A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “The fishermen have to wait.”

  Mweta said, at one with him, “I know. But that’s what we are having to do all the time—strike a balance. I don’t want anybody to have to wait a whole generation, that’s all. That’s the aim I set for us.”

  “The pity is that there will be preventive detention to deal with impatience.”

  “James,” Mweta said. He was seated again; he leant forward and put his hand on Bray’s big knee. “It will not be used for that. I promise you. It was not intended for that.” He sat back. His face shone like the faces of black schoolchildren Bray had seen, tense with effort and enlightenment.

  Bray felt the corruption of experience; perhaps things happen here as they do because we bring from the old world this soiled certitude that makes anything else impossible. He said, “Once the law is there, there’s no way of not using it.”

  In the old days they would have sat down to stew and bread and strong tea supplied by Joy, or not eaten at all until there was time for such a meal, but Mweta must have had to accept along with the turning of night into day on planes and the suitability of any hour as a working hour, the stodgy snacks that fuelled that sort of life. They had sandwiches and coffee on a tray; washing down the triangles of bread like labourers they discussed Mweta’s ministers, Mweta confiding doubts and Bray making observations that neither would speak of to anyone else. Mweta still wanted Talisman Gwenzi for Finance, he was a better economist than Jason Malenga and generally much shrewder, but who else would there be for Mines who understood as Gwenzi did that looking after Mines was purely a matter of a grasp of international finance, on the one hand, and handling local labour relations on the other—it wasn’t a knowledge of ores and mining techniques the Minister needed, all that was the affair of the companies. “If I had two more Gwenzis!” Mweta said enviously, “Just two more!” “One for Finance and one for Foreign Affairs, eh?” “That’s it.” And Gwenzi had pushed ahead the Africanization ideal magnificently—and put the onus on the companies. In two years, through intensive training courses devised and taught by the companies, all labour up to the level of Mine Captain would be African. Mweta swallowed his coffee. “A few years ago we weren’t even trusted to use dynamite down there.” They both laughed. “—Of course there may have been other reasons for that.” “Last time I was here Phiri was talking about training people for mining administration at the School of Further Education.” “The trouble is once you start a course like that, you’re going to get a lot of teachers resigning from the ordinary schools. They’ve got the basic education to qualify—and of course what an administrative job on the mines will pay compared with what you’ll get as a teacher … I think something like a Mine Secretary would get twice as much as a school headmaster … ? We can’t afford to drain our resources in one place to fill up in another.” “The best thing to do would be to channel people off at high—school level—have scholarships for the school—leavers to go on to the course at F.E., just as you have scholarships for teacher—training.”

  Mweta crunched a paper napkin into a ball and aimed it at the wastepaper basket. “Time, again, time. In the meantime, we’ve got to keep the Englishmen.” Mweta called all white men Englishmen: South Africans, Rhodesians, Kenyans, and others who sold their skills up and down Africa. “Talk to Phiri about it, though, it’s an idea.”

  Mweta’s mind moved among problems like the attention of a man in charge of a room full of gauges and dials whose wavering needles represent the rise and fall of some unseen force—pressure, or electricity. He spoke now of the move he had taken a few weeks before, the surprise expulsion of the leader in exile and group of refugees from the territory adjoining the western border of the country. These people had been living in the country since before Independence; in fact, one of the first things he had done when he got responsible government as a preliminary to Independence was to insist that Jacob Nyanza, David Somshetsi, and their followers be given asylum. He couldn’t receive them officially, for fear of the reactions from their country; but they had a camp, and an office in the capital, financed by various organizations abroad who favoured their cause. Outwardly, he maintained normal though not warm relations with the president of their country (there was an old history of distrust between them, dating from the days when Mweta and Shinza were seeking support from African countries for their independence demands); from time to time there had been statements from President Bete vaguely threatening those “brother” countries which sheltered their neighbours’ “traitors.” Mweta explained how it had become impossible to let Nyanza and Somshetsi stay. Of course, he had publicly denied President Bete’s assertion that Nyanza and Somshetsi were acquiring arms and preparing to use the country as a base for guerrilla raids on their home country. … He turned to Bray, pausing; Bray gestured the inevitability. “They didn’t care any more” Mweta said. “They didn’t even take the trouble to conceal anything. Nyanza flew in and out and there were pictures of him in French papers, shaking hands all round in Algiers. They kept machine guns in the kitchen block the Quakers built for them at the camp—yes, apparently there were just some potatoes piled up, supposed to be covering—” He and Bray had a little burst of tense laughter. “So there was nothing else I could do.”

