A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “You’ve forced him into a kind of opposition that isn’t there, between you.”

  Mweta’s hands dropped, swung helplessly. “Not there! If you give him that much, he’ll swallow your arm. You only think of him years ago.”

  “Yes, he has changed,” Bray said. “But you know I’ve seen him.”

  “No,” Mweta said. “No, I tell you I didn’t know.”

  It was the first time, the first time since he was that boy with a guitar, on a bicycle, that Bray didn’t know whether Mweta was speaking the truth.

  “When?”

  “That was where I was going—last week, on the Bashi road.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “No you don’t see. I wrote something to you—didn’t send it, the business about the boy bothered me.… But I wanted to tell you, I can’t believe Shinza would make a move to oust you if he were with you. If you were still in it together. The differences you had in the Party, just before independence—that’s not to be taken as conclusive. He’ll fight you there because he believes that the Party should stand for certain things, the Party shouldn’t take account of the government’s limitations, even if they’re enforced by circumstance: that’s what the Party’s there for, in a state like this one. To keep in front of the government the original idea of what Independence should mean, to oppose that idea all the time against the government’s acceptance of what is expedient, consistent with power. The dialectic, in fact. That’s what his opposition within the Party really means.”

  “Oh we all know about his early Marxist training. His six weeks in 1937. We’ve heard all about that from him a dozen times. We all know he was the intellectual of the Party while we were the bush boys. We’ve had all that.”

  Bray said, “What I’m getting at is there’s something in him that would always make him want to be a power, but not the one … that’s more or less what I said. You’d distrust a moral reason why I think he wouldn’t threaten you, just as I should myself.… But this isn’t a moral reason, it’s a matter of temperament. Temperament exhibited and proven over a long, long time.… He wants only to be known to the few people in the know. That’s enough for him. He enjoyed helping to ‘make’ you; why didn’t he employ the same energy to make himself?” (He thought, do I touch on vanity there; no, Mweta knows he didn’t need making in any sense implying inadequacy.) “Because he hasn’t the will to lead, really, he doesn’t want it. He didn’t want it. It’s a weakness, if you like, a kind of arrogance. Let someone else be out there handled by the crowd.”

  Mweta had the weary obstinacy of one who is following his own thoughts. “He’d have done exactly the same in my place.”

  “If he were with you,” Bray said, “If you were together, Mweta … you’d both be in the same place. He’d be seeing things from where you are, and that makes all the difference. Power compromises,” he added, with a gesture of embarrassment for that sort of phrase. “He wouldn’t have so much fire in his belly if he were sitting at table in this house.”

  Mweta folded the fingers of one hand over the knuckle of the other and pressed it, testingly. Bray suddenly saw that he was fighting for control, holding together some trembling part of himself. I have hurt him, I hurt him by so much as acknowledging the other one’s existence. They couldn’t change the relation in which they had stood to each other, he—Bray—and Mweta; he must have endorsement from me, that is my old role. Anything else is betrayal. It was stupid; and Mweta was not. But the boy on the bicycle; when Mweta’s with me he can’t get away from the boy on the bicycle. The President wants love and approval, unrelated to the facts, between us. When it comes to us.

  Bray felt a hardening distaste for the arrogant bare feet, the cigar at the centre of the broken—toothed grin in the thick beard. He said, “If I were you I’d send for Shinza. Now.”

  Mweta’s voice cracked his own silence. “But you disapprove of preventive detention. If Shinza came in with me you’d see both of us backing it.” He gave a cold and patronizing laugh.

  “There’d be no need.”

  Mweta was looking at the big frame he knew so well, as if for a place where it would give. “You think so? What about Shinza’s crowd? They’d follow him?—There’d always be need.” He got up and walked round the desk, glancing at the papers there like half—recognized faces waiting to attract his attention; turned abruptly and came and stood near Bray’s chair. “I’ve got no message for Shinza,” he said.

  “I’m not a messenger.”

  “But the best thing you can do is make him understand that what he’s doing isn’t any use. He’s not going to bring it off, whatever he thinks he’s aiming at. He’s making a fool of himself. Or something worse. Really James, if you are worried about Shinza, tell him to leave it alone, don’t encourage him.”

  It was a hit. “Encourage?”

  “As you said, the friendship of the old days, and so on.”

