“That’s a very grand affair.”
Shinza was grinning, coming in to Bray’s greeting. “Well, in those days you were generous to your Tribal Authority, you know. Chief Mpana was one of your big men.”
“So you married Chief Mpana’s daughter?”
“You know her, you’ve met her!” Shinza put his hand on the head of the dog, murmuring something admiring to it, and it growled and wagged its feather—boa tail.
“Yes indeed I have, she’s a charming girl. You’re lucky.”
“The car’s not in all that good condition.” Shinza laughed, sat himself down and glanced with a guest’s mild interest round Boxer’s room, seeing it as one of those white men’s lairs that even he, who had lived in Europe and America, sometimes found inexplicable.
“How is she? And the son?”
“It was nice of you to come and see her.”
“Unfortunately you’d gone out to get cigarettes.”
Shinza’s flash—a gap—grin of admittance, mutual acceptance—at once converted the casual atmosphere to another voltage. He waited while Bray poured the beer, but with an air of having got down to the ground between them. “That hasn’t been worrying me.” Bray made a face questioning the wisdom of such trust. “I know I had nothing to worry about. But I wanted to have a talk with you—you know, I want to tell you a few things, I want to show you—” He closed his teeth under open lips, his hands round the beer mug made, half—comically, a gesture of directing an invisible head to face something. “That’s all. A lot of things we decided a long time ago. Not only in London. Before that, right at the beginning, eh, here at home. What’s happening to all that, eh? What’s happening to it, James?”
His voice mastered the questions rhetorically. The half—insulting, preoccupied reserve that had discounted Bray’s presence when they talked in the house in the Bashi might never have existed. Now an old intimacy was taken for granted just as easily as it had been taken for dead. Shinza could move among examples, anecdotes, and private thoughts without bothering about sequence, because the links were there, in Bray’s mind as in his own. He accused, demanded, derided—speaking for them both. “Kayira sits in the House of Chiefs—that old criminal who raped a child a few years ago and told the judge it was his right as a chief. Those ignorant old men were going to be stripped of their ‘rights,’ of all their forms of parasitism, and made to stand on merit—but have you heard a mention of abolishing the House of Chiefs? No, you’ve only heard that the House is going to be enlarged so that those fat men in blue suits can spread themselves comfortably. —Painted, you know. Made nice. Mweta still talks about the need to forget tribal differences—that’s how it’s put now, you don’t say abolish tribalism because you might make the fat old men shake—but all the time he’s improving the House of Chiefs. Because they’re going to sit there—as long as he’s where he is. Mweta likes to make speeches about the time when we each had only one pair of pants—the trouble is, he doesn’t remember that we also knew, then, what we wanted. We were going to make this country over from top to bottom. Right? Turn the whole thing over, just like you kick an anthill, and make new lives for all those people running about not understanding where they were going. Right, James? But what are the signs? Reginald Harvey tells him that unless the gold price rises the company can’t think of opening marginal—production mines, and he takes it without a word. Well, not without a word, Harvey’s got plenty of words, Harvey’s only got to mention that the company can get a far bigger return by expansion in South Africa, and he falls over backwards to say how he appreciates what a favour the company’s doing by earning dividends here at all. But was that the idea! —Oh yes, I know, within two years all work up to the level of mine captain will be Africanized. So what? What sort of windowdressing is that if new jobs are not being created at the same time. We move up into the seats of the expatriate whites, and go on earning dividends for them when they go back ‘home’ to retire? Was that the idea? Christ, James, what were we talking about all those years, if it was for this? He handles the English and Americans like glass—because we need foreign capital. But if you keep going to the old places for it you keep on getting it on the same old terms. A child should be able to see that. And the profits are geared to their economies, not ours. The great new sugar scheme we’ve heard so much about—what’s it amount to? They’ll get sugar at a preferential price, while we could be growing rice instead and getting a better price in the open market. We’re exporting our iron ore at their price and buying back their steel at their price. We’re still selling our cotton and buying their cloth—the Czechs offered to send us the technical aid for a textile mill, but the tied loan he got from the Japanese for the cotton gin stipulates they get the whole crop. So we’re back where we were. Wearing the cloth they make and sell back to us. We could have had the same as Nyerere’s got—a textile mill as well as our cotton gin, a textile mill set up by the Chinese, all the know—how we want, and the whole thing financed interest—free. What’s he afraid of? He’ll only play the game with the devil he knows, eh? Apart from one or two big schemes that aren’t off the paper yet, and a couple of bad new contracts for the expansion of existing industry, like the deal with the fishing concessionaires, a useless thing if ever there was one, a mess—apart from that, what’ve we got?—The Coca—Cola bottling plant and a factory for putting transistors from Germany into plastic cases, because our labour’s cheaper than Europe’s, and they get a bigger profit when we buy the radios? Are we only educating our people to need the things they sell? Good God, are we to pass from exporting raw materials only to bottling, assembling—never making?”
