A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Both standing, they talked about Tisolo. There were brickfields there, good deposits of clay, the best in the country. For the rest, subsistence farming of the poorest kind. “Your brickfields must be expanding? So many government building projects coming up?” Yes, but the new clay deposits were in the eastern end of the district, and a rail link was needed before they could be worked to full capacity. “The Ministry of Public Works and the radio station building are going up with bricks from Kaunda’s country,” the old man said. “I wrote to Mweta. He’s a very busy man. It’s not so easy to see him these days. —But he answered. Yes, a very good letter in answer.”

  The man who had thrown away the packet of food spoke. “It told us what we know. Bricks will have to be imported until the railway is made.”

  “And the railway link is on the Number One list,” Semstu said, saying “Number One” in English. They all laughed a little, Bray as well. Semstu said, “I think the Number One list is a very long one. I would like to know where the railway is, on that list.”

  “And was that the cause of the trouble,” Bray said. There had been a strike at the brickfields the previous month. There was a second’s pause of indecision: the implication that this was not a matter to be spoken of with an outsider. But Semstu had known Bray before he had known any of the others. “People were told either wages must stay the same, or some men must be put off work. The union said that. Then when trouble started, the government sent someone down from here to tell them: the new brickfields are losing, until the railway comes, they ought to put off men anyway. But they will keep them on in the meantime if they don’t ask for more pay.”

  “But from what I read in the papers, the union itself was already negotiating for a wage increase when the trouble started?”

  “Yes, yes—first the union was asking the company for a wage increase, then the union turned round, you see, turned round again—and told the men at the new brickfields they would be put off if the men at the old brickfields went on asking for increase—”

  Bray nodded vehemently; none of the men looked at each other. The man who had spoken before identified himself as the one whose eyes were being avoided. “What else could we do. After we started talking with the company”—the brickfields were a subsidiary of the gold—mining consortium— “we got called up to the Ministry of Labour’s place, we were told by the Secretary there, look here, boys

  If someone could tell Mweta,” old Semstu pressed. “If we could get the railway. When you are talking to him perhaps you can tell him, next time?”

  Bray had seen working towards expression the realization that he was someone who might be able to be used. The old man said, “Of course you see him.”

  “Yes, I see him. But as you said, he’s a very busy man. Everybody wants something.”

  Semstu considered, but his face remained closed to any attempt to put him off. He settled his old hat back on his head; he dressed still in the reverend’s or schoolmaster’s black suit with a watch chain looped across the stomach, the early robes and insignia of literacy. “Letters are no good. They are written on the machine by someone.” His arthritic hand, holding the pipe, flourished a signature at the bottom.

  The others were looking at Bray and him with eyes screwed up against the light. The union man jutted his bottom lip and blew a lung—full of cigarette smoke before his own face. Bray said to him, “Your union will have to press UTUC to bring up the business of the railway with the Development Plan people.”

  The man grimaced up the side of his face, as at one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He shook his head and laughed, wary to commit himself, even to a fool.

  “But of course you’ve done that already.”

  “And then?” the man said.

  Bray smiled. “Well, you tell me.”

  “UTUC doesn’t say what we want, it tells us what the Company wants.”

  Silence. A deep inhalation of smoke drew both in together—company, development plan, all the same.

  Now that the exact moment had presented itself, Bray almost took his opening as a casual question to the man he was already in conversation with, but turned in time to Semstu. “Well, I’m sorry to hear things are not going so well in your district, Mukwayi, my old friend — What do you think, anyway, of this idea of the S.-G., of the United Congress of Trade Unions being appointed instead of elected? It’s a very important post—I mean, so far as troubles like yours are concerned, the S.-G., if he’s the right man, he’s the one to get the government to see—”

  “Oh but it’s Mweta who’ll say who it is.”

  “We were just saying—Mweta’s got so many decisions to make. Mweta has so many things to think about.”

  The old man said, “Mweta’s not going to choose a fool or a bad one.”

  “No, of course not. But as we were saying, he can’t keep in touch with what everybody thinks these days. He would have to take advice from someone, now, don’t you think—”

  “Yes, yes. But who?” The old man implied that it could only be the members of Mweta’s own cabinet, people of his own choosing.

