Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“That’s a very grand affair.”

Shinza was grinning, coming in to Bray’s greeting. “Well, in those days you were generous to your Tribal Authority, you know. Chief Mpana was one of your big men.”

“So you married Chief Mpana’s daughter?”

“You know her, you’ve met her!” Shinza put his hand on the head of the dog, murmuring something admiring to it, and it growled and wagged its feather — boa tail.

“Yes indeed I have, she’s a charming girl. You’re lucky.”

“The car’s not in all that good condition.” Shinza laughed, sat himself down and glanced with a guest’s mild interest round Boxer’s room, seeing it as one of those white men’s lairs that even he, who had lived in Europe and America, sometimes found inexplicable.

“How is she? And the son?”

“It was nice of you to come and see her.”

“Unfortunately you’d gone out to get cigarettes.”

Shinza’s flash — a gap — grin of admittance, mutual acceptance — at once converted the casual atmosphere to another voltage. He waited while Bray poured the beer, but with an air of having got down to the ground between them. “That hasn’t been worrying me.” Bray made a face questioning the wisdom of such trust. “I know I had nothing to worry about. But I wanted to have a talk with you — you know, I want to tell you a few things, I want to show you—” He closed his teeth under open lips, his hands round the beer mug made, half — comically, a gesture of directing an invisible head to face something. “That’s all. A lot of things we decided a long time ago. Not only in London. Before that, right at the beginning, eh, here at home. What’s happening to all that, eh? What’s happening to it, James?”

His voice mastered the questions rhetorically. The half — insulting, preoccupied reserve that had discounted Bray’s presence when they talked in the house in the Bashi might never have existed. Now an old intimacy was taken for granted just as easily as it had been taken for dead. Shinza could move among examples, anecdotes, and private thoughts without bothering about sequence, because the links were there, in Bray’s mind as in his own. He accused, demanded, derided — speaking for them both. “Kayira sits in the House of Chiefs — that old criminal who raped a child a few years ago and told the judge it was his right as a chief. Those ignorant old men were going to be stripped of their ‘rights,’ of all their forms of parasitism, and made to stand on merit — but have you heard a mention of abolishing the House of Chiefs? No, you’ve only heard that the House is going to be enlarged so that those fat men in blue suits can spread themselves comfortably. — Painted, you know. Made nice. Mweta still talks about the need to forget tribal differences — that’s how it’s put now, you don’t say abolish tribalism because you might make the fat old men shake — but all the time he’s improving the House of Chiefs. Because they’re going to sit there — as long as he’s where he is. Mweta likes to make speeches about the time when we each had only one pair of pants — the trouble is, he doesn’t remember that we also knew, then, what we wanted. We were going to make this country over from top to bottom. Right? Turn the whole thing over, just like you kick an anthill, and make new lives for all those people running about not understanding where they were going. Right, James? But what are the signs? Reginald Harvey tells him that unless the gold price rises the company can’t think of opening marginal — production mines, and he takes it without a word. Well, not without a word, Harvey’s got plenty of words, Harvey’s only got to mention that the company can get a far bigger return by expansion in South Africa, and he falls over backwards to say how he appreciates what a favour the company’s doing by earning dividends here at all. But was that the idea! — Oh yes, I know, within two years all work up to the level of mine captain will be Africanized. So what? What sort of windowdressing is that if new jobs are not being created at the same time. We move up into the seats of the expatriate whites, and go on earning dividends for them when they go back ‘home’ to retire? Was that the idea? Christ, James, what were we talking about all those years, if it was for this? He handles the English and Americans like glass — because we need foreign capital. But if you keep going to the old places for it you keep on getting it on the same old terms. A child should be able to see that. And the profits are geared to their economies, not ours. The great new sugar scheme we’ve heard so much about — what’s it amount to? They’ll get sugar at a preferential price, while we could be growing rice instead and getting a better price in the open market. We’re exporting our iron ore at their price and buying back their steel at their price. We’re still selling our cotton and buying their cloth — the Czechs offered to send us the technical aid for a textile mill, but the tied loan he got from the Japanese for the cotton gin stipulates they get the whole crop. So we’re back where we were. Wearing the cloth they make and sell back to us. We could have had the same as Nyerere’s got — a textile mill as well as our cotton gin, a textile mill set up by the Chinese, all the know — how we want, and the whole thing financed interest — free. What’s he afraid of? He’ll only play the game with the devil he knows, eh? Apart from one or two big schemes that aren’t off the paper yet, and a couple of bad new contracts for the expansion of existing industry, like the deal with the fishing concessionaires, a useless thing if ever there was one, a mess — apart from that, what’ve we got? — The Coca — Cola bottling plant and a factory for putting transistors from Germany into plastic cases, because our labour’s cheaper than Europe’s, and they get a bigger profit when we buy the radios? Are we only educating our people to need the things they sell? Good God, are we to pass from exporting raw materials only to bottling, assembling — never making?”

“It’s a slow start, yes.”

“A start! Where’s it headed for?” Shinza waited as if for the echo to die away. “It’s not the start we planned at all. He’s forgotten! Forgotten what this country meant to do. What we promised. Bush politicians’ big promises. Now let them bottle cold drinks while they wear out their freedom shirts.” He gave a bellow of a laugh. “Couldn’t you sit down and cry?” he said. “James, couldn’t you howl like a bloody dog?”

“Shinza, I suppose I’m naturally more detached about it than you—” And then in the raw atmosphere Shinza had stripped down between them, he said aloud what he was thinking— “It’s a terrible clarity you have … you know …? But perhaps it’s easy … perhaps you expect too much too quickly, because you’re not in the dust that’s raised, you haven’t had to do any of it — I see that in myself now that I’m stuck with this education project. Mweta’s had only a few months.”

“—Yes, and the twenty per cent of the budget that was going to go into education, how does it look so far? You’re penny — pinching to get anything done, eh? Meantime another thirty thousand kids are starting to draw their sums in the dirt in our so — called schools. And soon another fifteen thousand youths will leave half — baked and wander off to the towns.”

“It won’t be more than twelve per cent of the budget, certainly.”

“A few months! James, we know that a few months is a long time for us. PIP has become a typical conservative party — hanging on wherever he can to ties with the old colonial power, Western — orientated, particularist. It’s a text — book example. His democracy turns out to be the kind that guards the rights of the old corporate interests more than anyone else’s — the chiefs, religious organizations, precolonial nations. Foreign interests. All that lot. In seven months you show which way you’re going. It’s right from the start or it’ll be never. Look around you. This continent, this time. You don’t get years and years, you don’t get second chances.”