A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Well, I must say that I found the conduct of the court unexceptionable. It was something of a surprise. It was an open court. It was an impartial court—although, as you know, some of the accused were white, some coloured. The judge was an Afrikaner. But the conduct of the court was equal to the highest standards of jurisprudence as we know it anywhere in the free world. Justice was done according to the law.”

  “According to the law. Ah yes. But what of the law, Mr. Graspointner? The laws of the Republic of South Africa are unique in the world for their equation of the legitimate aspirations of the majority of the population with crime, with treason. Legitimate aspirations as defined in the U.N. Bill of Rights. Would you agree?”

  “Broadly, yes. That is so.”

  “Then was what you saw justice, or a going through the motions of justice? A lot of wigged heads jumping through the hoop. Is justice a piece of machinery or an ethical concept? Does the promulgation of a law make that law just? Can justice be done through it? I thought the answer to that question had been given at Nuremberg.”

  “It was not given at Nuremberg. It has never been given anywhere,” Dando said, with testy patience. “For the simple reason that there is no such thing as international law in the sense of an international standard of justice. International law is a code for Interpol, for refugee—swopping and spy exchange, for boundary blood—feuds and squabbles over airspace and the three—mile limit for herring fleets. Justice is an empirical affair arranged by each country in order to perpetuate a particular social system. You should know that. Bill of Human Rights! Why not the Sermon on the Mount? Good ringing phrases, man.”

  “Of course I met a lot of troubled people down there. Very, very troubled about just that issue, Professor Bayley—”

  “What a human climate to exist in! Could you live in a place like that?” Neil Bayley’s thighs rolled apart, his arms fell wide, he seemed to make free of the whole black continent, the muddy banks of the Niger and the Congo, the forests and the deserts, the shy Batwa and shrivelled Bushmen, the lovely prostitutes of Brazzaville and the eager schoolchildren of Gala. “Could you, Graspointner?”

  “Well, I don’t know. One mustn’t be too hasty about this. One person told me his raison d’être was to stay there in opposition, just be there, obstinately, even if he couldn’t do much to change things. I’m not a revolutionary, he said. I haven’t the courage to risk prison. But I can’t let them get away with it unwitnessed. I have to stay and oppose in my mind. It’s my situation; I haven’t any other that means anything.”

  “Disgusting!”

  “Of course, in daily life, he admitted … you develop a certain in—sensitivity … you let things pass that … eh?” The American turned to draw in Bray.

  Bray offered, “I read something the other day—every nation has its own private violence … after a while one can feel at home and sheltered between almost any borders—you grow accustomed to anything.” And he thought, where did I get that from? Somewhere in Graham Greene? Why do I keep turning to other people’s opinions, lately, leaving myself out.

  Neil Bayley stood up, blocking the waiter’s path. “Yes, thank you very much. At least one can choose one’s own violence. They’re not all equally vile, that’s the point. And I won’t have it that we’re all equally culpable. Flabby sentiment. So you could live there, James, a white man, and ‘oppose in your mind’?”

  Dando said, “Don’t be more of an academic idiot than you have to, Neil. Of course he couldn’t live there. Christ, he was being run out of this country by the British while you were still—”

  “—Yes, yes—a snotty—nosed piccanin having his backside striped in Exeter, Devonshire.” Bayley knew Dando’s pejorative in all its variations. They laughed; a noisy table in the loud room. Bayley sat down again for a glass of Dando’s wine and Bray was given a fine cigar with the jurist’s initials on the band. “I have a friend gets them in from Cuba, God knows how. The band’s put on in Tampa, I guess.”

  He thought, I have a friend, too, who likes cigars.

  He had to leave the company to pick up a borrowed dinner jacket and trousers for the Golden Plate dinner from the wife of the secretary to the Minister of Development and Planning—resourceful Vivien had arranged it. Gabriel Odise’s wife was a social welfare worker and the offices of her department were in the old part of the town, the strip of human habitation along the line of rail that once was all the town had been. A few old mupapa trees humped their roots out into the street, there; there was the cod—liver-oil smell from sacks of dried kapenta, and the strange sweet reek of dangling plucks in a butcher’s. A pair of Congo prostitutes, heads done up like bonbons in turbans, sat on the kerb giggling down at their painted toenails and gold sandals, and looked up smiling, as he stepped past. They wore the pagne and brief blouse that bared a little roll of shining brown middle, making local women look dowdy and respectable in their cheap European dresses. The internal staircase of the Social Welfare Department was stained and splashed with liquid in which ants had died and dust had dried, and the wall alongside it bore witness to the procession of people who hung about the place, for one reason or another, enduring by scribbling not the obscenities of the literate, but the pot—hook names and signature flourishes of the semiliterate. People sat tightly on one or two benches; the rest squatted on the corridor floor and moved their legs and bundles stoically away and back again to make way. While he waited among them—the only white person—he glanced down out of a window and saw in the courtyard at least another hundred and fifty people gathered on a ground worn bare by feet and bodies, under trees shabby as lamp—posts with the rub of human backs. Those in the corridor watched without resentment as he was beckoned in to Mary Odise’s room ahead of them. She was a pretty girl with the air—hostess neatness that African woman often assume with responsible jobs; as she let him in, her eyes went in quick tally over the crowd, with the look not so much of assessing numbers as of estimating the weight of what lay upon them, there on their impassive faces. A diagnostic look. She had a pink rose in a glass on her desk; the worn floorboards were scrupulously clean and there was the taint of baby—sick and dirty feet that can never be scrubbed out of rooms where the poor and anxious are received. The courtroom in Gala used to smell like that.

