Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Little boys raced behind the car while it swayed off gracefully. People were grinning at Bray, as one who had brought them distinction. Someone said, “That’s the biggest car in Gala,” and the old man, who had appeared again, said, “The mayor, you know who it is? The mayor!” The women giggled at his slowness. “He knows, he knows.” There was no envy of the mayor, with his splendid car manifesting his favoured position; only pride.

It was still light when Bray got back to the house and he wandered about the garden and then out across the bush perhaps in response to some faint promptings of habit reaching out from the life in Wiltshire — he and Olivia exercised themselves as regularly as city people did their dogs. The bats were beginning to fly over the golf — course and the club — house was already swelling orange with lamp — shaded light. Sunday evening: most of the white community were there, drinking after sport. He had put up his name for membership, again; the secretary’s face, when he filled in the form, was flat with the effort to disguise astonishment. But it was not a gesture of bravado, let alone a desire to rub his countrymen’s noses in the “triumph” of his return. He had always done things whose directness was misunderstood; it was not even the “hand of friendship” he was extending — simply an acceptance that he was living in Gala again, among these people, and did not regard them as outcast any more than he had shared their view, in other times, that the Galaians were beyond the pale of the community. When Olivia came, she might want to use the club swimming pool, anyway; the only one in the district. One had to make use of what there was. And then, of course, since Independence, the club had made the usual gesture of such dying institutions; the mayor had been made a member, ex officio, and so had Aleke, as P.O. — not that he supposed they had ever put a foot in the place.

There were thirty or forty cars parked under the trees; an Alsatian dog barked behind the closed windows of one. Excited by the darkening twilight, white children shrieked as they ran about the lawns. The building was adaptable; could be a real asset. As Bray went up the steps and heads were lifted here and there at the veranda tables outside the bar, he was thinking that it would be perfectly adequate for an adult education centre. In the smaller rooms the trade unions could hold night classes for apprentices, Sampson Malemba could run literacy courses, and the big dining — room could serve as a hall for performances by school choirs and so on.

He greeted a few people he knew. A beautiful blonde with a child on her hip and one by the hand stood patiently at the reception desk while her husband and another man, in club blazers, could not tear themselves away from the high emotion of companionship that comes from victory on court or course. Bray begged pardon past them, but they did not see him — except the children, whose blue eyes, wide in the moments before sleep, followed him to the notice board. His name was up, all right, but there was no seconder’s beside it. Broken bursts of singing sounded like a party going on; the repetition of the opening bars on a piano made him realize that it must be a rehearsal in progress: the theatrical production Joosab had mentioned.

He began that week to tackle a programme he had worked out for himself. Long talks with Malemba made it clear that it would be senseless to base a report and recommendations on existing schools and available figures for children of school — going age. The province was huge; a whole European country could fit into it. The last census was seven years old, and had scarcely pretended to accuracy. You couldn’t simply divide off the map into suitable chunks and allot a certain number of new schools to each, such — and-such a number of educational facilities to the square hundred miles. Sampson Malemba wanted a large new secondary school at Gala itself; but what was needed was a careful coordination of educational facilities over the whole province, from primary to school — leaving at least at the English O level, with provision for late starters and others, not suited by potential or opportunity to academic education, to be diverted to technical colleges of an elementary kind. “How many children in the primary schools of the province can be expected to be at secondary school level in, say, five years? Enough to fill the places in a new secondary school? More than we’ll have places for? So many that it would be better to have a new secondary school somewhere else?” But Sampson Malemba couldn’t answer that; “Exactly. It will depend on how many new primary schools we need and can get.” And that in turn depended not only upon how many children were in school, but how many could be in school. “And how many teachers we can hope to claim from the general pool.” “Ah, that’s the trouble.” Malemba was always happiest to agree. But Bray had decided that if he himself was to be any use at all, he must combine a down — to-earth acceptance of limitations with a certain obstinacy; he must assume they would be overcome.

He set out to go through the whole province, district by district and village by village, visiting schoolmasters and headmen and collecting the facts. He intended to make his own census of children of school — going age and youths, already in some form of occupation, who were still malleable enough to benefit from something more than a smattering of literacy. He didn’t see how he could begin to consider what ought to be done next until this was done. He began with Gala itself and its satellite villages, and meant to move out in a wider radius each day, each week, until he had covered the whole province from the lake to the Bashi Flats. He would return home every night so long as that was possible, then, as the circles carried him further from the centre, he would spend each night at a point convenient for the range of the next day’s inquiry. Malemba went with him round about Gala itself; it was all rather like a school inspection, with the inevitable assembly of children, the anxious formality of teachers — and at the end of the visit a sense that politeness had dissipated any real contact with the giggling, expectant faces of the children, turning blindly to the sun of attention, and the half — educated, poorly paid teachers garrulous or tongue — tied with their inadequacies. He came home each day that first week with a sense of the deadness of what was passing for education in these bare schoolhouses with their red earth playground stamped hard by the children’s naked feet. The children were squirming with life and the cold grease of third — rate instruction by rote staled in their minds, day by day. He wrote in his notebook: If all M’s government can do is extend dingy light of knowledge we brought, not much benefit. He felt that he himself was not qualified to find the radical solution that was needed; neither was the Ministry of Education, with its advisers, the capable English don who had been headmaster of a famous public school thirty years before, and the American on loan from a Midwest university’s African Studies programme. They were all men for whom the structure of education was based on their own educational background and experience; even he himself, who had lived in Africa so long, tended to think of needs in relation to the educational pattern familiar to him, and to fail to do so in terms of the child for whom what was taught at school did not have the confirmation of being part of his general cultural pattern at home. What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the latest basic techniques of learning. Someone who could cut through the old assumptions that relied so heavily on a particular cultural background, and concentrate on the learning process itself. That should be freed to form its own correlation to a relevant culture. “Write a letter to a friend describing a trip abroad with your aunt”—he thought often of the schoolmaster at Matoko.