— Don’t let’s go into details any further. — It was one of the Dolphins, cupping his palms and giving a curving thrust of the pectorals.
— How’d you know what he was saying—
— I don’t, we know she’s a beauty, don’t we, she’s got features.—
The brother from another part of the continent lowered his eyes on himself and moved his fine head in confirmation or sophisticated contrition. Everyone agreed he was an acquisition to the university; congratulatory, as if Steve had had something to do with the appointment. But it was most probable that it was through Professor Nduka that students from countries on the African continent were accepted for registration at the university; they can afford to pay the fees or are protégés of some international foundation that does, unlike the country’s own youth, who do not have enough either of money or scholarships; ‘the university is open to all’, Steve mouths the quote to Jabu. She will be thinking even if she doesn’t say as she did before, What are you going to do about it. Act. Act. He and the others of the group at the university who are again questioned: How do you promote the integrated culture of the institution in its identity as African with appointment of a Nigerian as head of a department — and march in protest with the men and women of our people who can’t afford to pay for a place in higher education.
If some churches still outcast homosexuals the theatre celebrated the opening night of Marc’s play, at last, having been rewritten by him in its successive versions, to his satisfaction. Like Jabu’s Baba, Marc has his philosophical clip to serve all circumstances: Tell it like it is.
The Developed World has been used to this probably since the Oscar Wilde trial (although he only said he had nothing to declare but his genius — not that he had nothing to declare but his love that dare not speak its name), but in the Developing World homosexuality has been a titillating subject for insinuating patter by stand-up comedians in sleazy night clubs, not a theme for the theatre.
Jabu is at the opening with one of the lawyers for whom she is what she calls ‘on loan’ from the Justice Centre in a child custody case; Steve was to be at a dinner for a visiting scientist that night. The play, which Steve and Jabu had been elected to read as a duty of their objectivity as well as privilege in its early versions, is very different in the dimension of performance, real voices and bodies. Live, it is seen to shirk the temptation of reverse claims, superiority above heterosexual relationships; if there are no wife-beatings and female ball-busting emasculation in this other sexual love relation, there is jealousy, betrayal and — a characteristic or irreverent teasing laughter, at one another, over all.
There was no interval so after the end the audience lingered in the foyer and bar to talk about the play and the full-frontal style of performance. Jabu felt a gentle tweak at one of her piled-up locks — Alan is there, behind her.
— Have you ditched my brother, who’s the guy?—
She’s worldly enough now to answer in kind. — Why should I do such a thing, a man from a family as distinguished as you Reeds. — She introduces him to her lawyer colleague. Like the temptation to mention a present malady to a doctor one meets, for a free consultation, Alan takes the opportunity to interrupt enthusiastic exchanges about the performance, in the spirit of Marc’s clip. — D’you think gay marriage is going to be legalised? What’s the talk among you male — and female — members of the profession. — An intimate cosy tip of the head acknowledges Jabu as among them.
— I should say it’s inevitable, but who can predict how soon.—
— Sooner or later, then. — That’s all the information you get for free: the unspoken, Alan feels he shares in amusement with Jabu. He won’t embarrass her by harassing the lawyer.
The performance perhaps creates a certain atmosphere along with the air-conditioning that allows frankness and wit. She asks playfully — You thinking of getting married?—
Alan gives her a little — hush there — hug.
Home, just past the church that usually exudes light and the latest digital recording, dark and silent, the pool in reflected streetlight the only open eye.
Steve is already in bed, arrived before her. He wants to hear all that he’s missed. She has questions that come to her, she wants to ask — sits on the bed pushing his book out of the way and they talk as if she were an animated guest walked in. — I can’t explain — it hit so hard, I don’t think I was the only one who saw how there’re ways we don’t even know we show prejudice, hurt them, maybe friends, our friends — comrades…our own. The pool was shiny when I passed, just now…And how they laugh at everything that happens to them. It was so funny, the play. I didn’t realise how they do this, when we read it.—
— Laugh at themselves.—
— Yes! At themselves.—
— Look, if you can do it you’re safe from what others say about you, your jokes quash their jeers, you poke fun at yourself and make a tough hide of it, the disgust and disdain just blunt themselves against it.—
Later when she had shed the evening experience along with her clothes and was in bed, the place in life each shared with nobody else. — If your people — Somehow this was not an attribution of separateness that was ever used by them, neither in naming his mother Pauline, Andrew, Alan, Jonathan, Brenda — the Reeds — nor her father’s gathering of Gumede collaterals, the broods black and white recalled in their familial clan relationships. — If blacks sometimes could do the same…Now that the old law is on the rubbish heap. Take up the small arms, you get what I mean, instead of the cowhide shields the waving assegais, the traditional show of identity, dignity against the white crap that’s still thrown at them — But at once he catches himself out. A correcting groan. — How can anyone compare a situation where you and your people have been used as a blank to be filled in with another people’s notion of what a human being is. Compare with the ridiculous — who should give a damn about who does which with what and to whom. In bed.—
She is down-mouthed smiling at her Steve, he doesn’t see, in their dark. He didn’t say ‘who should give a fuck about’.
As each practised the professions they might perhaps not have chosen if different youthful ambitions had not been put on hold by the Struggle, and in the aftermath freedom, overcome by necessities of private living, they often had obligations outside daily working schedules, hours each spent without the other. Hers, representing real advancement of what was better than ambition: fulfilment of her place in that basis of what’s called the New Dispensation, the law; his without the sense of common action in an alternative to the old confines of education, hers alternative to the defence of justice confined to those who can afford legal representation. She was embattled in the accepted opposition between prosecution and defence in court, but she’s at one with the colleagues, at her level the attorneys, and the advocates whom they serve, as she was among comrades in the Struggle. Even if most of the lawyers in the commercial firm she was ‘lent’ to had been fellow travellers onlooking from home, all are committed to justice now. In the laboratory, in his seminars, he served his academic purpose of imparting knowledge and skills; when the information notice that he was available to students in his room brought timid bewildered ones or cocky aggressive ones to his door, and the bridging classes which he and what remained of his like-minded academics persisted with the band-aid to school education he gave his obstinate best effort and encouragement. But in the faculty room he was in a coterie of the present among the structures of the past, fuming inwardly against the coffee machine’s mantra, the rites of scholarly self-esteem rising in fragrant steam. There were scientific conferences he attended to educate himself, faculty dinners for visiting research scholars he was invited to on the strength of his thesis being accepted by the university — the Vice Chancellor’s speech-making pride in the Department of Science, its choice for association by scientists prominent in astrophysics and the twenty-first century conception of the nature of the universe.