Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Bray spent two more days criss — crossing the higher part of the Flats from village to village on rough tracks. The exhaust pipe kept falling off the car and was repaired in various ways in every village. On the morning of the sixth day the Volkswagen was poled across the river and the silent motion, after the perpetual rattling of the car, was a kind of presage: Shinza was on the other side. In the light, sandyfloored forest he came upon movement that he thought, at a distance, was buck feeding; it was women gathering sour wild fruit, and they turned to laugh and chatter as he passed.

The trees ended; the scrub ended; the little car was launched upon a sudden opening — out of flowing grass and glint of water that pushed back the horizon. He had always felt here, that suddenly he saw as a bird did, always rising, always lifting wider the ring of the eyes’ horizon. He took off his glasses for a moment and the shimmering and wavering range rushed away from him, even farther.

The dabs and shapes of hot blue water gave off dark looks from the endless bed of soft grasses. Small birds flicked like grasshoppers from the feathered tops. There was a smell of space, here. Thousands of head of cattle on this plain; but they were lost specks, no bigger than George Boxer’s ticks in the grass. The road was terrible; the violence of progress across calm and serenity could only be compared to the shock of a plane hit about by airpockets in a clear sky. Herdsmen stood to watch, unmoved, speculative, as he negotiated runnels cross — furrowed by the tracks of the sleds used to drag wood. Ilala palm began to appear in the grass, the flanges of the leaves open like a many — bladed pen — knife. Feeling his way through the past, he drove, without much hesitance at turnings, to Shinza’s village. A new generation of naked children moved in troops about the houses, which were a mixture of the traditional materials of mud and grass, and the bricks and corrugated iron of European settlement. Some of the children were playing with an ancient Victorian mangle; Belgian missionaries from the Congo and German missionaries from Tanganyika had waded through the grass all through the last decade of the nineteenth century, dumping old Europe among the long — horned cattle.

Shinza lived now (so he was directed) behind the reed wall of a compound set apart like a chief’s — in fact, it turned out to be part of Chief Mpana’s quarters. Inside were various mud outhouses and an ugly brick house with a pole — and-thatch veranda, and scrolled burglar — proofing at the windows like that of the European houses in the suburbs of the capital. There were no children in here. It was very silent. An old woman lay on her side in the sun, completely covered by cotton rags except for her bare feet. Bray had the feeling that if he touched her with his foot she would roll over, dead.

As if he were in a deserted place, he wandered round instead of knocking at the door. He looked in on a dark, dank hut that held nothing, in its gloom, but two motorcar tyres and an old steel filing cabinet beside a pile of rotting sleeping mats. As he turned back to the sun, a man appeared, tall, small — headed, in grey flannel trousers and a sports — coat, like a schoolmaster or a city clerk. “Yes?” he said rudely, not approaching.

“Is Edward Shinza here, d’you know?”

The man did not answer. Then he approached to look over Bray more closely. “You want to see Shinza?”

“They tell me he lives here, now. Is he around?”

The man stood, refusing to be pressed. “I don’t know if he’s here.”

“Could you perhaps ask, for me?”

“You want to see him.” The man considered.

“I’m an old friend.”

“I don’t know. I’ll see if he’s here. At the moment.”

The man went into the house but Bray had the impression that he left it again by a back door; he saw someone come into vision a moment, crossing the yard. Bray stood in the sun. The old woman did not stir. There was a smell of hides. The man came back. “Come on.” They went into the house, into a sort of parlour with a wasp’s nest in the corner, and volumes of Hansard on a sideboard. The man waited in silence beside him like a bodyguard. They sat on the hard chairs for long minutes. The gloom of contrast with the sun outside lifted. Then Shinza came in, hands in the pockets of a dressing — gown, barefoot, feeling for a cigarette. But it would not be the first cigarette of the day; the immediate impression was not of a man who had just got up, but of one who had not slept at all.

So you decided to come and see me anyway.”

Edward Shinza, smiling, his nostrils open and taut, unmistakable. “James … you Englishmen, you do what you want.” He made a face fearful of consequences, but exaggerated into a joke.

There’s something different (Shinza had Bray’s hand casually, he held the matchbox between thumb and first finger at the same time): it was a tooth, a broken front tooth — that was it. Shinza now had a front tooth broken off in a curve, already so long done that it was smooth and rounded like the edge of any other tooth. He lit the cigarette and then looked at Bray, head drawn back, and said, still making fun of him, “You know it’s nice to see you, James, it’s nice, it’s — I should make a speech, honestly, I’d like to—” He deliberately ignored the dressing — gown, as if it were the way he chose to dress. He told the onlooker, in Gala, to leave but return in an hour, apparently careless of the fact that Bray could understand what was said.

But when he turned back to Bray and said in English — the remark was a paraphrase of one of Mweta’s slogans before large gatherings— “So you’re helping to build a nation, ay …” Bray thought that he had intended him to know that in an hour he expected to be rid of him, like any other guest.

“Weren’t you the one who taught him speech — making?”

Shinza was light — coloured for a Gala; he tenderly rubbed his yellow — brown breast where the gown fell open. A few peppercorns round the nipples, like the tufts that textured the skin of his face, sprouting from the surface pocked and cratered by some far — off skin affection, childhood smallpox or adolescent pimples. The furze ran together over the curves of the mouth, making a vague moustache. It emphasized the smile again, under the wide, taut nostrils. “A good teacher. But I didn’t teach him how to shut people up. He learnt by himself. Or perhaps others help him; I don’t know.” He made the mock — fearful face again, as if it were something Bray would recognize.

“Ah, come now — it was visualized as a one — party state from the beginning, you’d always said the — what was it you called it—?”

“Kiddies’ parliament,” Shinza fished up, dangling the phrase detachedly; a smile for it.

“Kiddies’ parliament — that’s it — the kiddies’ parliament Africans think reproduces Westminster in their states was not going to waste time and money in this one.”

“Of course, and I was damn well right, man. And now your boy would like to see me choose a fancy name and start an opposition party to draw into the open all the people around him he’s afraid of — a nice, harmless little opposition you can defeat at the polls by that unity — is-strength speech — making I taught him. Or by getting his Young Pioneers to beat up voters — it always looks nicer than turning on people who’ve made PIP and put him up there in the Governor’s house, ay? — Why do we stand?” He dumped on the table the clean washing — faded check shirts, crudely embroidered sheets — that was laid on an ugly brown sofa, and spread himself with careless luxury, flexing his neck against its back with the chin — movements of a man aware that he has not shaved.