He interprets, from her manner of response lately to ordinary happenings: angry when a pot of food she’s not checked soon enough threatens to have dried away the gravy, chastising herself by tugging at her scalp with recalcitrant braids when she’s at the mirror in the morning, and at her self-accused carelessness at letting her car run out of petrol so that a colleague had to fetch a can from a service station before she could drive home from the Centre. At times when they are alone together she will get up abruptly, a gesture of rejection of some TV commentator, leave the room; on other occasions she will be so eye-to-eye with the image and so tense against what is being said she ignores what she is usually alert to against all other registers of her attention, conversation, music — the racket of some trouble between Sindi and Gary Elias. He sees, feels approaching, pressing upon him like her flesh against him in their intimacy, that Jabu is affronted and disturbed, beyond his own reaction.
She does not say much when he looks up from the newspaper — D’you see this—‘Zuma allegedly solicited a 500,000 a year bribe’ from the French company that won the contract to supply some equipment for corvettes. Shabir Shaik’s company was the French’s black empowerment partner—
— Why do we do what the whites do in their countries. What business is it of ours. We aren’t their black colonies any more.—
He noted but did not misunderstand the juxtaposition in opposition, whites and blacks; ‘we’ excluding him, her man, from its solidarity identity. Jabu is shamed by the betrayal of blacks, of whom she is one, by themselves; although racism is no part of her life, finally proven by the existence of her own two children?
Gary Elias’s periods of the year spent with his grandfather are regular, pleasures not outgrown as his activities and interests at home in the city, school and Suburb grow. At least once among the school holiday visits his dad came along with his mother to deliver him to the village and pay his own respects: husband of the daughter not only of the Elder of the Methodist Church and headmaster of the school, but of the family commune. While he drove Jabu mentioned in undertone, they wouldn’t bring up the subject of Zuma during the visit. Her father had known Zuma well, was associated with him way back while he was MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in the KwaZulu Natal provincial government.
Steve had thought the arms deal was exactly the subject to engage, of interest to everyone in the village. Her father who always directed the conversation among those who gathered with him, wife and extended family in welcome, did not mention it, and authority emanating from him as naturally as he breathed, no one did. There was much else to exchange. Two lively cousins Gary’s age were urged to tell about the science laboratory equipment that had been donated to the headmaster’s school by some Norwegian foundation — this news produced in recognition of Steve as a man of science, must be a professor. — The Education Minister was here himself with the Norwegian Ambassador, you have met the Education Minister, Jabulile? — No limits to the level of achievements won for this daughter he had somehow instructed even when she was in prison. Everyone, including the survivor of Jabu’s two grandmothers, carried in respect tenderly to a chair, went to see Gary Elias playing goalkeeper with the style of his triumphs in the junior team at school. The comrade’s advice has been right, the boy was no longer a reluctant spectator of sport — Jabu exchanged a look away from the leaping catch of the ball, at Steve, in their acknowledgement. He spoke his acquired isiZulu and those around celebrated in applause for both him and his son. At a signal from Jabu’s mother food was carried in a procession of pots and bowls and there was bottled beer as well as a calabash of home brew her father had learnt was much to Steve’s liking.
These visits passing the grandson from one home to what is another have coaxed his son out of his temperament of withdrawal into open security, a belonging that before existed only in his blood. A child’s secret example of Tutu’s truth and reconciliation?
And the timing of this visit seemed to have brought assurance to Jabu, she chattered all the way back to the city, the Suburb. She was recounting stories, events from her childhood in the place in the world they had just left; what, so young, she hadn’t recognised as rivalries between the Elder’s pious congregation, the in-house power struggles with the heavy presence of the relatives in their thatched annexes, the skill with which she’d understood later, her mother managed not to be totally extinguished by her father; while this daughter belonged — chose to be — only to him.
