Sling-shot questions from the people around him and her, praise and disagreement dart to the platform, some verbal litter without hitting target, a few respectfully join the Reverend’s invocation of God as a member of the new party; the pertinent ones find Lekota ready for them.
— It’s true COPE says blacks shouldn’t get the jobs instead of whites? — The man is referring to the party statement that race as the determinant in the policy of Black Economic Empowerment would produce only a small black elite.
Lekota rallied to the opportunity. — I called for Affirmative Action to be scrapped because it doesn’t provide the real answer for us, our own people. The big one. Giving a man or woman the post because their hands are black like mine doesn’t make our economy equal and opened to all, if that man or woman has been historically deprived of acquiring the skills you need to do the job, to fill the post with the special knowledge it demands, and the young are still not getting these skills and knowledge to take up what is theirs…You won’t improve the living standard of the workers and the poor until equality in our education standards inevitably makes Affirmative Action out of date, into the waste-paper bag, simply by the number of qualified blacks who’ll be able to fill the senior positions. Our country needs everyone, never mind the skin. That’s the issue. That’s justice.—
Through the ears the mind takes immediately some statements more tellingly than others. With the closing AMANDLA! rising from the crowd to the platform the leaders’ chorus response AWETHU, Lekota came down and mingled, arms about people he knew and greetings to their presence for others made brothers and sisters by hearing him in his new political identity. On the way out through groups, ignoring, in their eagerness to be heard, the obligation to clear the exit, he may or may not have recognised Jabu — she had once been in the background of a legal team he was consulting. Anyway, he turned a moment, to ensure he had seen her, remembered (perhaps he too has Madiba’s faculty of face-recall among crowds, over years).
She took up her part in the moment. — When I was a young girl that book you wrote in prison…Letters To My Daughter, it had so much in it for me — what made me. — Of course (it is in his eyes) this is a recognition beyond that of the identity of himself he had just been creating up on the platform — but his arm was tugged by a handsome youth with black spaghetti dreadlocks. — Why dinnen you say wha’ about Zuma’s corruption? — And before he could respond (to the eagerness of those who’d heard the challenge) he was pulled the other way by somebody else.
There’s something of a moral assertion, responsibility, that the decision to leave the country doesn’t mean you don’t go to hear what the contesting parties’ hypotheses are if they succeed in coming to power; or in holding onto it. It’s not become an abstraction. What you hear, there, confirms — or contests, within that decision. Without changing it. Perhaps it will be contested within, for ever, without denying its validity. That’s the reality in all decisions. No reason to make a subterfuge out of going to hear Zuma or Terror.
— Jabu and I’ve been to the COPE election meeting. Last week. You weren’t curious? Seems the — other — parties won’t even have the chance to get hands on power unless they make alliances which contradict their individual aims, Where-They-Come-From; the ANC’s the only one with a sofa-size throne more or less able to contain nationalism, communism, traditional leadership — so far.—
He knows Lesego will be with the ANC, split or not.
He and Lesego are having their usual Friday lunch together in what used to be known as Chinatown (the Chinese, who had been segregated, but closer to whites on the colour scale, have moved upmarket in freedom) although now it is a street of Indian traders whose shops are closed and takeaway curry and Bunny Chow stalls left unattended during noon prayers at a nearby mosque. There’s one Chinese restaurant left. Lesego speaks of Lekota as of one dead — well, ‘passed on’, the euphemism generally used is perhaps apposite in the different, political sense, for Lekota. — What’d Terror have to say for himself. I just supposed I’d read it all…Lots of people turn up?—
— Full. But of course he’s not the one-man-band of Zuma. — Spring rolls arrived and mouths were occupied.
— Were there any of ours there, heckling from the youth group?—
An appreciative swallow of the bite dipped in sweet sauce. — Not that we saw. Someone did ask the big question and Terror answered well, or rather turned round on itself to his own advantage.—
— Oh he’s cool. That he is.—
Lesego started his won ton soup, tasting a spoonful, pausing to add drips of soya sauce, applying himself again, while he heard the account of Lekota’s response to the haltingly posed question about the call to abandon Affirmative Action. Between spoonfuls, he once waved the spoon licked clean, go on go on. — So you and Jabu were there. Heard it from him. — And as the colleague who had reported, turned to his soup, Lesego above his emptied bowl was beginning gestures not concluded…opening lifted hands, fingers running a scale, drawing a long breath through a scenting nose.
He was silent, as if he were the one now occupied with the soup. When he saw the last mouthful captured and he was sure of attention, he leant a little across the table and then drew back. — That’ll be one of the nails in the coffin. You’ll see. He’s attacked head-on by Cosatu. The new baby’ll be buried before it gets to squawk in parliament. I’ve got hold of that booklet the unions’ve put out, they’re saying COPE could cause great damage to the workers if it came in to power. It’d roll back the gains the unions and the poor have made since ’94, even if it drums up a small number of votes, gets a few seats in parliament. It would put brakes on policies to create jobs, cut poverty, accuses Lekota and his deputy Shilowa — big businessman, they’re cosying up — they’ve left the ruling party ‘to pursue an agenda of the capitalist class, international capital and its local allies’! The booklet’s to set the record straight, my man, so voters won’t be cheated by COPE. Lekota’s handing on a plate ammunition against himself, scrapping our genuine African herb medicine, Affirmative Action, that national muti. Man, it’s heresy to list our open sores for which it’s no use.—
There on the floor. Lesego must have slid the booklet under the door of his room while he went to the laboratory for a class after their lunch. Was it a sign, some sort of hesitant encouragement taken from the fact that Steve and Jabu went to hear the election speeches of the Party, congenital for them in the Struggle whatever’s become of it now, and then followed the electioneering of its break-away — this seen to mean the comrades were not going; anywhere. Except where the country was going in this election. Otherwise what was the point of sitting among people whose lives were being ordained.
Her legal qualifications are insufficient for Australia: part of the information going back and forth on many aspects, requirements for visa application — permanent visa, working visa, probably if you just want to go and visit the Opera House with its wing like a bird (picture in all brochures) ready to take off over Sydney harbour, attend the Adelaide Festival, fish on the Barrier Reef, you can get the tourist one without more collateral than ID, proof of funds, and medical certificate you don’t carry any communicable disease, what’s it now — swine flu? Of course the Australians are justified (the professional qualifications), no one wants shysters practising law who aren’t conversant with and observant of the legal system of the country. And she’s informed also that this may differ in some aspects from province to province. It looks as if it’s going to be Melbourne, but that is not settled. Migrate@2OZ.co.za had informed her she would have to complete additional legal subjects by correspondence from Australia through application to an ‘Additions’ Board. This study material is coming efficiently through email to the Suburb but she takes a batch from time to time to the Legal Agency’s library to make clear to herself the precise difference between clauses in the South African Constitution under which she is living and their counterparts — in that other country.