Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He got some of the laughter he wanted, but not much; though hardly anyone had escaped the evangelism of James Bond, many had not heard of Philby. The Speaker, sitting lop — sided against his tall chair as if his curly white wig weighed him down, had his attention caught by Cyrus Goma, now member for one of the north — eastern constituencies, already half — risen from his seat. So Goma had adopted the toga; while he spoke he settled the free end of it like an old lady putting her shawl straight, fastidiously, his jutting chin held jackdaw style towards one shoulder — just as Bray remembered it — his face tight, eyes screwed up, while his voice remained soft and reasonable. “We have accepted the necessity of this Bill. That is one thing. But we must not allow ourselves to think that people who are worried about it, who have grave doubts about it, are something to poke fun at. I suggest to the Honourable Minister of the Interior that such people are sincere; they should not be ridiculed. A Preventive Detention Act is no laughing matter. We did not laugh when the British imposed one on us.” There was a sudden contraction of attention in the House. “We did not laugh in the camps in the Bashi—” Someone called, “Yes, Bashi!” “—and at Fort Howard.” He paused a mere instant, but it was just long enough. “Howard!” “Bashi!” “Howard!” The Speaker called the House to order. Cyrus Goma swayed slightly and began to speak again, reasonably, softly. “Our President didn’t laugh when he spent seventeen months shut up there. He suffered because it was necessary to win our freedom. If we must accept that it is now necessary for us to introduce preventive detention, that is no occasion for laughter.”

There was a distrustful hush; momentary. A spatter of hard — palmed applause that, as it sought to assert itself, was pressed out by a kind of rise of temperature in the House. On his feet, someone shouted, “If you want to cry for traitors!” The assembly seemed to fuse in hostility, presenting a bristling corporate surface, the back of some huge animal rippling at Goma. But from the direction of the hand — clapping someone else took the floor, a young man, hippo — faced with minute ears, who rested a tapering, ringed hand on his huge backside. His English was strongly accented. “Can the Minister explain why the Bill was not fust put before the Central Committee? Correct me, but as far as I am aware this is the fust time it has not been done. The Party has not approved this Bill because the Party was not informed about it. Is the Central Committee going to be a rubber stamp, just to come down like that on decisions already made by the Government? Is that it?”

Cyprian Kente smiled, taking the House into his confidence at the naïveté of the question. “The Honourable Member is aware that this was a decision taken by the President under Emergency Powers.”

The huge schoolboy figure was obstinate.

“The President is also the President of the Party. Did he consult his Central Committee. That is what I am asking.”

Mweta, clear — faced, with the immediate, calming authority of a man who appears always to take everyone’s point of view seriously, rose in place of Kente. “I would like to reassure the Honourable Member, because I know the devotion he has brought to the Party ever since he was one of the outstanding organizers of Party youth. I share with him the concern that the People’s Independence Party — which you, and I, and all of us made — should continue to carry out through this government the policies it has hammered out of the will of our people. In urgent response to certain information, I took the step of introducing a Preventive Detention Bill without having had the opportunity to present the Bill to the Central Committee. But I would like to point out that I took this step in full consultation with the Cabinet. And out of the eight members of the Central Committee, five are members of the cabinet.” A triumphant hum of assent; he cut it short, modestly, continuing, “When this measure is presented to the Congress of the Party next month, I have no doubt that it will have the endorsement not only of the remaining members of the Central Committee, but also of Congress as a whole, granting a country — wide mandate for what was in the first place a majority decision by the full representation of the Central Committee in the Cabinet.” The stir of disagreement on the back benches was tramped out by the applause of well — polished shoes drumming the floor. Mweta’s supporters beamed and overflowed confidence. Carried by it, he did not allow himself to be swept away, but swiftly turned the momentum towards the dissidents: his voice rose clear out of the clamour. “In this first year of our nationhood we stand together in a way that perhaps will never be repeated. In the years of our children and our childrens’ children, if God blesses our country with the peace and stability we are striving for, the business of running this country may be no more than a piece of efficient administration by professionals. But we are brothers in arms. We are the people who demanded freedom when we didn’t have more than one pair of pants. Yes, we are the people — Cyrus Goma, the member for Selusi, myself, many, many faces I see here — who sat in prison together not because we wanted to destroy but because we wanted to create a new life for the people of Africa. We are the people who made the struggle and the same people who are now doing the governing. We are the first crop. That’s what the people who used to run us call it. And it’s true that they sowed the dragon’s teeth of colonialist repression and up we came, a generation breathing fire.… We have learned the hardest way since our schooldays what unity demands from us — and how, without it, nothing, nothing that is any good to any of us, can be gained or kept. Small doubts and differences — we respect them in each other. They are family opinions. They don’t touch the fact that we are one….”

Cyrus Goma with his hand blinkered against the side of his face, his eyes turned to Mweta, and on his face the expression of a man who cannot be reached. Dando looking bored. Bray moved out ahead of the press of people as the House adjourned for lunch; only the journalists preceded him — one small black man in a paisley waistcoat had already gained one of the streamlined glass telephone booths and was mouthing away. President calls for unity: of course. Bray stalked slowly down the flowered drive to the visitors’ parking ground and had to pause, not knowing for a second whether to jump back or forward before a mini — jeep swivelling out of the members’ car park. The driver was the huge young man who had brought up the question of the Central Committee. Braking, he bounced himself so high he almost hit the canvas roof, and coming down, gave an open — and-shut grin at the plight of the two near — victims, Bray and himself.

Bray was to meet Neil Bayley for lunch. An Italian who had drifted down from the Congo had opened a pizzeria just behind the Central African Stores — it was filled with the younger white people of the town; no African would pay six shillings for a circle of charred dough smeared with tomato and anchovy. When the small white population tired of eating pizza, the Italian would have to open a fish — and-chip shop, where the Africans would patronize him. But for the present it was evident that this was the place to go in a town where there was nowhere to go; under the bunches of raffia onions and the blare of “Arrivederci Roma” pretty secretaries from ministries, embassies, and missions and men from other ministries, embassies, and missions (Conferences are great places for picking up birds, Neil Bayley remarked) were occupied in the early moves of sexual attraction, most easily established across a table. Like everyone else, Neil Bayley and Bray drank the house wine in Coca — Cola glasses, and Bayley’s big river — god’s head with the red — blond curly beard gazed out in pleasure across the room between his bursts of intensely lively concentration on what he was saying. “Yes, yes, of course, Goma’s a subtle bastard, and when he opens his mouth he’s not only speaking for himself, you can count on that. What others can’t say because they’re in the cabinet, our Cyrus says from the floor.”