Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“She said, I blame myself. A Jewish father would have had some authority over his daughter. He would have seen that she was provided with a proper musical education. He would have found somewhere better for his children to live than buried in this place. A Jew would have done better.”

In the appalled silence the weak giggle spilt over, again. “I know I’m not well. But that’s true — she said it.” The terrible weak laughter was suddenly a fiercely embarrassed apology — not for himself, but for his wife.

“Poor Margot,” Bray said.

“I left all the keys, I left the van outside the bar, and I walked to the main road with my things. She was carrying a vase of flowers into the entrance and she saw me putting the keys down.”

I sometimes worry — he skipped the lines he had read before— You may be bored, now, in Wiltshire. And the place is looking so beautiful. I have come to love it more and more. It seems to me the only home I ever had, not excepting Dargler’s End. — Her father’s house. Olivia was one of those people who have had so happy a childhood that they cannot be thrown back into a state of insecurity, whatever else they may suffer.

“So you don’t get rid of me.”

“You stay, Hjalmar.”

“You don’t come out with a thing like that — just on the moment,” Wentz said. “She had been thinking it for years, eh?”

Rebecca appeared with her wet hair combed as it had been the first day she had come to the house, only now it was long. He got up oddly ceremoniously, his wife’s letter in his hand, and for the first time touched Rebecca in Hjalmar Wentz’s presence, lifting the wet hair and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m going to Malemba’s.” She sat down in the sun near Hjalmar with a bit of sewing; it was a dress for her little daughter and it lay in her lap for a moment under her eyes and Bray’s as the letter had done.

Rebecca and Hjalmar waved; he drove off down the road. The eldest Malemba boy was cementing the cracks in the concrete veranda of the Malemba house, and the younger children were standing about waiting for an opportunity to dabble in the mess. Sampson was still waiting for the house he had been promised when he became Provincial Education Officer; Bray had often remarked that the Malembas ought to have the house he had been given, but Sampson, in whom courtliness always took precedence over right, refused to hear of it. Sampson took him into the little living-room with its framed school certificates and palette-shaped, plastic-topped coffee table before the sofa. He said, “Sampson, I think you ought to have a gun with you at night. Something to frighten anyone off with.”

Malemba said, “It’s all right. I’ve got my cousin coming with me all the time now.”

“I’m glad. D’you think you can look after yourselves?”

“He’s a man who carries a knife.” Sampson sat with his hands dangling between his knees heavily, as if already he disowned them for what they might do.

The streets of the township were lively as a market, on a Saturday morning. Children, bicycles, slow-moving sociable people-the car was carried along through this, rather than progressed. Bray bought a newspaper-cornet filled with peanuts (for the Tlume children; he and Rebecca were going there for lunch) and while he and the vender completed the transaction a head popped in the car window on the other side — a young man, Tojo Wanje, who had been attentive and argumentative at Bray’s night classes. They went to the King Cole Bar on the corner. Tojo wore transparent moulded plastic sandals with broken straps, azure sunglasses shaped like a car windscreen, and used a folded newspaper to emphasize what he said. “This Tola Tola, what’s he want? What’s he want?” He had a way of laughing, head up, open-mouthed, vivacious. “I don’t know — you think it’s the Msos?” “This paper! I don’t learn nothing!” “No, well I think they’re not being given much information. Or they’re told not to use what they’ve got.” “Then why must I pay sixpence? I’ll rather buy myself a beer.” Bray bought two more bottles and the young man, who was a foreman at the lime works, told him there had been a fight the day before, pay-day. “These men, we call them the Big Backs-you know, they work putting the bags on the trucks, and they’re strong. Two new men were just taken on this week and when we were waiting at the pay office the Big Backs started kicking up a trouble, they told the new men to show their cards. So they show their union cards but they haven’t got party cards. Well, they were beaten up. I don’t know. Their money was gone, they were kicked on the ground. Then we made a complaint to the union — I myself, I said to them, who are these bulls, these shoulders without brains — oh, I think I better not open so wide in future!” And delighted, he roared with laughter. “But there is fighting, fighting all the time. — They don’t care to raise production,” he added, to show his tuition had not been wasted.

At first it looked as if Tola Tola would not be brought to trial immediately; he was, after all, being held under the Preventive Detention Act and in theory could be detained indefinitely — at least until the Act came up for yearly review as Dando had provided when it was framed. The pay dispute on the mines was not settled, and a two-week “cool-off” period which the unions managed to get the miners to agree to was broken by a wildcat strike. It was supposed to be a token one-day affair and restricted to the mine with the biggest production, but some categories of workers did not return to work the following day, and it dragged on sporadically, complicated by internal disputes not only between the mineworkers’ unions and the miners, but also among groups of the miners themselves. “It’s deteriorating into gang warfare,” Bray remarked one night at the Tlumes’. “Another chance for the whites down South to say how blacks don’t understand anything but tribalism.”

“Well it’s our own fault,” Nongwaye said, frowning with reasonableness. “It is the Galas and Msos who are beating each other up.”

“They’re turning on themselves in frustration because the unions’ve lost control. The unions are strung up between the government and the miners. They’ve made promises to both they can’t fulfil for either.”

“So those idiot Galas take it out on the Msos.” Nongwaye was Gala himself, and spoke as if of a family failing.

“Nobody understands anything but tribalism,” said Hjalmar. He, Bray and the girl had become so close, in a parenthetic way, that she was able to fling out her bare arm half-comically, half-consolingly, and give his shoulder a squeeze. And wan though it was, the remark almost succeeded in being a joke against himself.

It was probably because of the strike position that Mweta and Justin Chekwe were in no hurry to have a political trial. If people were in a quarrelsome mood, a trial would bring out more dissension for them to identify themselves with, or the confirmation of other grievances, perhaps opposed to their own, that would nevertheless widen the reference of dissatisfaction and rebelliousness in general. But the strike grew and spread anyway, its two aspects somehow coexisting in a third: that whatever the miners did in place of work — strike or quarrel among themselves over it — the mines could not run without them. Hardly later than Shinza had said, all the gold mines were out, and the coal, iron-ore, and bauxite ones followed. At the gold mines near the capital the Company army used tear gas and baton charges to disperse a huge march of miners making for the President Residence. The mine and capital hospitals were full of people suffering temporary blindness from tear gas, Vivien Bayley wrote; “bloody Albert Tola Tola can be thanked for all this. We know that he whipped up his little flop on the battle-cry that Mweta didn’t have the strong arm to hold down the unions and Shinza. Now Mweta’s showing the beastly kind of muscle they want. Why didn’t he stand out on that balcony of his and talk to them? They didn’t have so much as a stone. Even Neil says it was the last chance. They didn’t come to kill him, they came to talk to him because they won’t talk to Chekwe and his crowd. Hjalmar was right to flee from the wrath of Margot without waiting for the wrath of the Big Boss and the Company to fall upon this place (don’t tell him I said so). My riot bag stands packed.”