Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Then they began to talk. Rubadiri was one of those half — educated men of sharp intelligence, touchy with whites yet self — assured, and capable of a high — handed attitude towards his own people, who appear in authority all over the place after independence is achieved. PIP was kept alive by such people, now that the old brazier — warmth of interdependency that was all there was to huddle round had been replaced by the furnace blast of power. There was no sense in the dispute — that was how he presented it to Bray. The old men and women who were employed by the fish — drying “factory”— “those sticks in the sand with a few fish — you’ll see out there”—were not capable of any other work. They did not keep regular hours of employment, they were sick one day, they started only in the afternoon the next, they had pains in the legs — he laughed tolerantly. “It gives them something to do, the money for tobacco.” Of course, the company did own the fish — drying, it had been there, a small private concession that they had bought up along with some boats and the use of this landing stage when the factory was started. It produced a few thousand bags of dried fish a year, that went to the mines — but that demand was dwindling because even before Independence the mines had almost abandoned migratory labour and workers who lived with their families were not given rations as compound workers had been. For the rest of the market, the company had the fish — drying and fish — meal factory in Gala, as Bray must know, where the whole thing was done by machinery. So these people here — his hand waved them away— “the company just lets them stay.” The union that had been formed when the factory started didn’t recognize them.

When he began to talk about the “trouble” of the previous week he took on a closed — minded look, the look of a man who has stated all this before a gathering, repeated it, perhaps, many times, with a hardening elimination of any doubt or alternative interpretation.

“Now some people come along and say, the fish — dryers work here, they work for the same company, why aren’t they in the union? They say, they are paid too little, it’s bad for us if somebody accepts very low pay. How do we know, if there’s trouble, if one day we strike, they won’t be brought in to do our work?” He lifted his lip derisively and expelled a breath, as if it were not worth a laugh. “Of course they know, the same time, that’s all rubbish. How can women and old men do our work? All they could do is wash the floors! They don’t understand the packing, and the freezing plant machinery.”

“Why do these others bother about them, then?”

“Why? Sir, I’ll tell you. These are people who say they are PIP, but they are not PIP. They want to make trouble in the union for PIP. They want to make strikes here. I know them. They only want trouble.”

“They’re not lake people?”

He looked surly. “They are from here. But they have got friends — there”—he stabbed a finger in the air— “in the factory in Gala, there in town — I know.”

“So there was a row,” Bray said.

“Trouble, trouble, at the meeting. Some of our people want to expel them from the union. Then there was fighting afterwards … trouble.”

“And you — do you want them expelled?”

He smiled under his ragged moustache at Bray, professionally. “PIP doesn’t have to be told to look after the workers here. They must change their ideas and see sense.”

Bray talked to him a little longer, getting some useful information about the origins of the trawler and factory workers; it turned out that Rubadiri himself had his wife and family not in the immediate area, but in one of the villages farther up the lake.

Bray knew that he had kept the girl sitting in the car nearly an hour, but when he made out the racks of drying fish looking like some agricultural crop stacked in the sun away over the far side of the jetty, he went up quickly to have a look. It was true that it was more like some local fishermen’s enterprise than part of a large, white company’s activities. Just a bit larger — not more elaborate — than any of the home — made fish — drying equipment you saw wherever there were huts, as you went up the lake shore. The usual racks made of reeds and bound with grass, on which split Nile perch and barbel were draped stiff as hides, yellowish, rimed with salt, and high — smelling. The ground was bare, the verge of the lake was awash with tins and litter, and certainly no one was working. But of course it was Saturday. Naked children and scavenging dogs were about; then he noticed that a series of derelict sheds under one rotting tin roof were not storage sheds at all, although they stank like them, but were inhabited. There were no windows, only the dark holes of doorways. Faces loomed in the darkness; now he saw that what he had taken for rubbish lying about were the household possessions of these people. There were no traditional utensils, of clay or wood; and no store — bought ones, either — only the same sort of detritus as scummed the edge of the lake, put into use, as if these people lived from the dirt cast off by a community that was already humble enough in itself, using the cheapest and shoddiest of the white man’s goods. There were no doors to the sheds. He felt ashamed to walk up and stare at the people but he walked rapidly past, a few feet away, in the peculiar awe that the sight of acquiescent degradation produces in the well — fed. The malarial old lay about on the ground outside, legs drawn up as if assuming an attitude for traditional burial. Vague grins of senility or malnutrition acknowledged him from those black holes of doorways, gaping like foul mouths. He saw that there were no possessions within, only humans, inert, supine, crawled in out of the sun. A girl with the lurch of a congenitally dislocated hip came out with the cripple’s angry look that comes from effort and not ill — temper, and put on a beggar’s anticipation. A crone looked up conversationally but found it too much effort to speak.

He went back round the freezing plant to the car and said to Rebecca, “Come here a minute. I want to show you something.”

They walked rapidly, she subdued yet curious, glancing at him. “Christ, what a smell—” They passed the racks. He took her by the arm and steered her along the line of sheds. His grip seemed to prevent her from speaking. She said, “But it’s horrible.” “I had to show you.” They spoke under their breath, not turning to each other. The crippled girl, the crone, the quiet children watched them go.

Back at the car she burst out. “Why doesn’t someone do something about them? Who are they?”

He nodded. “I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t somehow exaggerating. I mean, this is still a poor country. Life in the villages isn’t all that rosy.”

“But this! In tribal villages they may not have the things they have in town, but they do have their own things, you can see they are living . In that place they have nothing, Bray, nothing. No necessities for any kind of life.”

“Just what struck me. They’re somehow stripped.”

“How do they keep alive at all?”

“They’re fish — dryers.” He began to tell her the story while they drove away and left the place behind them.

At last he said, “Well — let’s find somewhere to eat,” and slowed down to consider. She gave a little shudder: “Somewhere beautiful.”

“Where we were the other day?”

“Oh, lovely.” But when he stopped along the lake shore track and prepared to settle, she looked uncertain.

“Isn’t this the place?”

She said, “I thought you meant the island—”

“All the way over to the island?”