A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Cyrus Goma, his robe hitched up on his one high shoulder, agreed that agricultural development schemes were essential— “Of course most of them, too, are still bits of paper. But agrarian backwardness can’t be changed only by giving people dams and lending them tractors and sending out someone to teach contour ploughing. However backward and unskilled people are they have to live now in a modern money economy, and the first step is to recognize that their labour must be assessed in terms of that economy. The money they have to have to buy things with is the same as anyone else’s; the work they do to earn it must be valued in terms of that money, not as what the white farmer thinks is enough for old women and children. This principle will never be established until the farm workers are organized like any other worker. And the haphazard working of the land—the persistence of the old ways of our grandfathers who burned down enough trees for space to plant just enough crops to feed themselves, and moved on to another place when that soil was worked out—this won’t become a high—production, modern agricultural industry until the farm worker is an organized worker. How can there be an industry without proper wage scales, conditions of work, social benefits? Without these things the farm worker remains a serf.” The deeper his accusations went the drier his voice became. “I want to ask Congress whether the pledges that were made by the Party for the whole population are now for the people in the towns alone?” He paused but was rejected by silence. “—If you don’t want to ask yourselves that, then perhaps you’ll let me tell you that experts of very different political opinions all agree on one thing: agrarian backwardness always slows and sometimes prevents entirely any possibility of rapid economic expansion as a whole. In England the agricultural revolution, the enclosures of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, greatly facilitated the industrial revolution. In America, in Japan as recently as a hundred years ago, it was rapid agricultural reform that made the industrial miracles of these countries possible. In France, the land tax of the movement known as the physiocrats …”—Bray recognized a string of quotations from the fashionable agronomist René Dumont.

  “What a cruel thing, to come along to us on the farms with meetings and ask money to pay membership for union and tell us we will get all sorts of things we will not get.” A young man was on his feet; whether he actually had caught the chairman’s eye or not was too late even for the chairman to decide—heads turned as if to track the passage of a hornet among them. “What a cruel thing to make the people on the lands think they can live like in town just because they will have unions … we dig the mud and not the gold … we plant in the time when others are in school … why tell us that can change because we pay two—and-six and the United Congress of Trade Unions will say so….” People tried to interrupt and the chairman’s head bobbed on disorder. The speaker switched suddenly from an illiterate eloquence to conventionally phrased committee—room English, with the effect of sweeping up an advantage for himself from the consternation. “—The rural branches of PIP have been misled into pressing for this motion. Agricultural workers’ wages will rise and their conditions of employment improve as a result of improved production through government assistance schemes and nothing else. The farm workers are being used, they stand to benefit nothing by their demand, because there’s nothing in it for them. All there is in it is the attempt of a certain section of the trade union movement to extend its influence and funds, for reasons of its own. —I don’t want to say anything about those reasons.… The unions can’t do anything for the farm workers that the department of agriculture can’t do. This Party started as a people’s party, a peasants’ party, because that’s where we all come from, from the land”—applause, especially from those whose dress suggested they had moved furthest from it— “and there is no need for this nonsense about the people on the land being forgotten because there is still no difference between the people on the land and the people in the towns. We are the same. The idea of a different class of person in town, I don’t know where any of our people get it from. It is not an African idea. It comes from somewhere else and we don’t need it. Our Party was simply a people’s party and our Party in power is simply a people’s government.”

