What he was really searching is how she accepts in the other emotional life-upheaval of adolescence, itself departure from the familiarities of childhood — Australia. They have given her books, she’s been a reader since she learned to recognise words at the age of six, journals of the glories of the country supplied by seminar organisers.
What is the process of acceptance. The ‘envious’ remark of Sindi’s schoolfriends was really of the excitement of holidays; not deportation. Gary calling from the car in KwaZulu, Christmas, Christmas — the summer holiday he’d be back.
The concept of belonging is a pile-up junction of private footpaths and public freeways in a month before there’s going to be an election and the country (can you honestly call yourselves a nation only fifteen years after you’ve been centuries divided by cleaver, black and white) will get new governing parentage. Jacob Zuma, electioneering, says the ANC is a ‘child of the church’. The support of Christian leadership is in line with the commitment made when the Party was formed: three founding presidents were priests. Two thousand churchgoers pray hand in hand with him.
The church leaders have said they will encourage their members to ensure an ANC victory at the polls, and also undertake to fight against moral decay. On the same page of the newspaper she has taken up — not in the mood to force themselves to turn over the rejection by the boy — there is the report that the National Prosecuting Authority is still considering whether or not to drop sixteen graft, fraud and racketeering charges against Jacob Zuma.
— I can’t make sense, who’s in opposition to whom, if the NPA is really after Zuma, or putting on a front for justice. Keep refusing to say whether they’ll ever explain the hold-up of the trial.—
His private lawyer has her knowing head before him. — A few days ago a brother of Shabir Shaik told university students about the possible scrapping of Zuma’s charges. That’s the kind of inside information the Shaik family would have. What happens to Zuma also happens to Shaik, he’s on ‘terminal illness’ parole from serving his fifteen-year sentence for corruption and fraud but if Zuma comes to trial Zuma’s financial adviser will be arraigned somewhere along.—
She has ready every legal convolution in the continuing saga, Australians are lucky acquiring this astute mind from South Africa. Another byway, criss-crossing: there has been given a bit of press space even while electioneering commands the pages — an announcement. Australia slashes immigration to protect its workforce. No more foreign bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, hairdressers and cooks will be accepted. Academics in science and their partners in the legal profession who meet the local qualifications are not on the list disfavoured due to world recession. He has made certain anyway that he and his family — every requirement in place, only the specific date of arrival to be settled — are not affected.
Except by the presence of rising unemployment around the enclave of a university and whatever residential suburb are part of what’s to be left behind. The finger pointed down the empty gullet, surely she won’t have that, pointing at her over there.
The bishop from the Methodist Church has applied for defence against a group of shopkeepers taking the church and city to court in demand of enforcement of by-laws, the removal of toilets set up along the street. The church is inundated with something like four thousand more refugee arrivals in the city since a refugee camp just this side of the Zimbabwe border has been closed. When this was being discussed, who from the Justice Centre should go to the street and church for first-hand evidence of the situation — I know it. I’ve been there, months ago.—
Since, it has become normal life of the city while the political parties make speeches and the Suburb argues about the hidden agendas for power and the rifts between party leadership. She’d sat with Steve and the Mkizes, Andersons, attending round TV a COPE rally where Terror Lekota and the good Reverend Dandala again appeared electioneering together. This time footage showing each had prepared separately with a walkabout among the people and prayer at different churches.
Jake. — God puts his money on nobody.—
The Terror he and she were familiar with was saying — Reverend Dandala and I are on the same track. — People like Dandala in the South African Council of Churches cared for his family when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. He vociferously denies the public appearance with the Reverend alongside has anything to do with — (camera on crowd in cock-crow debating among themselves).
— What was that, didn’t get it — Isa’s appeal.
Steve and Peter crossed-voicing — Mbeki, Mbeki, Dandala supposed to be linked with our ex-President — Mbeki’s maybe muscling into COPE against Zuma—
The track returned to, Terror and Dandala embrace. Holding hands, they dance together, now Zuma’s not the only one to do the traditional African high-kick for the voters’ pleasure and reassurance: one of them.
There’s a pair of wide pyjama pants hung over the branch of one of the shrubs that once were planted to dignify the street outside the magistrates’ court. The pants shelter from the sun a child asleep. She can’t see a face, it will be one of the faces of those playing in the gutters or hanging from a woman’s hand; the soles of the feet at drawn-up legs are not black but worn grey with the friction of paving and roads. All is just as it was, only twice as much so. A continuity which overturns what this word generally means, the ultimate of disconnection: chaos. There’s no longer space for the ingenious normalcy of an old man rolling cigarettes out of bits of newspaper round tobacco scavenged from cigarette butts, the woman dividing railway lines through hair, attaching false locks on heads. The defiant culture of poverty. Culture’s the term she’s come to use, like everyone else, for an activity that’s seen as an ethnic response — the politicians dancing — and it is missing around her walkabout, this time. These people — brothers and sisters — now too destitute even to make a culture out of nothing; or they’re others come, haven’t been in this situation, at this destination of the Methodist Church long enough yet to do more than overrun the ‘culture’ established there to the disgust of the city. Well what do I know. I’m not a refugee ‘problem’ in somebody else’s country. I’m here a lawyer following an advocate’s instruction to investigate a case — scene of crime, Jake said when she told the comrades that was what she was going to be doing. Jake always ready with a wry take. You can count on him.
One of the Suburb comrades who’s member of the Communist Party — not much volume of electioneering from their small ranks but at least a few of them in government, veterans of the Struggle and likely to be in a continuing government alliance — the comrade’s theme is that race, pigment, are going to be replaced post-Struggle by class struggle evidencing itself already with the new rich, the blacks, including, don’t ignore, the youth leader Malema in designer outfits, never mind the shares it’s said he has in some big engineering industry.
A member of the class of the legal profession in her home country; not like those Brothers and Sisters whose close bodies her own is gently pushing past through the church doors. Not now. The present. But the present doesn’t last — have tenure, the legal vocabulary comes to her although Baba, before, made sure she would have a constantly expanding contemporary one for her future — even books in detention. Some of these placeless people blacks like herself are educated, with professional skills; on the wrong side of the political palaces. Baba’s Zuma, what would follow Zuma’s time, tenure, would the Youth ready to kill for him now, is it not on the condition he shall make way for them — euphemism for overthrow, discard him and take the country for themselves. Suburb soapbox talk — Luthuli had to make way for the young, didn’t he? Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu breaking down the doors the old man was knocking at.—