Her father had called to invite her son to spend Easter school holidays at the KwaZulu family complex of which by his mother’s birth he was a member. — Baba, but wouldn’t it be better in the winter holidays, you’ll be so busy with the church over Easter.—
He dismissed delay with his old adage from a school primer. — No time like the present.—
She takes it that in her father’s wisdom he’s judged the boy is ready to bring ceremonies of the two experiences of living, which are his heritage, together in full self-confidence.
So she’s sitting again in her father’s cubby-hole of privacy: the perfectly refolded and stacked newspapers — of course her Baba’s an assiduous follower of what is evolving of the country’s freedom to which he can allow he took his part, risked to direct his daughter. But they are too engaged by her father with the decision whether Gary Elias will sleep in Baba’s house or stay with one of his mother’s brothers who has boys around the same age — to speak of what her father must have read in those papers. Jacob Zuma, the Mtowethu Zulu who before he attained the second highest position in government, Deputy President to President Mbeki, was Umpathí Wesigungu Sakwazulu-Natal, the KwaZulu head of Executive Council, these days is suspected of collusion in bribery for arms deals.
She has delivered Gary Elias to Baba.
Driving back to the city, home and Suburb where arms are the subject of speculation and questioning preoccupation between comrades — herself among them; like a tap on the shoulder: I didn’t ask. My father. What he makes of this. The Brother Zulu was one of the old Freedom Fighters out there among the best, close to Mbeki, he served his years on Robben Island. What this means. In the present.
The talent-spotting eminence, Senior Counsel who in her first years at the Justice Centre moved on appointed as a judge, had not been mistaken in casually recognising her potential. Her quick capability in providing preparatory work for the Centre’s advocates became noticed in court and she was several times approached by lawyers from commercial firms whether perhaps she was available part-time to take on Assistant Defence in one of their Common Law cases. Whether this was influenced by the fact that she was black as well as a woman would show the adherence of the firm, Abdillah Mohamed, Brian McFarlane & Partners or Cohen, Hafferjee, Viljoen & Partners, to standards of transformation of the legal profession from whites only status, was of no account so long as it was being put into practice. What was of account was that the Justice Centre, knowing it was conviction to defend the exploited that kept this bright and conscientious attorney from going into commercial practice, gave her leave to take part in private legal work now and then. The earnings at a Constitutional Rights organisation are a matter of commitment in comparison with what a lawyer can earn in commercial practice.
She might have stayed on at the firm where she was articled after she abandoned teaching at the Catholic Fathers’ School; just when he left the paint business and went into education. Hers would have been a choice of money over what had decided her concept of being alive since her recruitment to freedom struggle, the induction through detention in a prison. As generations of uncles and brothers from Baba’s extended family had been imprisoned for walking the streets of the city without the passbook in their pocket. But the choice — chance — now to engage as a lawyer honestly enough, without depriving the Justice Centre or herself of dedication, meant some resources to meet the expenses, mouths gaping for money, of the nuclear family life in the Suburb. Steve and back-up Peter Mkize, who had once been a motor mechanic before Umkhonto we Sizwe (and proved a usefully skilled cadre in the transport vehicle deficiencies of a guerrilla army) decided that her car was a write-off dangerously unreliable and selected for her to buy one that had safety features, fancy locks, she couldn’t be expected to think she’d have need of, was more pricey than she thought right for her limit of acquisition. But school fees were raised — that should be, she and Steve agreed if teachers are to be paid adequately in private schools even while those in state schools must be supported in their demands against miserable reward as if they were the least important factors in a ‘developing country’, United Nations-speak for one with no man’s land between the heights of the rich and the poverty swamps.
Education. That’s Steve’s department isn’t it, in the partnership of ideals with love and sexual fulfilment and the pledge of children, which is the mystery called marriage. There’s rock beneath their feet, below the different work each does; their common beliefs. He waves her off to test-drive with all this between them in his smiling confidence and in her recognition of his supervision for her safety. What is love? You learn only as you go along. It’s not what overwhelmed at the beginning…Any more than you would have thought of hijacking (everyday on the roads now) as part of freedom; but you should’ve because there could be consequences of freedom not succeeding — not possible to in less than one generation? Not accepting the revolutionary ways and means to achieve the closure, historically vast as Space itself, between the rich and poor in human span as opposed to eternity.
He knows. She’s said it fondly many times, he thinks too much. Better just get on with it. His thesis has been published in a scientific journal. He’s still the Lefty in the Faculty — yes Leftover from the Struggle in his attitudes towards the orientation of the university. Always arranging seminars interdisciplinary on this aspect or that, the relation of academics to students, some process of new learning for both; while some white academics have spent half a lifetime in research of one nature or another, both as students and in honoured posts at universities abroad in the world, École Normale, Universität Hamburg, Institute of Advanced Studies Boston, St John’s Oxford, Japan, God knows where else students haven’t heard of. Assistant Professor Reed and his Comrade coterie are surely encouraged by the appointment of a professor from another country on the African continent to the Chair of Economics — some sort of tentative towards recognising cultural interdependence not as customarily defined with Europe and the USA. The economist, with his Oxford degrees and accent, was in academic rank more on that of the old guard round coffee, even though in elaborate West African dress and embroidered cap. He warmed his manner of speech with expressions, slipped into locutions from his own people’s usage, and drank with the Steve coterie, initiated to the bar where they met. At Steve’s house he was jauntily delighted to find the man had a black wife — apparently the sexual mores if not the taboos of the past in this country were still in his mind. He immediately started addressing Jabu in his own African tongue as if somehow she must understand; a verbal embrace just between the two of them. It was a compliment to her. She looked round to the others crowded on the tiny terrace, the place of welcome, as if someone did, could understand — there was a burst of laughter from Peter Mkize — He’s making a praise song, how beautiful you are, your eyes, your—