And at that moment, darkness — Oh fuck! from Sindiswa, a wild thrum from Gary Elias — electricity blackout.
He and Jabu share the moment. Just some piece of the vast equipment that misfunctioned. Probably failure to be routinely checked. Or, other times, the explanation, cables stolen. Evidently you can get good money for them from metal dealers, one of the ingenuities of having no job, the culture of unemployment, as a professor coined it at a social science seminar last week.
Dark is not — like a sudden flare of light, a disruption. The fumble around for candles, the bed the place of darkness as another kind of reflection: back at the results published end of term on the boards, 23 per cent dropouts missing. Earnest dutiful bridging classes a finger stuck in the hole of the flood wall against the failure of schools to provide ‘learners’ with education. The indigenes of this African population.
Some of the indigenous homeborn, homeskin, emigrated from poverty to the status of money and political power, the indigenous mass left behind, below, to do the work of fouling the streets in desperation for pay to survive on. A luta continua. Where’s the cosmic gap least, if never closed, in continuation of freedom’s revolution? Sweden, Denmark, Iceland? Too far. Too cold.
What to do with the house; the Dolphins don’t want it to go to strangers who won’t fit in with the Suburb, near-neighbours to themselves. They have found two men who have always fancied the possibility of extending the Suburb’s character by moving in, so to speak. The Suburb has been and will continue to be, if the Dolphins, Isa and Jake, Blessing and Peter have anything to do with it, a place, a home where colour, sexual partnership, have nothing to do with the qualities of living in freedom. — Even as an enclave in the tsunami — Dolphin Eric says — of revenge for the hideous old years, gimme my tender to build a World Cup Stadium, I’ll stash up millions in your ministerial pocket, you’re all welcome to keep afloat in our Gereformeerde Kerk pool. — (It would be a good line in one of Marc’s plays, neh.) The care the Suburb comrades have for one another has meant that although the playwright doesn’t live there any more he has made a deal whereby the prospective buyers rent the house to the former owners until these — depart. The new owners will take possession on 1 December; but the price of the sale — the playwright is shrewdly wise on the comrades’ behalf, is to be paid in advance; now. Unusual. But Foreign Exchange regulations on the flight of capital mean we may not be allowed to take it all to Australia. — You better go wild and kit yourselves out. You Can’t Take It With You.—
Gary Elias wants to know — When’m I going to BabaMkhulu’s for the holidays? — Two weeks of July have already gone by. Maybe when you are too young, and one of the protected, to have experienced ruptures in your way of life (they’ve even avoided this against their own better judgement by following the Mkizes’ decision that the boys stay on at that school after the initiation exposure) you have no precedent to bring sense to parting and loss.
Jabu has given the boy a date: next Saturday.
— I don’t think you have to come.—
Not have to come, does she mean this time? Or any time before the daughter’s husband finally has to make his farewells; face her father with his own male responsibility. Nearer the time she said. Compassionately, why burden her Baba with appalled attempts to assert authority to prevent the rejection of home, country. Place.
The poster of Jacob Zuma when the rape trial — went away.
Is she going to say goodbye? Now. Goodbye with Sindiswa, Gary Elias: her children who are also the headmaster’s, the Church Elder’s, the grandmother’s, the aunts’, by lineage and blood children of KwaZulu.
The question of his, the Reed family, no likelihood they would have any reaction of personal or clan abandonment, there is their pride in Jonathan’s qualifying as an engineer at an English university prestigious enough for him to find a good position anywhere in the world. His mother: she has surround of sons, daughter and grandchildren to accept his absence as she and his father had to when he disappeared in that fight against apartheid. She will certainly come to visit in the other country for some reason chosen rather than Britain; many people are relocating.
It wasn’t a good time for Jabu to have to accede to Gary’s rightful demand, although it made sense in another way; it decided when the actual date of departure would be — how to say it — put before Baba. The present coincided with a time when the Centre was concentrated on the development of the highest seat of justice in the country, the Constitutional Court about to appoint new judges to replace retirement of the four originally appointed by Nelson Mandela himself.
Someone has tacked a piece of plastic over the Zuma poster ragged but still there.
The boys are on the lookout for Gary Elias and colliding with each other run to meet the car, Wethu and Gary Elias announce arrival, and the boys yell back throwing the football up to the volume of their voices. The women have heard, led by her mother come clustering. Wethu has her bundles of fulfilled requests for city products to hand over to a clamour of joy, Sindiswa is embraced by the girls, the little ones clinging round her legs, the young her own age admiring her knee-high jeans, touching a forefinger to her double earrings, one hoop above the other in each twice-pierced lobe. Someone calls out in proud recognition the name of the TV star whose style this is.
Her father awaits his daughter in welcome; Baba, on the veranda of the house which is the place of the church Elder and headmaster of the boys’ school with a standard of education exceptional in rural areas. The house not like any other in the village.
The homecoming visit the same as it always is — was — Gary Elias coming to spend school holidays or an extended family gathering at Christmas, these years — although the Struggle that had taken her away has ended, she and the white man she had chosen within it meant another life for her — she had never come home.
Her mother has confidences to pass on in the kitchen when she joins her to help with the skills learnt as a female child obliged to have tasks there since she was lifted from her mother’s back and set down to shell peas, happily eating many on the way to the bowl. Hear about Eliza Gwala. She and her husband took in Es’kia Zondo when his wife died shame she was only forty-something, he had nobody to keep him to his diet he’s diabetic since a long time, and next thing he’s getting into bed with Eliza when Gwala on night shift you remember he’s at the coal mine? We all know but we never said…Now she want to marry Es’kia, she tell me she’s going to town to see about a divorce — but you know, it’s your kind of work, a lawyer, costs a lot. And Sophie passed on after you were here last time, she was my best friend, Baba never liked her but he arranged the funeral and everything the son nobody knows where to find him, he was supposed to have a job some Indian’s factory in Durban, they say he left to work at the docks — I must say Baba tried everything—disappeared, it’s easy in Durban so many people there from all over — they say you can hear every language, not isiZulu. Everything changed…
As wife and daughter come out to the table, laid on the colonial veranda, with the women bearing pots and dishes it’s as if from familiarity with the mother’s preoccupations Baba takes up where the conclusion he didn’t hear, left off. — Murumayara now has as hard a time as Mandela had — in a different way, and Mbeki didn’t take it on, he failed, so it has all come up for Murumayara Zuma to deal with. But he’s strong. Ready. With God’s will. And ours. — The injunction about will, in the language that is theirs, all of them gathered without him (her man).