This is the subject of gleeful uproar in the Suburb round the church pool. The Dolphins rejoice in this other example of double moral standards, for both arms and sex deals. A man who had held the second highest position of power in the land, Deputy President, apparently committed to fight HIV and AIDS, tells the male population a good soap-and-shower on the penis, after, is all you need, no antiretrovirals necessary.
Jake can’t resist. — And if you do find you’ve caught the incurable clap, you just put yourself on a diet of beetroot, garlic and wild spinach — if you can find that traditional veg at the supermarket.—
Everyone laughing again at what’s become colloquially the priceless synonym of absurdity, the nature cure advised by the Minister of Health in her rejection of antiretrovirals. That other trial, the arms deal corruption, has been indeed referred again (it will go away) in legal complications of irregularities. Jabu is best able to explain, passing on the enlightenment from the access of her own intelligence to expert legal minds.
Marc dives into the pool and comes up exploding water and laughing, shaking a shower from his fashionably shaven head. — What a fantastic plot! What a cast! If only I could — The playwright seizing on a new twist to a marvellous plot.
She sits in the court with the onlooker crowd on the day when Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma is cross-examined about how intercourse came about if it was not intentioned by him and he answered that in view of the affectionate goodnight exchanges between Uncle and a friend’s daughter (her provocative scanty attire already described to the court) it was traditionally incumbent in Zulu culture for a Zulu man to satisfy a woman who showed she was sexually aroused. ‘You cannot just leave a woman if she is in that state.’
It is illegal to make public the name of a woman who has laid a rape charge. To protect her anonymity this woman is known in court and to the media as Kwezi, ‘Morning Star’.
Outside the court Jabu, a woman among black women, made her way past those shouting their message. — Burn the bitch! — The image, photographs of Morning Star, are in flames.
The ex-Deputy President is found not guilty in his rape trial.
Marriage. A common identity. Is that what it is. What it stands for, leave the takens, the sexual implication out of it, the biological, even the legal, the mutual health insurance, tax benefits et al. These are Sunday church swimming pool subjects aired, argued over, kindly jested about to the comrade Dolphins by the Straight in the company. — So you want the right to get divorced?—
Whether by words avowed in church, mosque, synagogue, temple, in a magistrates’ court or in love vows privately coupling two of the same sex — marriage: it’s a term for a common identity encircling all the individual difference between two human beings. But mustn’t assume the differences are not there, the other identities: mustn’t presume they are like elements in a laboratory that combine to produce one substance to create decorative endurance or an explosion, according to the imperative at the time. He and she share political dismay at the Zuma ‘affair’—in both senses of the word, in this instance — the arms deal corruption charge that may never come to court is the other. She’s a lawyer identified within a resource for justice. He has an identity as a teacher, for him the designation ‘academic’ is a social class distinction; both lower and upper levels of learning alike are served by teachers. If a hero comrade turns out to have sexual morals as feet of clay, at least the university is showing signs of transforming into what he believes such an institution should be in the need of the present. He was an industrial chemist in a paint factory clandestinely producing formulae for making bombs, he was a cadre (these terms seem too Stalinist post 1994?) in a liberation army, he has now yet another identity in the synthesis of self. What’s called in psychological jargon job satisfaction’s a distraction from political disillusion. He’s able to come home to tell how some of the students who attend band-aid coaching are turning out to have the determination, the unbeatable guts comrades had to summon in Umkhonto situations — discover in themselves what uninspiring schooling had stifled. An ability to concentrate, question, an urge to use that over-aweing tomb, the library, as well as quick-fix Internet, educate yourself in innate fascination of discovering the apparently limitless reach of that mystery concealed from your own mind. Some are opening to a vocabulary of ideas as well as words beyond so how’s it, cool. This he could exploit for them by persuading scientists from nuclear research, virology, particle physics, to condescend to brief seminars where the ‘underprivileged’ were bold enough to ask questions that showed they had some perceptions of the ecosphere not confined to the romantic monsters of space-busters. They are given the revelation of Grid, learning a scientist named Wilczek’s concept of stuff that exists in what is regarded as space, emptiness. So it’s not a void? There atoms and nuclei are held together by forces acting between all the pairs of particles that they contain. It’s a highly structured, powerful medium whose activity moulds the world where their eyes see nothing. Wonder…
She was glad for them, for him, in the way of someone who has always had such expectations of someone like him. The idea that she might sit in on one of these sessions somehow didn’t come off. Peter and Jake were elated at the participation of the band-aid students when invited to an exchange between them and a visiting luminary.
Jabu had asked — would he manage care of the children, meals and all that, if she went to KwaZulu for the weekend, taking Wethu with her, Wethu hadn’t been home lately, a visit was due.
Could he manage! He laughed, butting her cheek with his. — The kids’ll have a ball, undisciplined, and I can get takeout I’m sure from the Dolphins’ jambalaya. — He knew what she did not say: she needed to be with her father in what must be to him the betrayal of the amaZulu, the people, disgraced by the behaviour of one who had been MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in their provincial government; one with whom the church Elder and headmaster had grown to be inducted to manhood by the killing of a bull by bare hands.