Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Hjalmar kept glancing at his wife to see if she were amused. She held her eyebrows high, like an ageing actress. Emmanuelle was inwardly alight, flirting with her father and even her brother, calling her mother “darling”—for the benefit of Ras Asahe or perhaps to present for herself a tableau of family life as she imagined it to be for other people.

It was a warm, singing evening with the moon rising on one side of the sky while a lilac — grained sunset had not yet receded into darkness on the other. There was the smell of boiled potatoes given off all over Central Africa, after nightfall, by some shrub. By the time he got to the tobacco sales hall where the Golden Plate dinner was being held, it was dark. He had not wanted to go, really — Mweta embarrassed him slightly by the invitation — but the cars converging on the grounds, the white shirt — fronts and coloured dresses caught in headlights, and the striped canvas porte-cochère with its gold — braided commissionaires created a kind of simple anticipation of their own. The warm potato — smell and the mixture of black and white faces in the formally dressed herd pressing to the entrance were to him evidence that this was not just another municipal gathering — this was Africa, and this time Africans were honoured guests, being met with a bow and a smile. There was a satisfaction — naive, he knew; never mind — in this most obvious and, ultimately, unimportant aspect of change. It did not matter any more to the Africans whether white people wanted to dine with them or not; they themselves were now the governing elite, and the whites were the ones who had to sue for the pleasure of their company. Fifty pounds a head for a ticket; he waited in line behind a rusty — faced bald Englishman and a lively plump Scot with their blond wives, and a black lady, probably the wife of some minor official, who had faithfully assumed their uniform of décolleté and pearls. She smelled almost surgically of eau — de-Cologne. The African Mayor and the white President of the Chamber of Commerce dealt jointly with the receiving line, dispensing identical unctuousness.

The tobacco sales hall had been decided upon because not even the Great Lakes Hotel’s Flamingo Room was big enough to accommodate the guests expected. The bare walls were entirely masked by red cotton; an enormous coloured poster of Mweta hung amid gold draping above the dais where the main dignitaries were to sit; stands of chemically tinted lilies and gilded leaves stood between long tables and at the four corners of a specially constructed dance floor like a boxing ring.

The perfect reproduction of municipal vulgarity was softened by a homely and delicate fragrance of tobacco leaves, with which the building was impregnated and which prevailed, despite the smell of food and women’s perfume. Bray was conscious of it when his mind wandered during the speeches. The Mayor spoke, the President of the Chamber of Commerce spoke, a prominent industrialist spoke, the chairman of the largest mining company spoke. Through grapefruit cocktail, river fish in a pale sauce (Tilapia Bonne Femme, in the illuminated lettering of the menu), some sort of beef evidently brought down on the hoof from the Bashi (Boeuf en Casserole aux Champignons), he sat between Mrs. Justin Chekwe, wife of the Minister of Justice, and Mrs. Raymond Mackintosh, wife of an insurance man who was one of the last white town councillors left in office. The white matron, like a tourist proudly determined to use her phrase — book sentences to demonstrate how much at home she feels, leant across him to say to the black matron, “Mrs. Mweta looks so young, doesn’t she? What a responsibility, at her age. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to cope. Doesn’t the hall look beautiful? One doesn’t realize how much really hard work goes into these functions — you should have seen our chairwoman, Mrs. Selden — Ross, up a ladder hammering nails into that material.” She added in a lower tone to Bray, “We begged it all from the Indians, you know.” Mrs. Chekwe, sullen with shyness, her neck and head propped up on the bolster of flesh held aloft by her corsets, did not know what to do with the fish, since, unlike the more experienced Bray and Mrs. Mackintosh, she could not overcome repugnance and eat it. She murmured, “Oh yes,” and again, “Oh yes?” varying the tone to a polite question. For his ten minutes’ attention to Mrs. Chekwe, he thought he might do better by talking in Gala, but decided it might be misinterpreted, on the one hand (Mrs. Mackintosh) as showing off and sucking up to the blacks, and on the other hand (Mrs. Chekwe) as patronage and the inference that her English was not good. However, he knew she came from the Northern Province and he managed a not too halting chat with her about the changes in the town of Gala and the whereabouts of various members of her family. Mrs. Mackintosh was talkative, one of those spirited colonial ladies— “It’d take more than this to throw me”: she was referring, of course, to her problems as a member of the ladies’ committee, but she gave him a game look that swept in present company. She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country, and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive — economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered — that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

He had been placed at the main table, but right at the end — a name fitted in after the seating plan had been made up. The industrialist spoke of the huge new assembly plant for cars (a British — American consortium) that would employ five hundred workers, and said how stable government and “sensible conditions” for foreign investment were attracting capital that turned its back on neighbouring territories with their “impossible” restrictions on the foreign ownership of stock and “wild demands” for nationalization of industry; “here industry and the nation will go forward together.” Sir Reginald Harvey, chairman of the gold — mining companies, spoke in a tone of modest, patriarchal pride, “allowing himself boldly to say that the mining industry, whose history went back to before the turn of the century, “brought to this part of Africa the first light of hope after the centuries — long depredation and stagnation of the slave trade. On the basis of the auriferous rock discovered then, in the eighteen — nineties, the modern state of today has been founded….” It was not even necessary for him to mention that forty per cent of the national income came from the mines; everyone in the hall was aware of that as unquestioningly as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. The mining industry was continuing to open up new fields of endeavour … there had been a temporary setback at the old Mondo — Mondo mine — but the tireless research, on which the company spent over a million a year in its efforts to better mining techniques and raise production, might soon make it possible to overcome these difficulties and reopen the mine … the mining companies and the nation would go forward….

Applause was regular and vociferous, descending on cue as each speaker closed his mouth. Black cheeks gleamed, the blood rose animatedly in white faces while in the minds of each lay unaffected and undisturbed the awareness that what the industrialist had said was, “You’ll use our money — but on our terms,” and what the chairman of the gold — mining group had said was, “We don’t intend to reopen the Mondo — Mondo mine because our shareholders overseas want big dividends from mines that are in production, not expansion that will create employment but take five or six years before it begins to pay off.” The director of the cold — storage company, whose butcher shops all over the country had served Africans through a hatch segregated from white customers until a PIP boycott three years before had forced a change, charmingly insisted that the black guest across the table from him accept a cigar. “Put it in your pocket, then. Smoke it at home when you feel like it.” Mr. Ndisi Shunungwa, Secretary General of the United Trades’ Union Congress, who had once said, “They got in with a bottle of gin and a Bible — let’s give them back what they brought and tell them to get out,” solicitously fished under the table to retrieve the handbag of the wife of the Director of Medical Services. A plump and grateful blonde, she was apologetic: “Oh I am a nuisance … oh, look, you’ve got all dusty on your arm.… Oh I am …”