A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  It was here, in this space to which people drifted on a Sunday, that the drumming came from, the drumming he had heard over in the town. There were little shops blaring jazz, with open verandas on which men stood or sat drinking. In the open ground in front of one was a wall—less thatched shelter beneath which tall drums were mounted over charcoal embers. When Bray’s car came to a stop, it was in the middle of a pause; a young boy was using a goat’s-skin bellows to flush the embers into heat to make the drums taut. Only one drum was keeping a dull beat going so that the rhythm could be taken up at any point, at any time. The undertone thudded gently through the chatter round about and the jazz. Bray just sat in the car in the midst of it all. Babies broke away and staggered onto the clearing, to be pursued and snatched up by older children. Others cried or were suckled. The women talked absorbedly and gazed about, alert to the children, but they had the smiling air of women who are spectators of their men. Some of the men were drinking, others stood together, fallen away from the centre of their activity. Somebody got on his bicycle and rode away; someone else arrived. The undertone of the drum was counterpointed by a louder beat, breaking over it from another drum; the drummer, putting an ear low, was not satisfied with the quality of the resonance and the counterpoint died away. The drummers were absorbed in tending the drums and did not speak to or look at the drinkers or anybody else. Their faces and hair were powdered with dust. They ordered the boy about and his strong pointed elbows moved in and out over the bellows; red eyes opened and closed in the charcoal. But with the brief counterpoint that was taken up and died away again, a middle—aged man with clips on his trousers had begun to tread, alone, in the clearing. Another joined him, and then another. Slowly, what had gone slack between the drinkers and the idlers was pulled close again; the drums were drawn in, the men were drawn in; there was an ever—mounting yet steady and serene jumble of movement and drums, shuffle, pause, and beat, that in all its counterpoint of sound and movement was yet the sum of one beat, experienced as neither sound nor movement, the beat of a single heart in a single body. It was not orgiastic or ecstatic, but just a Sunday afternoon dance; Bray lifted his long legs out of the car and stood leaning an arm on the boot, among the onlookers. People seemed to know who he was. A remark passed between them now and again; he asked a question or made an observation, as one does, out of proximity. An old man confirmed that the bars were fairly new. A young man waited for the old one to move on and then dismissed all that he had said: this bar was three years old. And the dance was an old—style thing that the old—fashioned people did. If I were you I’d be dancing, Bray said. The young man looked derisive and a woman laughed. The stamp and beat came up through Bray’s feet and theirs as if they were all standing on deck over an engine room.

  A black Mercedes with the flourish of new officialdom about it drew an admiring acknowledgement of turning heads. It had stopped short, suddenly, in the middle of people. Bray was surprised by the approach of one of the white—collared, dark—suited passengers, who had jumped out and was hurrying over with long strides before which way was made for him. “Are you all right?” Before Bray could answer, the face of the mayor was thrust out of the back window of the car, and the voice called across in English, “Have you lost yourself, Colonel? Can we help?”

  Bray had met the mayor a few days before, with Sampson Malemba. “No, no, just passing the time.” And then he thought it polite to go over to the car. “Thanks all the same.” “Sure you’re okay?” The mayor, a large man with his hair parted in the centre over his unmistakably Gala face, was dressed for some official occasion; or maybe he was simply enjoying paying visits in his handsome car, accompanied by relatives or friends dressed in their best.

  Little boys raced behind the car while it swayed off gracefully. People were grinning at Bray, as one who had brought them distinction. Someone said, “That’s the biggest car in Gala,” and the old man, who had appeared again, said, “The mayor, you know who it is? The mayor!” The women giggled at his slowness. “He knows, he knows.” There was no envy of the mayor, with his splendid car manifesting his favoured position; only pride.

  It was still light when Bray got back to the house and he wandered about the garden and then out across the bush perhaps in response to some faint promptings of habit reaching out from the life in Wiltshire—he and Olivia exercised themselves as regularly as city people did their dogs. The bats were beginning to fly over the golf—course and the club—house was already swelling orange with lamp—shaded light. Sunday evening: most of the white community were there, drinking after sport. He had put up his name for membership, again; the secretary’s face, when he filled in the form, was flat with the effort to disguise astonishment. But it was not a gesture of bravado, let alone a desire to rub his countrymen’s noses in the “triumph” of his return. He had always done things whose directness was misunderstood; it was not even the “hand of friendship” he was extending—simply an acceptance that he was living in Gala again, among these people, and did not regard them as outcast any more than he had shared their view, in other times, that the Galaians were beyond the pale of the community. When Olivia came, she might want to use the club swimming pool, anyway; the only one in the district. One had to make use of what there was. And then, of course, since Independence, the club had made the usual gesture of such dying institutions; the mayor had been made a member, ex officio, and so had Aleke, as P.O. —not that he supposed they had ever put a foot in the place.

