Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“You’ve forced him into a kind of opposition that isn’t there, between you.”

Mweta’s hands dropped, swung helplessly. “Not there! If you give him that much, he’ll swallow your arm. You only think of him years ago.”

“Yes, he has changed,” Bray said. “But you know I’ve seen him.”

“No,” Mweta said. “No, I tell you I didn’t know.”

It was the first time, the first time since he was that boy with a guitar, on a bicycle, that Bray didn’t know whether Mweta was speaking the truth.

“When?”

“That was where I was going — last week, on the Bashi road.”

“Oh. I see.”

“No you don’t see. I wrote something to you — didn’t send it, the business about the boy bothered me.… But I wanted to tell you, I can’t believe Shinza would make a move to oust you if he were with you. If you were still in it together. The differences you had in the Party, just before independence — that’s not to be taken as conclusive. He’ll fight you there because he believes that the Party should stand for certain things, the Party shouldn’t take account of the government’s limitations, even if they’re enforced by circumstance: that’s what the Party’s there for, in a state like this one. To keep in front of the government the original idea of what Independence should mean, to oppose that idea all the time against the government’s acceptance of what is expedient, consistent with power. The dialectic, in fact. That’s what his opposition within the Party really means.”

“Oh we all know about his early Marxist training. His six weeks in 1937. We’ve heard all about that from him a dozen times. We all know he was the intellectual of the Party while we were the bush boys. We’ve had all that.”

Bray said, “What I’m getting at is there’s something in him that would always make him want to be a power, but not the one … that’s more or less what I said. You’d distrust a moral reason why I think he wouldn’t threaten you, just as I should myself.… But this isn’t a moral reason, it’s a matter of temperament. Temperament exhibited and proven over a long, long time.… He wants only to be known to the few people in the know. That’s enough for him. He enjoyed helping to ‘make’ you; why didn’t he employ the same energy to make himself?” (He thought, do I touch on vanity there; no, Mweta knows he didn’t need making in any sense implying inadequacy.) “Because he hasn’t the will to lead, really, he doesn’t want it. He didn’t want it. It’s a weakness, if you like, a kind of arrogance. Let someone else be out there handled by the crowd.”

Mweta had the weary obstinacy of one who is following his own thoughts. “He’d have done exactly the same in my place.”

“If he were with you,” Bray said, “If you were together, Mweta … you’d both be in the same place. He’d be seeing things from where you are, and that makes all the difference. Power compromises,” he added, with a gesture of embarrassment for that sort of phrase. “He wouldn’t have so much fire in his belly if he were sitting at table in this house.”

Mweta folded the fingers of one hand over the knuckle of the other and pressed it, testingly. Bray suddenly saw that he was fighting for control, holding together some trembling part of himself. I have hurt him, I hurt him by so much as acknowledging the other one’s existence. They couldn’t change the relation in which they had stood to each other, he — Bray — and Mweta; he must have endorsement from me, that is my old role. Anything else is betrayal. It was stupid; and Mweta was not. But the boy on the bicycle; when Mweta’s with me he can’t get away from the boy on the bicycle. The President wants love and approval, unrelated to the facts, between us. When it comes to us.

Bray felt a hardening distaste for the arrogant bare feet, the cigar at the centre of the broken — toothed grin in the thick beard. He said, “If I were you I’d send for Shinza. Now.”

Mweta’s voice cracked his own silence. “But you disapprove of preventive detention. If Shinza came in with me you’d see both of us backing it.” He gave a cold and patronizing laugh.

“There’d be no need.”

Mweta was looking at the big frame he knew so well, as if for a place where it would give. “You think so? What about Shinza’s crowd? They’d follow him? — There’d always be need.” He got up and walked round the desk, glancing at the papers there like half — recognized faces waiting to attract his attention; turned abruptly and came and stood near Bray’s chair. “I’ve got no message for Shinza,” he said.

“I’m not a messenger.”

“But the best thing you can do is make him understand that what he’s doing isn’t any use. He’s not going to bring it off, whatever he thinks he’s aiming at. He’s making a fool of himself. Or something worse. Really James, if you are worried about Shinza, tell him to leave it alone, don’t encourage him.”

It was a hit. “Encourage?”

“As you said, the friendship of the old days, and so on.”

“I didn’t say, Mweta,” said Bray, gently. “And the past — well that’s what it is. You two, you and Shinza, it’s a matter of state, now, and I can’t have any part in it. I can only tell you what I think about you two; but that’s all. What I think, what I believe, urgently believe.”

“All right, all right. All the same, when you see him you’ll tell him what you think.”

Bray said, “Don’t you want me to see Shinza?”

Mweta said sadly, with a touch of the politician’s deftness at the same time, “James, I would never tell you what you should do. Good God.”

But I ought to know it — what I should do. “I’m your visitor here.”

Mweta said emotionally, “You’re home.”

Bray said, “What happens when the Party Congress comes up? Next month?”

Mweta was still chairman of PIP, and Shinza, as a regional chairman, was on the Executive.

“We meet. If he comes.”

“How do you mean?”

Mweta waited a second and then said, “He’s not always at his place, these days. So they say.”

“But he’d come for the Congress, of course.” Bray’s tone changed; he made it sound almost as if he were joking: “Maybe you’ll have it out, then. Eh? Something very down — to-earth about Party congresses. — Tell me, what sort of people are you going to detain with your new Act — are they all kids like the fish factory one I picked up? What do you hope to hear from them?”

“That’s Onabu’s affair. He’s got men who know the right questions.”

“All the fish — factory lad did was explain the fishing concession to some people at the hostel. Of course the Union found this annoying. Or out of order, or something. But it hardly seems to call for two months and seventeen days in jail. Time to ask a great many questions.”

Mweta said, “Well, all that will be looked after now, thank heavens, local police people won’t be able to do what they like. There are proper provisions and checks in the Act — Chekwe worked it out with Dando very carefully. — That silly boy wasn’t badly treated?”

Bray said, “He was beaten. There doesn’t seem much point in testifying to that, now. — You don’t really mean that every time a workman grumbles this is at the instigation of Shinza? Granted, his ideas may influence the Bashi people in our part of the country. But what about people elsewhere? Can everything that bothers you be laid at his door?”

“That’s what the questions are for — to find out whose door. And if it’s Shinza’s — you wouldn’t believe it?”

“I’d have to. It wouldn’t change my belief that it didn’t — doesn’t need to happen. You don’t have to make an enemy out of Shinza.”