Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Of course.”

“Because you can see how Becky is — she never believes that anyone would do her any harm. To come to the bundu in the first place — just mad. Well, if you want one of the good — looking sexy ones you settle for having to do the thinking yourself, don’t you? Can’t have everything—” His daughter had come up to him and he wound up the visit, talking of the mother but playfully transferring the reference as if it were applied to the daughter, hooking her ragged strands of hair behind her ears with his first finger, turning her meagre urchin’s face to rub noses with his own. “Is that all you’ve got to wear, your brother’s old pants? Lovely bird like you? Shall we go and buy you a decent dress?” She did not speak, only nodded her head vehemently to everything. It was true that there was something shabby and deprived about Rebecca’s children. Bray had a curious loyal impulse to distract the father’s attention from this by changing the subject. “What sort of equipment have you got for the lake — you don’t mean diving suit and oxygen and all that?”

And so Gordon Edwards insisted, at the lake on Sunday, that he try spear — fishing with him. There were several pairs of goggles, flippers and three spear — guns. He found a strange and delightful engulfment, freed from association with anything else he had ever experienced. He caught only one small fish, while the other, of course, expertly got quite a catch, including a Nile perch weighing about fifteen pounds. Once they met underwater, the two men, coming up to face each other at the end of the gliding momentum of their web — extended feet. He met the smile behind the goggle — plate, the wet — darkened hair, the undulating body; the encounter hung a moment in that element.

“Well, how’d you like it?” She was waiting for them when they came back.

“Oh wonderful. I felt like a fish in water—”

Nothing would persuade Aleke or Tlume to go down. “And these’re the guys who shout about other people exploiting their natural resources, ay, James?”—Gordon Edwards, cocking his head at them. Aleke said from under a hat, lying in the shade, “My country needs me. Life too valuable.”

The Frasers’ rumour was borne out. While they were all at the lake that day a party of PIP thugs drove through the workers’ quarters on the bald hillside at the iron-ore mine and kicked over the Sunday cooking fires that were going outside nearly every house, burned bicycles, and in one case, killed somebody’s tethered goat. Aleke related all this later — when they got back from their picnic there was an urgent message for him from the new Commissioner of Police, Selufu, to come to the mine. There was a moment when Aleke half — suggested Bray should go with him but it was no sooner broached than both of them, for different reasons, let it pass, as if it had not been serious. Perhaps Aleke had been told to let it be seen that Shinza’s old friend had, in fact, some quasi — official status in the interests of Mweta; perhaps he merely had been told to make Bray feel important.… On the other hand, if he had no directive from above, maybe the moment the words were out of Aleke’s mouth he had wondered whether an uncertain quantity like the Colonel should be allowed an inside view of difficulties in the district. They had never talked again about the boy Lebaliso had beaten in Gala prison.

But down at the boma next day Aleke, his fan turning from side to side all morning although the winter weather was pleasant, talked about Sunday’s affair rather as if it had been a rowdy football match. He was critical of such behaviour but described it with gusto. “One old woman was worried as hell about her sewing machine — she ran out with it on her head, I don’t know where she thought she was going — and a fellow”—he always called PIP militants “the fellows”— “made a grab at her more out of devilment than anything. A policeman grabbed him, so she puts down the machine and she starts punching and kicking the fellow while the policeman’s holding him.… You’ve never heard such a carry — on. And the women are always the worst … our women! Nothing gives me a headache like one of those old mothers when she starts yelling.”

The PIP “fellows” had gone to the mine with the purpose of supporting the union officials’ decision (made against the decision of the miners themselves) not to start a wildcat strike. They said they wanted to hold a meeting at the mine— “to let them know that not only the union but PIP expects them to go to work,” Bray supplied. “Exactly,” Aleke said. “The fellows say it was going to be a peaceful appeal to loyalty and so on. And nothing would have happened, man, if the moment the lorry arrived at the compound everyone hadn’t started shouting, specially those old ones. …” A few heads had been broken; not enough to create an emergency at the Mission hospital. “You’re lucky, Aleke, when I was doing your job, I’d have had them all up before me in court next day.”

“Don’t I know it.” Aleke offered good — natured professional sympathy. Although he described the night with such laconic detachment, he and Selufu apparently acted efficiently. Selufu arrested most of the PIP fellows and they had been remanded for preparatory examination by the Gala magistrate. It was all as it should be; Bray allowed some inner tension to relax. Of course he wondered about Shinza — there in the area of the mine the week before the proposed strike. Well, Shinza would see that the PIP militants at least had been arrested.

Mweta’s letter came back promptly; Bray certainly would be invited to the Congress — under what label, he didn’t say. As Bray knew, the Congress was going to be held in the capital this time. (There was already much criticism over this move; it had always been held in the small village of Yambo, on the border of Central Province and Gala, where just after the war the first successful political demonstration and the first arrests by the British administration had taken place.) Mweta ignored the fact that Bray hadn’t written the letters he had wanted from him and simply said, as if there had been no silence of rebuff in this area of their relationship, he wondered what Bray thought about the dispute at the iron mine?

He wrote at once from under his fig tree that what interested him was the pattern emerging from disputes like those at the fish factory and the mine. In both cases it was the same: an issue raised by the workers was not backed by their shop stewards and other union officials, who were also PIP officials. The issue in both cases was an agreement reached between the union and the employers which apparently was not acceptable to the workers as a whole: in the fish factory, the status of so — called casual labour (and Mweta knew, he had told him himself, how those people were employed and lived); at the mine, a question of rates of pay for overtime. It seemed clear that PIP interference in the unions was in danger of defeating the function of a trade union itself — to represent the workers’ interests as against those of the employer. This was what could happen where the interests of the employer and the state appeared to coincide, and the government, in turn, was the Party. It led to labour unrest without union leadership which had the confidence of the workers sufficiently to be able to control them. “If you destroy the unions, you need the police — more and more police. At the beginning. In the end, of course, it’s peaceful, because the workers have no more rights to assert. State and employer, knowing what’s best for the economy, decide what they need and don’t need. And there’s a name for that, too.” Taking his tongue out of his cheek, he remarked that he would look in on the court when the PIP militants appeared; it was a good thing for the Party that they had been arrested and committed for trial.