No Time Like the Present: A Novel (32 page)

End of Outback Bantustans.

‘The Australian government is committed to the process of reconciliation between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians. Reconciliation involves symbolic recognition of the honoured place of the first Australians and the implementation of practical and effective measures to address the legacy of profound economic and social disadvantage experienced by many Indigenous Australians, particularly in health, education, employment and housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than Non-Indigenous students. Today Australia has a population of 21 million. More than 43 per cent were either born overseas themselves or have one parent who was born overseas. The Indigenous population is 23 per cent of the total.’

In South Africa everything in reverse. Whites 12 per cent of the 49 million population, still dominate the economy, the black majority which overcame also produces those who join the white class and take freedom as the advance to corruption and distancing from the majority living jobless between shacks and toilet buckets.

Take the Down Under information to her; familiarising herself with law over there, unlikely she’s not aware…

The fact that she’s never brought it, to us.

We’ve paid our Struggle dues: and the result? What our son and daughter must grow up to be here, at home, by birth and genes, responsible to a Zuma, a Malema.

Gary Elias is practising on his newly acquired guitar and Sindi, Jabu and Wethu are watching the news on TV, Wethu doesn’t want to see again alone in her cottage the excreta of city’s life where she found herself that afternoon, the rotting food nesting flies, the shore of dirty paper, broken bottles, torn T-shirts cast by municipal workers on strike again, when she was there to buy some special headache
muti
demanded by a sister back home in KwaZulu.

Education:—no, mustn’t allow himself to be distracted by sections on agriculture, bird life, entertainment, Internet cafés. Education: over the past decade the Australian government has committed to halving the gap in literacy and numeracy between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians (that’s a humbling admission in identity, imaging South African whites agreeing to call themselves Non-Africans!)…Although it’s admitted there’s still a long way to go to increase the educational levels of the Indigenous, the progress is encouraging. Out of the country’s total population the number of Indigenous children attending school has increased to 4.2 per cent…universities: the proportion of Indigenes attaining Bachelor or higher degrees, 5 per cent of the national intake—

And at that moment, darkness—Oh fuck! from Sindiswa, a wild thrum from Gary Elias—electricity blackout.

He and Jabu share the moment. Just some piece of the vast equipment that misfunctioned. Probably failure to be routinely checked. Or, other times, the explanation, cables stolen. Evidently you can get good money for them from metal dealers, one of the ingenuities of having no job, the culture of unemployment, as a professor coined it at a social science seminar last week.

Dark is not—like a sudden flare of light, a disruption. The fumble around for candles, the bed the place of darkness as another kind of reflection: back at the results published end of term on the boards, 23 per cent dropouts missing. Earnest dutiful bridging classes a finger stuck in the hole of the flood wall against the failure of schools to provide ‘learners’ with education. The indigenes of this African population.

Some of the indigenous homeborn, homeskin, emigrated from poverty to the status of money and political power, the indigenous mass left behind, below, to do the work of fouling the streets in desperation for pay to survive on.
A luta continua
. Where’s the cosmic gap least, if never closed, in continuation of freedom’s revolution? Sweden, Denmark, Iceland? Too far. Too cold.

What to do with the house; the Dolphins don’t want it to go to strangers who won’t fit in with the Suburb, near-neighbours to themselves. They have found two men who have always fancied the possibility of extending the Suburb’s character by moving in, so to speak. The Suburb has been and will continue to be, if the Dolphins, Isa and Jake, Blessing and Peter have anything to do with it, a place, a home where colour, sexual partnership, have nothing to do with the qualities of living in freedom.—Even as an enclave in the tsunami—Dolphin Eric says—of revenge for the hideous old years,
gimme my tender to build a World Cup Stadium, I’ll stash up millions in your ministerial pocket
, you’re all welcome to keep afloat in our Gereformeerde Kerk pool.—(It would be a good line in one of Marc’s plays, neh.) The care the Suburb comrades have for one another has meant that although the playwright doesn’t live there any more he has made a deal whereby the prospective buyers rent the house to the former owners until these—depart. The new owners will take possession on 1 December; but the price of the sale—the playwright is shrewdly wise on the comrades’ behalf, is to be paid in advance; now. Unusual. But Foreign Exchange regulations on the flight of capital mean we may not be allowed to take it all to Australia.—You better go wild and kit yourselves out. You Can’t Take It With You.—

Gary Elias wants to know—When’m I going to BabaMkhulu’s for the holidays?—Two weeks of July have already gone by. Maybe when you are too young, and one of the protected, to have experienced ruptures in your way of life (they’ve even avoided this against their own better judgement by following the Mkizes’ decision that the boys stay on at that school after the initiation exposure) you have no precedent to bring sense to parting and loss.

Jabu has given the boy a date: next Saturday.

—I don’t think you have to come.—

Not have to come, does she mean this time? Or any time before the daughter’s husband finally has to make his farewells; face her father with his own male responsibility. Nearer the time she said. Compassionately, why burden her Baba with appalled attempts to assert authority to prevent the rejection of home, country. Place.