  “I didn’t say, Mweta,” said Bray, gently. “And the past—well that’s what it is. You two, you and Shinza, it’s a matter of state, now, and I can’t have any part in it. I can only tell you what I think about you two; but that’s all. What I think, what I believe, urgently believe.”

  “All right, all right. All the same, when you see him you’ll tell him what you think.”

  Bray said, “Don’t you want me to see Shinza?”

  Mweta said sadly, with a touch of the politician’s deftness at the same time, “James, I would never tell you what you should do. Good God.”

  But I ought to know it—what I should do. “I’m your visitor here.”

  Mweta said emotionally, “You’re home.”

  Bray said, “What happens when the Party Congress comes up? Next month?”

  Mweta was still chairman of PIP, and Shinza, as a regional chairman, was on the Executive.

  “We meet. If he comes.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Mweta waited a second and then said, “He’s not always at his place, these days. So they say.”

  “But he’d come for the Congress, of course.” Bray’s tone changed; he made it sound almost as if he were joking: “Maybe you’ll have it out, then. Eh? Something very down—to-earth about Party congresses. —Tell me, what sort of people are you going to detain with your new Act—are they all kids like the fish factory one I picked up? What do you hope to hear from them?”

  “That’s Onabu’s affair. He’s got men who know the right questions.”

  “All the fish—factory lad did was explain the fishing concession to some people at the hostel. Of course the Union found this annoying. Or out of order, or something. But it hardly seems to call for two months and seventeen days in jail. Time to ask a great many questions.”

  Mweta said, “Well, all that will be looked after now, thank heavens, local police people won’t be able to do what they like. There are proper provisions and checks in the Act—Chekwe worked it out with Dando very carefully. —That silly boy wasn’t badly treated?”

  Bray said, “He was beaten. There doesn’t seem much point in testifying to that, now. —You don’t really mean that every time a workman grumbles this is at the instigation of Shinza? Granted, his ideas may influence the Bashi people in our part of the country. But what about people elsewhere? Can everything that bothers you be laid at his door?”

  “That’s what the questions are for—to find out whose door. And if it’s Shinza’s—you wouldn’t believe it?”

  “I’d have to. It wouldn’t change my belief that it didn’t—doesn’t need to happen. You don’t have to make an enemy out of Shinza.”

  Mweta was shaking his head against the words as they came at him. “Believe me, James, believe me.”

  Yet he didn’t want Bray to go; there was always, between them, the sense of being held in a strong current. Out of it, in opposition, they floundered, and were drawn back.

  Bray said suddenly, “You’re not going to arrest Shinza?”

  “If that should ever be necessary it would be a
bad day for us.” It was parenthetic, a private reference to the old triumvirate: himself, Bray, and Shinza.

  Bray felt a useless resistance and alarm: Mweta retreated, out of reach, into the old relationship, as if what the President did was another matter. Bray was led, stumbling and reluctant, to talk of other things: “And Aleke? What do you think of Aleke?” “Oh, quite competent, I think.” “A bit easy—going, mm?” “Oh … I can’t fairly judge that. It depends what you want of him, anyway. He’s got a good civil—service temperament.” “Exactly, exactly. That’s just what I mean. But he gives you what you need?”

  Bray stopped, and smiled. “I don’t know whether I’m doing what you need from me.”

  “But how’s it going, James?”

  Bray kept the smile, answering slowly and politely. “I’ve covered the whole province. I’ve made my own census of the educable population, you might say, a pretty broad age limit. Now I must collate the stuff and write a report. That’s it, more or less. It should be a fairly accurate sample guide for the rest of the country. Once it’s done, it’ll be easy to do the same sort of thing for the other provinces, the work could be allotted to local people. Then I shouldn’t have to spend more than a few weeks in each. I don’t know how much longer I’ll need to stay in Gala; I’ll see Kamaza Phiri.”

  “Good, you’ll see Phiri …”

  “He wrote with some suggestion that I ought to put what he calls pilot schemes into operation in Gala. Before moving on. I’d written him a note on an idea I had for a technical school of a kind. I thought we might take over the club”—they both laughed— “but I think I’d better do what I have to do to complete the report—I’d better move off to the other provinces soon.”

