She smiled with closed lips and paused — before the evocation of Zuma’s man, the father. — Uzikhethele wena impilo yakho! You made your life, I let you choose, you must live the way it is in this time.—
What is she saying, comrade Jabu, that whatever her betrayal of her Baba, his bitter sorrow, her rejection of him; her betrayal of herself, Ubuntu, her country: a woman, in the order of her Baba’s community, she will live this time as ever on the decision of her man.
Australia, I am leaving with him, leaving our country, KwaZulu, leaving you. The woman goes where her man goes, that’s the ancient order understood, but he knows, Baba knows, had his own kind of revolution in nurturing his female child to independent being. Wouldn’t be deluded, would accept that she was emigrating — that reversal of what brought foreigners to take the continent, Africa which was not theirs — as a wife obedient to her husband. Baba will still force her to meet him on common if not equal ground — he is the father, ultimate authority after the Word of God — he had provided for her. She has to defend herself on the choice made for the children, hers and thereby Baba’s lineage, children of Africa, of the Zulu nation.
Protect herself from knotted liens of nature her man must recognise, always should have recognised, liens he didn’t have. Being born here is not enough. Even in the equality of the Struggle.
Sindiswa is about to be fourteen. When she’s asked what she wants as her birthday present she says one of the new mobile phones where you can see movies and read books, the pages passing, you don’t have to turn — her cell phone is old stuff.
— Oh please — must she be like all the kids (and his students) a clamp on her ear, apparently talking aloud to themselves.—
He keeps his ‘old style’ mobile in the car — for hijack emergencies…? There are breaks in real communication in the faculty room just when someone is putting together an argument worth hearing and he/she is claimed by a singsong sounding somewhere under clothes like a digestive gurgle. When a student comes to him to discuss a formula not clearly grasped — that’s what he’s there for, a teacher always available — he has bossily made it a rule that the thing must be switched off. He’s not cool, Prof Reed, although they say he was one of the whites in Umkhonto.
— Everybody has them. Gary’s nagging too.—
— Exactly.—
Brenda has called — for Jonathan’s sake, Steve is a brother after all, even if their ways were parted during the bad years — everyone agrees now they were that, although not personally involved except in being white. Brenda keeps tally of family anniversaries and birthdays as calendars mark Christmas and now Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and so on, holy days. She’ll just pop round and drop a little something for Sindiswa, big girl, no more toys, what would she like?
— Your aunt—
Sindi comes from her room enquiringly — Baba’s place?—
— Your aunt Brenda. — They chatter, Brenda has an assumed understanding of young people (it works) who are balancing on the edge of adulthood.
The outdated landline is handed back happily to Jabu. A natural connection has been made by her daughter and the wife of Steven’s brother. — Won’t you and Jonathan eat with us when you come to wish happy birthday, no party, I’m sorry, because she’s taking her school friends to celebrate at McDonald’s that evening, believe it or not.—
The receiver resounds Brenda’s dismissal. — Of course I believe it!—
— Just lunch. On Sunday, then. How many of you?—
— Only Jonny and me. As you know, Ryan’s overseas and the others all make weekend plans.—
— Should we have a braai. — Jabu’s suggestion, for his approval. She’s such a South African, this descendant of amaZulu warriors!
— Whatever’s going to be easiest for you, m’love.—
She doesn’t mind family occasions, even on his side (why does he make the distinction) although their kin, his-and-hers, are the comrades. That progeniture is the one they live, survivors, while Ruth was blown apart as she opened a parcel, the gift sent to her, Albie lost an arm and the light of one eye…who else? The great ones.
They’re moving to eat on the terrace, the garden table upgraded with a cloth. Jonathan is volunteering to carve the leg of lamb that was decided on, although there’s putu with beans as well as roast potatoes Reed style (or what Jabu knows as white style). Steve grants expertise to his brother. While Jonathan tests the knife for keenness he’s telling of his son Ryan. — It seems he’s been working hard, and the great standard of the courses — you know he got into the London University School of Engineering? He’s still found time, ay, to fall seriously for a girl, sister of one of his top student friends. He’s bringing her to show her, not us — Africa, sometime next year, the swimming pools and the lions.—
Brenda proudly amused. — Sindiswa, you better get ready to be a bridesmaid. A wedding in the family. We’d like him to graduate first, but it’s not our affaire to decide!—
She has given Sindiswa a beribboned packet. Sindi is fitting something from it round the principal recognition of her birthday, the iPhone she has chosen. The gift is an elegant cover for the mobile. Sindi must have told Brenda in the kitchen, Steve didn’t want her to be just ‘talking to herself’.—But these things are educational as well as a good safeguard for us parents, your child can always reach you if she’s in trouble in any way, this place, you never know…this dangerous city.—
The weekend papers he was out early to buy in addition to the two subscribed to. Scattered about, the image of Jacob Zuma is the front page.
When he has made coffee, his share of tasks of a meal, with some aside of excusing himself nobody hears under the table’s rally of voices, Jonathan is teasing flattered Gary Elias about the sporting prowess he’s sure of the boy, Brenda has another social gift, orchestrating subjects and gossips about celebrities which animates herself, Jabu and Sindi in femininity if not liberation, he goes to the living room and snaps on the screen, the roar—
Awuleth’ Umshini Wami
Weeks go by, when they don’t speak of whether he’s still in contact with the possibility/opportunity, Australia. Normal life takes up attention and energy. The immediate on its track. There was a connection apart from what they customarily share when a winter school on the interface between law and social sciences was organised at his university and she, Jabu the freedom fighter-cum-lawyer was one of the invited participants, some from other countries in Africa, the USA, Brazil, India. He left the Science Faculty the day she was a panellist on the connection between law and public access to power and heard her speak, with interruptions of applause for the points she expounded. As part of an audience, to see, hear, one you know intimately, sexually, intellectually, in temperament, oddities, as nobody else does is to find that no one knows anyone utterly. He’s sat in on a few court cases but there she was a modest member of a legal team, one of the attorneys assisting advocates, a combined presence. Here, up at a microphone with the attention of all around him on her become oddly, strangely one of them, sees the supple length of her brown neck above the small well between her collarbones as she raises her head to acknowledge the audience in her relation to them; the iconic image in the elaborately wound cloth giving height to the piled hair it holds, a few locks painted with coloured strands free from it, moving in emphasis while she speaks. She is in African dress not the businesslike garb for the courts. Which is hers: Jabu’s? Why is she dressed in this one for an occasion whose subject is the law. You have to be in an audience to come upon, why; what you should know and don’t.