Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

As he walked back to the veranda, the schoolmaster was standing on the steps in an army — surplus overcoat, hat in hand. Bray had the impression that he had been waiting about in the shadows, perhaps not sure, among all the white men’s faces heavily blocked out of the dark by the streaming light, which was the one he sought. “Oh good … splendid … this’s my glass, I think—” and they sat down. He ordered the beer that the other said he would have. “I don’t know whether I ever introduced myself, Bray, James Bray — and yours …?”

The schoolmaster cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Reuben Sendwe. Reu — ben Send — we.” Then he nodded in acknowledgement of this identity and sat back again.

He was, of course, used to being summoned and talked at; Bray knew that being able to drink up at the hotel wouldn’t change that. One could perhaps only make him forget himself. Bray began to talk about himself, about how he had worked in the British administration, been district commissioner in the Gala district, and then become “unpopular”—as he put it — with the Colonial Office. “But that’s all ancient history, not of much interest”—he wanted to know more about the school, about schools and teaching, generally, in this district. Sendwe had got what secondary school education he had at the mission at Rongwa. Naturally he knew Father Benedict. “The Fathers told me this morning that the government is going to take over the school. What do you feel about it?” Sendwe said, “I wish, sir, I knew how much money our government has got.” “Yes, money—? Go on.” He licked his dry lips, “If our government has plenty money, then we must take over all the mission schools. If we did not have the missions when I was small, there was no secondary school for me. The English government had only that one small school at the boma, you know? But if there is the money then it is the best thing for all education to be the same, for all children to get the same chance. And then you see, our government can’t think, all right, there is a mission school there, near that village or that village, so why must we build another school — you know what I’m saying?”

“Oh yes, exactly—”

“That was what the English government did, but our government must not now do the same. That is why we must close the mission schools. Not because the Fathers are not good men. I don’t say that. Nobody of our people says that. The Europeans mustn’t say we are throwing out the mission people; we must have our own schools in our country, that’s all. I just want to know if we have got money.”

“I think you have,” Bray said, “but not the teachers, that’s going to be the trouble. I hope you can persuade the mission teachers to give over the running of their schools to the government, but to stay on and teach. Even then hundreds of teachers will have to be recruited from somewhere — somewhere outside.”

“If we have got the money,” he said, with satisfaction.

“Does the Education Department help you with your own studies? Where do those lessons you showed me come from — a correspondence course?”

He shook his head and coughed. “I pay myself.… From London.”

The veranda was emptying and cars were driving away although a hard core of drinkers remained noisily in the bar. Mrs. Pilchey came bearing down across the veranda with authority. “Doesn’t anybody intend to eat tonight?” she said at large. She was level with Bray and he half — rose politely. “I certainly do. Shan’t be too long.”

Sendwe was standing up. She looked at him. “Well, how did the sheep go down?” she asked in her loud voice. “Oh, you know Mr. Sendwe, Mrs. Pilchey—” “Of course I know Sendwe.” The schoolmaster’s hand went out for his hat and clutched it automatically from the chair. He stood there in the overcoat and, the way the veranda globe shed its glare, his eyes couldn’t be seen at all in his thin black face. He said, “Oh madam, I should come to thank you. It was very, very nice. But I was sick since then.”

She kept the stance of someone waylaid. “Celebrations too much for you were they?”

“I have a very bad cold” he said. And as she was going he took courage and appealed. “The children were very, very happy with the meat. I thank you very much.”

“That’s okay,” she said briskly, on a rising note, and was gone with the heavy tread, listing a little to one side, of one who has been too many years on her feet.

He sat smiling. “It was a whole sheep,” he said. “The hotel gave it to the school for Independence. Oh it was a very nice present. Oh the children were happy.” He coughed again, took some beer, and went on coughing. When he had recovered his breath, Bray said, “What about dinner, now? What d’you say?”

“I have had a meal.”

“Oh, are you sure? You don’t feel like something else, now?”

“No, I don’t feel hungry ever since I have this cold again.” He was still breathless from the coughing bout.

Bray said, “Are you doing something for it?”

“I went again to the clinic. They say I must go to the hospital for tests.” He mentioned the name of the TB hospital in the capital. He held up three fingers. “I was there for seventeen months three years ago. But they cured me. It’s only about two, three weeks now I’ve got this very bad cold. I don’t feel hungry.”

“I see. Well then, let’s have another beer.” But they did not sit down again. “When will you go?”

The man smiled. “It’s very far.”

“But you shouldn’t wait.”

“When I write the O levels,” he said. He seemed suddenly confused by the feeling that the visit was over and he did not know the right way to conclude it without leaving without what he had come for. “Sir, I want to ask if you can write to me about my young brother. He wants to learn farming — European farming. He’s working there at Mr. Ross’s farm and Mr. Ross is good, he teaches him while he’s working there. Now for a long time he wants to go to the farmers’ school, we heard about it. If you can please send to me the papers for him — I can help him to fill in everything … to apply.… If you can just send me the papers ….”

Bray explained that he was not going to the capital, but north; but he would arrange to have particulars about the agricultural college sent. The figure in the army overcoat plunged into the darkness, bisected diagonally for a moment by the light cast by the hotel. Bray turned to the dining — room, where some men were eating and talking with the gusto of old friends getting together. The thud of the waiters’ bare feet shook the boards; he ordered a half — bottle of wine and propped up, where he could glance at it, a report picked out at random from the file he was still carrying about with him. Already he was falling into the bachelor habit of reading while he ate. While he remembered, he made a note to send the schoolmaster an Oxford dictionary.

So that was starting all over again; he was half — amused, half self — contemptuous. The man was so desperately poor in everything — what was there that he didn’t need? Olivia said, “Kindness is ridiculous.” She had meant here; then. She had had to organize jumble sales so that the charitable white wives could provide a clinic for African children, while the mines were paying dividends of millions a year to shareholders in England. She had had to put on white gloves for opening charity bazaars; out of the newspaper pictures taken when they arrived in London in the sensation of their recall from the territory, had looked a civil servant and his lady disconcertingly like the class and kind of couple on whom white settlers had depended so long.

After dinner he went off to his room past Davy Jones’ Locker and the flushed faces there — a large Englishman with the administrator’s gait of a man eternally carrying papers under his arm.