“It’s a slow start, yes.”
“A start! Where’s it headed for?” Shinza waited as if for the echo to die away. “It’s not the start we planned at all. He’s forgotten! Forgotten what this country meant to do. What we promised. Bush politicians’ big promises. Now let them bottle cold drinks while they wear out their freedom shirts.” He gave a bellow of a laugh. “Couldn’t you sit down and cry?” he said. “James, couldn’t you howl like a bloody dog?”
“Shinza, I suppose I’m naturally more detached about it than you—” And then in the raw atmosphere Shinza had stripped down between them, he said aloud what he was thinking— “It’s a terrible clarity you have … you know … ? But perhaps it’s easy … perhaps you expect too much too quickly, because you’re not in the dust that’s raised, you haven’t had to do any of it—I see that in myself now that I’m stuck with this education project. Mweta’s had only a few months.”
“—Yes, and the twenty per cent of the budget that was going to go into education, how does it look so far? You’re penny—pinching to get anything done, eh? Meantime another thirty thousand kids are starting to draw their sums in the dirt in our so—called schools. And soon another fifteen thousand youths will leave half—baked and wander off to the towns.”
“It won’t be more than twelve per cent of the budget, certainly.”
“A few months! James, we know that a few months is a long time for us. PIP has become a typical conservative party—hanging on wherever he can to ties with the old colonial power, Western—orientated, particularist. It’s a text—book example. His democracy turns out to be the kind that guards the rights of the old corporate interests more than anyone else’s—the chiefs, religious organizations, precolonial nations. Foreign interests. All that lot. In seven months you show which way you’re going. It’s right from the start or it’ll be never. Look around you. This continent, this time. You don’t get years and years, you don’t get second chances.”
It was said coldly, an accomplished fact; and yet also a strange mixture of threat and concern. At the same time as his argument carried Bray with him, the presence of Bray brought out in him an old responsibility for Mweta.
“I don’t agree he’s done as badly as you think. But the general direction—”
Shinza was watching him, fishing a cigarette out of the sagging breast poc
ket of the holiday shirt made of Japanese cotton, and the recognition of the admittance he had drawn from Bray—now appearing—grew beneath the control of his face as Bray was speaking.
“—The way he’s going, I’m inclined to agree about that.” Bray made a gesture of impatient self—dismissal. “I’m sure it’s not the way it should be. If you and he meant everything—then. I must judge by what was visualized then. The sort of state you had in mind, that I believed you to have in mind when I”—his voice disowned him, as it always did, fastidiously, when it came to defining his part in a struggle he did not claim his own— “decided to go along with you. It’s true—what you were absolutely clear about was that coming to power wasn’t going to be a matter of multiplying the emancipated, while the rest of the people remained a class of affranchised slaves—” He referred with a smile to the phrases from Fanon. “It’s never been put better.”
“—That’s been forgotten. And something else we got from Fanon: ‘The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’”
“I don’t remember … ?”
