These days Steve and Jabu are invited to rehearsals of the freed talent of writers, actors, singers from whom the opinions of friends are sought, criticism argued. Growing up in the ‘location’ beside the coal mines Jabulile had never seen a play until she was at the students’ Christmas effort at her teachers training college over the border. But her opinion was found worth listening to when one of the comrades’ plays reimagined a setting and social arrangements half-lost or half-ignored in the generation of labour herded down mines or in factories instead of themselves herding their cattle, and the generation that has lived by the edicts of Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Guevara instead of tribal custom. The Dolphin Marc put before her the draft of his play, with its version of the dimension of freedom gained. From her half-rural, half-industrial base, as a background to her transformation first as a revolutionary and then school teacher, she seemed able to believe with certainty that this custom now wouldn’t be followed exactly like that, this reaction to a girl refusing to be sold for a bride price to a man she didn’t want was likely to be different from the submission of the past; a pastor portrayed might not have been a sellout reporting as God’s will a secret ANC meeting of the time in his parish. People who had written out, so to speak, since 1994, inside knowledge of the lives devastated and endured, were publishing in mushroom ventures heroic stories from precolonial legends, appropriating these to their present as Europeans do those of ancient Greece. What the white regime called tribal chiefs now were Traditional Leaders sitting in parliament like any other political party. They too had brought ancient individual authority in languages and territorial fiefdoms to something of a common identity within the powers of government to direct people’s lives. Yet — in the bewilderment — paradox of freedom, who would have thought of it — the Traditional Leaders at least offered the support of observances of conduct that had directed life in some certainty; so — the ancestors are still with the people as they were through humiliation, the racist assaults, the wars; there through eternity. And to whom the people are still responsible? A few traditional Leaders had collaborated with apartheid, given status in reserves for blacks known as Bantustans—‘Bantu’ = people, as in racespeak reference to those areas.
The ex-Bantustan leaders aren’t exactly impimpis from the past in a modern democracy. People are free to recall themselves as they wish, just as the couple Jabulile, Steve, are revolutionaries become citizens. The Constitution confirms it. The normal life, the one that never was.
There’s a hand-delivered envelope, messenger, not post. ‘Steve from Jonathan’.—This’s come. — She hands it to him with a shoulder lift of curiosity. Inside, a printed card with the celebratory scrolls of some occasion. He reads; then reads aloud not so much to her as to himself. It’s an invitation, an invitation to the ‘barmitzvah’ of a son of his brother. The date, the address of a synagogue. — What is this? — He waves the card.
The amazement surprises Jabu, she takes the question literally. — Isn’t it something the Jews do… — Jewish cadres might have referred to it when memories of childhood were exchanged to pass the time between tense preoccupations in the bush.
— To make a boy a man. Like you do with ritual circumcision schools, only it doesn’t hurt.—
Of course she knows his circumcised penis was done when he was a baby.
— It’s a religious ceremony, isn’t it?—
— What is this? Jonny, Alan and I were snipped at my mother’s whim, I suppose, that’s all Jonny can claim for the religion, just as our father introduced us to Father Christmas not Jesus on the cross. What’s got into him.—
— Maybe his wife wants it. — Brenda, the one who embraced her so enthusiastically when she was introduced to the family.