The poster of Jacob Zuma when the rape trial—went away.

Is
she
going to say goodbye? Now. Goodbye with Sindiswa, Gary Elias: her children who are also the headmaster’s, the Church Elder’s, the grandmother’s, the aunts’, by lineage and blood children of KwaZulu.

The question of his, the Reed family, no likelihood they would have any reaction of personal or clan abandonment, there is their pride in Jonathan’s qualifying as an engineer at an English university prestigious enough for him to find a good position anywhere in the world. His mother: she has surround of sons, daughter and grandchildren to accept his absence as she and his father had to when he disappeared in that fight against apartheid. She will certainly come to visit in the other country for some reason chosen rather than Britain; many people are relocating.

It wasn’t a good time for Jabu to have to accede to Gary’s rightful demand, although it made sense in another way; it decided when the actual date of departure would be—how to say it—put before Baba. The present coincided with a time when the Centre was concentrated on the development of the highest seat of justice in the country, the Constitutional Court about to appoint new judges to replace retirement of the four originally appointed by Nelson Mandela himself.

Someone has tacked a piece of plastic over the Zuma poster ragged but still there.

The boys are on the lookout for Gary Elias and colliding with each other run to meet the car, Wethu and Gary Elias announce arrival, and the boys yell back throwing the football up to the volume of their voices. The women have heard, led by her mother come clustering. Wethu has her bundles of fulfilled requests for city products to hand over to a clamour of joy, Sindiswa is embraced by the girls, the little ones clinging round her legs, the young her own age admiring her knee-high jeans, touching a forefinger to her double earrings, one hoop above the other in each twice-pierced lobe. Someone calls out in proud recognition the name of the TV star whose style this is.

Her father awaits his daughter in welcome; Baba, on the veranda of the house which is the place of the church Elder and headmaster of the boys’ school with a standard of education exceptional in rural areas. The house not like any other in the village.

The homecoming visit the same as it always is—was—Gary Elias coming to spend school holidays or an extended family gathering at Christmas, these years—although the Struggle that had taken her away has ended, she and the white man she had chosen within it meant another life for her—she had never come home.

Her mother has confidences to pass on in the kitchen when she joins her to help with the skills learnt as a female child obliged to have tasks there since she was lifted from her mother’s back and set down to shell peas, happily eating many on the way to the bowl. Hear about Eliza Gwala. She and her husband took in Es’kia Zondo when his wife died shame she was only forty-something, he had nobody to keep him to his diet he’s diabetic since a long time, and next thing he’s getting into bed with Eliza when Gwala on night shift you remember he’s at the coal mine? We all know but we never said…Now she want to marry Es’kia, she tell me she’s going to town to see about a divorce—but you know, it’s your kind of work, a lawyer, costs a lot. And Sophie passed on after you were here last time, she was my best friend, Baba never liked her but he arranged the funeral and everything the son nobody knows where to find him, he was supposed to have a job some Indian’s factory in Durban, they say he left to work at the docks—I must say Baba tried
everything
—disappeared, it’s easy in Durban so many people there from all over—they say you can hear every language, not isiZulu. Everything changed…

As wife and daughter come out to the table, laid on the colonial veranda, with the women bearing pots and dishes it’s as if from familiarity with the mother’s preoccupations Baba takes up where the conclusion he didn’t hear, left off.—Murumayara now has as hard a time as Mandela had—in a different way, and Mbeki didn’t take it on, he failed, so it has all come up for Murumayara Zuma to deal with. But he’s strong. Ready. With God’s will. And ours.—The injunction about will, in the language that is theirs, all of them gathered without him (her man).

A better life for all. She doesn’t say, what’s become of it—that wry observation among comrades.

What is Baba’s demand to everyone at his table, she receives as directed to her. From his mind, that time she came from Zuma’s trial for rape. Reproaching—no, tutoring her—which while she rejects she has the confusion of feeling part of—close with, not
to
him—an identification that is called love. In the Suburb there is the intense exchange over shared food and drink, perceptions of what’s happening around and to them, their conception of the country now, as much a sustenance necessity as what they’re reaching out forks for, swallowing. Here at home there is no such compulsion to the reality that contains them all, KwaZulu and the Suburb, the commuters stoning the trains that leave them stranded, the doctors on strike in hospitals so ill-equipped in one month a hundred babies have died, while although the money from sons out of work in the city isn’t coming any more, here the hens are laying and there was a fair crop of mealies for the winter, the matric passes at the boys’ school were the highest in the province last year and the headmaster has every intention (the will) to bring the mark still higher this year. It is only in the late afternoon when he comes back from a church meeting that Baba and daughter can find themselves alone. The women are about women’s business, you hear now and then the anecdotal exclamations, a drift of song. Distant thump of the ball on hardened winter earth, the boys on the football field, Sindiswa with one of the girls who is making herself a dress, showing intrigued Sindi how to use a sewing machine powered by foot on a treadle.