“Look it up,” said Shinza. “Look it up.”
“It’s a long time since I read him. —I wonder now if you were clear enough in your minds about how to go about getting what we were so sure you wanted. The less simple objectives remained very much in a sort of private debate between you and Mweta—”
“—And you,” Shinza said.
“—A handful of others, not even a handful. It couldn’t be helped. Everything was hell—bent on the business of organizing PIP purely and simply as a force that would get independence. How many people could be expected to see beyond that. Well it’s an old story, not worth discussion—one of the results of the policy we”—he was suddenly speaking of himself as part of the colonial administration— “had of discouraging political parties until such time as they burst forth as mass movements—and then in due course they could be counted upon to become potentially violent and could be banned in the interests of law and order .… But the effect was to make parties like PIP miss out the vital stage of their function as political schools and ideological debating forums, a means of formulating the blind yearning to have into something that would hold good beyond the”—his hand spiralled through the air— “grand anticlimax of paper freedom. That really wasn’t touched on—a practical means of taking hold not of the old life out of the white man’s hands, but a new kind of life that hasn’t yet been. It just wasn’t touched on. Only among ourselves. And at the back of the minds of even the most intelligent and reasonable people there’s a vague intoxication of loot associated with seeing the end of foreign rule. Loot of one kind or another … it doesn’t have to be smashing shopwindows, you know. Even the imponderables can be loot. ‘We’ll shop around when the time comes.’”
“Maybe.” Shinza made the concession of one who does not agree. “Maybe I should blame myself. I should have seen.”
“What could you have done, with things as they were?”
“I should have seen what he was.”
Bray gave a little snort of a laugh. “I always say the same thing. It always comes round to the same thing. It should have been both of you. It was the two of you. One didn’t know what originated with which one—of course always granting the influence of your trade union experience. One couldn’t foresee how he would develop after a split. Or how you would, for that matter.”
“I’ve always known what we were going to do. Nothing’s changed at all with me. I was just too damned lazy, I suppose … you’ve got to give yourself a kick in the backside sometime.” He put his hands behind his head, smiling, making his words ambiguous by the easy gesture.
“You definitely don’t consider starting a new party?”
Shinza was shaking his head before the words were out. “I’ve told you. PIP is this country—just as he says, PIP made it. Everything must come from PIP. He would like a purified party, of course, degutted like the bloody fishing concession. PIP is the party I started.”
“It was meant as a leading question,” Bray said.
“I don’t hide from you. You see it all exactly as I do, you haven’t changed either, it’s just you’ve got the same polite nice way of speaking you always had, really nice, covering it up … James! But if you had to choose between Mweta and what happens to this country—Good God!”
“He said more or less the same to me.” It was dryly, gently set aside; he smiled.
“With one essential difference, of course, whatever he decides for this country must be right.” Shinza stretched his toes like fingers and clenched the leather button that held each sandal.
“No, no—just the implication that I would do what is usually known as ‘anything’—in other words, something that went against my grain—because it might help.” Still the old maid, setting the mats straight, he thought.
“Help? What?” said Shinza. “To hold the country together almost exactly as it was before? To keep the sort of status quo the Europeans call stability—the stability of overseas investment, the stability of being so poor your feast comes once a year when the caterpillars hatch on the mopane? But we want an instability, James, we want an instability in the poverty and backwardness of this country, we want the people at the top to be a bit poorer for a few years now, so that the real, traditional, rock—bottom poverty, the good old kind that ‘never changes’ in Africa, can be broken up out of its famous stability at last, at long, long last, dragged up from the shit—”
How demandingly, alive, they both reached out—he and Mweta. Bray said, “I must tell you, he may have some idea about your going over the border. He mentioned something—before I came to see you again. I didn’t take much notice at the time.”
“Borders! Doesn’t mean anything in the Bashi,” Shinza said. “People are wandering over after their goats, every day. You forget we’re the same people on both sides.”
