—Whaila has taken you in hand.—
Once up the old splintered staircase, Whaila became again the obsidian of single purpose against which any personal attachment glanced off. He and Arnold were at one. She was not between them. There is no way of telling, ever, whether Whaila knew about the attachments of the girl on Tamarisk, because that kind of knowledge had no place in the purpose. The form of Hillela’s presence was Praetorian—the only way an outsider could describe it. Not only did she keep people at bay (her eyes flicking a warning when she handed over to Whaila a suspect telephone caller), she could be felt (some emanation of her, from the concentration of human destiny going on inside her, the creature turning from fish to biped) willing the direction of a discussion, seeing, moves ahead, what would put Whaila at a disadvantage. Her presence paced the borders, of his sense of self. She was there, with an intense fixing of her black eyes upon him, sometimes with an insignificant gesture—breath taken, hand filling a glass with water—a fidget over which his concentration tripped a moment and was regained with a new awareness. The alarm that closed her face when Arnold made a point Whaila might have made, amused Arnold: how slyly and expertly she turned him away, too—from his amusement and advantage, this time—by a relaxing of her lips and a resting of her gaze upon him that belonged to the borrowed room in a foreign news agency. She was not present at the most important discussions, of course; not yet, but she was there, outside the door, so to speak. When Arnold was back from his tour of Cairo, Algiers, Accra and Lusaka, Christa asked—How did you find Hillela?— A smile, confirming a private prediction: —Ambitious.— She laughed. —What do you mean, ‘ambitious’!— —Well, she’d like to see Whaila where Tambo is.— —That’s not too likely… yes. But Whaila’s a splendid fellow. He’ll go far. She’s right about that.—
There was a space round Whaila in the office even when the company were not his peers; James and Busewe were beguiled by Hillela, the three drank beer together while, entranced, her face tilted up at them from folded arms, she listened to the stories of their youth and childhood—the childhood of the children left at home by Bettie and Jethro when they came to work in white people’s houses. But they were conscious that a task requested by Whaila and scamped by them, a half-hour when they kept him waiting, a hesitation in carrying out anything he expected of them, came under her scrutiny. Feet put up unthinkingly on his table were withdrawn. Cigarettes stubbed in the ashtray, there, would stop her as she walked by. With her Busewe and James were familiar; whatever the balance had been before she came, there was no familiarity with Whaila, after. Yet they have said of her: She was okay, man. It didn’t matter. The denial is taken to refer to her being white. But it is more likely to have been an acceptance of her exigence; that it was the cause there was insistence on being served meticulously through Whaila: their cause, whatever her motive or impetus was.
Whaila liked to make statements that were really propositions to set off the others. He had the will to make everyone around him ‘think things through’ that ran beneath the perfectly orthodox version of policy and events he presented in public. He wanted to keep an historical perspective. —Tambo said the Defiance Campaign was ‘aggressive pressure’—it wasn’t just lying around waiting to be arrested, you know.—
Busewe pocked the dirty wood of his chair-arm with the point of a pencil. —But what did you really do, man? Going into locations without a permit, walking around after curfew, sitting on Blankes Alleen benches, trying to get served at the white counter in the post office. Je-suss! The only good result was the chance to use the courtrooms to make speeches.—
—Four months of keeping the police occupied, keeping a high profile for resistance? That amounts to nothing?— James was old enough to have boarded a Whites Only coach on a train when he was hardly more than a boy.
—I’m not saying nothing. Where did it get us? When everybody with the strength to carry on was in jail, that was the end. It was feeble, man! When the government made the sentences too heavy, people didn’t want to keep on any longer. If you start defying you can’t give up. You can’t say, go ahead, arrest me, and then say—but only if I don’t go to jail for too long. It was too much the idea of the Indians, that campaign … with the English in India, the whole thing had rules, man, the Indians would go so far, the English would give in so far. They knew they were getting out of India in the end. The Boere don’t accept any idea of giving over power, ever. Never. We know that, from the start. Why should we use campaigns that were worked out for a different kind of place?—
The ideas of others worked in Hillela’s blood like alcohol; when she was stirred or puzzled by or disagreed with what was being said she would breathe faster and faster until at last she broke in. —If the blacks won’t fight, it’s the government that makes them fight.—
—That’s it exactly.— Whaila acknowledged with a chairman’s impartiality; the interjection might just as well have come from James or Busewe. —That’s the stage we reached after the Defiance Campaign. The realization that we are forced to fight. But it doesn’t make the campaign a failure. The campaign simply proved that there is no way but to fight, because the government doesn’t know how to respond to anything else. It was a phase we had to complete, to convince ourselves, hey? Over fifty years passed before Umkhonto! Hell—maybe we needed too long for convincing! They were too slow, the old ones … More than fifty years! We might not even live that long!—
Busewe had punched a cross that was turning into a tree. —If they’d changed strategy earlier it would have meant Congress would’ve been banned earlier. And then? … But maybe before the Nats took over in forty-eight we’d have had a better chance of remaining above ground.—
