark-skinned Saviour: blasphemous. One such happened to be, even greater travesty, painted by a white man, traitor — it was seized from the gallery wall and banned.