  Bray took out a cigar and held it unlit between his lips. And so Nyanza and Somshetsi had had to move on, over the border to the next country, to the north—east, a country which was not part of the new economic federation which was about to link their country and Mweta’s.

  “I saw Jacob Nyanza. Nobody knows. I saw him before they went. He was always a more reasonable chap than Somshetsi.” Mweta stopped; of course, he would have hoped that Nyanza, if not Somshetsi, would understand. But apparently it had not been so. Bray lit the cigarillo and Mweta followed the draws that burgeoned the blunt head into fire. He did not smoke or drink: influence of the Presbyterian mission where he had gone to school. “You saw what Tola Tola had to say at Dar-es-Salaam?” Bray’s lips opened and closed regularly round the cigar. He nodded.

  “It was good, eh?”

  Bray said, smoke curling round the words, “One of the best speeches there.”

  “This morning there’s a call to say he’s going to Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki.” In the House some of Mweta’s most important front—benchers had questioned the expenditure of the Foreign Minister on travel and produced a log—book of his journeys, showing that since Independence he had been in the country for only a matter of weeks. “Yes, if I had another Gwenzi,” he said. “Albert is busy broadening the mind, isn’t that what you say. If someone invited him to drink a glass of iced water at the North Pole, he’d go. It’s very difficult for me to do anything. He gives me his good reasons … you know? And of course he is capable. They listen to him—” He meant in the world outside. Albert Tola Tola was also an Mso, the only one with a key cabinet post; what Mweta really was discussing was the fact that Tola Tola, capable or no, could not be replaced without betraying the electoral pact with the Mso, and could not be kept without agitation from Mweta’s men looking for a good reason to have him out. And beneath this tacit acceptance of facts was another that could not be taken for granted—if Tola Tola were given another portfolio, did Mweta believe that he would become one of the ants? Did Mweta fear there was a possibility of a disaffected Tola Tola being drawn to discuss his grievances with others—Neil Bayley had mentioned the Minister of Development and Planning, Paul Sesheka, Moses Phahle, and Dhlamini Okoi. Tola Tola was a brilliant man; sophistication had taught him the showmanship of the common touch as a formidable substitute for what Mweta had naturally.

  Bray was able now to talk about the Bashi Flats as an issue apart from the question of Shinza—Shinza or no Shinza, there must be roads, there must be an energetic move to make the Bashi less like another country in comparison with the area round the capital and the mines. “The trouble is there’s nothing there,” Mweta said.

  “No, nothing in terms of what is exploitable, what’s
attractive to foreign capital. But the people, Mweta.”

  “Unless there’s a mineral discovery of some kind—there’s a geological survey due out there in the next few months, Swedes—the only thing is cattle. And even then. I mean they come down on the hoof—what slaughter cattle there is.”

  The Flats were one of the few parts of the country not infested with tsetse fly, the carrier of the cattle disease trypanosomiasis, but cattle were used mainly in the traditional way, as a form of wealth and capital possession within the tribes. Bray said, “You’ll have to change all that. Get beef cattle—raising going there on a commercial basis. Then you’ll be able to stop importing meat from the South. And it’ll be uneconomic to have the stuff coming down on the hoof—you’ll have a good reason for building roads.”

