A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “If Shinza became Secretary—General of UTUC again it would provide a perfect opening.”

  “For what, man, for what?”

  “If Mweta would see it. A perfect opening to take Shinza back into the fold without loss of face. Shinza would have taken the step out of ‘retirement’ himself, he would have the one key position outside government; Mweta could simply put out his hand without patronage and without humbling himself in the least, and take him in. And the solution to labour troubles, the end of the split factions in the unions, at the same time. He would have a strong government then, all right.”

  “With Edward Shinza breathing fumes down his neck.”

  Bray smiled. “He isn’t drinking these days.”

  “It’s not brandy I’m thinking of. The revolutionary spirit.”

  “No harm in a bit of that.”

  Dando settled back for attack, his chair a lair. “I should bloody well hope so. I should bloody well hope there is. I don’t know what mugs like me’ve wasted our time for on this continent if the ideas we brought to it haven’t any harm in them for the set—up the blacks took over from the whites.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “Here I am, all right.” Dando’s look lunged hit—or-miss round his garden; caught, his old dog cautiously wagged its tail. “But Mweta isn’t going to have any continuing revolution stuff pressed on him by Edward Shinza or anyone else. When he talks about building on solid foundations and so on he means just that—not the peasants’ toil and all that, but also the two—bricks-high capitalist state that was already under way here. He may put on a few decent outbuildings of state—owned enterprise here and there, you understand—but there’ll be no change of style in the main structure. It’ll look a bit like a Swiss bank—or perhaps a West German one’s better. The extended family will have their huts in the grounds and they’ll get quite a few pickings from Golden Plate dinners, they’ll be better off than they were before, mind you, and they won’t mind. Mweta genuinely believes that’s the best he can do and he’ll certainly do it the best way it can be done. A little black Wirtschaftswunder. If he let Shinza near at all—if he let him climb up by way of UTUC, he knows quite well what he’d have on his hands—the risk of the trade unions setting up in opposition to the government. That’s what Edward Shinza’s after, that’s his comeback by constitutional means, that’s what he’s going to try for, and our boy knows it.” He poured another drink for Bray as if to stop his mouth.

  “I can’t see it. I don’t think Shinza’d stand a chance. If he’s making a bid for power through the unions, it’s to put himself in a position where, as I said, Mweta can recognize he needs him, as he always did. It’s strange, even now when he talks against Mweta, sometimes with pretty strong resentment—he has a kind of concern, a feeling of responsibility, for him; still. Anyway—feeling or no feeling—I don’t see he’d stand a chance of the other thing.”

  “Why in God’s name not? Don’t you see? Do I have to spell it out, Bray? You know UTUC and the Party have always been virtually the same thing, all these years until now. They both drew members from the same class, they had a similar intellectual formation—as far as political methods and social and economic attitudes were concerned, there wasn’t any major difference between them. Some of the leaders of both were even the same people! Look at Shinza himself—first chairman of PIP and at the same time Secretary—General of UTUC. And Ndisi Shunungwa and a bunch of others. In spite of this, a situation could have developed early on where although they were in double harness the one could have pulled ahead of the other, eh?—you could have had the situation where a labour organization comes into conflict with a less progressive—minded political party. It didn’t happen—it couldn’t happen then because of two factors: the country wasn’t free of outside political domination and it hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. Eh? But now it’s a different story. We’re independent, the front line’s not at Government House any more. In theory, UTUC ought to give purely professional considerations priority, now—they ought to go for corporate trade unionism. But UTUC is also virtually an integrated trade union, eh, part of the state, supposed to carry out the state’s policy and aims—wasn’t there even a clause to this effect in UTUC’s constitution? I’m damn sure there was. UTUC’s the representative of the workers and the junior civil servants, but it’s also a kind of strong arm of the state department of labour—and that’s a hell of a balancing act to bring off, my lad. UTUC’s become a two—headed calf and there’s Shinza’s chance to make the killing. All he has to do is set himself up as champion of the rights of the workers against the state’s domination of the unions and subordination of the welfare of the workers to the demands of the state. He’s doing it. Look at his inspiration.” He chopped his upended palm on Bray’s agenda, with its marked resolutions. “He’s done it with a dozen wildcat strikes all over the country. They listen to him on the quiet and defy their own union officials because the contradiction with its built—in dissatisfactions is there already—the two—headed calf.”