  Now Shinza spoke for the first time. He wore the same shirt as the day before, a cigarette pack outlined in the buttoned breast—pocket. Bray, who had heard him so many times, felt a bile of nerves turn in his belly, found himself alert for the silent reactions emanating from the mass, intent and yet moving with the calm tide of breathing around him. Shinza, like Mweta (Mweta had begun by modelling himself on him) let them wait a moment or two before he spoke, a trick of authority, not hesitancy. Then he opened his mouth once—the broken tooth was an ugly gap—and let it close slowly, without a sound. The voice when it came seemed to be in Bray’s own head. “The People’s Independence Party grew from bush villages and locations in white people’s towns where villagers came to work. It grew from the workers’ movements in the mines, where the mineworkers were also people from the bush.” The voice was quiet and patient; a little too patient, perhaps—they might think it insinuated that they would be slow to follow. “It is true that it was a peasant movement and that we are all sons of peasants. But it is not true that this is enough to ensure for all time that the ruling party remains the people’s party, and the government a people’s government. Looking back to the face of our youth will not take away the scars and marks it has now.” A hand absently over the beard that hid his own. “For some thousands—less than a quarter of the population—life has changed. They work in ministries, government departments, offices, shops and factories. Those at the top have cars and houses; even those at the bottom know they have a regular pay packet coming in every week and can make down payments on their stoves and radios, those things that are the quickest way to show a higher standard of living.” A small shrug. “But for tens of thousands, very little has changed. Three—quarters of the population is still on the land, and although industrialization—provided it is something more than a growing foreign concession—will absorb a good percentage in time to come, tens of thousands will always remain—on the land. We are all the same people, in town and country, yet they have no cars and brick houses, no fridges and smart clothes.… We are all the same people, yet they have no regular pay coming in twelve months a year, no unemployment insurance, no maximum working hours, no compensation for injury, and no redress for dismissal. We are the same people?—The same but different? Yes—the same, but different. We must face the fact that big talk about un—African ideas is a stupid refusal to see the truth. Industrialization itself is an un—African idea—if by that you mean something new to Africa. A political party is an un—African idea. This beautiful cinema we’re sitting in is an un—African idea, we ought to be out under a tree somewhere.… The recognition of the fact that we have developed an urban elite, that there is a fast—widening gap in terms of material satisfactions as well as other kinds of betterment between that elite and the people in the country, that the few are racing ahead and showing nothing but their dust to the many—this recognition isn’t un—African or un—anything, it’s a matter of looking at what’s actually happening. If we were a classless people, we are now creating a dispossessed peasant proletariat of our own. The lives of the people in the rural areas are stagnant. If PIP as a ruling party is to remain the people’s party it was through the Independence struggle it must recognize what it has allowed to happen. Just now we heard members of Congress opposing a motion that asks for elementary rights for farm labourers as a working force. Can we believe our ears? Is this the voice that PIP speaks with, now?” He paused to goad interjection; but again there was a sullen silence. His voice strode into power. “Well, we are here at the seventh Congress of PIP, the first since the Party formed a government; we must believe. Yesterday our women’s organizations had to protest because they were shut out from Congress. We had to believe our ears then, too, when we heard that women who from the beginning worked for Independence alongside the men
, our women who have always been full members in a party pledged not to discriminate against any human being on grounds of tribal affiliation or sex—our women have been left outside to make the tea while Congress debates decisions that will affect their lives and their children’s lives. —We have heard, and what we have heard can mean only one thing: the lines of communication between Freedom Building in this town and Party branches in the villages and the bush are breaking down. That is why the Party discusses the position of farm workers as if they were strangers, people living somewhere else—men from the moon. That is why. The Party remains a people’s party and the government remains a people’s government only so long as the people know that the government and Party are at their service. There should be no forgotten districts, there should be no forgotten sections of the population. The task of the Party is to be the direct expression of the masses, not to act as an administration responsible for passing on government orders. The Party, whether ruling or not, exists to help the people set out their demands and become more aware of their needs, not to make itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders. If PIP is prepared to ignore the demand of the farm workers for organization as a recognized labour force with the right to negotiate its own affairs, PIP is guilty of the contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves—an attitude we thought we had got rid of forever when Government House became the President’s Residence. This Congress must face the fact that the Party is in danger of becoming a party of cabinet ministers, civil servants, and businessmen.”

  Applause and dissent clashed like the two halves of a cymbal; many who applauded did so in the hunch—shouldered, half—defiant way of those who fear disapproval. Country people whose characteristics and clothes had not seemed prominent in the ranks of knees and faces suddenly emerged in a distinctive force of numbers. Faces with tribal marks, stretched ear—lobes hanging to frayed shirt—collars—they seemed to be everywhere. Bray felt oddly elated; yet for the moment he had hardly taken in what Shinza had said—he had been gauging the faces around him, the faces on the stage. Mweta kept his head turned away while Shinza was speaking; no reaction whatever, except perhaps—revealed to Bray’s nervously heightened observation—a slight lift of the chin that showed he was listening, all right, after all. The motion was very narrowly defeated, and the defeat greeted with a grumbling groan of resentment; the collective presence is a strangely emotional entity, whose combined voice has a command of expressive noises—nonsyllabic cries, warnings, keenings—that the people who comprise it have forgotten how to produce, individually. Cyrus Goma moved restlessly in the restriction of his own defeat. Shinza met nobody’s eye, looking straight ahead with what, from Bray’s distance, looked like a faint, private smile, or a delicate lifting of the lips in endurance. While Bray’s eyes were on him he suddenly scratched himself vigorously on the chest; a kind of comic signal, a sign of life.

