Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Mweta had the mummified look of one who has become a vessel of ritual. But once the declaration of independence was pronounced he came, as out of a trance, to an irresistibly lively self, sitting up there seeing everything around him, a spectator, Bray felt, as well as a spectacle. Bray was half-embarrassed to find that he even caught his eye, once, and there was a quick smile; but Mweta was used to having eyes on him, by now. He talked to the elderly English princess who sat beside him with her knees peaked neatly together in the Royal position curiously expressive of the suffering of ceremonies, and Bray saw him point out the contingent of Gala women, their faces and breasts whitened for joy, who were lined up among the troops of musicians and dancers from various regions.

And yet when that ceremony was over, and in between all the other official occasions — State Ball, receptions, cocktail parties, banquets, and luncheons — a mood of celebration grew up, as it were, outside the palace gates. He attended most of the official occasions (he and Roly saluted each other with mock surprise when they met in the house, half-dressed in formal dinner clothes every night) but the real parties took place before and after. These grew spontaneously one out of the other, and once you had been present at the first, you got handed on to all the others. He really knew only some of the people but all of them seemed to know about him, and many were the friends of friends. Dando took him to the Bayleys; but Neil was a friend of Mweta, and Vivien was the niece of, of all people, Sir William Clough, the last governor, who had been a junior with Bray in the colonial service in Tanganyika. The Bayleys were friends of Cyprian Kente, Mweta’s Minister of the Interior, and his wife Tindi, and Timothy Odara, one of the territory’s few African doctors, whom Bray, of course, knew well. Through each individual the group extended to someone else and drew in, out of the new international character of the little capital, Poles, Ghanaians, Hungarians and Israelis, South African and Rhodesian refugees.

After the State Ball there was a private all-night party in a marquee. Roly Dando had promised to drop by, and of course Bray was with him. Many other people Bray had seen at the ball streamed in in their finery: they had contributed to the arrangements for this party. Cheers went up from the people already present who had not been at the ball; they had decided to dress for once, too, and the two groups of women mingled and exclaimed over each other, everyone began to talk about what the ball was like, champagne came in, a Congolese band whipped up their pace, and the absurd and slightly thrilling mood of the State Ball and the cosy gaiety of the party swept together. The tent was filled with chairs and divans borrowed from people’s houses, and flowers from their gardens. Someone had put up a board with a collage of blown-up pictures of Mweta — speaking, laughing, yawning, touching a piece of machinery with curiosity, leaving, arriving, even threatening. The trouble everyone had taken gave a sense of occasion to even the wildest moments of the night. Vivien Bayley, queenly at twenty-six, with her beautiful, well-mannered, disciplined face, came to hover beside Bray between responsible permutations about the room to make sure that this young girl was not being bothered too much by the attentions of someone older and rather drunk, or that young man was not being overlooked by the girls who ought to be taking notice of him. Bray surprised her by asking her to dance, swaying stiffly to a rhythm he didn’t know, but nevertheless keeping the beat, so that they wouldn’t make fools of themselves among the complicated gyrations of the Africans. “I’m so glad you dance,” she said; he was ashamed that he had asked her only out of politeness. “Neil won’t — I think it’s a mistake to let oneself forget these things because of vanity. Tindi Kente is a wonderful dancer, wonderful, isn’t she — just like a snake brought out by music, and sometimes he’ll try with her. He loves to flirt with her when Cyprian’s not looking, but get her doing her marvellous wriggle on the floor and he just stands there like Andrew, dragging his feet.” Andrew was probably one of her children; being accepted with such immediate casual friendliness by everyone was rather like being forced to learn a foreign language by finding oneself alone among people who spoke nothing else: it was assumed that he would pick up family and other relationships merely by being exposed to them.

Someone called to Vivien and they were drawn away from the dancers to a crowded table. A young woman leaned her elbows on it and her white breasts pursed forward within the frame of her arms. “Have my glass,” she said, as there were no spare ones to go round. She went off to dance, holding in her stomach as she squeezed past and balanced her soft-looking body. The heat was heightened by drink and animation and the glass filled by the long, narrow black hand of his neighbour was marked by the fingerprints of the white woman who had relinquished it. “You don’t remember me? — Ras Asahe, I came to your place in England once.” The young man said he was in broadcasting now, “so-called assistant to the Director of English Language Services.”

“And how’s your father? Good Lord, I’d like to see him again!” Joseph Asahe was one of Edward Shinza’s lieutenants in the early days of PIP.

“He’s old now.” It was not the right question to have asked; what the young man dismissed was any possible suggestion that he was to be thought of in connection with Shinza. His clothes, watch, cufflinks were those of a man who feels he must buy the best for himself, he had the Mussolini-jaw quite common among the people in the part of the country he came from but those hands were the lyrical, delicately strong, African ones that escaped the international blandness of businessmen’s hands as Bray had marvelled to see them escape the brutalizing of physical hardship. Convicts broke stones with hands like that, here.

They made conversation about the radio and television coverage of the celebrations, and from this broke into talk that interested them both — the problem of communication in a country with so many different language groups. “I wonder how much use could be made of a radio classroom in country schools, whether it couldn’t help considerably to ease the shortage of teachers, here, and maintain some sort of standard where teachers are perhaps not very well qualified. I’d like to talk to somebody about it — your man? I’m not keen to go straight to the Director-General—”

“It won’t make much difference. They”—Ras Asahe meant the whites— “all know that after the end of the year they’ll be on contract, and that means they’ll be replaced in three years. Not that they ever made an effort. Sheltered employment all these years, what d’you expect? You don’t need ideas, you don’t need to move out of your chair, you simply go on producing a noise out of the magic box to keep the natives quiet — and now, boom, it’s all gone, including the only incentive they ever had, their pension. They’re pathetic, man; certainly they haven’t much to offer when they look for jobs with the BBC. They’re just not going to find any. They want to go, they’re longing to, you can see they can’t stand the sight of your face when you’re working together — which makes things very pleasant, you can imagine—” A slim little white girl slipped between them and took up Ras Asahe’s hand with the gold-metal watch-bracelet as if it were some possession she had put down— “Save me from Daddy Dando.”

“—I could give you a dozen examples of the sort of thing that happens — the ceremony this afternoon: like a horse-race, man — the arrangements were exactly what they used to use for the charity Christmas Handicap, what else do they know? Suggest what you like, they just talk it away into the cigarette smoke, nobody even listens.” The girl was there in their conversation like a photograph come upon lying between the pages of a book; Bray was not sure whether she was child or woman: thin collar-bones, a long neck with a face hardly wider, pale and sallow, a big, thin, unpainted mouth, black hair and glittering, sorrowful black eyes. She wore a dress made of Congo cloth.