  “People from the Ministry of Labour. Perhaps the Planning and Development people.” Bray added, to the union man, “The ones you ran up against.”

  “And who can know better than Mweta which is the right man?”

  The other men left the car and began to draw nearer, cautiously. Bray appealed to them all, simply, openly— “Well, I’d say the workers themselves. They must know whom they want to speak for them. That’s what trade unions are for.”

  “The Secretary—General should go on being elected.” The old man set out the statement in order to consider it.

  “It’s always been like that until now,” Bray said. “Since Shinza and Mweta started the unions and got the colonial administration to recognize that the workers had rights. Ever since then.”

  The old man suddenly pulled back against the direction of the talk. He seemed to be warning himself. “Ah, now we have Independence. Mweta knows what to do. If he decides to choose the man, he knows why he wants to do that.”

  After a moment he cocked his head sideways under his hat at Bray, a man unsure of his hearing, and pointed the pipe at Bray’s middle. “But you are a clever man. You went with Mweta and Shinza to get us Independence. We don’t forget you. People will remember you as they remember our fathers. You are not saying it, but what you are saying now is that you don’t think Mweta is right.”

  “I’m saying that whoever Mweta chooses, it’s not right that he should choose. UTUC must elect its own Secretary—General.”

  “Yes, that too; but you are saying Mweta is wrong.”

  “Yes, I am saying Mweta is making a mistake. And I will tell him. Because he is a great man I always tell him when I think he is wrong.”

  The old man liked that; grinned. “Oh I see you are still strong. —When the British made him go away, we said here they will have to tie him down to their ship like a bull—” but the younger men were not interested in these legends of colonial times.

  “I hear that Shinza wants to be the Secretary—General.” Instinct told him to be bold; for the first time in his life he did not seem to have much else to go by.

  He could not tell whether or not they knew about Shinza all along, whether it was the factor they balked at inwardly. “Shinza, eh?” the old man said. “And do you agree with that?”

  Bray said offhand, “He was S.-G. before. If UTUC wants him. Nobody knows trade union work better than Shinza.”

  “I want to talk to you about something.” The old man looked round at the others. They drifted off in a group, taking their time about it, holding their smart jackets over their shoulders. Bray and the old man got into the back seat of the car; although the doors were open it was no cooler than standing outside. There was a vase of wax roses in a holder beside the rear mirror. Semstu said, “Will it not be a bad thing …”

  He might mean that it was bad to cross Mweta’s will, or he might me
an he did not like the idea of Shinza in office at this time. It would have made sense to have found out a bit more, from Shinza, about his more recent relations with the old man. “You want to know what I think? I think Mweta needs Shinza in a position like that. He needs Shinza”—Bray made a measuring gesture—” ‘up there.’ Shinza has become too far away.”

  “Down in the Bashi, yes. It’s far. And Shinza understands the trouble—he was in the mines himself.”

  “Exactly. Shinza is another pair of eyes and ears for Mweta, and he knows what he sees and hears, too.”

  “The man they sent down to the brickfields”—Semstu’s tongue—click cracked like a whip in disgust. “He had passed his school, yes—”

  Bray let him alone to think a minute.

  “Goma’s been worrying me about the vote. All the time he comes to me.”

  “Well, it’s important. The five Tisolo branches, you know.”

  “But I was worried it was a bad thing … because Mweta wants to choose.”

  “I don’t think it’s a bad thing.” Even in Gala, he heard the English habit of authority and self—assurance in his voice; just as a whore turned respectable retains a professionalism in her manner towards men.

  Semstu talked on, about Goma— “his head is pressed into his shoulder like a vulture, it’s hard to trust a man who looks like that bird”; jealousy of Mweta, jealousy of Shinza— “someone must have talked between them”; the comfort of the Luxurama seats, the first Congress—did Bray remember?—when the police had seized the agenda. When all this preamble was over and he could do so with independence, he said, “You can tell Goma I will do it.”

  “All five branches?”

  “All five.”