  “You’ve given the answer yourself!” He had been scratching the surprised dog energetically behind the ears while Dando talked, waiting an opening. Now he gave the dog a final thump. “You say that before Independence, even if the trade unions had found themselves in conflict with a less progressive—minded party, they couldn’t have set up a successful opposition because the country hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. The working class wasn’t big enough. But this still applies. There still hasn’t been industrialization on a scale nearly extensive enough to bring about any considerable increase in the size of the wage—earning class. UTUC simply hasn’t the numbers and consequently hasn’t the major economic resources to establish itself in opposition to Mweta’s government. Under Shinza or anyone else. Shinza’s been in the union movement since he was on the Boss Boys’ committees as a youngster on the mines, remember. He’s been around in other African states. Remember he’s an old buddy of Ben Salah; he knows who came off worst in Tunisia in the clash between the trade union organization and the Neo—Destour government … it’s the same sort of thing here. Shinza must know that at this stage it can’t be done.”

  “It can be tried. Anyway, if Shinza could bring off even a Ben Salah here I’ve no doubt he’d consider himself lucky. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Perhaps he sees himself, the old union leader turning the screw on the government so successfully that he ends up making a gala appearance, à la Salah, as Minister of Planning and Finance a few years from now. And perhaps Mweta sees that in one of his teetotal cups and wants to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

  While their voices grew louder and cut across each other vehemently the bats of early evening were flitting about them, an embodiment of things that went unsaid. In a pause—the air thickened quite suddenly with darkness, he could no longer see Dando’s small face clearly and felt his own to be hidden—he thought how they talked of Shinza as if he had been in another country, an interesting man in an interesting political situation one read about, instead of a mile or two away, in the Gomas’ house in Old Town. It was from Dando that this attitude imposed itself. He was an old man in an official position, and all his fiery objectivity was academic; as he had said himself, once, he worked for Mweta. Shinza could not enter into consideration, in his personal life.

  After dinner he excused himself without saying where he was going and drove to Old Town. The approach had not been improved; streets were still untarred and streetlights irregularly few. He passed the bar in an old shop where he had gone with Bayley and the others, that time, during the Independence celebrations. It had been Rebecca’s discovery, but she was not with them; he remembered waiting in the car outside the shabby flat building where she lived, while Neil Bayley threw pebbles at her windows. But the flat was in darkness; another time, another Rebecca.

