A better life for all. She doesn’t say, what’s become of it — that wry observation among comrades.
What is Baba’s demand to everyone at his table, she receives as directed to her. From his mind, that time she came from Zuma’s trial for rape. Reproaching — no, tutoring her — which while she rejects she has the confusion of feeling part of — close with, not to him — an identification that is called love. In the Suburb there is the intense exchange over shared food and drink, perceptions of what’s happening around and to them, their conception of the country now, as much a sustenance necessity as what they’re reaching out forks for, swallowing. Here at home there is no such compulsion to the reality that contains them all, KwaZulu and the Suburb, the commuters stoning the trains that leave them stranded, the doctors on strike in hospitals so ill-equipped in one month a hundred babies have died, while although the money from sons out of work in the city isn’t coming any more, here the hens are laying and there was a fair crop of mealies for the winter, the matric passes at the boys’ school were the highest in the province last year and the headmaster has every intention (the will) to bring the mark still higher this year. It is only in the late afternoon when he comes back from a church meeting that Baba and daughter can find themselves alone. The women are about women’s business, you hear now and then the anecdotal exclamations, a drift of song. Distant thump of the ball on hardened winter earth, the boys on the football field, Sindiswa with one of the girls who is making herself a dress, showing intrigued Sindi how to use a sewing machine powered by foot on a treadle.
— So COPE is in trouble. What a mistake Mosiuoa Lekota made ever to think he would get away with it — but maybe Zuma is better off without him.—
They are at home; in its own language.
He knows her so well, from her promising childhood, better than the sons of which more could have been expected (he’s never disguised his disappointment in her brothers’ lack of attainment, no lawyer, doctor or politician among them). Perhaps she voted COPE. He will not have, he never will forget her reaction to the trial that was a ploy to disgrace the future president.
— Baba, we need an opposition. Not those little old clubs of whites, or new black ones. — She in turn knows he wouldn’t betray Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma even for the kingdom’s traditional one, the Inkatha Freedom Party. — You know history better than I do, you’ve been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.—
— Zuma is the guarantee of democracy as our President. He was a poor boy growing up in the worst time, he knows what it means to be hungry without rights, he was a freedom fighter for what? — to make sure our people will never again be ruled by any power from outside, we’d have a government where we all have the same rights — isn’t that what you mean when you say democracy? And in that government — if there are men who want power against it, quarrel with their own brothers, like Lekota, turn against the man the people want, Zuma their man no doubt about that, if those men work in government against him, is that democratic? — In English now, its colonial origin better suited to betrayal. — So they try their little opposition party game, what can they offer our people that the ANC doesn’t? Nothing. You’ll see, some will come crying to be taken back by Zuma into the Party. He is the man to make our African democracy.—
English best for this. — Everyone’s talking about millions being spent on making a palace out of the President’s state residence — what a time to spend a fortune on one of his houses where he’ll spend only a few days a year and the housing target promised for our people living in shacks doesn’t show any sign of being met. Well the President’s big spending started right off, the seventy-five millions his election party cost.—
Doesn’t answer, contest. Maybe Baba was invited to some such occasion held by the traditional leaders of the AmaZulu in celebration of one of their own as President.
What’s left, at last, to say between them.
— The mess in the streets where you are? I don’t like to think of you and the children—
— Not where we live. The central business parts…and on the marches to the big employers’ headquarters, transport authorities — bus and train drivers’ strikes, the municipal workers—
— Someone is putting them up to it, for sure…it’s all part of plotting against Msholozi. What is it like for you, going around the city.—
— They don’t need inciting, Baba, they’re miserably paid, they’re poor even if they still have jobs, not yet laid off.—
— Of course Zuma couldn’t have taken on our country at a worse time, the recession hitting us from the world.—
That’s his explanation.
— But Baba, trashing the streets is all that’s left to get something done for them. Negotiations drag on, the workers demand fifteen per cent they’re offered five per cent they come down to eleven, they’re offered eight…on and on. The worst time. I see every day in the city people with nowhere to live and when Steve and I drive past at night, they are there, they’re sleeping on the pavements in the cold, it’s a bad winter this year.—
He must have the last word with her on Zuma; his advice, her father’s. — Our President has only had a few months. How can he be made responsible. Singa mubeka kanjani icala na?—
There is no subject, Australia.
Baba has accepted (as he did, although that was a matter of his decision for her, a bright female soul should not be disadvantaged educationally, enlightenedly, by being female) that whatever he thinks of the desertion, the betrayal of heritage of Africa, it is her own made by right (fault?) of his ambitious evolution of her from the status of the sex that stays behind in every sense while the brothers go to school. He believes, she sees, it’s out of his hands; in God’s hands.
And this shows he’s gone further than ever in his trust of her? Terrible must be for him to hold this while she disrespects, rejects the future of the country to be achieved led in the person of a son of the Zulu nation.
Sindiswa has always been uninterested in, resistant to KwaZulu visits, finding reasons for staying behind in the Suburb; at this stage of adolescence in the time to be calculated before the adventure of Australia her school friend envies she is getting on intimately (blood will tell?) with her cousin contemporaries. It’s television that has brought them together — not blood will tell — they all envision life, sex, love, ambition, popular aims, gains of success, fear failure, from the same sitcoms and soap operas. Almost every mud-plastered house has the altar of the box, now. Baba himself has the same wide screen in his house as installed in his school, both to provide the informational and educational material available; the programmes on culture and politics in the world brought by the image without the opportunity or need to desert. No one and nothing whatever is permitted to distract him from the sight and sound of every public appearance, even on state visits to other presidents in distant places where President Jacob Zuma is received by the President of France, President Brother Obama, or the Queen of England. The hour of each newscast is a knell that silences all interruptions in Baba’s house. She sits with him now in the old instinctive ordinance to his interests, the privileges she had as his favourite child. Six o’clock and there is Zuma eloquent as he concludes a dramatic appearance he has made in a KwaZulu district where a rival party has the majority in provincial elections but nevertheless is confronted with a community burning tyres, attacking the mayor over failure of water to run from the taps, lack of medical supplies in a clinic where the women give birth.