  That was all there was to it. He saw himself saying to Shinza, that was all there was to it. I have done my errand. As easy as that. He went to the café where he and Shinza had eaten sausages but was not hungry. His feet and hands had swelled, after the chill of the Luxurama, standing in the heat. His watch stuck to his wrist and gave way from wet flesh and hairs with a sucking pull as he shifted it. The artificial fruit juice was moving round and round in its container, bright and cloudy. The Greek proprietor and his wife were drinking Turkish coffee in tiny cups. “Could I have a cup of that?’

  The little man had two dimples in his greenish—pale face as he smiled at the big Englishman. “Oh, we don’t sell this kind of coffee, it’s what we Greeks drink ourselves.” “I know. I like it very much. Could I have a cup?” The man was amused. “Oh if you want. I’ll give you.” The pregnant wife, very young, with wisps of black hair showing in the white arches of her underarms, fetched a cup, unsmiling. In the cupola between the body and the arm he tasted always the sweety—scentedness of something smeared there to disguise sweat, and the slight gall, as of an orange pip bitten into, of the sweat itself, and his tongue, moving one way smoothly, felt the nap of shaven hair—roots when it moved the other. The coffee was boiling hot, thick and delicious. Rebecca had not been in his mind at all; only this one part of her, suddenly, claimed him with an overwhelming sense of reality of its own. Cunt—struck, they call it—never mind that it wasn’t the right part—he thought deeply lovingly, not minding what they called it. He was at once swollen in the other way, too. He ordered a bottle of soda water because the man wouldn’t take money for the coffee: it was he, Bray, who had done him the honour of appreciating the customs of the country—a country thousands of miles away.

  Every day in October at this time a strange transformation of elements took place. The sky was no longer colour or space but weight of heat; it pressed down upon figures, trees, and buildings. The streets of two o’clock in the afternoon looked squat and beaten. He felt his height hammered towards the ground, where only the big red ants moved lightly and freely. He took a taxi the few blocks back to the Luxurama. The taxi drivers of the capital were in the euphoria of good business—Congress brought plenty of customers to town. The driver wore a white golfer’s cap and sunglasses, and at the traffic light played the drums with flat palms on his thighs in time to loud music from his radio.

  The foyer had almost emptied itself back into the auditorium already; Bray saw that he could slip in without seeing the Shinza contingent. He didn’t want to talk about Semstu. But Shinza himself came out against the stream of delegates going in; he was hurrying somewhere with papers in his hand.

  “Well, how did you get on with your old friend Semstu?”

  “You will have the Tisolo branches.”

  A parody of his own thought, it came from Shinza: “Easy as that.”

  Bray said nothing. Shinza was in that state when the imminence of a decisive event becomes unbearable and the mind seizes upon some trivial detail to be completed, some half—phrase to be added, putting into the performance of these useless things all the urgency that is turned back by the event itself: here; now; carrying with it the oracle of its outcome. Whatever the bits of paper were, he held them as if they were his destiny, his eyes already impatiently past Bray, his lips clamped with a sort of smile on a dead cigarette. “I wish they’d trust me easily as they trust you.”

  “They trust me because I haven’t got any power. That wouldn’t be much good to you, would it.” He took from his pocket the little gas lighter Rebecca had given him, and the tiny flame spurted with the roll of his thumb: “Here.”

  “You haven’t got a box of matches for me?—I’m out.” Mechanically, Shinza bent his dark fleecy head and relit the cigarette.

  “Keep this.” A few scribbles of white, like threads of white cotton you’d pick off woolly cloth, there on the crown. Bray had never had with Shinza the sense of affection he had with Mweta, the affection that of course meant a certain physical affinity, too, which is to say a tolerance for the other person’s body, its essences and characteristics. That was partly what the girl meant when she said once that he “loved” Mweta; he would have used Mweta’s razor or put on a garment of Mweta’s (not that he could ever fit into anything Mweta wore!) as unthinkingly as he would use a towel streaked with the black stuff that washed off Rebecca’s eyelashes. But with Shinza, who knew him so much better than Mweta did—Shinza, matched with him in mind, locked with him in generation—between Shinza and himself there was something of physical hostility. He remembered once more the moment the day he had first seen Shinza again, with the boy—child he had begotten on a young girl, feeble in his hand. A moment of pure sexual jealousy. And no woman involved; no individual woman, only woman as the symbol by which a child was fathered. Well, the genie was out of the bottle these days; his feelings, that whole flood of nervous responses, had somehow pushed forward into daily use, overwhelmingly available and alert, a kind of second intelligence. Looking down on Shinza’s head for a second, he thought, was that when it began—when he was holding his son?

