A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Out in the street women’s organizations in various quasi—uniforms—the only uniform thing about their dress was its combination of red—and-black PIP colours—sang full strength. One of the Young Pioneer groups had a tea—chest band going. Now and then, shouting Party slogans, holding their flags and banners tottering above people’s heads, these celebrants surged into the foyer and made it impossible for lobbying delegates to make themselves heard, or for traffic to move up- and downstairs to where the secretarial committee responsible for the agenda sat in the mezzanine. Press cameras rose like periscopes out of the crush; flash bulbs puffed and caught faces in sudden lightning. A countering surge of impatience rather than the efforts of Party stewards sent the singers and chanters giddying back into the street among children, icecream tricycles, and the motorcycles of the police.

  The heat of October—the white settlers used to call it suicide month—held siege outside, but the Luxurama was air—conditioned; in this refrigerator smelling of smoke and chewing gum Bray heard every word fall, suddenly clear of the noise and thick—headed humidity. Mweta walking in to give his opening address matched the mood of confidence Bray felt all around in the quick eyes white against black faces, the tense composure of people who hold ready within them, untouched as yet by any blight of counter opinion, the speeches they have prepared, the points they are going to send home. And Shinza was up there somewhere on the stage among the Executive and Central Committees; slowly the face detached itself; the beard, the way of looking up easily, not out into the auditorium but to one side, as if some invisible confidences were being made to his inclined ear. There he was.

  Mweta’s tunic had the variation of a small—patterned scarf in the neck; it made a reddish blur from a distance under the lights of the stage, and made one aware of his face among all others even when one was not looking at him. His skin shone; he was healthy and handsome. He began by speaking in his warmly confidential way of the instability of the government machine which was taken over less than a year ago, with the repatriation of the colonial administrative staffs greatly increasing an already chronic shortage of manpower. The country’s skills always had been largely provided by expatriates because the colonial power had “thought it unnecessary” to develop the skills of the local population—that was the well—known policy of colonialism. “We were not ‘prepared’ for independence by the white man and when we fought for it and won, we took our country into our bare hands.” From the very first day the fact had been faced that much of the administration and skilled labour would have to continue to be done by expatriates—with the difference that “we are the employers, and they are our employees, now: we pay the piper and call the tune.” Considering this difficult, this dangerous, this precarious state of the country when it fell at last into the hands of its rightful owners, how did it look now?

  Mweta broke off and looked out and around into tiers of spread knees and faces that he must have been able to half—see in the dimness of the house lights beyond the glare that enveloped him on the stage. He bared his face, a Sebastian to many arrows. And seemed to pluck them, harmless, from his flesh, in advance: yes, there had been certain difficulties, labour troubles in industry and public works, all of which were really the direct consequence of the colonial legacy, the problems shelved and shirked under colonialism, always put aside for another day. “That day is ours”—he switched suddenly to his football—stadium, mass—meeting voice, so that for a moment it was too much for the microphone, and the phrase flew back and forth about the walls— “that day is ours and it has to be dealt with by us just as if the government had created those problems instead of inheriting them. It is easy to please people for the time being, to put something into their hands and send them away happy—for a little while. But what happens when they come back with hands outstretched again, and this time you have nothing to offer, because you have strained the country’s economy beyond its resources?” The needs of economic development, at this stage, must prevail over all others. The welfare of the country as a whole was what the government had in mind when it did not, could not and would not accede to the demands of the mineworkers, which were not based on the economy of an independent, developing country, but harked back to the economy that had existed in colonial times. It was understandable that this confusion could arise in the minds of the workers … and of course in this country everywhere there were individuals ready to take advantage of the confusion for their own ends. But “the PIP government has to stand tall and look over the heads of its people.” The PIP government was settling industrial disputes in the way that served the long—term interests of the workers better than they perhaps could realize—in fact in their best possible interests, as well as those of the country as a whole. “During the European war, the British government in the U.K. took special measures, including forbidding the right to strike, in order to keep up industrial output. We are at war, too—with the underdevelopment of our country, with backwardness and poverty. I will never take the easy way out, if it means losing that war. I will never put myself in the position where the people of this country must be turned away empty—handed.”

  On the last syllable of the high—sounding phrase he produced his usual trick of confronting himself with another concrete accusation—there had been another problem that had had to be dealt with in these first few months. He had given a full statement to the nation at the time, but of course he would always regard it as a special responsibility to account to the Party for what was done in the Party’s name. A Preventive Detention Bill had been introduced; a measure to put a stop to any underhand attempts to throw the country off balance at the time when it was still finding its feet. As he had already pointed out, in certain sections of the community impatience for the fruits of freedom could temporarily overcome the people’s natural good sense. They were then in danger of falling victim to those sly disruptive forces that appeared all over the new Africa, trying to persuade people to sabotage themselves. It was easy to fan grievances; easier than to satisfy them through hard work and the controlled and orderly growth of the country. “When we have built our state we shall be able to tolerate the quibblers and the plotters as harmless madmen and we won’t need preventive detention. It is a temporary measure for our new kind of state of emergency—an emergency not of unrest but of the necessity to get on with the job, unmolested by pests.”