  Mweta said, “But if Phiri wants to set up something in Gala. There’s no hurry to leave Gala.”

  “Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; but that’s when I’m alone, you know. It’s something to do with the atmosphere of the place, the smell of it and so on. But my old house and the boma—they leave me cold. I suppose leaving the old life the way I did … Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; sometimes I feel I’ve never come back.”

  “I don’t think you should be in any hurry. Is the house you’re in all right, there? We really ought to be able to get you a decent house, James. If you hear of any people who are leaving, any settler’s house you know about, you must write—the government could buy a house like that for you.”

  “Oh the house is perfectly all right for my purpose. There’s a magnificent fig in the garden.”

  “There should be a really nice house for you and Olivia. It worries me. Not one of those British shacks. She can’t come to live like that.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the house! For a few months, it’s perfectly adequate. I don’t know whether Olivia will come, now. She’s hung on so long, you know.”

  “Don’t be in a hurry,” Mweta said, looking at him, open. “You know, it’s a funny thing, all these years—I always thought of you as if you were still there, in Gala. And even when I went there; I expected you. I think of you in Gala. Like myself. I’m in Gala, too. That was the time”—he drew first his lower lip under his teeth, then his upper lip. “Now I must rely on Simon Thabo.” Thabo was Provincial Minister for Gala. “You can’t talk to him, James. If I send for him he says to me, don’t concern yourself, Mr. President, everything is under control. You know how some Africans are, James, you know how we are? He has certain ways of saying things, certain words he repeats. And he always talks in English, the special English he learnt at that public administration course run by the mission down in Zambia. I say to him, don’t tell me what the police chief said, saluting in front of you, don’t tell me that. Tell me what people said, what you heard. … I could get more from five minutes’ talk with you, James, than I get from all his reliable sources and what—not.”

  Bray thought of the boy who had been locked up, while he was living in the house with the fig tree less than five miles from the prison. “I’m in the dark.”

  “Thabo is not a person you can talk to,” said Mweta. “With you there, I … I know that whatever you say to me, you have this country”—his fingers knocked at his breast— “inside—and you will see, you will see, I can’t let personal feelings in this. And you won’t either. I have to know what’s happening there. From someone who understands.”

  —Shinza. Shinza. “I didn’t even know that Lebaliso had people in jail,” Bray said.

  “It’s a big country. Impossible to prevent these things. Little policemen feeling big. We will learn.” He meant it, in spite of his Detention Act. Bray watched him. He said, in a rush, “James, we are disappointing you. Good God.” Bray sheltered for a moment, like a match alight between his palms, an idiotic vanity; conscious that it was so: prime ministers and presidents as confrères now, and still he turns this way. To me. Mweta was saying, “You must help us, James. We need you, just like always.” That’s why he is where he is; the politician’s unfailing instinct for taking up the advantage he’s put you at. Bray was fascinated, as a man who knows he has had a lot to drink does not realize that the judgement is arrived at under the influence. He answered what was not at issue; Mweta could regard it as a code: “If only this education thing of mine makes sense.” And Mweta let him talk. “After all, I’m not an expert, I go by what I see to be necessary, a very home—made pragmatism, and the shortcomings of education as I know it. Must it be a white—collar affair? Do the lake people need to produce lawyers? What about literate fishermen, able to run their own cooperative from top administration to control of spawning grounds? If we’ve got nothing, if we’re starting from scratch, then can’t we escape the same old educational goals? I wish I knew more. I feel the answer lies somewhere in educational techniques as much as in organization. I don’t know enough about them.”

  The talk turned to the fishing communities Bray had visited. Bray criticized the terms of the new concession without further mention of the boy who had been detained for doing so, and Mweta listened with that flickering of the eyelids of a man to whom words are whips, blows, and weapons, taken on the body and given on the bodies of others. He agreed that the concession was hardly an improvement on colonial times, so far as direct benefit to the fishermen was concerned, but argued that the increased royalty made it worth while. “Five years, James. Five years is nothing. By then we’ll be in a much better position to take over the fishing industry not as an isolated thing, but as part of the whole development of the lake country. I’m hoping for a fifteen—million loan or a new road up there, some of the money coming from the company itself, and the rest from the countries the company represents. Then none of our surplus fish will go up the lake for small profits, but down here and to the markets in the South.”