  He made out Mrs. Okoi’s dry—cleaning shop in this present darkness and what must be the Goma house ju
st opposite; there once had been numbers painted on the brick but they were long worn off. This was one of the more prosperous streets and there were no cooking braziers out, but children and gangs of youths occupied it with their yells, laughter, and games, the smallest ones standing about asleep on their feet like a donkey that stood quietly nearby. The core of the standard two—room house had been built onto all round and there was a strip of polished concrete leading to a front veranda; the gate was missing and a dog tied to a wire between two stakes that enabled it to run up and down, brought up with a strangling jerk at either limit, struggled like a hooked fish to get at him. He knocked a long time before someone came: a pretty small child in pyjamas. It looked at him and ran away. But he could hear voices, and Shinza’s laugh, beyond the tiny room the door opened on to. Straight—backed chairs in the room, a refrigerator and a Home Encyclopaedia, an old sofa made up as a bed for two more small children who were asleep under the bright light. At last the inner door opened with a glimpse of faces and gesticulation through cooped—up heat and smoke. A woman looked at him and at once looked back into the room for direction, but Cyrus Goma appeared impatiently, and as soon as he saw who was there came forward and shut the front door behind Bray in welcome. “Come right in. My mother … My younger brother … Basil Nwanga … Linus Ogoto …” It was full house, with Congress in town. Shinza was on his feet and standing pleasedly about; he put an arm on Bray’s shoulder. Two men were playing cards at the end of the table, oblivious, looking down at their hands and up at each other, not speaking. A lad was doing his homework in a corner he’d found for himself on the floor. The radio was playing. A young woman brought a pink glass with a gilt rim and Shinza poured Bray a beer. Cyrus Goma’s mother, like a household god in its shrine, sat a little apart on a strange dark wood chair, a sort of small pew that clearly no one else would ever dare occupy. On a second look Bray realized that it was an old—fashioned commode that had been adapted for less private usage; whatever member of the Goma family had acquired it probably had had no idea of its original purpose. The old woman was large and black as only people from the part of the country that bordered on the Congo were. The features Cyrus had inherited were a pencil sketch of the central motif fully developed here; the head blocked out massively, the nostrils scrolled, the wide downturned lips blue—tinged with age, the eyes bloodshot, one slightly bulging (a mild stroke, perhaps), the earlobes, now empty of the copper rings they had once held, hanging in self—ornament, contemptuous of all adornment, down to the thick shoulders. Under her long cotton dress her feet were bare. She did not speak, acknowledging Bray only with a deep breath and then, from that drawn—up height, a grand inclination of the head. Every now and then she hawked and took snuff with a noise that everyone ignored. This was both sad and a sign of respect commanded: she was not banished for the dirty habits of senility, but neither was she taken any notice of.

  Shinza was in the mood that used to come to him on the eve of elections when PIP first began to contest settler seats. He made self—deprecating jokes, game rather than confident. A David rather than a Goliath. The man who had been introduced as Linus Ogoto went point by point through the resolution he was going to lead next day, that the salaries of government personnel were too high. He was a forceful man with a corrugated face and head—even the fleshy shaven scalp was quilted with lines so that the intensity of the changes in his expression were not confined to the face but ran over the whole head. He lectured Bray in fluent, heavily accented English: “You know what the estimated figure is? Forty—seven per cent of the budget. Ministers and shop—front managing directors like Joshua Ntshali—” “Careful, Ntshali’s a neighbour of James’s,” Shinza put in. “—They’re getting three to ten thousand a year. —Our unskilled workers earn between thirty pounds and seventy—two. —Wait a minute, I haven’t finished. I’ve got a few other figures. Free house, basic car allowance seventy—five pounds, special extra allowance of one shilling a mile on official trips, and any day they like, cheap petrol from the PWD pumps. Senior civil servants and officials of the corporations get very much the same privileges.”

  Cyrus Goma and Nwanga were both M.P.s and had a good salary and some privileges themselves; but of course they were not cabinet ministers. It seemed taken for granted by them that they would accept cuts in their salaries; this surely would not fail to be noticed when they were lobbying among ordinary people. “I’ve got the figure for the average earnings of Congress delegates. Seventy—three per cent earn under six hundred a year, and of that seventy—three per cent nearly three quarters earn between thirty and a hundred a year. That’s all.”

  “Cash earnings, of course—? Subsistence crops and so on don’t come into it, ay?” Under his levity Shinza was alert to holes into which opposition would poke its way.

  “Cash earnings. What a cabinet minister gets from his garden in the land doesn’t come into the reckoning for him, either.”

  Shinza nodded rapidly, satisfied.

  Nwanga said to Bray, “The Dondo and Tananze crowd are going to back that up full strength. They want a freeze for all earnings above six hundred a year.”

  “Well, nearly everybody in that hall earns less than six hundred. They shouldn’t feel like disagreeing.” Ogoto looked as if he were staring them all out.

  “That was some detective work, Linus,” Shinza said aside. “How’d you do it?”—referring to the figures for delegates’ earnings.