  There had been a third problem, and this one also was not this country’s alone, but common to emergent Africa. Often there was instability and unrest in neighbouring states; stable and peaceful countries found themselves in the position of having to play host to refugees “of one kind and another.” These refugees knew perfectly well that they enjoyed the shelter of the country on the strict condition that they did not abuse it. No country could tolerate the presence of “plotting foreigners who violate the right of asylum by bringing arms into the country, and by using the ordinary, peaceful activities of the people as a cover for a traffic in weapons.” Fish trucks transporting food from the lake to the capital had been used in this way by refugees. He would not allow anyone to “conduct a war at our expense.” These people had been told to leave; and they could consider themselves lucky that they had not been tried in a court of law. The decision about whether such exiles should be tried for bringing in arms lay with the Attorney—General, and he would not fail to act if such incidents occurred again—other refugees could take note.

  In spite of “all these troubles we were heir to when we took over” the country’s prestige today stood high, both among its fellow African states and in the rest of the world, and, what was more important, the people could see their hopes taking shape in daily life. Africanization was going ahead. In the civil service, nearly half the customs officials were now African. African Provincial Officers had replaced all white District Commissioners. Sixteen African magistrates had been appointed. The command of the police force was in the hands of an African—a reflection of the unity and loyalty of the country
that he did not think any other new state could match. In two or three years, even the commander of the army would be “one of our own people.”

  A new Apprenticeship Bill would see that the private sector of industry played its part in training youth as artisans. Of course the biggest step forward had already been taken—in two years, under the training scheme that had been put into operation immediately with the cooperation of the mining companies, all labour in the mines up to the level of Mine Captain would be African. He was happy to be able to announce for the first time, to this Congress, that he had just been told that the Minister of Education and the Minister of Development and Planning had made successful arrangements for the International Labour Organization to set up a management—training project in the capital. The specific aim would be to train Africans to bridge managerial gaps in commerce and industry, and take over middle—level and senior jobs now held almost exclusively by foreigners. A further aim would be to help expand the economy by motivating more Africans into business. The project would last five years, at the end of which time the United Nations experts would have phased themselves out. The United Nations Special Fund would bear eighty—five per cent of the costs, and the government the remaining fifteen per cent.

  He had a way of waiting patiently for applause to end, his mind apparently already moved on ahead to what he was going to tell his audience next; but he gave a quick, wide smile of acknowledgement before he began to speak again. It was education now— “the whole position of education is being urgently reviewed with the object not only of making a full ten years’ schooling available to all children, but also of finding a new approach that will cut through the psychological barriers that colonial schools created in the education of our children by relating the learning process only to foreign cultures and putting the idea into their heads that they were being offered a smattering of something that didn’t really belong to them.” Then he turned to the development of natural resources—the successful negotiations for the vast hydro—electric scheme meant that “our children will know a life of plenty while we ourselves are still alive.” It also meant, since it was the joint project of two African states, that the country had taken the first important initiative in Pan—African cooperation, the building of a third world of African achievement, by Africans, for Africans, in Africa. In industry, the foreign mining companies’ investment over the next five years would be between thirty—five and forty million pounds. This was the answer to those people, still thinking in terms of dreams before independence became a concrete reality, who “talked nationalization” at this stage. There could be no talk of nationalization in an underdeveloped nation.

  He raised both palms to stem applause. This first Congress since the Party had come to power was perhaps the most important one in the Party’s history. PIP had become, in effect, the government, and was itself responsible for carrying out the mandate it had been given by the people—it was no longer in the position of putting pressure upon others to do this or that. This called for certain changes. The Party could no longer be set to perform the old functions, the old activities of the struggle for freedom—these had become outdated and wasteful in some instances. It must realign itself in accordance with the functions and activities of a party firmly in power, a party that was not not only the inspiration of the people, but the consolidation and backbone of the government it had put in power. This was the spirit in which, as President, as leader of the People’s Independence Party, he had called for this Congress so soon after Independence, sooner than the Presidents of most countries would have cared to report back. He knew that now, just as in the early days of the struggle for freedom, he would find the Congress vigorously adaptable, and ready to offer “the courage and collective wisdom of a truly African leadership gathered from every corner of the country.”

