The bedroom — that non-conformist confessional. So she cast a vote, well that’s her right, it was withheld over so many generations from her people she’s entitled to use it for them, even on her way out.
She has another choice to admit. — I voted COPE.—
There are too many confusions to be questioned between them in the process of packing oneself up, each must trust the other. The accord in the Struggle — that was another time.
Baba taught her to have her conviction, duty (among many others to be observed and of which, turning away from the poster on the fence, she is in default in respect of her father). To face for herself what others expect of her. But she has no obligation to tell the gathering of Suburb comrades Isa has insisted must receive together at the Anderson house twenty-four hours later the final results of the day, 22 April. The mood — rueful, it’s Zuma — congratulatory, the Party has anyway defeated the lucky dip of rivals; of course whatever their doubts the comrades of the Suburb have all voted for the Party. It’s as if in the emotion of the day the coming final defection of two among them is forgotten. It is — understood? — Steve and Jabu did not vote.
There is no surprise in the televised announcement above blare of crowd, ululating women, farting vuvuzelas — a sound majority.
— The scary shift to the Left that might have put some crosses in the wrong place—
— Who would have?—
— The whites who’re afraid of Zuma, the rival blacks, House of Traditional leaders—
— Didn’t happen. — Oh it probably did, but Zuma had Malema herding the Youth!—
Then amazement. Final analysis: COPE gets 8 per cent of the vote — they’ve been in existence how long, three months? — Two months, for God’s sake! — Terror must be dancing as well as our Zuma.—
Her vote in the count, that is as clandestine love once had to be.
The doubts the comrades had about Zuma as their Party’s choice — there were preferred names of those not potentially damaging to the country, less compromised by corruption and sexual shenanigans, although no one knows what the power virus may manifest against the antibodies of trust — are overcome by evidence that the Party of liberation, Mandela’s, Tambo’s, Sisulu’s — it’s still in charge! The loyalty of intelligent people, some battle-scarred, isn’t the uncritical slogan fealty. All the better for that. Viva ANC if not Viva Zuma! There is zest in the fact of victory, third time, over sham elections of the past, whites only, same as the signs on the public lavatories. Jake and Isa brought out wine, beer, and the whisky bottle for those who had advanced to it in the present. The children — except for attentive Sindi who played Antigone in her school’s curriculum which naturally includes politics as an element of everyday history from ancient times — had only gusted in and out, irritatedly gestured away by Jake during the result announcements that will affect their lives if not determine them. They burst back along with Blessing’s contributed snacks. Jake and Isa’s Nick slid a CD to play what his parent liked from the unimaginable distance when they were young, a Miriam Makeba, and the folks, he knew, wouldn’t resist it. While the boys finished Blessing’s curried chicken wings Peter took Sindiswa by the elbow, up to dance. Marc, swinging sexy gyrations round his serious choice of a new gender partner, wife Claire; Jake and Blessing circling Isa’s hip-shrugging solo.
They see Sindi their schoolgirl; dancing as a grown woman does with a man.
Sindiswa in Glengrove Place, proof of clandestine revealed: forbidden intimacy. Growing up in a second freedom, in another country, from burden of the past.
They dance wildly as they had in their beginnings in the Struggle, Swaziland, Baba’s girl and her white boyfriend.
A week or two later President Zuma’s multi-million celebration is a bash, the press didn’t hesitate to remind, on taxpayers’ money. Wethu had gone home to vote where she was registered, KwaZulu. She came back — Happy Happy! Her refrain as she unloaded the gifts of emerald swatches of spinach you don’t see frozen in supermarket packs, woven shoulder bags, straw and reed origin of the plastic version city women wear, and for Gary Elias a little clay figure of a boy clutching a calabash as a football, modelled by one of his holiday pals. He laughed with pleasure and scorn at the arms without hands; his father challenged, — You couldn’t make anything like this out of mud, could you?—
Wethu brought greetings and what must be a message rehearsed with school principal Elias Siphiwe Gumede. She paused between chatter about and for nobody in particular to recall to his daughter faithfully — Baba says we must thank God the country he said it’s in good hands — how was it — oh for us, our country. And we — we can be — proud amaZulu. — This was a translation, polite in a house where English was familiarly spoken. She gave the message again in its original isiZulu with the gravity in which Jabu’s Baba had spoken it.
The Justice Centre is preoccupied with the immediate. Situations in which its lawyers are likely to have to take on defence for individuals singled out by the police among mass protesters from ‘informal settlements’ outside this town or that where there’s rioting over that colloquialism for bucket toilets, water supply, electricity…‘service delivery’.
— A car burnt, shops stoned, the clinic set alight, a local government official seriously injured. The Minister of Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs who’s been making speeches condemning violence was supposed to go to the settlement to calm people, hasn’t come. Instead he’s threatened to crack down on what he says are instigators and perpetrators. Three arrested, who knows whether they shouted louder than others or actually got there first in the attack on the official. We’re going to apply for bail on Monday.—
He turns to her perspective they’re living with just as before the election victory euphoria. (Morning after: still babelas from the first in 1994.) — But let’s give your Zulu countryman a chance, he hasn’t even had a month, never mind the American President’s hundred days.—
She looks at him, half-smile down the corner of her mouth. So fair-minded he ought to be a judge. There’s irony that didn’t exist in the clarity of cadres, you were for or against, simply a matter of life or death, apartheid the death-in-life.
For him the immediate that was preoccupying the university was happening not in this university but can’t be ruled out as not to happen. The university at which it was, is where students in the Young Communist League threaten to make the university ungovernable by mass action until the principal agrees to step down. — So it’s not Black Empowerment issue, that vice chancellor principal’s as black as ours. — Lesego has come to the Science Faculty to talk.
— Not much in that — well, shows we’ve moved on. It doesn’t matter whether the man’s black or white he’s responsible for what’s wrong at his university even if he says it’s due to government underfunding.—
— What can the university do to stop the Young Communists from disrupting mid-term exams. Mass action, bring in the National Students Congress, that’ll mean some of ours joining. Eish! You know what they say, ‘We usually sing loud as possible to ensure our demands are heard’. Call in the police to beat them up?—
At home Sindi asks — What are the guys protesting about, what do they want?—
— Twenty thousand have been refused permission to write exams because they couldn’t pay their tuition fees this year — her mother explains.
Sindi’s clamped teeth and tightened shoulder blades. — When I’m at university, I’ve paid fees, I don’t want people stopping me from writing exams. I don’t want to be in it. — She has the — privilege? — they’ve paid for it, for her: the principle of Socratic argument not violence, for everybody.