Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Mweta was shaking his head against the words as they came at him. “Believe me, James, believe me.”

Yet he didn’t want Bray to go; there was always, between them, the sense of being held in a strong current. Out of it, in opposition, they floundered, and were drawn back.

Bray said suddenly, “You’re not going to arrest Shinza?”

“If that should ever be necessary it would be a bad day for us.” It was parenthetic, a private reference to the old triumvirate: himself, Bray, and Shinza.

Bray felt a useless resistance and alarm: Mweta retreated, out of reach, into the old relationship, as if what the President did was another matter. Bray was led, stumbling and reluctant, to talk of other things: “And Aleke? What do you think of Aleke?” “Oh, quite competent, I think.” “A bit easy — going, mm?” “Oh … I can’t fairly judge that. It depends what you want of him, anyway. He’s got a good civil — service temperament.” “Exactly, exactly. That’s just what I mean. But he gives you what you need?”

Bray stopped, and smiled. “I don’t know whether I’m doing what you need from me.”

“But how’s it going, James?”

Bray kept the smile, answering slowly and politely. “I’ve covered the whole province. I’ve made my own census of the educable population, you might say, a pretty broad age limit. Now I must collate the stuff and write a report. That’s it, more or less. It should be a fairly accurate sample guide for the rest of the country. Once it’s done, it’ll be easy to do the same sort of thing for the other provinces, the work could be allotted to local people. Then I shouldn’t have to spend more than a few weeks in each. I don’t know how much longer I’ll need to stay in Gala; I’ll see Kamaza Phiri.”

“Good, you’ll see Phiri …”

“He wrote with some suggestion that I ought to put what he calls pilot schemes into operation in Gala. Before moving on. I’d written him a note on an idea I had for a technical school of a kind. I thought we might take over the club”—they both laughed— “but I think I’d better do what I have to do to complete the report — I’d better move off to the other provinces soon.”

Mweta said, “But if Phiri wants to set up something in Gala. There’s no hurry to leave Gala.”

“Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; but that’s when I’m alone, you know. It’s something to do with the atmosphere of the place, the smell of it and so on. But my old house and the boma —they leave me cold. I suppose leaving the old life the way I did … Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; sometimes I feel I’ve never come back.”

“I don’t think you should be in any hurry. Is the house you’re in all right, there? We really ought to be able to get you a decent house, James. If you hear of any people who are leaving, any settler’s house you know about, you must write — the government could buy a house like that for you.”

“Oh the house is perfectly all right for my purpose. There’s a magnificent fig in the garden.”

“There should be a really nice house for you and Olivia. It worries me. Not one of those British shacks. She can’t come to live like that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the house! For a few months, it’s perfectly adequate. I don’t know whether Olivia will come, now. She’s hung on so long, you know.”

“Don’t be in a hurry,” Mweta said, looking at him, open. “You know, it’s a funny thing, all these years — I always thought of you as if you were still there, in Gala. And even when I went there; I expected you. I think of you in Gala. Like myself. I’m in Gala, too. That was the time”—he drew first his lower lip under his teeth, then his upper lip. “Now I must rely on Simon Thabo.” Thabo was Provincial Minister for Gala. “You can’t talk to him, James. If I send for him he says to me, don’t concern yourself, Mr. President, everything is under control. You know how some Africans are, James, you know how we are? He has certain ways of saying things, certain words he repeats. And he always talks in English, the special English he learnt at that public administration course run by the mission down in Zambia. I say to him, don’t tell me what the police chief said, saluting in front of you, don’t tell me that. Tell me what people said, what you heard. … I could get more from five minutes’ talk with you, James, than I get from all his reliable sources and what — not.”

Bray thought of the boy who had been locked up, while he was living in the house with the fig tree less than five miles from the prison. “I’m in the dark.”

“Thabo is not a person you can talk to,” said Mweta. “With you there, I … I know that whatever you say to me, you have this country”—his fingers knocked at his breast— “inside — and you will see, you will see, I can’t let personal feelings in this. And you won’t either. I have to know what’s happening there. From someone who understands.”

— Shinza. Shinza. “I didn’t even know that Lebaliso had people in jail,” Bray said.

“It’s a big country. Impossible to prevent these things. Little policemen feeling big. We will learn.” He meant it, in spite of his Detention Act. Bray watched him. He said, in a rush, “James, we are disappointing you. Good God.” Bray sheltered for a moment, like a match alight between his palms, an idiotic vanity; conscious that it was so: prime ministers and presidents as confrères now, and still he turns this way. To me. Mweta was saying, “You must help us, James. We need you, just like always.” That’s why he is where he is; the politician’s unfailing instinct for taking up the advantage he’s put you at. Bray was fascinated, as a man who knows he has had a lot to drink does not realize that the judgement is arrived at under the influence. He answered what was not at issue; Mweta could regard it as a code: “If only this education thing of mine makes sense.” And Mweta let him talk. “After all, I’m not an expert, I go by what I see to be necessary, a very home — made pragmatism, and the shortcomings of education as I know it. Must it be a white — collar affair? Do the lake people need to produce lawyers? What about literate fishermen, able to run their own cooperative from top administration to control of spawning grounds? If we’ve got nothing, if we’re starting from scratch, then can’t we escape the same old educational goals? I wish I knew more. I feel the answer lies somewhere in educational techniques as much as in organization. I don’t know enough about them.”

The talk turned to the fishing communities Bray had visited. Bray criticized the terms of the new concession without further mention of the boy who had been detained for doing so, and Mweta listened with that flickering of the eyelids of a man to whom words are whips, blows, and weapons, taken on the body and given on the bodies of others. He agreed that the concession was hardly an improvement on colonial times, so far as direct benefit to the fishermen was concerned, but argued that the increased royalty made it worth while. “Five years, James. Five years is nothing. By then we’ll be in a much better position to take over the fishing industry not as an isolated thing, but as part of the whole development of the lake country. I’m hoping for a fifteen — million loan or a new road up there, some of the money coming from the company itself, and the rest from the countries the company represents. Then none of our surplus fish will go up the lake for small profits, but down here and to the markets in the South.”

“The fishermen have to wait.”

Mweta said, at one with him, “I know. But that’s what we are having to do all the time — strike a balance. I don’t want anybody to have to wait a whole generation, that’s all. That’s the aim I set for us.”