  He tried on the dinner jacket and measured the pants against his side, waist to ankle. She took good—natured pleasure in the fact that they would seem to do. “The tie! I forgot to ask about the tie.”

  “I can easily buy one. It’s extraordinarily nice of you … you’re sure your brother doesn’t mind?”

  “He has two and never wears them. They used to be working clothes, for him—he’s got a band, they’re playing at the Great Lakes Hotel. They wear silver jackets now, with blue lapels—terrible! And the dry cleaners here don’t know how to do them. He’ll just have to give them away when they get too dirty.” She folded the suit expertly and put it in a strong paper carrier that bore the legend: I’ve Been Saving At The Red Circle Supermarket.

  “Very overworked, Mary?”

  She was fastidious to avoid the gushing complaint that was a convention among white colleagues.

  “Not really. You can only see a certain number of people in one day. And if you try to rush it, you can’t help them. I’m attached to the Labour Department now, and I get all these people referred to me from the Labour Exchange.”

  “So many old women and children—don’t look particularly employable, to me.”

  “They’re not looking for work. They’re looking for relations who come here from the bush on the chance of getting jobs. They don’t know where the person they’re looking for is, they don’t know where he works—if he works. What are you to do? They have no money. You find them sleeping down at the bus depot. The Labour Department doesn’t know what to do with them. They send them to me.” She gave her gentle, sympathetic laugh. “I’ve suggested setting up a shelter—there’s the old market building, for instance, I thought of that. But the C
hief Welfare Officer points out that we’d be taking responsibility for them … they really shouldn’t be here. They’d just stay on endlessly, some of them. It’s a headache.”

  “What on earth do you do?”

  Mary Odise had trained as a social worker in Birmingham, where she had investigated the wife—beating, child—neglect and drunkenness of the people who had brought white civilization to her country. At one of the Independence parties he found himself sitting with her and she mimicked for him an Englishwoman, pouring out the sordid tale of her woes, who once said, “I don’t feel so ashamed with you, dearie, as you’re a blackie.”

  She was professional. “Give them bus fare and try to persuade them to go back home. But now we issue bus chits instead—they were taking the money and hanging on. Yesterday my junior found out some of them have begun to sell the bus chits.” She was laughing softly as she showed him out. As the door opened there was a listless surge in the corridor: eyes turned, bodies leaned forward. He was stopped on the stairway by an old man with a piece of paper so often folded that it was dividing into four along the dirt—marked creases. A garbled name on it looked as if it might be that of a building firm; he shook his head, pointed at the queue in the corridors, and gave the old fellow half—a-crown. He was careful not to speak a word in Gala or the local language. To these poor country people, by long experience, whiteness was power; if it were to be made accessible to them through their own tongue, how would he escape the importunity of their belief? Next thing, I’ll be making an ass of myself, trailing old people round to find wretched yokels who are hawking tomatoes somewhere.

  The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the dampspotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still in it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies any more. Ras will lend you his. It’s just like two pieces of black ribbon, crossed over in front.” Ras Asahe was with the Wentz family; drinks were on the round table under the drawn—down lamp. There was the atmosphere of solicitude and consideration that comes after a successfully resolved family upheaval: Asahe must have been approached about his uncle.

  “Sure, if you want to pop over to my place?”

  But Bray was quite satisfied with the tie he had. Hjalmar was laughing loudly at Asahe’s description of an exchange with the director of broadcasting programmes in English, whose deputy he was. Apparently the man was a South African—Asahe imitated the Afrikaner accent: like many educated men in the territory, Asahe had been to university for a time, down South, as well as having worked in broadcasting in England. “… It happens to be standard BBC pronunciation, I told him. ‘Hell, man, well it’s not standard our pronunciation.’—I won’t be surprised if the rumour goes round from him that I’m a neo—imperialist….”

  Hjalmar kept glancing at his wife to see if she were amused. She held her eyebrows high, like an ageing actress. Emmanuelle was inwardly alight, flirting with her father and even her brother, calling her mother “darling”—for the benefit of Ras Asahe or perhaps to present for herself a tableau of family life as she imagined it to be for other people.