  The general applause first swamped the different currents of reaction. Then, as the various forms of applause became distinguishable from the general, they also became indicative of the differing forms of the reaction itself, as the instruments of an orchestra are indistinguishable in the crescendo in which they all are sounded, but can be identified when it dies down and some fall silent, while others sustain a theme or variation in which they at once become recognizable: the voice of the oboe, the collective plaint of the strings. Part of the hullabaloo was simply polite—everyone’s hands must be seen to move when the President has spoken—and died out, leaving the hard palms of a large section of enthusiasts to keep a heavy brass going, getting louder, backed by the muffled regular stamping of feet on the cinema carpet. This deafening, obliterating racket stirred the dust of an unrest in other sections; men who had been sitting merely resisting any show of accord since they had given their token acknowledgement of the speech, began to move about in their seats, to twist their heads around them, to surge subterraneously towards another solidarity, in opposition.

  Bray rested his neck back against his seat for a moment. The air—conditioned spaces were filled with turmoil like the wheeling and counterwheeling of birds. He had the impulse to make contact; to spin a filament between himself and Roly Dando, sitting up there on the stage with his arms akimbo and his ankles crossed under the conference table, the position he had taken up in unconscious defensiveness at the moment when Mweta had referred to his powers as Attorney—General. (Like a member of a private bodyguard, a thug; little Dando.) —Or to catch Mweta himself, straight in the eyes, believing for a moment that Mweta could make him, Bray, out, from that distance. The few remarks about an education plan were almost word for word what he had written to Mweta; they came back to him from the public rostrum, an oblique claim on his anonymous presence there in the crowd. The Secretary—General—Justin Chekwe was Secretary—General of PIP as well as Minister of Justice—was beginning the interminable business of welcoming and introducing representatives of political parties who had come from other countries as observers. Spatters and squalls of applause followed the names: enthusiasm for the TANU man from Tanzania, the UNIP man from Zambia; a half—hearted acknowledgement for the Nasser delegation with their cropped crinkly shining hair, pleasant smiles and trancelike squinting gaze—the country people did not know quite who they were and for many of the others who did, they were too Left to be given the accolade. In the usual way, Mweta was elected President of the Congress and it was moved that the election of the Party President, office bearers and committees would be held at the final session.

  Attention had drawn in momentarily as this formality was gone through: it was as though everyone ran his mind’s eye over the limits of the battleground, confirmed in the contours of time. Two and a half days in which to persuade, to rally, to group and regroup, trade favours, call in old scores and tot up new ones. In the pale—nailed dark hands scribbling notes and the unctuous, closed, hearty, determined or uncertain faces were embodied all the intentions gathered from townships, villages, lake, flood plains, road—side stalls, Freedom Bars, that cohere slowly in the interstices of daily life. Between ploughing, drinking, herding, labouring, loafing, dreaming on rush mats or iron bedsteads, arguing in wattle—and-mud church halls, lounging over pin—ball machines and planning over second—grade clerks’ ledgers, the formulation comes into being. I want. You want. He wants. We want. They want. The conjugation of human will. Because of it some of these heads about him were lit up within with a private scene in which this face ousted that and this name took away from that a prefix of office. Somewhere in the agenda there was the plan of campaign to be decided; he had some idea of it in advancehe must have a proper look before the sessions started in earnest. Already, while other formalities of procedure were being got out of the way, Mweta’s address was being sifted away into this memory and that—slotted, categorized, the intention extracted and the verbiage discarded. What was Shinza making of it? A thickly built man beside Shinza hid him from view most of the time.

  At the lunch break Bray hung about near one of the fish tanks; his white face couldn’t be misse
d anyway. The delegates had the gaiety of boys let out of school before work has even begun; no one got farther than the chatter of the foyer. Several old PIP campaigners came up to greet him—Albert Konoko, once treasurer (not an entirely honest one but he was long ago relieved of the post and the early “irregularities” forgotten), old Reverend Kawira from the Ravanga district with his stick and his dog—eared briefcase, Joshua Ntshali, the mayor of Gala— “We should have made arrangements to come down together—why didn’t you give me a tinkle? Plenty of room in my car—some cold beer, too”—the one or two Indians who survived at delegation—level from the small band who had supported PIP openly from the beginning. People threw cigarette ends in the tank and with his rolled—up agenda he lifted out one at which a fish had begun to nibble. “Poor fish.” Shinza stood there. Shinza was good at private jokes derived from other people’s absent moments. “You know Basil? Basil Nwanga.” He had with him the heavy young man with the tiny hippo ears who had almost run Bray over outside the House of Assembly one day. They recognized each other, grinning. “I heard him put his word in, in the House, not long ago.” Nwanga went off after a few moments with the air of one who had been curious for an introduction, got it, and knows he mustn’t intrude. “Are you going to eat?” Bray said.