  There were thirty or forty cars parked under the trees; an Alsatian dog barked behind the closed windows of one. Excited by the darkening twilight, white children shrieked as they ran about the lawns. The building was adaptable; could be a real asset. As Bray went up the steps and heads were lifted here and there at the veranda tables outside the bar, he was thinking that it would be perfectly adequate for an adult education centre. In the smaller rooms the trade unions could hold night classes for apprentices, Sampson Malemba could run literacy courses, and the big dining—room could serve as a hall for performances by school choirs and so on.

  He greeted a few people he knew. A beautiful blonde with a child on her hip and one by the hand stood patiently at the reception desk while her husband and another man, in club blazers, could not tear themselves away from the high emotion of companionship that comes from victory on court or course. Bray begged pardon past them, but they did not see him—except the children, whose blue eyes, wide in the moments before sleep, followed him to the notice board. His name was up, all right, but there was no seconder’s beside it. Broken bursts of singing sounded like a party going on; the repetition of the opening bars on a piano made him realize that it must be a rehearsal in progress: the theatrical production Joosab had mentioned.

  He began that week to tackle a programme he had worked out for himself. Long talks with Malemba made it clear that it would be senseless to base a report and recommendations on existing schools and available figures for children of school—going age. The province was huge; a whole European country could fit into it. The last census was seven years old, and had scarcely pretended to accuracy. You couldn’t simply divide off the map into suitable chunks and allot a certain number of new schools to each, such—and-such a number of educational facilities to the square hundred miles. Sampson Malemba wanted a large new secondary school at Gala itself; but what was needed was a careful coordination of educational facilities over the whole province, from primary to school—leaving at least at the English O level, with provision for late starters and others, not suited by potential or opportunity to academic education, to be diverted to technical colleges of an elementary kind. “How many children in the primary schools of the province can be expected to be at secondary school level in, say, five years? Enough to fill the places in a new secondary school? More than we’ll have places for? So many that it would be better to have a new secondary school somewhere else?” But Sampson Malemba couldn’t answer that; “Exactly. It will depend on how many new primary s
chools we need and can get.” And that in turn depended not only upon how many children were in school, but how many could be in school. “And how many teachers we can hope to claim from the general pool.” “Ah, that’s the trouble.” Malemba was always happiest to agree. But Bray had decided that if he himself was to be any use at all, he must combine a down—to-earth acceptance of limitations with a certain obstinacy; he must assume they would be overcome.

  He set out to go through the whole province, district by district and village by village, visiting schoolmasters and headmen and collecting the facts. He intended to make his own census of children of school—going age and youths, already in some form of occupation, who were still malleable enough to benefit from something more than a smattering of literacy. He didn’t see how he could begin to consider what ought to be done next until this was done. He began with Gala itself and its satellite villages, and meant to move out in a wider radius each day, each week, until he had covered the whole province from the lake to the Bashi Flats. He would return home every night so long as that was possible, then, as the circles carried him further from the centre, he would spend each night at a point convenient for the range of the next day’s inquiry. Malemba went with him round about Gala itself; it was all rather like a school inspection, with the inevitable assembly of children, the anxious formality of teachers—and at the end of the visit a sense that politeness had dissipated any real contact with the giggling, expectant faces of the children, turning blindly to the sun of attention, and the half—educated, poorly paid teachers garrulous or tongue—tied with their inadequacies. He came home each day that first week with a sense of the deadness of what was passing for education in these bare schoolhouses with their red earth playground stamped hard by the children’s naked feet. The children were squirming with life and the cold grease of third—rate instruction by rote staled in their minds, day by day. He wrote in his notebook: If all M’s government can do is extend dingy light of knowledge we brought, not much benefit. He felt that he himself was not qualified to find the radical solution that was needed; neither was the Ministry of Education, with its advisers, the capable English don who had been headmaster of a famous public school thirty years before, and the American on loan from a Midwest university’s African Studies programme. They were all men for whom the structure of education was based on their own educational background and experience; even he himself, who had lived in Africa so long, tended to think of needs in relation to the educational pattern familiar to him, and to fail to do so in terms of the child for whom what was taught at school did not have the confirmation of being part of his general cultural pattern at home. What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the latest basic techniques of learning. Someone who could cut through the old assumptions that relied so heavily on a particular cultural background, and concentrate on the learning process itself. That should be freed to form its own correlation to a relevant culture. “Write a letter to a friend describing a trip abroad with your aunt”—he thought often of the schoolmaster at Matoko.

