Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

While he was drinking it, the shadow of one of the big trees fell across the veranda and seemed to bring a breeze. The heat of the afternoon turned, as it did quite suddenly; one of the guinea fowl began to call. He was no longer used to driving for hours at a stretch. His big body was restless with inactivity. He walked off nowhere in particular, though he knew this road that led from the main road to the Matoko boma about two miles away. The red sand was pleasant to tread on — he had not walked at all, really, in the month in the capital, except in the streets of the town; no one walked — and the coarse sleek grass leaned beneath its own weight on either side of the road, as high as his shoulders. Scarlet weavers with black masks flicked up out of it and hung upside down at the entrance to their nests. A rough driveway marked with whitewashed stones and aloes curved up to a small schoolhouse on a rise and down again. He took the little detour to give some sort of shape to his stroll. There was the school garden — a patch of maize and beans, some staked tomatoes — the length of dangling iron that was the school bell, and, as he walked past the open doorway, the schoolmaster himself sitting at work. The man jumped up and at once started apologizing as if guilty of a grave breach of hospitality and respect. “No sir, I am very sorry, sir, I was just taking the chance to get a little study—” Bray greeted him in Gala, giving him the form of address to be used by respectful pupils towards the master, to put him at ease.

The man was shyly delighted and immediately brought out all he had to offer — the school register, the exercise and text — books of the pupils, all the time explaining and answering Bray’s questions in a slow, anxious way. A pupil who had been sitting with him at the deal table where he was working sat, unable to go on, her hand on her place in a book, listening and smiling faintly in greeting. She looked like a grown woman, but irregular schooling often meant that African schoolchildren were far older than whites. The schoolmaster himself was very thin, black and pigeon — chested under a woollen pullover. His two — roomed school was seven years old; there were some desks but the smaller children, the schoolmaster explained, still sat on the floor. Some of the children who lived far away stayed in children’s huts in the village and walked home at weekends. “This year we are sixty — five” he said, “our biggest year so far. And twenty — one are girls.” He proudly showed a single poster on the damp — mapped walls: OUR LAND — a smiling miner working down a gold mine; smiling fishermen hauling in a catch; a smiling woman picking some crop. Population statistics in green, revenue figures in red. “From the Education Department. Oh yes, we are beginning to get nice, nice things. I am filling in the forms. Now we will get them. I wish you were here when the children are in school, they would sing for you.”

Bray had been sung to so many times by black schoolchildren. “Another time, I hope.”

“My wife teaches the choir. She also teaches the first and second grade.” The young woman was smiling, looking up from one to the other.

“I thought you were one of the young schoolgirls!” Bray said, and they laughed.

“Well, I am teaching her for her Standard Six exam. She goes next month to town for it. She has had four children, you see, her studies were interrupted. But I teach her when I can. She wants to write the teacher’s exams eventually.”

“It’s lucky for you that you married a teacher.” Bray tried to draw her into the conversation.

“And I am working for my O levels, the Cambridge Certificate,” the schoolmaster said, with the urgency of a man who has no one to turn to. “I have here the English paper — not the one I will have to write myself, you understand—’

“I know — a specimen.”

“Yes, the paper written by the students in 1966—you understand. I have a difficulty because there are some words not possible to find—” He went over to the table and brought a small, old, school dictionary.

“I see — well, that wouldn’t have the more unusual words, would it—”

The wife swiftly helped him to find the paper and his exercise book. He went down the paper with his eyes, lips moving a little. Bray noticed how tight his breathing was, as if he had a chest cold. “This one word here — here it is, ‘mollify’ …?”

Bray wanted to laugh, the impulse caught him by the throat as a cough rises; he took the examination paper to play for time, in order to pretend, out of the “civilized” courtesy of his kind, that uncertainty about the meaning of the word was something anyone might share — and this in itself was part of the very absurdity: the assumptions of colonial culture. He read, “Write one of the following letters: (a) To a cousin, describing your experiences on a school tour to the Continent; (b) to your father, explaining why you wish to choose a career in the navy; (c) to a friend, describing a visit to a picture gallery or a film you have enjoyed.”

The schoolmaster wrote down the meaning of “mollify” and showed those questions, ticked off in red ink, that he had been able to answer. “This will be the third time I try,” he said, of the examination.

“Well, good luck to you both.”

“When she goes for the Standard Six she takes our choir along for the big schools competition. Last month they won the best in Rongwa province. Now we don’t know — but we hope, we hope.” The schoolmaster smiled.

He was shown the football field the pupils had levelled; a little way behind was a mud house, shaped European — style with a veranda held up by roughly dressed tree — trunks, which must have been where the schoolmaster and his family lived. An old woman was doing some household chore with pots, outside, in the company of two or three small children. The schoolmaster said, “If there was someone I could ask, like I ask you—” but he was embarrassed to appear to grumble and began to talk about his pupils again.

Bray, feeling as he had felt a thousand times before in this country, the disproportionate return he was getting for a commonplace expression of interest, said, “What do you feel is your biggest problem at the moment?” and was surprised when, instead of turning again to his expectations of the Education Department under Independence, the man took time to think quietly, in the African lack of embarrassment at long pauses, and said, “We have to make the parents let the girls come to school. This is what I have been trying to do for years. Our girls must be educated. I can show you the figures — in nineteen — sixty-five, no nineteen — sixty-four, yes … we had only nine girls, and they left at the end of two years. Yes, two years. I cannot persuade the parents to keep them on. But I try, try. I go to the parents myself, yes, in the country. I talk to the chiefs and tell them, look, this is our country now, how can the men have wives who are not educated? There will be trouble. We must have the girls in school. But they don’t want to hear. I went to see the par — ents, I talk to them. Yes, well, this year we manage to keep twenty — one girls and some are in the Standard Three class already. I talk to the people slowly.” The man smiled and took one of his gasping breaths; his hand took in the bush, his suburbia. “I go and tell them. I’ve got my bicycle.”

Bray remembered that things were different now, even at Pilchey’s. “Why don’t you come up to the hotel this evening — I’m staying the night. We could talk some more.”

The schoolteacher had the suddenly exhausted look of a convalescent. He screwed up his eyes hesitantly, as if there must be something behind the invitation that he ought to understand. “At what time, sir?”