A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Applause was regular and vociferous, descending on cue as each speaker closed his mouth. Black cheeks gleamed, the blood rose animatedly in white faces while in the minds of each lay unaffected and undisturbed the awareness that what the industrialist had said was, “You’ll use our money—but on our terms,” and what the chairman of the gold—mining group had said was, “We don’t intend to reopen the Mondo—Mondo mine because our shareholders overseas want big dividends from mines that are in production, not expansion that will create employment but take five or six years before it begins to pay off.” The director of the cold—storage company, whose butcher shops all over the country had served Africans through a hatch segregated from white customers until a PIP boycott three years before had forced a change, charmingly insisted that the black guest across the table from him accept a cigar. “Put it in your pocket, then. Smoke it at home when you feel like it.” Mr. Ndisi Shunungwa, Secretary General of the United Trades’ Union Congress, who had once said, “They got in with a bottle of gin and a Bible—let’s give them back what they brought and tell them to get out,” solicitously fished under the table to retrieve the handbag of the wife of the Director of Medical Services. A plump and grateful blonde, she was apologetic: “Oh I am a nuisance … oh, look, you’ve got all dusty on your arm.… Oh I am …”

  Mweta spoke very briefly. From where he was seated, Bray was presented with the profile, the high, round black brow, the little flat ear, the flash of the eye beneath womanish curly lashes, the strong lips that were delicately everted in speech. All who worked together for the country were countrymen, Mweta said. “From the earliest days of our struggle” he had never thought of citizenship as a matter of skin colour. If it was wrong to profit by the colour of the skin, it was also wrong to discriminate against a colour of the skin. He understood “this dinner was the most expensive meal any of us here has ever eaten.” There was laughter; he smiled briefly, but he was serious, candid, a man who had lived until less than a year ago in a tinroofed, two—roomed, black township house: “—but the cost is really much higher even than that, the price of this happy meeting has been paid over more than fifty years by the labour of the people of this country and the energetic foresight of those from outside who had faith in its development.”

  Loud music unfurled over the talk and clink of plates, and the harrassed stump of sweating waiters. Joy Mweta was steered out onto the dance floor by one of the white men. Voices rose in adjustment to the noise; the Congolese band played their particular hiccuping rhythm, marked by South American rattles and clappers. Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter. Some of the white men began to drift together as they did at club dances, and the black men were drawn to the male camaraderie of whisky and business talk. White wives went off to the cloakroom close as schoolgirls, and came back with faces animated by a good laugh about the whole affair. Black wives sat patiently, born to endure the boredom and neglect of official occasions. Dancing with a dutiful Bray, Mrs. Mackintosh was made careless now by gin and tonic. She giggled at the red bunting that covered the walls. “Bummed it from the coolies, my dear. They cheated the poor bloody native for so many years, they can afford to give away something now.”