  “I was on it for months, man. People don’t answer letters, you know—you have to keep on at them. It’s cost me a lot in stamps.” Ogoto laughed suddenly, embarrassed, and his ears moved the hide of his scalp. Then once he had overcome the embarrassment of praise it went rather to his head; he couldn’t stop talking, with intense enjoyment, of the trouble he had gone to. He told one anecdote after another; everyone laughed except the card players and the schoolboy, burrowing down in their concentration, and the old woman.

  Bray talked to Cyrus Goma about a resolution concerning peasant workers. He had noticed it was to come from the Southern Province’s regional council—Goma’s seat was in the Eastern—but Goma knew its terms precisely. “The idea is farm workers should be recognized as the personnel of an agricultural industry, and they should be organized, just like any other sector of industry. Seventy—one per cent of workers in this country are still on the land. They haven’t any proper representation, no properly laid—down conditions of employment, no minimum wage, nothing. Of course it’s a tricky thing to work outmost of them aren’t employed full time as cash wage—earners, as you know. They’re employed seasonally by white farmers; part of the time they work their own or tribal land; or they’re squatters allowed to work some of the white man’s land in exchange for a share of the crop….

  “Is there good support?”

  Goma gave a short laugh. “In principle. Who’ll get up and say he’s against improving the life of nearly three quarters of the working population? But people can hold back for other reasons.”

  “Of course. Organize that seventy—one per cent of peasants and the trade unions increase their power out of all recognition.”

  Goma shrugged. Whenever Bray approached the definition of policy behind the separate resolutions of Shinza’s faction, Goma presented a bland front. Shinza was back in discussion with Linus Ogoto and Nwanga, his cigarette waggling on his lip. “… In Guinea, I mean, don’t let’s forget the issue of Africanization didn’t arise … the French pushed off as soon as Sékou opted out of the French Community, there were no more expatriate civil servants earning fat salaries for local people to compare themselves with. They were on their own. It was easy to introduce drastic salary cuts. But you must be very careful how far it goes … if you get deteriorating wage scales and fringe benefits at the level of, say, the teachers, it’s a boomerang”—he yawned, now and then, with excitement— “you get their union campaigning for a review of salaries again—”

  Shinza was disturbed at the fact that the question of Mweta taking p
ower to appoint the Secretary—General of UTUC was placed early on the next afternoon’s agenda. A man in a grey suit with tribal nicks on his cheekbones said, “They want to get it out of the way.” Shinza ignored him, ignored Bray’s eyes. He leaned his elbow on the table, put his hand over his mouth and gave a heavy sigh through distended nostrils: “Out of the way.” Of course, he wanted to have time to make an impression on Congress, to demonstrate over several days his return to active leadership and his claim to support before the issue came up. He was half—forgotten and he must remind PIP of what he still was and could be. Then whichever way it went—if the motion were to be defeated and Mweta took to himself the right of appointing UTUC’s Secretary—General and overlooked him, or if it succeeded and UTUC’s executive retained the right to elect him—Shinza’s political stock would rise.

  Cyrus Goma said something to Shinza about the time. The little group took on the wariness, eyeing each other, of people expected elsewhere. Shinza scorned the mystery. “If you feel like it, come along … ? If you wanted to …” Goma with his hunched head frowned down at himself; the others stood awkwardly. Shinza sensed the pressure of disapproval and passed over the invitation as if Bray had already refused, “I’m sorry … we’re just pushing off to see Dhlamini Okoi.” So Okoi, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, was in the Shinza camp too, now. Shinza smiled lazily to see that conclusion in Bray’s face. But Goma looked sharply, gloomily annoyed. Bray paid his respects to the old woman again. Now that Bray was on his way out, Cyrus Goma was pleasant with relief, chatting to show that there was nothing personal. “… after all these years. And how’s Mrs. Bray? She’s happy out there in England? When you write please give her my greetings, I don’t know if she remembers me….” He still had on the West African cotton robe that was his form of dress for public appearances. “Let’s go.” Shinza gave the word. He said to Bray, as if in confidential amusement at the attitude of the others— “Till tomorrow morning. Don’t get into trouble in the big city.”