If the question of Jacob Zuma’s relationship with Shabir Shaik didn’t surface at her father’s house, it is raised where politics are also sidled round tactfully by Jonathan and Brenda, out of respect for commitments they don’t share with the combination of Steve and his wife, though they had warmed to and always welcome her personally. On the Reed mother’s eightieth birthday, a party is in progress at Jonathan’s house. It is Jabu who’s given time and thought to with what present Steve should honour his mother on what would be recognised with ancestral respect in the church Elder’s community. Someone addresses in kindly attention as to one who would be concerned — What’s going to be done about this corruption stuff that’s coming out. How serious is it — or just infighting, like all governments?—
Jonathan doesn’t wait for response from Jabu. — People are confused about the sound of the name. Shabir—thank God he isn’t a Jew.—
He has to keep on reminding, telling himself. The arms trade, dirtiest in the world. The true cliché. There was no impulse, it was back then, no time to face this when Umkhonto had to lay hands on arms wherever and from whom they would come. Not the democratic powers of the Western world; these were busy stocking up the armories of apartheid, military and financial.
— So what d’you do.—
You knew what it was you had to do in the bush.
He answers himself, in new derogatory voice: Get together a delegation. Yes? This isn’t your troubles in the lecture halls at a university behind its security gates, my Bra. And we aren’t in your camp in Angola, ready for our Cuban comrades to fight beside us. Mustn’t apply the code, the morals of the Struggle, as adjusted to the tongue-twisted Peace-and-Freedom.
From Peter Mkize, Jabu and Jake the question, statement — whatever it is — comes outspoken. So what d’you do.
And answers himself again because no one else wants to, or knows. — You join the chorus from the opposition holier-than-thou, slam for your own upright benefit the corruption in the government, corruption by the ANC.—
Peter speaks as if constrained to betray under interrogation. — Zuma was our Chief of Intelligence in the bush.—
— And ten years on the Island! — Jabu keeps the calendar of armed resistance.
Heroism has an imperialistic halo, not to be invoked for individuals when every cadre was dedicated to whatever the Struggle demanded; in responsibility, stoicism, suffering.
Jake brings knuckles down on the table, crushing something. — How’s it possible to believe these same comrade leaders have forgotten what they were, what they fought through — in exchange for freedom as bribes, freedom as money.—
Perhaps it was the very same October evening that it was happening?
Not only the ware Boer suburb has transformed in accordance with political correctness as an expression of justice. The suburb of fine houses, many with fake features of the various Old Countries from which the owners came, that had been in well-off white ownership has also undergone invasion, if not transformation. Where the white inhabitants, some second or third generation in possession, have sold the family home for security reasons and bought an apartment in a gated complex supposedly quarantined from burglary and assaults, or left the country to live out of rule of a black majority government, there is no longer any law to prevent any black who can afford such a stately home from acquiring it. One block away from the house where Steve grew up, past which he rode first on his tricycle, later bicycle, the Deputy President Jacob Zuma had chosen to buy, and lived in flittingly from time to time, a house among his other homes about the country. During the week when the now ex-Deputy President Zuma, dismissed from his cabinet post by President Thabo Mbeki as the consequence of his financial adviser Shaik declaring in court Zuma received bribes from a French arms dealer, Zuma was in his house neighbouring Steve’s old home. A young woman, daughter of a comrade with whom Zuma had shared ten years on Robben Island, and who in respectful African custom addresses him as malume, uncle, asked or was invited to spend Saturday night after a party in the house. A confused story: both probably lying, they had intercourse — the only admitted fact. She laid a charge she had been raped. He, in this trial that did come to court after postponement from December to April, said there was consensual sex. Zuma headed the ‘Moral Regeneration Movement’, a government initiative on prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS. He admits he knew the woman was HIV-positive, he had no condom; he took a shower afterwards as this was, he said, post-coital cautionary prevention of infection. If not in so many words, a gift to the press. A cartoonist created a crown for the man that would surely ever after be his royal image: a plume in the form of a shower sprinkling over his head.