  It was a warm, singing evening with the moon rising on one side of the sky while a lilac—grained sunset had not yet receded into darkness on the other. There was the smell of boiled potatoes given off all over Central Africa, after nightfall, by some shrub. By the time he got to the tobacco sales hall where the Golden Plate dinner was being held, it was dark. He had not wanted to go, really—Mweta embarrassed him slightly by the invitation—but the cars converging on the grounds, the white shirt—fronts and coloured dresses caught in headlights, and the striped canvas porte-cochère with its gold—braided commissionaires created a kind of simple anticipation of their own. The warm potato—smell and the mixture of black and white faces in the formally dressed herd pressing to the entrance were to him evidence that this was not just another municipal gathering—this was Africa, and this time Africans were honoured guests, being met with a bow and a smile. There was a satisfaction—naive, he knew; never mind—in this most obvious and, ultimately, unimportant aspect of change. It did not matter any more to the Africans whether white people wanted to dine with them or not; they themselves were now the governing elite, and the whites were the ones who had to sue for the pleasure of their company. Fifty pounds a head for a ticket; he waited in line behind a rusty—faced bald Englishman and a lively plump Scot with their blond wives, and a black lady, probably the wife of some minor official, who had faithfully assumed their uniform of décolleté and pearls. She smelled almost surgically of eau—de-Cologne. The African Mayor and the white President of the Chamber of Commerce dealt jointly with the receiving line, dispensing identical unctuousness.

  The tobacco sales hall had been decided upon because not even the Great Lakes Hotel’s Flamingo Room was big enough to accommodate the guests expected. The bare walls were entirely masked by red cotton; an enormous coloured poster of Mweta hung amid gold draping above the dais where the main dignitaries were to sit; stands of chemically tinted lilies and gilded leaves stood between long tables and at the four corners of a specially constructed dance floor like a boxing ring.

  The perfect reproduction of municipal vulgarity was softened by a homely and delicate fragrance of tobacco leaves, with which the building was impregnated and which prevailed, despite the smell of food and women’s perfume. Bray was conscious of it when his mind wandered during the speeches. The Mayor spoke, the President of the Chamber of Commerce spoke, a prominent industrialist spoke, the chairman of the largest mining company spoke. Through grapefruit cocktail, river fish in a pale sauce (Tilapia Bonne Femme, in the illuminated lettering of the menu), some sort of beef evidently brought down on the hoof from the Bashi (Boeuf en Casserole aux Champignons), he sat between Mrs. Justin Chekwe, wife of the Minister of Justice, and Mrs. Raymond Mackintosh, wife of an insurance man who was one of the last white town councillors left in office. The white matron, like a tourist proudly determined to use her phrase—book sentences to demonstrate how much at home she feels, leant across him to say to the black matron, “Mrs. Mweta looks so young, doesn’t she? What a responsibility, at her age. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to cope. Doesn’t the hall look beautiful? One doesn’t realize how much really hard work goes into these functions—you should have seen our chairwoman, Mrs. Selden—Ross, up a ladder hammering nails into that material.” She added in a lower tone to Bray, “We begged it all from the Indians, you know.” Mrs. Chekwe, sullen with shyness, her neck and head propped up on the bolster of flesh held aloft by her corsets, did not know what to do with the fish, since, unlike the more experienced Bray and Mrs. Mackintosh, she could not overcome repugnance and eat it. She murmured, “Oh yes,” and again, “Oh yes?” varying the tone to a polite question. For his ten minutes’ attention to Mrs. Chekwe, he thought he might do better by talking in Gala, but decided it might be misinterpreted, on the one hand (Mrs. Mackintosh) as showing off and sucking up to the blacks, and on the other hand (Mrs. Chekwe) as patronage and the inference that her English was not good. However, he knew she came from the Northern Province and he managed a not too halting chat with her about the changes in the town of Gala and the whereabouts of various members of her family. Mrs. Mackintosh was talkative, one of those spirited colonial ladies— “It’d take more than this to throw me”: she was referring, of course, to her problems as a member of the ladies’ committee, but she gave him a game look that swept in present company. She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country, and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of
that accommodating will to survive—economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered—that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

  He had been placed at the main table, but right at the end—a name fitted in after the seating plan had been made up. The industrialist spoke of the huge new assembly plant for cars (a British—American consortium) that would employ five hundred workers, and said how stable government and “sensible conditions” for foreign investment were attracting capital that turned its back on neighbouring territories with their “impossible” restrictions on the foreign ownership of stock and “wild demands” for nationalization of industry; “here industry and the nation will go forward together.” Sir Reginald Harvey, chairman of the gold—mining companies, spoke in a tone of modest, patriarchal pride, “allowing himself boldly to say that the mining industry, whose history went back to before the turn of the century, “brought to this part of Africa the first light of hope after the centuries—long depredation and stagnation of the slave trade. On the basis of the auriferous rock discovered then, in the eighteen—nineties, the modern state of today has been founded….” It was not even necessary for him to mention that forty per cent of the national income came from the mines; everyone in the hall was aware of that as unquestioningly as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. The mining industry was continuing to open up new fields of endeavour … there had been a temporary setback at the old Mondo—Mondo mine—but the tireless research, on which the company spent over a million a year in its efforts to better mining techniques and raise production, might soon make it possible to overcome these difficulties and reopen the mine … the mining companies and the nation would go forward….