In the coffee bar they turn to afterwards, restless with their reactions, a young man attached himself, confronting Peter where they sat along the counter. — Man, you one of those educated who want us to stay for ever doing what whites do, all the white shit, let men marry men that’s better custom not circumcision to make men, your brain from the old colonial time, it’s not Africa, for us, now.—
— My brother, that’s not what I said. We keep our ideas, what’s called customs. But we must also keep them right, way they were before, you know what that means, they weren’t a way of making money — you hear what I’m saying? Circumcision, always done by our special men — experts, you understand? They knew how to do it and nobody died, no boy had what he was going to be as a man’s body messed up for him? Now anybody with a kitchen knife tries to do it, it’s cheap, you don’t pay much and you’re finished, for life. — Peter made a slashing gesture between spread thighs.
— The AmaXhosa do it. If it’s done properly by people who know how, maybe it’s a good custom, helps against HIV and AIDS infection, never mind if or not it makes a man. But our amaZulu killing the bull with your bare hands, such pain, so cruel. Not because you’re hungry. To show you’re strong. And as you really grow up to be a man you’re going to find you have to show other ways to be strong for the trials that come. — The young man didn’t expect to hear from a woman, what do they have to do with male rituals.
Jabu had swung round her stool to recognise a mfowethu by his features or his home mannerisms of the language they share. So she takes the challenge rebelliously, personally. Would her Baba believe it had come to this: her sense of a right of leaving all this behind. What has all this to do with Baba — but everything was always to do with him — otherwise I wouldn’t be who I am; where I am. Where I’m going. To be.
He, the descendant of colonisation, wouldn’t be here beside her wouldn’t be taking her, no, going with her of her own volition to another country, as if he really understands the brutality. People need symbols.
Yes — oh yes, of their power over nature is it? Over other people or to please the gods? Yes. But they’ve changed since those times haven’t they, the Mexicans don’t sacrifice their people to the gods any more. The bull hasn’t done anything wrong. It hasn’t angered any gods, it’s only an animal. You’d think by now it’d be enough — as a symbol — at least slaughter the bull, eat it, not torture it to death.
Slaughter humanely. To be confronted by her with the obvious — they eat meat, he and she, and there are so many unspeakable happenings skin-to-skin close, human to human, real, not symbolic, around them.
The converted chicken-house isn’t empty.
Lesego is representative of the university’s African Studies in a national association exclusively of black South Africans which attempts no more successfully than Left, Christian or human rights organisations to condemn and halt violence against immigrants in recognition of African brothers. Lesego himself doesn’t accept that the African continent is extended family, for whom space everywhere in the continent must be made as the reason why they should not be rejected. Being Lesego, he goes to meetings of the association as his own-appointed representative of the living conditions of South African black communities so deprived, degraded that their last ragged hold on existence is broken by the invaders.
— That’s why our South Africans turn violent. — Lesego’s angry saliva shines at the corners of his lips as he has the figures coming. — Twenty-three per cent national unemployment, and this when guys whose employment is to wave you into parking space aren’t counted, up to half the children in shacks don’t go to school, parents can’t pay, provide more than a plate of pap a day — it’s poverty, the cause of this violence.—
— What’re any of us, veterans of the Struggle, eh, going to do about it? Zuma was our Head of Intelligence — the President, what’s he doing about it. Why don’t you come with me, see ‘on the ground’ one of the settlements where people were beaten up, kicked out — two killed — last week.—
— Jabu and I’ve seen, months ago, the people who had to get out of Alexandra, they’ve made some kind of slum camp for themselves on open ground just across the street from houses of the old and new rich in a security-tight suburb — great indignation from the residents black and white.—
— And what was done about it.—
— I suppose the residents got them cleared out. A threat to safety, the value of property reduced by what was on their doorstep.—
— So Steve we’re sitting around talking…shocked…Eish! — Lesego dismisses, he’s forgotten for the moment, that Australia is the response for not going to do anything about it.
—‘Xenophobia’, a future no one in the bush the desert thought of.—
— Just a minute, hold, my brother — how could we know then our countries round us would turn their liberation into dirty power struggles with their own people, the Amins the Mobutos and now Mugabe, so their refugees would flood in on us.—
Seen it all before.
In Lesego’s car, it occurs. — Isn’t umlungu going to be unwelcome whitey. I don’t want to make them suspicious of you.—
Lesego doesn’t so much as consider this. — They know me, their non-racial frontman. At least I’m a black prof of African Studies at a university where white profs used to study us. They’ll think you’re a journalist I’ve brought to write about what happened to them back home. Not to worry.—
Wasn’t worried about the possibility of being abused, harsh words, anger that might spill over an emigrant from his local white world no, but that people could be offended at being a spectacle for him.
Once Lesego left the highway there was a jumble of burned tyres on a road to be manoeuvred through. It seems from newspaper pictures and TV coverage there’s an endless source of these, they are the flags, the logos of protest. Lesego, as if remarking on a passing foreign landscape — Must have been cleared from where they barricaded the highway. — The road was a ploughed track of swerving levels, boulders washed up exposed from past rainy seasons, holes to be avoided or if too deep and wide, bumped through in low gear. Taxi buses taking their right of first way somehow missed hitting the car as they aimed for it: Lesego’s experienced with these conditions. There were the remains of vehicle skeletons. A couple of stick-limbed and a lumbering fat boy yelled from the game they were busy with in one of them. (Can paediatricians explain why undernourished children can be either painfully thin or somehow blown up like empty bags.) Now there was the beginning rather than entrance to the place. Men stood about talking each other down and an old woman sat on a packing case before what might have been a house was someone’s life exposed, three walls of the same kind of cardboard she was seated on, one buckled sheet left of a tin roof, the fourth wall missing or never existent, a neatly made bed there with a bright floral cover, shoes, pots, some shirts hanging on a wire, a tin bath, a poster of a football star.