  He danced with Evelyn Odara. She dragged him off to be introduced to an elegant girl he had noticed passing with unseeing eyes the African wives dumped like tea cosies and the white women watching her with their men, a white dress and dangling glass earrings making her black satin skin startling. Doris Manyema. But he had met her before, during the Independence celebrations. She had just been appointed the country’s cultural attaché at United Nations; she received congratulations with guarded, confident disdain—it was as if one could look at her only through glass, this beauty who would take her place neither in the white man’s back yard nor in the black man’s women’s quarters. She was going by way of Algiers; they talked of Ben Bella and Boumedienne for a few minutes and then a young white man who had been waiting for an opportunity to join in, meanwhile looking at her nipples touching against the inside of her dress and touching at his own blonde moustache in a kind of unconscious reflex, passed some remark about Tshombe’s death. “I lost my bet he’d get out of prison there. I worked out the chances—you know, how many times he’d survived by the skin of his teeth before—fed ’em to a computer. Marvellously wily fellow, he was. I’m in insurance—actuary, you see,” he said, a disarming apology for talking shop. Doris Manyema did not look at him, saying to Bray, “I hope Tshombe rots in hell.” “Oh come now.” The young man, jollying, bridling sexually. “I just took a sporting interest.” Her long eyes looked down along her round cheekbones, her small nose distended slightly at the nostrils. “We don’t share the sporting instincts of you people. Your blood sports of one kind and another. They only kept him alive that long because of Mobutu. Otherwise he ought to’ve been thrown in a ditch the way he did with Lumumba.” The young man asked her to dance and led her off by the elbow, golden sideburns very dashing. “A handsome couple,” Evelyn Odara said, with her man’s laugh. She was draped like a solid pillar in florid robes; Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses were flashing as they did when he made a political speech, but he was dancing with his apologetic blonde, smiling down sociably with his head drawn back from her, while she had on her face the circumspect, wide—eyed look of a woman who is dancing with her pelvis pressed against a strange man. As the evening went on, roars of laughter came from the groups of hard drinkers; they began to forget the presence of Africans and tell their obscene stories. The black men gathered here and there and spoke in their own language, pas devant les enfants. In the men’s room, one of the white men standing beside Bray took a quick look round and said to a companion, “Thank Christ it’s gone off all right, eh, Greg? Jesus, but it’s heavy going with these chaps. And one mammy I had to push round the floor—I’m telling you, I needed to go into low gear to get that arse on the move.”

  The confusion of noise was interrupted suddenly by the band stopping. People broke off talk and looked around. There was some sort of stir; people, began to crowd up; a different kind of buzz started and was hushed again. Mweta with Joy was parting a way through the guests, his guitar in his hands. That was how Bray saw it: his guitar. But of course it was not that guitar, it was simply one handed over from a member of the band in answer to a suggestion or request, maybe even Mweta’s own sudden idea. Anyway, he was walking almost shyly, Joy by the hand and the guitar in the other, with the look of half—anticipation (he had loved that guitar) and half—pride (he had liked the pleasure village people took in the performance) he used to have when he got off the bicycle and the guitar slid from his back. Without any announcement, quite naturally, they stepped up onto the dais and he began to play, while she brought her hands together once or twice, straightened her young, slack, motherly body in its schoolgirlish pink dress, smiled, and then began to sing with him. Their voices were soft and in perfect harmony. They sang some banal popular song from an American film of the Fifties.

  The whites applauded thunderously; delight came from them: perhaps it was an unconscious relief at seeing this black man of all black men in the old, acceptable role of entertainer. The Africans merely looked indulgent; after forty years of being told when to come and go, when to stand and when to take your hat off, a black president himself decided upon procedure. Then Mweta handed his wife down from the dais, gave back the guitar and left the hall through an avenue of people who surged forward spontaneously under the bright glance of that black face, that smile of vulnerable happiness.

  He thought of how he had said to Bayley of Mweta, “He calls for an act of faith.” What he had really meant was it takes innocence, a kind of innocence, to ask for an act of faith. He was talking to the Director of Information, who, as the first black journalist in the territory, had come to interview him years ago when the summary recall to England had just been announced. “What was worrying me most, I was worrying you would notice that I had no shorthand at t
hat time …” They laughed, in the convention that the past is always amusing. But he was experiencing a clenched concern for this being that was Mweta, a contraction of inner attention, affection and defensiveness on behalf of Mweta, defensiveness even against himself, Bray. He was hyperperceptive to the world threatening to press the spirit of Mweta out of shape—white businessmen, black politicians, the commanding flash of Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses, the OAU—his mind picked up random threats from memory, newspapers, and the actuality around him. There must be one being you believe in, in spite of everything, one being!

  The band inflated the hall with noise again. At once the guests were deafeningly set in motion, drinking and dancing.

  Next morning when he was on the road back to Gala trees and bamboo clumps came at him monotonously and his mind settled upon the past few days as if they had been lived by somebody else.