“If I can imagine what you’re doing there, it’s reasonable that he may.”
Shinza was drawing and swallowing smoke with absent appetite. Once a cigarette was lit it remained in the side of his mouth until it burned down to his lips.
Bray said, “What’s it all about—Somshetsi and Nyanza?”
“The usual thing, in exile.” The glance held, direct, as if to prevent Bray’s mind from venturing off this chosen interpretation of the question. “They haven’t been getting on too well .… Nyanza’s always been a pretty easy—going chap, sitting back and waiting for the fruit to fall. When Mweta said go, he just went straight to Somshetsi”—he jerked his bearded chin—” ‘pack up’; never occurred to him to make a bit of fuss, to let a few friends know .… I mean they could have played for time, there could have been denials, protests to the High Commissioner for refugees at U.N. —”
They grinned. “Considering the way they were scrupulously observing the conditions of hospitality,” Bray said; and waved his own provision aside.
Shinza said matter—of-factly, “Well, that’s about it. Somshetsi thinks Nyanza will just make himself comfortable wherever he gets pushed off to next. Somshetsi wants to get going. He doesn’t see himself dying in bed with the grandchildren round. Of course there’s help to be found if you show you’re moving.”
“Not much you can do if you’re the width of a whole country away.”
“No, that’s true.” Shinza agreed with detachment.
“I can see what you can offer—promise—Somshetsi, but I don’t quite see what he has worth offering you.”
There was the understanding between them of people who are both lying; Shinza’s flexed bare yellow toes with their thick, uncut nails; the silence, strangely easy. With tremendous effort to break free: “Unless you’re thinking of going in for a guerrilla war.”
“And then?”
It was being drawn out of him; Shinza wouldn’t say it for himself. “I suppose—you could give him a leg up over the border, he could bring the arms from outside, you could do things together. Just as the South African and
the Rhodesian guerrillas do, through Zambia. Only more successfully, I should think. It would depend whether you’re prepared to use violence.”
Shinza’s head nodded, hearing a lesson by rote. Then he said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.”
Perhaps he referred to the hopelessness of starting a new party, perhaps—he gave a half—comic shudder—he implied that he couldn’t win a guerrilla war if he were so unwise as to start one.
“You’re going to turn up at the Party Congress?”
“Turn up? It sounds like a dance hall.” He rose from the base of the spine, straight—backed. “I’m on the Executive. Still. I’m going to be there.”
“Bravo!”—How easily I fall whichever way he aims.
“And you’re going to be there?”
The answer came pat, in the same mood. “I’m a Party member. I suppose I still am? But of course I don’t belong to any delegation I know of.”
“Oh he’ll see to that. You remind him.” Shinza said in a satisfied way that made Bray uneasy, “Good God, I wanted to talk to you, you know, James? It’s all right, all right. I knew it would be all right. You can’t be fooled.”
“Shinza, I just have a—well—mad hope. About the Congress. You may be able to do something about the—direction. That’s the place.”
“Well, come and see. Come and give us a hand.” Shinza was not good at being hearty; he gave his smoker’s wheezy laugh at himself. “Come and be frog—marched out with me, it’ll be like the old days.”
The dog had got up and stood swaying its plumes in the veranda doorway. Boxer appeared, making his approach exaggeratedly forewarned by grunting as he mounted the steps, sighing and whew—ing; the dog was puzzled. Boxer spoke to the black man sitting in his living-room with the offhand, demonstrable ease of one whose forms of intimacy, if they exist, are thereby defined as something far removed from this. “You flourishing, Shinza? Of course. What’s the grass been like this year? Of course, you’re bored by cattle, I know. But your father—in-law—he must have a nice five or six hundred head, eh? One never can get at the figure. But those chaps down there have got sizeable herds, all right. I wouldn’t mind a share. Was there much redwater this year? It’s been a bugger, here. I’ve lost fifteen or sixteen of my beasts.”
A Guest of Honour Page 31