—So COPE is in trouble. What a mistake Mosiuoa Lekota made ever to think he would get away with it—but maybe Zuma is better off without him.—

They are at home; in its own language.

He knows her so well, from her promising childhood, better than the sons of which more could have been expected (he’s never disguised his disappointment in her brothers’ lack of attainment, no lawyer, doctor or politician among them). Perhaps she voted COPE. He will not have, he never will forget her reaction to the trial that was a ploy to disgrace the future president.

—Baba, we need an opposition. Not those little old clubs of whites, or new black ones.—She in turn knows he wouldn’t betray Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma even for the kingdom’s traditional one, the Inkatha Freedom Party.—You know history better than I do, you’ve been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.—

—Zuma is the guarantee of democracy as our President. He was a poor boy growing up in the worst time, he knows what it means to be hungry without rights, he was a freedom fighter for what?—to make sure our people will never again be ruled by any power from outside, we’d have a government where we all have the same rights—isn’t that what you mean when you say democracy? And in that government—if there are men who want power against it, quarrel with their own brothers, like Lekota, turn against the man the people want, Zuma their man no doubt about that, if those men work in government against him, is that democratic?—In English now, its colonial origin better suited to betrayal.—So they try their little opposition party game, what can they offer our people that the ANC doesn’t? Nothing. You’ll see, some will come crying to be taken back by Zuma into the Party. He is the man to make our African democracy.—

English best for this.—Everyone’s talking about millions being spent on making a palace out of the President’s state residence—what a time to spend a fortune on one of his houses where he’ll spend only a few days a year and the housing target promised for our people living in shacks doesn’t show any sign of being met. Well the President’s big spending started right off, the seventy-five millions his election party cost.—

Doesn’t answer, contest. Maybe Baba was invited to some such occasion held by the traditional leaders of the AmaZulu in celebration of one of their own as President.

What’s left, at last, to say between them.

—The mess in the streets where you are? I don’t like to think of you and the children—

—Not where we live. The central business parts…and on the marches to the big employers’ headquarters, transport authorities—bus and train drivers’ strikes, the municipal workers—

—Someone is putting them up to it, for sure…it’s all part of plotting against Msholozi. What is it like for you, going around the city.—

—They don’t need inciting, Baba, they’re miserably paid, they’re poor even if they still have jobs, not yet laid off.—

—Of course Zuma couldn’t have taken on our country at a worse time, the recession hitting us from the world.—

That’s his explanation.

—But Baba, trashing the streets is all that’s left to get something done for them. Negotiations drag on, the workers demand fifteen per cent they’re offered five per cent they come down to eleven, they’re offered eight…on and on. The worst time. I see every day in the city people with nowhere to live and when Steve and I drive past at night, they are there, they’re sleeping on the pavements in the cold, it’s a bad winter this year.—

He must have the last word with her on Zuma; his advice, her father’s.—Our President has only had a few months. How can he be made responsible.
Singa mubeka kanjani icala na?
—

There is no subject, Australia.

Baba has accepted (as he did, although that was a matter of his decision for her, a bright female soul should not be disadvantaged educationally, enlightenedly, by being female) that whatever he thinks of the desertion, the betrayal of heritage of Africa, it is her own made by right (fault?) of his ambitious evolution of her from the status of the sex that stays behind in every sense while the brothers go to school. He believes, she sees, it’s out of his hands; in God’s hands.

And this shows he’s gone further than ever in his trust of her? Terrible must be for him to hold this while she disrespects, rejects the future of the country to be achieved led in the person of a son of the Zulu nation.

Sindiswa has always been uninterested in, resistant to KwaZulu visits, finding reasons for staying behind in the Suburb; at this stage of adolescence in the time to be calculated before the adventure of Australia her school friend envies she is getting on intimately (blood will tell?) with her cousin contemporaries. It’s television that has brought them together—not blood will tell—they all envision life, sex, love, ambition, popular aims, gains of success, fear failure, from the same sitcoms and soap operas. Almost every mud-plastered house has the altar of the box, now. Baba himself has the same wide screen in his house as installed in his school, both to provide the informational and educational material available; the programmes on culture and politics in the world brought by the image without the opportunity or need to desert. No one and nothing whatever is permitted to distract him from the sight and sound of every public appearance, even on state visits to other presidents in distant places where President Jacob Zuma is received by the President of France, President Brother Obama, or the Queen of England. The hour of each newscast is a knell that silences all interruptions in Baba’s house. She sits with him now in the old instinctive ordinance to his interests, the privileges she had as his favourite child. Six o’clock and there is Zuma eloquent as he concludes a dramatic appearance he has made in a KwaZulu district where a rival party has the majority in provincial elections but nevertheless is confronted with a community burning tyres, attacking the mayor over failure of water to run from the taps, lack of medical supplies in a clinic where the women give birth.