  A hennish anxiety, last night.

  Write to me. Write to me. We must keep in touch. About Shinza, of course; go back to Gala and keep an eye on Shinza. Don’t forget to keep in touch about Shinza.

  Call for an act of faith: it takes innocence. Bunk. It’s an act of incipient Messianism—oldest political trick in the world.

  I suppose so.

  There was a salutary aftertaste in jeering at himself for being taken in.

  Part Three

  Chapter 10

  Beneath the fig tree he sat day after day compiling his report. There was no more rain; at night the stars formed encrustations of quartz across the sky, bristling light, and the smallest sound rang out. Kalimo laid ready a fire of logs on which the dried lichens were frilled medallions of grey and rust.

  In the imposed quiet of Gala he found himself held in a kind of aural tension—something cocked within him, as in an animal in the dream that is grazing. Listening; he would raise his head from the papers and the hum of the tree’s proliferate and indifferent life—rustling, creeping, spinning, gnawing, crepitating, humming—did not lull him. Gala had the forest village’s eerie facility of covering everything, of swallowing everything, sunk out of sight by the closing in of a weight of green. Down under the mahogany trees the same foreshortened black figures went. No sound from bare feet in the dust; voices flitted like birds caged by the branches. Slave raids, punitive expeditions of Portuguese and English—the wake of perpetually renewed foliage came together behind them. The distant clangor and grind of the small industrial quarter was muffled out in the same way. Nothing happened in the open in this small, remote, peaceful crossroad. All change was a cry drowned by the sea of trees. A high—pitched note, almost out of range. (In a noon pause, one morning, he experienced in fantasy this same quiet of sun and heavy trees existing while things went wrong—he saw a car burning, bleeding bodies far down under the shifting shade—pattern of the trees. It lasted a vivid moment; his skin contracted—it seemed prompted physically, like the experience of déjà vu—a rill of cool air had got between his damp shirt and warm back.)

  He began at once to spend a lot of time down at Sampson Malemba’s house in the old township.

  Kamaza Phiri had made available an immediate grant to get a technical school going. Bray had said to him, “You realize that what Malemba and I are doing is a bit of mouth—to-mouth resuscitation on the old government workshops your department closed? The whole thing’s contrary to policy.” Phiri’s palms expanded, tea—rose coloured. “It’s an experiment for the purposes of the Bray Report”—the side of Bray’s mouth went up in amusement at the term— “I’m prepared to go along with it.”

  Sampson Malemba was filled with a meticulous enthusiasm. He was making a round of the factories to talk to people about what initial courses were most needed. He had written off to Sweden for prices of machine—shop equipment. “Why Sweden, Sampson?” But at the table in his kitchen with its flowered oil—cloth he had done his homework; “The agreement—you know. The loan the government got: there’s a balance of credit there for agricultural and industrial machinery.”

  They had a plan for small village centres to be run as ancillaries to the main one in Gala itself—each chief was to be asked to build a large hut where basic equipment would be provided by the scheme for the teaching of shoemaking, carpentry, and, most important, maintenance and simple repair of the motorized farming equipment the agricultural department lent to these communities. Malemba had had a brilliant idea: mechanics in the two local garages would be paid to give night classes in the villages, or, if these were too out of the way, weekend courses. The great problem for every branch of instruction was to find people qualified to give it; but if one let oneself be deterred by that, both were sanguinely aware nothing could be done in Africa at all. The garage mechanics were the sort of model makeshift solution to be tried for in every instance—they spoke the language, and although proper apprenticeship as motor mechanics had never been established for Africans under colonial rule, they had, while working for Bwana, became skilled all the same. In Gala they had kept the cars and tractors of the white community going for years; their own community had had neither.

