Sindiswa goes along to KwaZulu only on occasion when it is understood that everyone goes. Gary Elias, Wethu’s usual companion on visits, attacks — Ooww no, not this weekend, we’ve got some guys from Pretoria, our first team against them — I’ve got to be there, we must vuvuzela our guys. Who’s going to take me to school sports, Saturday?—
— I am of course. — Steve will not be going to KwaZulu, not expected to share all daughterly duty.
After the meal the children and Wethu watch an episode of a television thriller they follow and she is in the kitchen with the two mugs of coffee she makes every night for the Suburb’s patrol watch he has suspected of being personnel of impimpi veterans.
— Anything special happening at home this weekend?—
— Not that I know of. — She lifts the mugs in a gentle hint for him to open the kitchen door for her.
She’s gone out to the front gate to hand out what has become the men’s comfort.
Back in a few moments, and stood while he locked the door behind her. He turned and smiled: forgotten something? But she wasn’t looking round the kitchen.
— I think I have to tell him about Australia.—
— But why. What for?—
He’s saying what has it to do with your father.
— What he would think about leaving. Us leaving. Me leaving.—
— I can’t see how that can have anything to do with us just looking at — What’s got into you, we’re not taking the plane tomorrow, are we, we’ve made a hell of a lot of decisions, we’ve always had to have all the circumstances clear, simply considering. Why does he have to know — right — it’s ‘common knowledge’ gossip among comrades even, I’ve picked up although I don’t know how it spread, by someone’s Twitter Face Talk or whatnot, to the Faculty. But how would this have reached the village…the school, the church. — While he is speaking: her leaving. What business is it of anyone. What the Reed clan would think about him leaving; a son has opted for a superior degree that will qualify him for a post in another country while civil engineers are needed for the future of this one. ‘Her leaving’—her Baba. Yes her Baba. What Baba thinks in every decision for every move she makes in her life, the life he propagated and that is deep in her being as Sindiswa and Gary Elias were embedded in her womb; it matters to Jabu. It’s not a question of influence; between her and Baba, his comrade wife and her Baba there is an identity. Final one?
What is called the intake of shades-of-black students at the Faculty of Science has increased at least sufficiently to more than compensate for those who have failed their year or abandoned the idea of becoming an industrial chemist, engineer, and other scientific professionals, either because they’ve run out of scholarship support or the best intentions of band-aid classes have not proved able to subvent poor teaching of maths in schools from which they came. Research has become part of the curriculum, study of climate change, as well as alternatives to fossil fuels as producers of electric power. The university Business School has the largest number of new students, no longer seen as a dead end if you weren’t white and had the footprints of a businessman father to lead you into company directorship, banking, commerce. There are black directors in mining cartels and shopping mall complexes, insurance companies. It’s encouraging, while understood, certainly by an academic that attending lectures together, working in labs, libraries, side by side at computers and canteen takeouts is the simple side of transformation; so long as students live at home or in some pad in the city. Hostels bring together in the intimacy of shower stalls, adjoining beds, place for the need of differing personal possessions, the skin colours and habits of young people who have never lived together in the same closed space before. There’ve been some incidents of minor spats at the ‘mixed’ hostels — mixed only in the old jargon of race — these students play hard rock recordings when others are trying to study, this guy blocks the wash basin with combings from his hair; nothing serious as inference of racism.
A New Year.
The newspaper report of what happened last year at a university, in a part of the country that still has its old Boer Republic name — Free State — long preceding apartheid, dating from Boer defiance against the British (fellow) colonisers — it’s hardly credible in the version now revealed by whoever the informant or informers were.
There are accounts pursued for months by journalists on the Internet from individuals anonymous, reluctant to be interviewed, and then — photographs. Somehow got hold of, clips of a video apparently made by some of the participants in whatever the event was supposed to be. White students at the traditionally Afrikaans university of The Free State held out the ultimate hand of non-racialism and no class prejudice by inviting the university cleaners of their hostel, black, to a party customarily marking the initiation of new students, usually a very private clandestine ritual. The mostly elderly four women and one man whose role in these students’ higher education was to clean up after them, danced in drunken freedom, and then on their knees forced to help themselves generously from a pot of stew. One of the students had pissed into it.
What was the progenitor.
Yes. yes. Need to know. It goes that far back, initiation. Beyond ancient history, not of battles and kings, tyrants and slaves. Back beyond all that — into evolution. But not how apes stood upright and lost their tails. So very far: back to the intimate anatomy. If you’re female, Jabu is a girl, you have a definitive initiation in your body. The day of that is when you bleed. (What it must be like to put your hand between your thighs and there it is.) You have become a woman. As a male, a boy, for us nothing so drastic as bloodletting. The rising of the worm you pee through, become a stiff upright, it happens apparently in the womb and you can make it happen through childhood by toying with it. Must have experienced when the attention of your hand became urgent and there was fluid spurting excitement, pleasure. So. Then you were not a boy: a man.
Rituals the body has.
Was there some sort of other, gleeful ceremonial in the dorms at the high school where Reeds have been educated over at least two generations. Don’t remember so could not have been significant either as good or traumatic. Must anyway have felt by it totally recognised, safe and accepted, in that manly white enclave, sons of those who mattered.
University. Could you call it recruitment outside the curriculum. Nothing so authoritative. Initiation; beginning to understand a contradiction in the ways of living, let alone thinking — that’s political initiation. Didn’t really come out of the bibles of revolution read: rather the disappearances into Swaziland, putting into practice tentatives of what theory called liberation, contradictions resolved by action, you can choose sides, you don’t have to belong in the one you were born to. Guts not obedience. The proof of it later at the paint factory, ingredient of concoction of explosives to blow up power substations and rupture the service of apartheid. Initiation: what you yourself did.
And Umkhonto. The comrades who went for the first time on raids, into battle across the desert and through the bush, to kill the apartheid army and be killed by them — what student hostel initiation, if it is to test endurance, did they need.
Religious initiation. But of course how could you remember that you must have yelled as you were snipped — when do Jews do it — before two weeks old? — at some atavistic whim of your mother married to a Gentile (if not observant Christian). Muslims do it at a stage in development, marriage, when at least it makes more sense to become a man by ordeal of some sort; we males don’t go through childbirth. And the justification, for non-believers: it’s not mutilation but a hygienic advantage. And there are differing opinions apparently, among women frank enough in gender freedom to come out with these: intercourse with a circumcised penis is more/less rousing than with an intact foreskin. What will she say. It’d imply a wider experience than with me. Before me? Since. You don’t ask such opinions of your woman.