What are we, Steven and Jabulile doing here, giving opinions like our comrades, about what the politicians actually are dealing with both when they declare their policies of government are those the people need and want, and when they attack (not with Malema’s obscenities but just within the limits of free speech) the hopelessness of other parties to meet these.
Comrades; about to vote. Each sees in the familiar aspect of the other — is it to be loyalty to the Party, Mandela’s, that brought freedom. That means: Zuma. For the purpose of power to the Party.
— Tales of corruption among his peers are being unearthed, tattered and dirty; who revealed state security information in exchange for how much.—
Zuma is the Party now. If its self-severed half is the alternative — and for the comrades there’s no third — has Terror Lekota taken the ethos of the Party in his pocket, rescued it. To keep it alive: a shift of the loyal vote. That means: Lekota.
The decision the comrades are having to make exists as a state somehow in common rather than as it is, irrelevant to the two among them who have taken the option of leaving behind the obligation — no, giving up the birthright, to vote for what kind of leaders, what government commitment to justice there’ll be in the fairy-tale slogan.
Jake can’t keep his mouth shut even to spare himself. — Who’re you going to vote for?—
Some sighs to reject the intrusion, others laugh at exposures that could threaten comradeship, and no one remarks that he and she laugh with them.
The bookshop and university library have few books by Australian writers compared with, say, literature of India, contemporaries from Satyajit Ray to Salman Rushdie, novels, poetry, within that country and its relation to the world. But the presence of India is historical. The population’s share of South Africans of Indian origin: indentured labourers in the nineteenth century, through the years of Gandhi’s presence and influence on the early liberation movement; the enterprise of a shopkeeper class despite segregation: the emergence of South African Indians beside Mandela in the Struggle and continuing prominently in freedom politics. Australia; that country to which people emigrate doesn’t have a pervading presence among local images. Online he can order Patrick White (whose early books he’d read long before there was any idea he’d ever live in the country they invoked), David Malouf, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally. Jake says he’d better not read Germaine Greer, and he’s therefore ordered a work with a kick in the butt title Whitefella Jump Up and the subtitle claim, ‘The Shortest Way to Nationhood’. It turns out to be a skilled tirade with some home truths about the attitudes of white Australians to the remnant of Australian aboriginal people. He comes to a page where she says ‘it was only when I was half a world away that I could suddenly see that what was operating in Australia was apartheid, the separation and alienation South Africa tried desperately and savagely to impose on their black majority…I want to see an end to the problemisation of aborigines. Blackfellas are not and never were a problem. They were the solution if only whitefellas had been able to see it.’
She once owned a rainforest property in Australia and for a time divided her life between professorship at a university in England and her home forest.
The half-and-half cop-out.
They’ve never talked about it, but there’s no question there’ll be a change of communication. Nothing foreign as there so often is in a decision such as theirs. English. Their language, except for her for whom it was once a second language, and there’s family usage of what was her first, passed on as some sort of accomplishment inheritance to Sindiswa and Gary Elias. There is indirect allusion, for him, when the talk around the coffee machine is of frustration of teaching in English while the student’s home language is one of the African nine. — I find I’m resorting to pidgin concocted by putting together with a first-year student a common concept, just differently expressed, he may have in his own tongue.—
The Leftist refusing to face facts. — Couldn’t just be the student’s lack of intelligence you’re finding.—
— That’s not what Steve’s saying, it’s the chaotic failure of the schools—
— The ‘learner’ has been ‘learned’ way below the level of literacy where scientific terms and processes have to be acquired as part of whatever world language is to be used—
— Because you have to have one—
— Is English as our entry to the world a survival of colonialism? Many of us blacks see it like that—
— And French, Portuguese the same, the old masters—
— Should a country that’s got rid of them demand world entry for an indigenous language — let them understand us.—
— So which among the nine that were here before the Europeans came—
Christina van Niekerk is such a quiet woman, usually it’s not noticed if she’s there (why isn’t she in an Afrikaans university) — stands sounding her Afrikaans rounded vowels. — Some among those whites evolved a language that mixed something of their Dutch with the words of Malay slaves they brought from countries they’d invaded in Malaysia, but without inclusion of languages of the indigenous San and Khoi, except for words that describe what the Dutch didn’t know, animals, customs, landscape of the natives. So we claim the taal, Afrikaans is an African not a European language.—
— And our English? Such a taal of cockney, Oxbridge posh, tribal Scots, Liverpudlian, mispronounced names of Huguenot origin, turns of phrase ‘you should be so lucky’—translated from Yiddish of grandfather immigrant Jews — we can’t claim it to be an African language? Just a relic of colonisation?—
Hominids have lived in South Africa for nearly two million years. Australia inhabited less than 60,000 years ago. He’s been reading that like the San and the Khoi, the indigenous Down Under had languages of communication between themselves and the reality of their environment before the English came to colonise, first with convicts exported. But there’s no question — Australians recognise as their language and lingua franca, English. Their created taal is known as Krioclass="underline" it’s not a mix of settlers’ tongues from Europe, but the indigenous people’s language with some English, the need to make themselves understood, by the masters.
— Whites don’t speak indigenous languages, even Kriol. — Professor Rouse invited to the coffee room from Linguistic Studies (Lesego trawls people from various faculties in eagerness to bring exchange between what he calls another apartheid). — Maybe not in Australia, but come on, you can’t say that of us — many whites, particularly males brought up on farms, they played with the farm workers’ boys, they’ve grown up isiZulu or isiXhosa or Sepedi speaking along with their parental English or Afrikaans.—
There’s another way to have your English language boy speaking an African language; this time a mother tongue since the boy’s mother is Baba’s daughter. But it isn’t appropriate to bring that up — Lesego and others who know this is their colleague’s last year among them — would be thinking, much use isiZulu will be to the boy where there are no Zulus.
She’s the one to bring up what they have taken for granted. The co-educational school they’ve decided on for Sindi (of course) and Gary Elias, his strong reservations dealt with by the promise he will be taken to look it over while in November there’s still time to make a change.
— Is the school for anyone, we’ve never asked, really. The black children.—
His reading doesn’t give an answer to a question no need of asking. The emigration people haven’t for one moment in all the to-and-fro of acceptance as desirable citizens shown any reservations (For Christ’s sake! As father Reed would say of the preposterous presented) about a black wife, she’s been there before them, the lawyer but in all her assertion of formal African dress, regal adorned head, from that first day at the seminar — what could the children be but black and white, an identity, not a ‘mixture’.