As with Jews and Muslims, initiation to manhood is tribal among Africans. AmaXhosa circumcise in adolescence or adulthood, in time to be considered a man ready for marriage, Zulus don’t, any more. It’s probably not in the traditions observed now by her Baba.
Not only is the coffee hot in the Faculty room. Westling from Psychology should have something enlightening to say on the Free State. He is professionally beyond disgust, judgement — Suffering. Doesn’t have to be surgical. It seems adult initiations all involve that other form: humiliation. You have to show you can take it, the jeering and taunting by your peers. And then you get drunk with them. That’s exactly what it is, what it’s supposed to signify you become one of them, behaviour of your own adult-kind, as in turn you will initiate the next student.—
— But it is exactly that what has happened at that university was not.—
Lesego is ready. — What do the people who scrub the floor flush the shit from the lavatory have to do with students becoming men? It wasn’t, can’t be initiation. Tell me, say it, into what? Those students accepting them as their own, same as themselves? Out of despising those men and women who clean their dirt they trick them into something you can’t even think about. Was the come on in, the worst insult of all; invite these poor blacks to party with the students, get them drunk, make them dance for you — and then eat from a pot one of the same students has pissed in. It’s all there, filmed on video.—
But the academic colleagues don’t commit themselves to probing revulsion, disgust, and — understood but not breathed — something like that, unimaginable as it is, could happen only in that province, that university.
Disgust. Disgust can’t be the end of it.
It’s raining and instead of the church swimming pool the comrades are in Jake and Isa’s house.
— Who’re these superior louts receiving higher education — no, tertiary, eh in our new ‘dispensation’—sounds less discriminatory between high and low opportunity? Who are these superiors themselves more degraded than any filthy degradation into which they initiate their ‘inferiors’.—it’s Jake.
Some things you can argue out only with yourself. He is hardly aware of his own voice — Were those young men so brutalised, don’t let’s call them beasts, beasts are innocent, hunt and attack only for survival — did their parents’ torture of so many in ingenious crude daily apartheid routine — did this seep into their DNA — do what? — haunt them into some hideous farce of repetition.—
Jabu launches across the room at him; for everyone there. — So they can’t help it?—
What had to be said — excuses? There cannot be any kind of haunting justification of present behaviour taken from that of grandfathers, uncles, fathers, who were the torturers in their Special Branch, their police, their army! Is there a skin-branding of shame which scars into defiance, indecency, the extortionate unbelievable? — So you don’t have to take any blame for your kind that an old bloodied coat can’t shrug off.
Only Pierre, the Afrikaner Dolphin can speak about the Free State, aloud — Boere. Afrikaners. — Pierre’s taken on the hardest kind of recognition, responsibility for what his people have done to themselves.
While they also produced a Dominee Beyers Naude who wouldn’t preach in a segregated Gereformeerde Kerk.
In that only refuge from what’s happening elsewhere, another university — in bed again away from all intrusions, there was tension to be felt in her. He stroked her hip where his hand lay. She drew away as if she were going to speak, say something that among crossing voices hadn’t been heard.
How not to have understood! He and the others mindblown by what had been done in the name of the white-skinned; themselves. She is part of the old women cleaners, the men lured to drink with the sons of the past masters, fed in a stew all that they’d had thrust down their throats all their people’s lives, the whites’ rejection pissed out as blacks’ share of life’s abundance.
Make love to her, would be the tender healing, most respectful acceptance of what she couldn’t release herself of without cursing him in the wordless sense of what his skin represents. But for once, first time ever, since the bold boy-girl desire met, ignoring the Reeds, ignoring Baba, in Swaziland, he could not expect to enter, taken in by her. How long will it be — it’s the country in mind now, not the Free State, no-no it’s too easy to say it’s colour, race, Jabu has multiple identities in living: in her convictions, ethics, beliefs, along with the congenital. A love between them, her Baba and her, which that other love, woman and mate, has not supplanted. Her bond with her Baba survived the disillusion and pain of that other visit the day when she went back home to KwaZulu after sitting — witnessing — at the rape trial and found her father outraged by the trial and triumphant in the dismissal of the charge against Zuma.
Also easy to miss within her multiple identities something you would rather miss. The attachment tangle, strength beneath any acquisition to selfhood, of that history called ‘tradition’ (didn’t colonials dub as a basket of customs anything other than their own ways dealing with the events of life and death). The attachment, not in sense of emotion but of a history alive in the present which he cannot claim to share with her and her Baba. Must face, like it or not — comrades and lovers as they are with their definitive shared history of the Struggle — leaving is different; for her, Jabu. Call it Australia. Whatever. He’s not leaving what she’s leaving.
What her father knows, she’s leaving.
— What did he say.—
— Nothing. At first. I almost thought he hadn’t heard me right. What I’d told.—
The father removed beyond belief. She read the conclusion taken, this one of the communication facilities of growing up together not as children but as adults. — No, his way of not being pushed, you know, taking his time…you see…for the meaning of what’s been said. He just opened the door in his room and sent a boy to fetch tea and only when we started to drink — Are you and your children going too. — Like asking a man in the family who’s off to a job he’s found in the city. I said again, opportunities…you’ve heard about. — Australia, England, America, Ghana — he said it—‘all the same’.—
Opportunities. Quoting from the cuttings — as a circumstance, reason Baba would perhaps respond to that she herself had not shown any recognition of to himself, Steve; but this was her Baba who had seen sending her away to education in Swaziland was his decision of opportunity for her.
— And then. He was angry. So then—
She pinches in her nostrils a moment, concentration to repeat her Baba faithfully, of course they would have been speaking in isiZulu. — He changed to English, ‘There are many white people going there, I read they call it something, relocating, that must be the word they took when they put us, black people into Locations outside the towns.’—
— That’s all? Didn’t ask anything, more about you.—
What about her; first thing she knew was coming upon the cuttings wasn’t it.