So what Jabu is saying: even children cannot be innocent.
She has her precision. — Not guilty of the exploitation but not innocent of knowing about it…it’s all too confusing. For a child who isn’t really a child any more — not here. She told Wethu and me — one of the girls saw how the man who has a township store near where her family lives was beaten and the store set on fire, the girl’s proud of this, says he was cheating people, charges high prices for bread and baby food and firewood. Was he a man everyone knew, one of themselves? From the description given by the girl, and passed on by Sindi, seems to have been a Somali.—
Xenophobia is being discussed while senior lecturer from department of psychology and adjunct professor of sociology are drawing coffee. Steve remarks aside to Lesego how what is externalised as xenophobia has wormed itself into a schoolgirl, classmate of his daughter, against the high human principles taught at that school.
The man was a foreigner? But if he’d been a local who was overcharging? You don’t believe he’d be attacked, you don’t see that a capitalist (oh, a capitalist now, even a spaza shop-man’s screwing the poor is a class issue, my Bra, economic). You think he’d’ve been allowed to exploit them if he’d been one of their own?—
— Long as he was home black—
They can have a down-mouth laugh, just between them at Steve’s, the white man comrade’s subconscious fear of racism in reverse — a local strain of xenophobia? That’s economic, too, isn’t it.
Wethu lives with Sindi in the house yet still holds court during the day in her cottage with city friends, women from her church and the petrol attendant from the filling station, his seems more than the empathy from the church women; a kind of responsibility expressed for what her association with him brought upon her, the disrespect of vicious blows from a man who could have been her grandson.
The right thing to do is send her, take Wethu home to KwaZulu. Baba. She would have had to be returned in good time before November anyway, that had been decided upon for unwanted emotional farewells, now more certain than ever. Wethu must feel threatened; horror proven to her there is no shelter, in the Suburb from the city that Baba’s daughter and her husband could provide, good people, family, though they were.
Nothing is what’s expected: the old woman appeared not to hear when she was told she’s going home, even when Jabu went to her in the privacy of Sindiswa’s room, that temple of female adolescence, and gently explained in isiZulu, with all the traditional reverence between young and aged, that she would have been parting from this extended family soon; she knows they are going to another country.
Sindiswa had walked in and listened.
She followed her mother out, and to the living room, where her brother and father were about to play chess. Gary Elias set up the board and men while Steve watched at the flimsy distance of a television screen municipal strikers threatening weapons — sticks, clubs, anything they could pick up — against nurses, before angry, terrified patients in a hospital, a plaster-encased arm flung back and forth jerking across the camera’s vision.
Sindiswa’s voice reduced everything else to mere noise. — Wethu’s coming to Australia.—
Jabu’s eyes sharply silenced, stopped him, her knee rocked the chess table shivering the men as she cut off the other reality, of the city in whose midst they were. — I hope you haven’t given her that idea, Sindi.—
The child (could you be a child while grown-ups made violence around you, entered this house of theirs and tied down trampled on the body) wasn’t to be deflected. Not only could Wethu not be returned to the chicken coop he had converted into a cottage, she could not be left behind where there is no respect for one of the grandmothers who could be attacked and beaten in exchange for a television set.
— Wethu will go home, to Baba, she’ll be able to forget what happened here.—
Sindiswa was scraping her foot up and down the floor in hard-won patience. — She won’t. She came here, she wants — she’ll go with us when we go.—
Now he speaks to forestall Jabu. — Sindi. She’d be lost. Absolutely. In Australia. There’s no one there for her, lonely, lonely.—
— She’ll find friends. — Sindiswa turns to challenge their discrimination. — If we are going to, why shouldn’t she.—
— She speaks hardly any English…It’s entirely different, we have the same language, we’ve led the same kind of life—
Does he, how can he explain to this exception, this child of—‘intimate integration’, love unknown to racism: the facts of life in this society aren’t the story of the bees and the birds…
Fact is. The Suburb is the bourgeoisie of the comrades. We’re not, even in our mix, like the old-style whites, but we’re not living the life of the people though some of us are black — the Mkizes and Jabu, our syntheses Sindiswa and Gary Elias. Out of the mouths not of babes and sucklings but adolescents from the privilege of progressive schools your own pretensions are brought to you.
— She’s got spirit, all right! — Jabu grants, Jabu exclaims.
— But our Antigone standing for the wrong cause, your Centre wouldn’t brief her.—
— Oh I think we would, not in this case, but for some other…—
Bed is their tribunal, so little privacy when handing over, packing up not only the furnishings at what is resolving as a stage of life (as he had to carry her from the clandestine hideout over a threshold to the first house) but the certainty — the Absolute of the Struggle, left behind along with a present: a liberation, in a form that could never have been believed could come about. Happen. Well. A signal of the new generation always comes to take over. Mandela and Tambo from Luthuli, and on and on, the next and the next, an insolent Antigone…The freedom-born generation and how they’ll deal with the travesty that’s being made of freedom. ‘A better life’ lyric of a pop song outdated, into the trash emptied on the street by workers paid a wage the price of a cabinet minister’s cigars. How to get to sleep. Only animals can sleep at will. But it’s possible to do so on authority of at least one conviction.
If the present could never have been foreseen you don’t therefore have the right to condemn Sindiswa and Gary Elias to grow up in it.
The groups of the Left — communists, Trotskyites, probably no old Stalinist survivors—’are hardly more than a curiosity’ (triumphal sneer wheezed by Professor Craig-Taylor in the coffee shelter) a luta continua having been taken over as a black national rhetoric by an innocent-faced young man with a resuscitated Munich Beer Hall delivery, Julius Malema — he may be the Antigone in the era of sex change (that’s Marc’s quip as one of the Dolphins who’s got himself married, to a woman).
There is a force which does not belong to the colonialist past that has asserted its rights in the African millennium: a political party. Traditional leaders in parliament, whether or not they are representative of all tribal origins with all nine languages, they support the customary rights of each. The amaZulu don’t circumcise, the AmaXhosa do. And this rite of entry to manhood has become money-making. — Like everything else. — Peter Mkize at a meeting in the city called under some acronym of human rights on the report that in the winter season of circumcision twenty boys are dead. — Why doesn’t our Minister of Health prosecute the crooks who butcher our young on the cheap, cut-price offered to parents who don’t want to pay the cost of the traditional practitioners in circumcision ‘schools’?—
As a Zulu comrade Peter better be careful about sticking his neck out like this on the subject of manhood rites…The amaZulu rite decrees that their young males kill a bull with their bare hands — including prodding out its eyes, slow torture of the huge animal. An animal isn’t human, of course, but there has been an outcry by animal rights groups since this year’s performance of the ritual, made public when cameras reproduced the agony of the death. Zuma himself must have taken part in the ritual long ago, and you don’t go around questioning the humanity, morality of how the President attained his proven manhood with many wives and other women. Although she is the one who wanted them to accompany Peter to the meeting — Baba, did her father fulfil the rite, too…before, along with the rites of the church? It’s not a thought to repeat to her.