Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Mweta spoke very briefly. From where he was seated, Bray was presented with the profile, the high, round black brow, the little flat ear, the flash of the eye beneath womanish curly lashes, the strong lips that were delicately everted in speech. All who worked together for the country were countrymen, Mweta said. “From the earliest days of our struggle” he had never thought of citizenship as a matter of skin colour. If it was wrong to profit by the colour of the skin, it was also wrong to discriminate against a colour of the skin. He understood “this dinner was the most expensive meal any of us here has ever eaten.” There was laughter; he smiled briefly, but he was serious, candid, a man who had lived until less than a year ago in a tinroofed, two — roomed, black township house: “—but the cost is really much higher even than that, the price of this happy meeting has been paid over more than fifty years by the labour of the people of this country and the energetic foresight of those from outside who had faith in its development.”

Loud music unfurled over the talk and clink of plates, and the harrassed stump of sweating waiters. Joy Mweta was steered out onto the dance floor by one of the white men. Voices rose in adjustment to the noise; the Congolese band played their particular hiccuping rhythm, marked by South American rattles and clappers. Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter. Some of the white men began to drift together as they did at club dances, and the black men were drawn to the male camaraderie of whisky and business talk. White wives went off to the cloakroom close as schoolgirls, and came back with faces animated by a good laugh about the whole affair. Black wives sat patiently, born to endure the boredom and neglect of official occasions. Dancing with a dutiful Bray, Mrs. Mackintosh was made careless now by gin and tonic. She giggled at the red bunting that covered the walls. “Bummed it from the coolies, my dear. They cheated the poor bloody native for so many years, they can afford to give away something now.”

He danced with Evelyn Odara. She dragged him off to be introduced to an elegant girl he had noticed passing with unseeing eyes the African wives dumped like tea cosies and the white women watching her with their men, a white dress and dangling glass earrings making her black satin skin startling. Doris Manyema. But he had met her before, during the Independence celebrations. She had just been appointed the country’s cultural attaché at United Nations; she received congratulations with guarded, confident disdain — it was as if one could look at her only through glass, this beauty who would take her place neither in the white man’s back yard nor in the black man’s women’s quarters. She was going by way of Algiers; they talked of Ben Bella and Boumedienne for a few minutes and then a young white man who had been waiting for an opportunity to join in, meanwhile looking at her nipples touching against the inside of her dress and touching at his own blonde moustache in a kind of unconscious reflex, passed some remark about Tshombe’s death. “I lost my bet he’d get out of prison there. I worked out the chances — you know, how many times he’d survived by the skin of his teeth before — fed ’em to a computer. Marvellously wily fellow, he was. I’m in insurance — actuary, you see,” he said, a disarming apology for talking shop. Doris Manyema did not look at him, saying to Bray, “I hope Tshombe rots in hell.” “Oh come now.” The young man, jollying, bridling sexually. “I just took a sporting interest.” Her long eyes looked down along her round cheekbones, her small nose distended slightly at the nostrils. “We don’t share the sporting instincts of you people. Your blood sports of one kind and another. They only kept him alive that long because of Mobutu. Otherwise he ought to’ve been thrown in a ditch the way he did with Lumumba.” The young man asked her to dance and led her off by the elbow, golden sideburns very dashing. “A handsome couple,” Evelyn Odara said, with her man’s laugh. She was draped like a solid pillar in florid robes; Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses were flashing as they did when he made a political speech, but he was dancing with his apologetic blonde, smiling down sociably with his head drawn back from her, while she had on her face the circumspect, wide — eyed look of a woman who is dancing with her pelvis pressed against a strange man. As the evening went on, roars of laughter came from the groups of hard drinkers; they began to forget the presence of Africans and tell their obscene stories. The black men gathered here and there and spoke in their own language, pas devant les enfants. In the men’s room, one of the white men standing beside Bray took a quick look round and said to a companion, “Thank Christ it’s gone off all right, eh, Greg? Jesus, but it’s heavy going with these chaps. And one mammy I had to push round the floor — I’m telling you, I needed to go into low gear to get that arse on the move.”

The confusion of noise was interrupted suddenly by the band stopping. People broke off talk and looked around. There was some sort of stir; people, began to crowd up; a different kind of buzz started and was hushed again. Mweta with Joy was parting a way through the guests, his guitar in his hands. That was how Bray saw it: his guitar. But of course it was not that guitar, it was simply one handed over from a member of the band in answer to a suggestion or request, maybe even Mweta’s own sudden idea. Anyway, he was walking almost shyly, Joy by the hand and the guitar in the other, with the look of half — anticipation (he had loved that guitar) and half — pride (he had liked the pleasure village people took in the performance) he used to have when he got off the bicycle and the guitar slid from his back. Without any announcement, quite naturally, they stepped up onto the dais and he began to play, while she brought her hands together once or twice, straightened her young, slack, motherly body in its schoolgirlish pink dress, smiled, and then began to sing with him. Their voices were soft and in perfect harmony. They sang some banal popular song from an American film of the Fifties.

The whites applauded thunderously; delight came from them: perhaps it was an unconscious relief at seeing this black man of all black men in the old, acceptable role of entertainer. The Africans merely looked indulgent; after forty years of being told when to come and go, when to stand and when to take your hat off, a black president himself decided upon procedure. Then Mweta handed his wife down from the dais, gave back the guitar and left the hall through an avenue of people who surged forward spontaneously under the bright glance of that black face, that smile of vulnerable happiness.

He thought of how he had said to Bayley of Mweta, “He calls for an act of faith.” What he had really meant was it takes innocence, a kind of innocence, to ask for an act of faith. He was talking to the Director of Information, who, as the first black journalist in the territory, had come to interview him years ago when the summary recall to England had just been announced. “What was worrying me most, I was worrying you would notice that I had no shorthand at that time …” They laughed, in the convention that the past is always amusing. But he was experiencing a clenched concern for this being that was Mweta, a contraction of inner attention, affection and defensiveness on behalf of Mweta, defensiveness even against himself, Bray. He was hyperperceptive to the world threatening to press the spirit of Mweta out of shape — white businessmen, black politicians, the commanding flash of Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses, the OAU — his mind picked up random threats from memory, newspapers, and the actuality around him. There must be one being you believe in, in spite of everything, one being!