They laugh together, Jonathan aware that in this matter his brother Steve is not the man to ask for useful advice.
England. Other consultancies. Yes. Why never think of England if you have such great thoughts at all and are pursuing them. Connections. The influential academics at the conference where all arrangements were efficiently managed by the official with a man’s name in its female version. ‘Home’ to England where father Reed’s line came from. Life in England: a few days in an old mill converted to a private place.
The old year is seen off at the Jake/Isa venue, but all were joint hosts, Blessing and Peter Mkize, Jabu and Steve, the Dolphins, including renegade Marc and his wife. The comrades in the sense way back in the Struggle and now in the Suburb commune, ignite one another in enjoyment just as they are ready at hand when anyone among them is in trouble.
Dancing, she and he are the clandestine lovers in Swaziland where Baba sent her to be educated and the university student was evading the Special Branch. They circled Marc dancing, nuzzling his wife as in parties round the church pool he used to one of the Dolphins — his lover?
Jabu whispering after an unaccustomed extra drink or two. — What d’you think there was about her…—
She means in particular that attracted Marc; what — in the one who’s not a male…?
Yes? Not easy for himself a man who’s attracted only to women, to place himself in Marc’s — what — body sense and aesthetic sense.
Into the small ear close to him. Wine speaking. — She has a beautiful long waist.—
Connections. (Jonathan had brought them up.) England.
The one with the feminine version of a man’s name, she has a waist that your hand goes smoothly down from the intimate armpit to the hollow at the hip.
Time hasn’t materiality, the New Year’s arrival is aural, cheers jetting with fireworks from the Suburb and the city all around, the stamp of drums and farting blare of vuvuzelas, supermarket clone of the oxhorn that used to be blown to honour tribal dignitaries, not in its plastic evolution deafening crowds when a goal is scored on the football field. From whatever was their partying in the yard the sons have appeared among the adult embraces landing where they will, the hugging, shoulder-thumping half-triumphant to have made it through an old year, half-expectant of the new one — and the seeking out, alone among all the press of others, a special meeting, embrace between those who live each-to-each. They are clasped as one body, but they kiss for the first time — never before in the time that is now, this year, he sees tears magnifying her eyes in celebration. She laughs and they’re kissing again.
This is the last. To be the last change of time in the Suburb, with its normal life claimed.
Subject Ozclass="underline" OUR PEOPLE
It’s the heading of information pages come online to his room in the faculty. Australia the world’s smallest continent and sixth largest country etc. (all that’s in the cuttings read before). Indigenous people lived on that continent up to 60,000 years ago; their lives were changed irrevocably after the British claimed Australia in 1788. British colonisation began as a penal colony with convicts shipped from Britain. Free settlers from there were joined by people from other parts of Europe, and Malays, Japanese…they started the pearling industries. By the 1930s the indigenous population was reduced to 20 per cent of its original size. Today a little more than 2 per cent of Australians are identified as Indigenous (seems ‘aboriginal’ has become a no-no, like ‘Kaffir’). Largescale immigration began after the Second World War…and after the abolition of the ‘White Australia’ policy, migrants came from many parts of Asia. Recent patterns show more coming from Africa.
In the years that followed European settlement the indigenous population declined significantly as a result of increased mortality. In 1967 the Australian Constitution was changed to recognise the indigenous for inclusion in the national census. (So earlier figures must be guess estimates?)
RECONCILIATION. Six years into the twenty-first century that population had increased by 11 per cent to 450,000 out of the country’s total 21 million. In 1992 in the High Court of Australia, Eddie Mabo was the first Indigenous person to have native title rights to land recognised on behalf of Indigenous people. The Mabo decision led to the establishment of the Native Title Act 1993 which recognises native land ownership throughout Australia. In 2008 the Australian Prime Minister apologised to the Indigenous people for the ‘Stolen Generation’: the Indigenous children who between 1910 and 1970 were forcibly removed from their families, inflicting profound suffering and loss in Indigenous Australians. Education, health, housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than non-Indigenous Australians…overcrowding is associated with poor health outcomes, 2004–5 health survey found 27 per cent of Indigenous were living in overcrowded conditions.
White South Africans didn’t apologise to black South Africans for the abuse suffered by blacks from whites, seventeenth century to apartheid’s final perfection of the means. Didn’t apologise for anything — didn’t have to, they were dealt with in the retribution that counts most — their last regime finished off by the Struggle.
Humans lived in Australia 60,000 years ago.
The San, humans living in what is now South Africa 200,000 years ago, joined by the Khoi Iron Age people from the north of the African continent; these also have managed to survive under whites that saw them as hardly human — some must have done so by clandestine breeding with other blacks, the whites’ Malay slaves — and even the whites? They got the vote along with everyone else in 1994. They now have radio stations broadcasting in what has survived of their own languages. They live wretchedly degraded in poverty, the freedom transformation of the country to which they belong more than any others in the population.
So it’s not emigration. What’s left behind? It’s not another country, if you’re an aborigine, over there.
At home in their living room, he has the information at hand to show her. She’s worked late at the Centre, it has taken on a case against mining companies which have for years dismissed with token or no compensation workers who contract asbestos poisoning and develop TB due to conditions breathed in underground.
She gives it back in the gesture for later.
— Not going well? — The case, he’s aware, has been lost in two lower courts, now it is for the Constitution height.
Doesn’t seem to have accepted the question. She’s telling him something, nothing to do with the day’s work. — I stopped by the supermarket for grapes Sindi wants and one of the men who hawk brooms in the street came up to me, now, as I was leaving. I gave the usual sorry, don’t need, and he said Headmaster Gumede’s daughter, I know you — recognised me from home, even my name. He’s one of Baba’s schoolboys but he hasn’t found a job since he finished school two years ago. Come out of Baba’s school really literate, numerate…all he can do to feed himself is try to sell straw brooms he says Zimbabwe refugee women make.—
She has an aspect of being unreachable. How say to her, give her the other handout, the man’s one of thousands. But this is one of Baba’s charges, educated by Baba for the new opportunities. She’s describing exactly how the man approached, the mask of the beggar’s confronting face that comes with the calling as that of the preacher or the judge comes with theirs. What he is seeing is that what she, Jabu, is experiencing is guilt. Why? She’s guilty of belonging to the new black class that is not out on the streets. Not a cadre along with a Home-Boy whom Baba hasn’t been able to give freedom as he gave it to her to pursue. Guilty of false pretences.