Whaila had an unconscious habit of abruptly changing position in his chair when he had to correct an error of judgment. —D’you imagine Smuts would have been less tough with us than Verwoerd! Look at history, man. The English made an English gentleman out of a Boer general; but you know what the great Englishman Rhodes said: ‘I prefer land to niggers’. No. The problem of tactics and results is very much a question of timing. Timing. It worries me. We need to think a lot about the timing in any situation where we launch new tactics.—
—‘People in a privileged position never voluntarily give up that position’.— Hillela took opportunities to test the platitudes of her reading. She turned to the stranger, Whaila. —So there’ll never be a right time for that? D’you think there’ll be a right time for tactics to make them give up?—
—There’ll be many times along the way to that one … Many years, perhaps. That’s the side of strategy I’m talking about. Tactics must always be first matched against the situation. Taking too long before making a decision can be a disaster. You can miss out… But it’s no good getting frantic because nothing much is happening at home just now. What fits the present situation is to concentrate on getting support outside—foreign powers and international organizations are absolutely crucial to us, more important than activity down there. The whole movement will die without support. Collapse. So we have to run about … The front line is this end.—
—Man, I still think they have to keep up the sabotage down there somehow. Even if it’s with wire-cutters and choppers.—
—What I think—symbolic targets are the idea—all right. But sabotage is correct tactically for another reason. What is sabotage?— James was quoting a formulation, too. —Sabotage is violence to property. And whites are the ones with property—it’s something blacks don’t have. So sabotage is dead right in the situation. The results can be calculated, hey, Whaila; you’re talking to whites in a language they’re going to understand.—
—Well yes. But it’s a tactic that’s not going to have much chance to succeed from the point of view of timing. We just don’t have the manpower to do the job. Too many in prison, or here, outside. Our people are getting arrested and rearrested all the time. You’ve got a hundred-and-eighty days’ detention, now, not just ninety. And the sentences
—they’re getting five or ten years for nothing. We don’t have the sophisticated weapons to be effective. Have to keep running about … we need new sources of supply. The government has all the weapons, all the spies to make the sabotage campaign fail, as things stand now … I don’t know … and maybe we haven’t thought enough about the way the enemy will react. We know the reaction to mass action, okay, since Sharpeville—but the type of action the government will take against a sabotage campaign, not only against our Underground but also the people … the people! How much more repression can the townships take without expecting more positive results from us? There’s also the question of training.— He stopped himself. —How much training our men have had and how good it was. In real military battles experts decide which weapons are right for which purpose, their striking power and so on. It’s something I want to go into … When it comes to guerrilla operations in the bush, the throw-outs from other countries’ hardware aren’t going to do.— They knew this must be what they had heard as a blur of voices when he and Arnold were behind a closed door. —And then there’s timing again … Things’ll be easier next year when Basutoland and Bechuanaland become independent. If we can get in there, we’ll be just over the fence from our people …—
—Only Smith to worry about, then; our men will be able to come with ZAPU* down from Zambia right to Gaborone. You can just about wave over to the folks from there!—
—Not yet, Bra James, not quite yet.:—
Hillela took the freedom under turns of talk, to follow any aspect of the kind for which, as her cousin had complained in childish confidences long ago, all the advantages she had shared with him never gave an explanation. She would surface suddenly with her preoccupation, laying it before them. —There are people who have given up being white.—
Busewe pretended to be jolted from his chair. All three men laughed at her.
—You know exactly what I mean. What it means, there. Bram Fischer, the Weinbergs, Slovos, Christa, Arnold. And there are others … another kind. I knew them, I was in a family … they wanted to but they didn’t seem to know how?—
*
—It solves nothing.— Pauline served her family at table. Carole had her boyfriend to lunch. Sasha was there but he did not bring girls home. —Back here his kind still carry a pass. Feeling free to sleep with a black man doesn’t set him free.—
Carole’s boyfriend knew one mustn’t expect small-talk at that table. And the merciless intimacy with which each member of the family knew the context of subjects raised meant that he could not expect to follow anything more specific than the emotions roused. Carole squeezed his thigh comfortingly under the table. Her mother lifted her head, two streaks of grey, now, at the hairline, like Mosaic horns, to challenge; but no-one was drawn. Carole had told Bettie the news in the kitchen. —Hillela? A black man? What, is that girl mad? Black men are no good for husbands. He’ll run away, you’ll see. Ah, poor Hilly. We must bring her back home to us.—
Sasha in his room tore some sheets out of an exam pad and began to write: She’s jealous. Saturday classes for kids. Reformers are (take pride in being) totally rational, but the dynamic of real change is always utopian. The original impetus may get modified—even messed up—in the result, but it has to be there no matter how far from utopia that result may be.
Utopia is unattainable; without aiming for it—taking a chance!—you can never hope even to fall far short of it.