  To get to the fishing communities farther up the lake he left his car at the fish—freezing plant at the southern tip and went by water, hitch-hiking, more or less, on the cumbersome, home—made boats of the independent fishermen. Some of them were traders rather than fishermen, really; they went where the kapenta were running, and then sold them by the eighty—pound sack wherever on the lake they were scarce. Boundaries were ignored by these boats; they put in wherever there was a likely village, and the men aboard spoke Swahili as well as Gala—Swahili had come down, hundreds of years ago, from the East Coast and was the lingua franca of the lake, even though the inland people, so far south, did not speak it. Locked in the middle of the continent, the lake villagers had something of the natural worldliness of seaport inhabitants, and the sense of individualistic independence of those whose range takes in the tilting, glittering horizon forever receding before the boat. They laughed and joked and talked fish prices around Bray; his Gala was so good again, now that he was speaking it every day, that he could take part in the talk and even pick up the Swahilisms that crept into it. Hour after hour he sat on his berth of sacks of dried kapenta, exchanging his Karel l’s for their pipe tobacco, the boat dipping and lifting over the immense glare of the lake. His English face turned stiff and red and then, as if some secretion of pigment, that had ceased functioning in the years he had been away, began to be produced by his body again, his arms and hands and face became richly burnished and the face in the shaving mirror was a holiday face. No matter how animated the talk was, the voices were lost out on the lake as completely as a dropped coin ingested by the waters. To him the scape—radiance of water and sky, a kind of explosion of the two elements in an endless flash—was beautiful, with the strange grip of sensuosity of place, of something he had never expected to see again. This was it. One couldn’t remember anything so physical. It couldn’t be recaptured by cerebration; it had to be experienced afresh. The fish eagles gave their banshee whistles, a sound from the dark side of the sun. Now and then the water boiled with the tails of churning shoals, rock—bream feeding on kapenta, tiger fish snapping at rock—bream, fish eagles and gulls hovering, swooping and snatching. To his companions, the place was a condition—weather, luck (with the fish), distance to the next objective. His mind idled; did this add another meaning to the theory of aesthetics that held that beauty was an incidental product of function? Beauty could also be another way of reading circumstances in which a function—in this case fishing for a living—took place. One of the men put a finger to the right side of his nose and cleared the left with a sharp snort, into the lake. The water that same exquisite pale element through which the fish shone, bore the snot flushed efficiently away.

  On shore, there were whole communities of several thousand people where the children didn’t go to school, just as (Aleke complained when Bray got back to Gala) the men didn’t pay taxes. “While you’re about it, up there, perhaps you could think of something we can do about that.” Aleke spoke in the dreamy humour of a man slightly dazed with problems. “The government tells me that after the miners, those fellows are the biggest money—earners in the country, but they don’t want to know about income tax. All you can get out of them is that they’ve always paid hut tax. Income tax is something for white men to pay. Must they become white men just because we’ve got our own government? Good God, man, what sort of thing is this independence!” Thinking of the fishermen, Bray laughed rather admiringly. “Well, they’re self—employed, illiterate, and extremely shrewd—quite a combination for an administration to beat.” “I mean, how can you assess their earnings? It’s not a matter of keeping two sets of books. It’s all in here”—Aleke poked a finger at his temple— “what auditor can get at that?” “Organize them in cooperatives,” Bray said, still amused.

  “Well, there is the big trawler company.”

  “Yes, but that’s a foreign company, the men who work on the trawlers are just employees. I mean the people who fish and trade for themselves. Oh, it’ll come, I suppose.”

  “Those people? They don’t want to hear from us what’s good for them!”

  “Never mind, Aleke, the president favours free enterprise.” They both smiled; this was the way in which Mweta gave poker—faced reassurance to the mining companies, without offering direct affront to members of the government who feared economic colonialism.

  “D’you bring any fish?” Aleke asked, shoving papers into drawers; Bray had walked in as he was going home for lunch.

  “Didn’t think about it! But I’ll remember next time. What does your wife like? I saw a magnificent perch.”

  “Oh she’s from town, she wouldn’t touch anything out of the lake. But I won’t have the kids the same. I told her, they must eat the food that’s available, there where they live. So she says what’s wrong with meat from the supermarket?”

  “I’ll bring you a perch, next time.”

  “Yes, a nice fish stew, wit
h peppers, I like that.” He had taken up a nailfile and was running the point under the pale nails of his black hands as if he were paring a fruit. “I’m full of carbon. I have to do my own stencils, even. I shouldn’t really go home to eat today, the work’s up over my head, man. Honestly, I just feel like driving all the way and kidnapping a decent secretary from the Ministry.” Grumbling relaxedly, he left the offices with Bray; one of his small sons had come down on a tricycle to meet him and was waiting outside, nursing a toe that had sprung a bright teardrop of blood: while they examined the hurt the drop rolled off the dusty little foot like a bead of mercury. The boy had ridden against the low box—hedge of Christ—thorn that neatly bordered the bomas entrance. All bomas in the territory had Christ—thorn hedges, just as they had a morris chair to each office and a standard issue of inkpots. “Look at that,” Aleke said in Gala. “It’s gone deep. What a plant.”