— Mine managers…co-option to the capitalist class! — Is Tertius trotting out a label or expressing his own politics? Alan has a private laugh with his man.
— But Stevie, what about Mbeki’s high style, he quotes poetry in his speeches, English, Irish poets, what the hell does Yeats mean to your mine workers coming off shift—
— Sure. It’s always a mistake to be an intellectual if you’re a president. The Man of The People knows your rat-a-tat street march slogans, quotes from the fathers of the liberation. He’s got to get used to being sharp-sharp, eh, you’re saying. Cool. As if the way we gabble has anything to do with policy drive, getting change done.—
— It has, it has! The way people feel about power, it’s parodied in the way we express ourselves.—
— Madiba could — he had to concentrate on the country within its borders. The chaos of the old regime left, the chopped-up map people were fenced in, ghettos, locations, Bantustans called Separate Development, Madiba dealt with the dismantling at home. Our identity wasn’t a continental task then, OK. But we’re the African continent. Just as Europe is not Germany, Italy, France and so on, individually. Mbeki has to integrate us as a concept if we are ever going to be reckoned with in the order of the world. Seeing us, the country individually, it’s the other hangover, from when we belonged piecemeal as Europe’s property. Backyard. Grant Mbeki sees that.—
— Democracy begins at home. That’s what locals say. — Tertius flourishes the wine bottle. Jabu puts a hand over her glass. — No no? Congo’s been the DRC since the sixties and they’re still fighting each other regionally. Mugabe’s good start in Zimbabwe has careered off into dictatorship. We can’t pretend other neighbours aren’t in trouble or heading for trouble and we won’t be involved.—
Jabu’s lifted hand tilts. — There are girls from the Congo out on the streets near where we used to live, the local ones complain they take away their customers—
— Darling, that’s always been the first form of international trade. — But Steve is not sure either, whether his quip is stale repartee or solidarity against a liberation which has not changed the last resort of women — to go into the business of trading entry to their bodies for survival.
— So you’re back on the Sunday lunch circuit. Oh ho. — A swap to family politics. Alan to Steve, although he’s turning a shoulder, mock coy attention to Jabu. — You and I, they have to give us a seat at the table. It’s the new democracy, ay. Which doesn’t extend further to our kind — He catches Tertius’s earlobe between thumb and forefinger. — We still have the tattoo Queer setting us aside from the bear-hug. We’ve been beaten up by bully boys when we danced together in a night club, and Tertius’s dominee brother thunders to his congregation God’s love-wrath at ours — the love that dares not speak its name. There you are…quoting high-falutin’ like Mbeki.—
‘A seat at the table’ will not be recognised by the lover or the brother’s wife, and maybe Steve himself won’t get the allusion, either, he’s removed by revolutionary distance from the maternal Jewish connection that is the reason for all three of them, the brothers, being circumcised males.
The seat at table is laid at the Sabbath, Friday night family dinner, for the stranger whom the head of the household leaving the synagogue after Sabbath service shall invite to share a meal. Ancient, it is a meaningful origin of charity with dignity. Alan once studied religious faiths — including the secular one of his brother Steve. This on his way to trying out Buddhism. Maybe the ‘research’ had not to do with any gods but with his adolescent need for some explanation why he was not after girls, as all his friends were. He read poets alongside — what he retained was to have no discrimination against what was evidently the poetry of political ideology; it was poetry that was holy to him; why shouldn’t Mbeki quote Yeats — lines, images recalled that distilled what he wanted to invoke better than in any way a politician could. If he, Alan, could have chosen to be anything he would have been a poet rather than a revolutionary; that’s the revolution against all limits of the ordinary.
He’s a copywriter in an advertising agency.
Jabu didn’t always expect, or even want Steve to come with her on her return home — that other kind of home he didn’t have, couldn’t have as his ancestors were of another country or countries, for that matter; they had come to this one, at best, only some generations back. Her parents and extended family lived in what had been a ‘location’ for blacks outside a coal-mining town in what remained a rural area. There had been and still were large farms long owned by whites, where location men who didn’t dig coal were labourers. But the ‘location’ was not the urban slum of city ghettos. Her father’s house — her grandfather’s house — was a red-brick villa in the adopted colonial 1920s-style of those provided by the mining companies for its white officials. It marked the standing in the ‘location’ community of the Pastor of the Methodist Church for blacks, which her grandfather had been, and that of her father, an Elder, Diakone, in the church and headmaster of the high school for black boys. There were round annexes in the yard, mud walls smoothed by the women builder-occupants under thatch of straw gathered by them. Collaterals lived in these.
The women were accustomed to leading a woman’s life alongside a man in a bed but sharing, apart, their own preoccupation with care of children, cooking, maintenance of the family commune in their activities, from growing vegetables to building shelter. Jabu has always been her father’s child. She wasn’t kept at home while a brother, males always first in line for education, went to school. Her father found a place for her at a mission school, paid the fees and a younger brother waited his turn for entry.
Elias Siphiwe Gumede was not a tribal chief yet he was the man of authority in recognition that he had managed to get himself educated to a high standard with letters after his name, BEd., due to his own proud determination dismissive of the difficulties for a rural black boy; but sisters’ and cousins’ husbands did not take the example of favouring girls, although nobody would contradict him with disagreement over the way he ignored the correct procedure of the people. At first her mother endured, with silence like consent, the disapproval of the women to be read in their faces when they chanced to look up from private gossip; then the daughter brought home excellent reports, the mother proudly walked in on the enclaves to announce, 76 per cent in arithmetic, 98 in isiZulu, 80 per cent in English, each term further success. The girl child’s learning achievement. Well, English, that was something, but isiZulu — that’s our language of course she knows — from home, from the time she learnt to speak.
Her father was not aware either of the gossip or the counter boasts, or if he knew was not concerned; he expected to have her homework presented to him every night and equally could not be expected to fail to see where her attention had strayed or she had scamped what should have been pursued. She soon did not resent this strict condition because of the way in which he presented it, it was as if it was some special occupation, special game only she, among the children, shared with him. And as she grew up she realised how much she had gained in the process of real comprehension, from her father, beyond the instruction by rote, of school.
Was it his intention or her idea that she go away over the border to Swaziland to a teacher’s training college?
The one over the border was not restricted by colour. This was not the advantage mentioned when the possibility of her entry was discussed, it was the quality of degree offered which, her father insisted to his wife, was decisive, the standard of the teachers — and he knew who they were, people who had studied in Africa and overseas, universities in Kenya and Nigeria as well as in England.