  Mweta began to make notes of their conversation. “I want to come out there with you and have a good look round. I’ll fly to Gala next month some time and we’ll go up. And then later in the year we’ll go to the lake. Perhaps I can bring Joy and the kids, if Olivia’s there they can have a holiday for a few days while you and I—there’s that house for me, you know, I’ve never seen the place—” The fishing company had presented the President with a “lodge” on the lake, at the time of Independence. “In the meantime, James, you will write to me, ay? A letter every now and then. Let me hear. We mustn’t lose touch.”

  He insisted that Bray stay in the capital for the rest of the week. “You’ll come to the dinner. The one with the white businessmen. I’ll tell Asoni.” Mweta threw back his head and his shoulders heaved loose with laughter. “You know what they wanted to know? If they must build a special lavatory for me.” Years before, when some minor royalty came to the territory, PIP had made political capital out of such unpromising material as a “comfort station” for the Royal Highness, quick to point out that this small building cost more than the type of house provided for an African family down in the native town. While they laughed Bray remembered it was Shinza’s idea; Shinza had a sure instinct for the concrete issue, however unimportant, and knew how to make his opponents look absurd as well as reprehensible.

  When he got back to the Silver Rhino and went to the reception desk for his key, he stood there, the man who finds himself on stage in the middle of a play he knows nothing about: Hjalmar Wentz and his daughter were passing and repassing one another excitably in the cage formed by counter, desk, and safe. Hjalmar faltered, greeted Bray, but the girl was in a high passion: “Just wish to Christ you wouldn’t go on about the war of the generations, that’s all. Things you read in the English papers. It’s got nothing to do with the generations.” Hjalmar’s thin—skinned blond face was red along the cheekbones and under the streaks of yellow hair on the dome of his forehead. Her black eyes shone with the glitter of an oil—flare on night water, her breathing sucked hollows above her collar—bones. She shuffled a pile of letters together and walked out; Bray caught the musky whiff of anger as she lifted the flap of the counter and exposed her little shaved armpit, licked with sweat.

  Emmanuelle had heard about her parents’ plan to ask Ras Asahe to intervene on their behalf with the brewery. “God knows who told her,” her father said, and Bray saw that Hjalmar must have told many people besides himself. The impossible thing was that she wasn’t angry because they’d thought of using Asahe, but because they had hesitated to do so, been afraid to suggest it to her … she was furious about that. She had raged at them for “driving everybody crazy” when they knew all along something could be done. She had said to her father, “Your scruples make me want to vomit.” He said to Bray, “Of course children must assert themselves, it’s inevitable, and in each generation the form that opposition takes is always impossible for parents to understand.”

  Bray had heard the girl’s reaction to that. He said, “You’ll be able to go ahead and see what you can do through Ras Asahe, anyway,” but he was aware that the practical aspect was something Hjalmar Wentz looked at without recognition now. The red faded patchily from his head as his hands touched about the familiar objects on the desk.

  The girl was doubled up in one of the sagging deck—chairs in the garden. Bray tried to walk quickly past so that she would not have to pretend not to see him, but she said, in the rough sulky voice of a child making amends for bad behaviour, at the same time unable to disguise her lack of interest in the trivial preoccupations of other people, “How was your shopping?”

  He stopped, to show that everything was all right between her and the world. “Oh I wasn’t looking for anything special, you know.”

  She was picking at some invisible irregularity beneath the skin of her upper arm, picking at it with her nail and then cupping her hand over the dark, smooth knob of her shoulder. She said, “They are ridiculous. Oh nice … but that doesn’t change it—ridiculous. They shouldn’t ever have come to live here—a gesture, that’s all. My father’s so romantic. Everything he’s ever done was a romance.” While she spoke she scratched at the grain of skin until whatever it was was lifted off, and a dark and brilliant eye of blood sprang against the flesh. She squinted down and put her mouth to it tenderly.

  Bray said, “Even Germany?”

  “Particularly Germany.” She kept sucking the blood and then looking at the place. “He can’t manage ordinary life at all, and she can’t stand that. And who blames her. What’s the point of shambling around from country to country. What’s the point of being saved from gas ovens, for that.”