  Another problem was a place to house the centre. Bray felt fairly strongly that it should not be in the old African quarter or even in the new housing and hostel area, but in the “town” itself. It was important for ordinary Galaians to make a stake, firmly, in what had always been the white man’s and was now the white man’s and the black officials’ preserve. He wanted the people who merely came into town to work, buy, or comply obediently with one or another of the forms of administration that ruled their lives, to establish once and for all that they belonged there, too. The club, the Sons of England Hall, the Princess Mary Library—they had passed by these for too many years. He wanted them to claim the town at last. He did not say this in so many words, as he went to see various people with a view to finding premises. (It was not for nothing, after all, that he had once been a civil servant.) But in the apparent simplicity of his approach—as if this were a routine matter of no unusual significance—there was something that, in spite of, perhaps because of, the old, innately unaggressive manner that many of them remembered in him from before, roused that unforgiving resentment towards one who always seems to have the moral advantage. His audaciousness was of the quiet sort, too, a joke played upon him by his background, producing in him a parody of the stiff upper lip. He approached the secretary of the club, even though he and Mweta had laughed at the very idea; one had to give the club members a chance. It was rather like the chance Dando had to give parliament to rescind the Preventive Detention Act. He suggested to the secretary that the disused billiard room—the generation of billiard players had died off, the squash courts were popular now—might be used for adults’ secondary school classes Sampson Malemba himself intended to teach. The billiard room had a separate entrance from the club complex’s general one. The classes would be held at night only. Then there was the big barn or shed that, as he (Bray) remembered, was put up to house the pack (years ago there were drag hunts in Gala and someone had brought out from Ireland the hounds who had died, one by one, of biliary fever; but not before they had bequeathed the occasional U—shaped ears that still appeared, in the odd generation of local curs). That shed would make an adequate workshop for fitting and turning classes, and as it was well away from the main building, would not interfere with members’ activities in any way.

  “You see we’re going to be a bit like one of those big universities, with their faculty buildings distributed through different quarters of the city,” Bray said in gentle self—deprecation. He and Sampson Malemba—sitting inside the club for the first time in his life—caught each other’s eye and smiled.

  But the secretary seemed afraid that a smile might give away the whole club to the black victors as a wink at an auction sale knocks down a job lot. He said, weightily, “I understand.” He would, of course, put the matter before the committee—Bray must write a letter, setting out the facts, etc. “Yes, Mr. Malemba will do that—the scheme is under h
is department.” Again, the secretary “understood”; but he could tell them straight off (and here he did smile, the beam of regrettable bad news) that the billiard room was jam—packed with scenery and props, the dramatic and operatic section had claimed it years ago, he couldn’t even get his boys in there to clean up the place. And that barn— “You do mean the one down near the compound, just by the seventh tee?”—that barn was where the green—keeper kept his stuff, the mowers and so on, and, to tell the truth, some of the caddies dossed down there; “I know about it and I don’t know about it—you know.” He became expansive with conscious good nature now that he was disposing of his visitors. “Perhaps we can enrol the caddies,” Bray said, feeling like a jolly missionary. The secretary was a big fellow whose thighs rubbed together as he left his chair; his short hair was so wetted with pomade that he had always the look of one who has just emerged from the shower. He laughed along with the black man, although he had not actually spoken to him apart from the initial introduction. He ushered them out with an arm curved in the air behind their shoulders. “Colonel, have you mentioned your scheme to any of the people here? I mean, just in the course of conversation?” It was the reasonable, flattering tone he might have used to encourage a member who had a good second—hand squash racket to dispose of; he knew Bray hadn’t so much as had a drink in the bar since he’d been told his membership was approved. And Bray murmured, straight—faced, “I haven’t been much in Gala lately, I haven’t had a chance, really …”

  In the car he said, “What a mistake about the caddies. The golfers will take it as the knell of doom: now we are going to take away their caddies and educate them.”

  “I would like very much to put them in school.” Malemba was dogged. “Those kids know nothing but to smoke cigarette ends and gamble with pennies.”