  He certainly had made an impression on Congress. If two sharply defined factions had never existed before, they did now. When those delegates hesitantly but irresistibly sounded their palms for Shinza, his support, his own popular following came into being once again for everyone present to see and hear. It existed now. Mweta must know that. He must have taken, too, the messages smoothly slipped into the speech that were meant for him; no turning away of the head could avoid them.

  In the foyer Bray came out of the men’s room and into Roly Dando and Shinza at exactly the moment they couldn’t ignore each other. Dando said, “So that’s your line now, Edward,” just as if they had been meeting every day. “I have no line, Roly. I’ll support any resolution that constitutes action based on the workers’ productive role, against economic imperialism. That’s my policy. Always been the same. You know that.”

  Dando’s grin at the patness of it rearranged his wrinkles. “Oh yes, the party—within-the-party.”

  “Let’s have lunch and you can expand what he knows,” Bray said.

  “You two can go off and enjoy your lunch. I’ve got work piling up in my bloody office. These circuses are just a waste of time for me.”

  People gathered around Shinza openly, now. Goma, Ogoto, and huge young Basil Nwanga were racing about, marshalling his attention tensely here and there, with eyes that deftly selected and rejected among the crowd of delegates. Mweta, who had not appeared before outside the sessions but gone off at once in the presidential car, moved through the foyer surrounded by Central Committee people. He saw Bray and steered towards him, bringing his encirclement with him as he could not duck beneath it. Past heads and faces he called, “I’ll see you tonight?” Bray’s look questioned. “Didn’t the secretary telephone you?” “Might have, after I’d left the house.” “Dinner. About eight o’clock. After the cocktail party. All right?”

  It was awkward to go back to the orbit of Shinza after this singling out. Cyrus Goma had watched accusingly. Bray had to make a determined effort to overcome his own feeling of culpability and get Shinza aside for a moment, pushed to it by a mixture of excitement and anxiety over the motion condemning Mweta’s power to appoint the Secretary—General of UTUC, that was due to come up in the afternoon session. Shinza was not too hopeful; yet it was difficult, in the rush of vigour that the evidence of real support in the people gathering round him brought, for him not to feel heady with the chance. Anyway, talking to Bray, it seemed suddenly to make him make up his mind about something. His face stiff as a drunk’s, he brought out calmly, “You remember old Zachariah Semstu? He still says the word and all five branches in the Tisolo district bleat back.… Cyrus’s been chatting him up for days, but you know how it is …no matter what he thinks, the idea of a vote against Mweta sticks in his throat … well, it’s understandable. But he knows that you—that so far as you’re concerned—I mean, he’d always trust what you’d say. If you’d just have a word with him, there’d be no trouble.” And Bray said, so quickly that he heard his own voice, “All right. Where is he?”

  “He’s down in the carpark. Linus’s just passed him. Near the fence at the back of the building. Just stroll down as if you’re going to your car, and you’ll see him.”

  Bray left the Luxurama unheeded and came out into the heat. He was walking over the humpy ground with the momentum of a push in the back. A hundred suns revolved at him from the cars he approached and passed; every now and then his feet crunched over patches of clinker that had been used to fill up hollows. A single tree left standing was covered with a whole dry season’s dust like a piece of furniture shrouded in an empty room. The little boys who hung about with dirty rags, pestering to clean windscreens, were gambling for pennies around its exposed roots.

  He saw some men sitting half—in, half—out of an open—doored car. They were eating fish and chips and one of them crushed his paper packet in his fist and aimed it at the rest of the rubbish that had collected under the tree. The old man Zachariah Semstu was sitting neatly on an upturned fruit box, smoking a pipe with a little tin lid on a chain. As Bray came up the old man gestured at the children to point out where the packet had fallen, and, not recognizing Bray for a moment, said testily to the others, “Let them eat if you don’t want to.” Bray was greeting him formally in Gala, he called him “my old friend.”

  The old man’s ears recognized what his eyes had not. A look of joyous amazement wakened his face. The business of greeting went on for five minutes. “But you have seen me in there,” Bray said, with a tilt of the head. “Well, well … I had heard you were back in the country. I had heard it. But we thought you had left us forever … you stayed away so long.”

  “I had no choice. As you know, I wasn’t allowed in, all those years.”

  “And I have grown an old man,” Semstu said.

  The others had the look of people who have heard it all before; they were inert under his authority. He introduced two of them, both apparently office—bearers in Tisolo Party branches, but presented the less important ones collectively, with an encompassing movement of a hand w
hose fingers, Bray saw, had the characteristic sideways slope away from an arthritically enlarged first knuckle. Ten years is a long time; depends which stage of life you were in at the start.