  He laughed at her, but she suddenly became shocked at herself, if he would not be. “We’re such bloody yahoos, my brother and me. I’m just as bad, in my way. That’s another thing. My mother wrings her hands because we’ve grown up wild in Africa, so uncultured, without the proper intellectual training of the Europeans who wanted to murder her.”

  “And you think you’re wild?”

  “D’you think we’d survive, if we were like them.”

  There was this continual presence of people brushing against him, like so many cats weaving through his legs. And they were all so brimful of assertion and demand, eyes turned upon you, car doors banging, entrances and exits opening and closing the aperture of your attention as the pupil of an eye reacts to light and dark. The impulse to express this to someone glanced off with the flat remark to Vivien Bayley: “I hardly realized how solitary I’ve been.”

  Before he could get in touch with Roly Dando, Dando telephoned. “Didn’t get a wink of sleep the night you arrived, I hear.” Bray, standing in the veranda telephone booth beneath the picture of Mweta, on which scribbled numbers had encroached, smiled at the aggressive cackle. “I gather you haven’t lost any. The President tells me you and Chekwe did a good job.” “Oh bloody hell, Bray. I can always be counted on to do a good job. Not so bad as it would be if I hadn’t been here. That’s all I ask, lad. That’s as much as I expect of myself.”

  At dinner at his house, he said, “That’s how I’d define the function of the law in any country you’d like to name, today. That’s what the principle of justice has come to—you control how far the smash and grab goes. Settle for that. Better regularize it than allow the rule of law to be lopped off and carried aloft by the dancing populace, ay? So you have your immigrant quotas in Britain, so the British won’t turn on the blacks next door, and you have your censors back in the newspaper offices in Czechoslovakia, so the Russians won’t come back instead.” He drank a mixture of lemon juice, soda, and a white spirit in a bottle without a label. “Popococic gets it for me—slivovitz. The Yugoslav trade commissioner. Pure spirit’s less trying on the kidneys. That’s what’s really on my mind these days—believe me, your ideals only function when you’re healthy, they only give you any trouble when everything’s working well inside. I’ve got this damn prostate thing, getting up to pee every hour and if I’m caught out somewhere having to stand with one leg round the other to hold it in.” His face was petulant with dismay and consternation at a machine that refused to work properly. He had got thin; his voice, for the s
ize of that shrinking head, sounded bigger than ever. The old Labrador lay panting between them on the grass. At the bottom of the garden the gardener and a friend were playing chisolo on a board scratched out of the red earth, a gramophone screeching very faintly behind the urging grunts and cries with which the stone counters were encouraged to progress from one hole to another.

  “You can have an operation, Roly.” The twigs of the thorn—trees on the close horizon ran hair thin, jet and hard as if the pink sky had cracked intricately, like a piece of fine china.

  “Yes, I know, you wait and see what it’s like. I’d pack up and go off to sit on my arse somewhere, but what’s the point. All countries are the same. We’re all backward people. Might just as well stay put where I am instead of taking up a new lot.”

  “Whose idea was the Detention Bill?”

  Dando showed that the question was irrelevant: “Cyprian Kente’s I suppose. Has a lot of ideas. Or a gift for coming out with what others don’t want to be the first to say. Mweta has an unspoken thought, Kente brings it right out loud where it can’t be suppressed, you see.”

  Kente was the Minister of the Interior. “Mweta mentioned only you and Chekwe.”

  “Call in the scribes. We’ve got the right words. I was able to get in my word, anyway. There’s a clause that the Act’s got to come up for renewal every year. That’s my little clause.”

  The cicadas began a chorus of doorbells that no one would ever answer. Bray said, handling both Dando and himself gently, “And it will be renewed every year. Long after everyone’s forgotten quite what it was for in the first place.”

  “Well, wha’do I care. It’s my conscience clause, laddie. I put it there. The temptation of virtue, justice, if anyone should like to fall to it. Available. You see what I mean.” His cheek lifted with a twinge of inner discomfort. The Labrador got up slowly and put its snout on his knee, but was pushed away.