  Someone had forgotten to turn up the houselights in the Luxurama and only the red exit lamps glowed. After the daylight he saw little in the dimness and was aware of all the eyes there, turned not upon him but in quiet tension upon what was to come. There was not much talk. He felt his way to a seat. Then the lighting was corrected and everyone was discovered by it in a kind of dreamy impatience, waiting for the Executive and Central Committees and the President to file in.

  Mweta had put on the robe he had worn for his investiture. It left his neck free of collar and tie for the October heat—but that didn’t prevail in here. The robe made him look much taller and the muscles running to a V at the base of his throat showed in a streak of shine along the smooth black skin as he turned his head. Shinza was hunched at the table, his raised shoulders keeping out his neighbours, his two fists supporting his chin and covering the lower part of his bearded face. Bray kept looking at him to see if he would look up; to make him look up. He felt curiously anxious that Shinza should do so, anxious about what the delegates were thinking of this image. Shinza did not move. The familiar gesture with which he fished in his breastpocket for a cigarette was missing.

&nbs
p; With the same conventions that carried it from any one piece of business to another, Congress came to the motion: “That the People’s Independence Party Congress views with grave alarm the intention to make the position of Secretary—General of the United Trades Union Congress a personal appointment by the President of the State, instead of an appointment voted by election within the United Trades Union Congress membership, as it has been since the birth of trade unions in this country. The People’s Independence Party moves that the President be respectfully informed that such usurpation of democratic procedure is contrary to the spirit of the State and the principles of free labour upheld by the People’s Independence Party and the United Trades Union Congress, on which the State was founded; and that the President be requested to affirm the unalienable right of UTUC to elect its Secretary—General.”

  The legalistic jargon, the chairman controlling the order in which voices might be heard, the people sitting with that bit of paper, the agenda, token of the taming of their wildest and most urgent thoughts translated into symbols on cheap white paper; this ancient form of human discipline—frail cracked amphora, handed down by the Greeks, that it was—held. All the festive bonhomie of the gathering at its first meetings had worn off by now. Suits were rumpled with sitting and the smokers went through pack after pack, enduring the alternation of boredom and tension. In spite of the air—conditioning, or rather, circulated coldly by it, there was the smell of the herd, man—herd, brought about not by physical exertion but the secretions of determination, resentment, apprehension, nervous excitement, coming, Bray thought, from myself and all the others. We don’t speak, I don’t know what they’re thinking on either side of me, our arms touching on the chair—arms, but we give it off, this message that we no longer know how to read as animals do.

  The first speaker to the motion had been carefully chosen: the trade unionist Sam Gaka was a man of the kind dubbed “painfully sincere”—that is, given a particular, insistent grasp of a certain set of facts without relating them to a hierarchy of other facts. In any society where it was possible, he would have been apolitical; here he simply failed to understand what his political position was. He was a believer (almost in the evangelical sense) in corporate trade unionism—the restriction of union activities purely to professional questions of the employer—employee relationship. And so, although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could never have practised, since from the beginning UTUC had been part of the nationalist political struggle, with the employer/white-colonial one and the same force against which the worker/black-subject had to assert his demands/rights, and although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could not practise now, because an underdeveloped country had to be able to “call upon” its workers in the old political sense to fight the State’s struggle for economic emancipation—he was able to argue for the election of the Secretary—General from the “pure” position of corporatism. For those who recognized it, gave a name to it; to the majority he was simply saying that UTUC’s members, representing the whole working force of the country, must always know the best person to speak for them to the government, that the whole idea of trade unionism was based on the workers’ selection of their own spokesmen, etc.