Instinct is utopian. Emotion is utopian. But reformers can’t imagine any other way. They want to adapt what is. You move around, don’t you, bumping up against—brought up short every time!—by the same old walls. If you reform the laws, the economy defeats the reforms. (That’s what my father tells you, so you must admit it’s true), If you reform the economy, the laws defeat the reforms (out of your own mouth, to him, a hundred times, when you’re on that war-path of yours with a neat hedge Alpheus clips on either side). Don’t you see? It’s all got to come down, mother. Without utopia—the idea of utopia—there’s a failure of the imagination—and that’s a failure to know how to go on living. It will take another kind of being to stay on, here. A new white person. Not us. The chance is a wild chance—like falling in love.
Sasha did not know what it was he had written: a letter? He did not keep a diary, having too frequently a revulsion against his own thoughts to want to be able to turn back to them. He would not tear up the pages. He would put them away yet at the same time leave them around somewhere easily come upon. She might read them. She was always so eager, secretly, to understand what she couldn’t, ever; so nosey.
*Zimbabwe African People’s Union
A Perfect Circle of Sand
Hillela was conscious throughout. But the hard work going on in her body, which usually performed its functions without bothering her, engaged her completely during the birth. As if in a train crossing at full speed a landscape in the dark, she saw and heard nothing outside that body until the sudden cessation, the light moment after part of her body slipped free of her. There was a great uproar of shouting and rejoicing. The yelling sway of voices chanting, singing, at different distances. It was all for her; she put the heel of her hand on her trembling empty belly and tried to sit up, smiling. She had come all alone to the hospital and now everyone was celebrating her, everyone.
Whaila was away in their home country, his and hers, when his baby was born. Nkrumah was in Peking, and the celebration in the streets was a real one: the crowds rejoicing an army coup, and his fall.
She knew where Whaila was but no-one else did, not even Busewe and James—or if they did, acknowledgement was not made. They were supposed to accept that he was somewhere in Europe at a meeting of the alliance he had helped form, a few years earlier, with liberation groups from the Portuguese-colonised countries, FRELIMO from Mozambique, MPLA from Angola, PAIGC from Guinea. The father of Ruthie’s grandchild moved in the streets of South African cities within passing distance of Olga (in Cape Town at the tail-end of her summer holiday), Pauline and Joe (on their way to a lecture at the Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg) and Sasha (leaving the city’s reference library and taking a detour into the black end of town to buy an African jazz record for a girlfriend’s birthday). Whaila was just as close, at one time or another, to his children by his divorced wife, and to his mother’s house, 8965 Block D, in a black location. But he was also just as far, because he could make no attempt to see them; he carried a forged passbook with a false name, and that persona was under orders to see what could be done to revive the internal structure of the movement and accelerate recruitment of men for military training outside.
Hillela seems to have had no realization he might never come back. That he might be discovered or betrayed, and arrested, as Njabulo was when he infiltrated. Busewe had come to visit her bringing the standard African gift for a hospital patient, a bottle of orange squash. She rather mischievously wheedled to see if she could get out of him where she might send a letter that would reach Whaila ‘in Europe’. She wanted, above all considerations of life and death, to tell Whaila how the baby had come out: like him, like him. The white American nurse had been embarrassed when she was asked, amid the cheers in the streets pressing against the hospital windows, whether the baby would grow black?—of course it was pinkish-yellow, newly-hatched. The black nurse giggled and gave expert opinion. —It never be white (jutting her scarred chin). When they born that colour, nothing you can do to make it white. She goin’ to be a black girl.— —Oh you think so? It is always like that? Are you sure?—
The American turned away in further embarrassment at the patient’s confusing joy, which was surely vulgar if not, in some peculiar way, racist?
Whaila came back, and saw that Hillela had never feared for him. She might be white, but she was the right wife for a revolutionary, who, ideally, shouldn’t have such ties at all. She greeted him with desire, not questions. Her eyes were on him impatiently when other people were around, drawing him to their bed. The baby ha
d slept with her until he returned but she turned it out to a cot to yield him his place. She wanted him to ‘give her’—that was how she put it—another baby at once. He said it was too soon and added what he thought would be the last word for any woman he had known: —Anyway, I don’t want to see you swollen up all the time, I like you slim.— No, no she must have more children. There were distracting caresses for a while. —You don’t really want a whole lot of kids to cart around with us from country to country. God knows where we’ll have to go next.— Her open gaze contracted and dilated, holding him steadily. —An African wife isn’t a wife if she doesn’t produce children.— —Oh my god, Hillela, is that what’s on your mind!— He kissed her for the foolishness. —I’ve got enough children, already, that I never see. I’m satisfied to have just this one here with us.—
She was not offended by the reminder that another woman had supplied him with sons. Had it really been impossible somehow to meet them, down there? —I’m sure I would have found a way.— He took the opportunity to teach her something she would have to learn, once and for all. —There are always ways. To do what you have to do, you have to forget about those ways.—
A Sport of Nature Page 24
