Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He woke in the small hours of the mornings and his mind punched the facts out of the clarity of darkness. Shinza always had been able to count on influence with the advanced sections of the community, the workers, through his connections with the trade unions. On the side he also had had a useful pull on tribal loyalties through his relationship with the Paramount Chief’s family — he was a nephew, if Bray remembered correctly. It was mainly because of him that the Lambala — speaking people — an offshoot of the Gala, distributed widely through the Bashi country — had been kept within PIP from the beginning. With his marriage to Mpana’s daughter he must now greatly have extended his support, and taken into his influence not only Mpana’s considerable following at home but also the scattered thousands who had always formed a large part of the labour force all over the country. Mpana was the man who, in Bray’s time, had been appointed Tribal Authority by the colonial government when it deposed the Paramount Chief, Nagatse, for intransigence and support of the nascent PIP; with Independence, Nagatse had been reinstated as Paramount Chief and Mpana found himself once again an ordinary chief with a souvenir of better times — his battered American car. Well, Shinza drove that car, these days. It was a logical enough alliance, marriage apart. Mpana and his people certainly would not forgive Mweta the demotion; however far removed from theirs Shinza’s cause was, if it opposed Mweta, it would serve their own.

And Shinza? Nagatse had been one of his converts, his “enlightened chief who wasn’t afraid of a nationalist movement. Mpana had been one of the “good government boys,” a stooge Shinza made fun of, which was his sharp and generous way of despising. Family feeling would hardly change that; but no doubt expedience did. Shinza had curious friends, everywhere, these days.

Sometimes as he lay awake among these facts it seemed to him that Shinza’s roster of friends now constituted a stark assembly — in assessment, in the dark. He placed Mweta before them. He could not decide what Mweta would do, should do. If I were Mweta — but the point was, he was not. He tried to rid himself of lifelong preconceptions, discard the last hoary virginity. But there was always another and another — if he could come to the end of them! His mind was freed by the night. If there was a revolution to let people out from under intimidation, exploitation, and release them from the chalk circle drawn by the wrong sort of power, how far could the revolution go to protect itself and what it gained for people? How far, before it slowly picked up the rubble of the same walls and weapons it had smashed; began to use them against what it called the counter — revolutionaries? What were counter — revolutionaries? The enemies of the revolution, or revolutionaries who thought the revolution was being betrayed? Shinza and Mweta had both identities dubbed on them, each by the other. Shinza believed that Mweta had betrayed the principles of the revolution, and was its enemy; Mweta believed the same of Shinza. And he wanted them both to be wrong. He wanted to believe that together, neither would sell out the new life more than the daily attrition of human fallibility in power made inevitable. He defined it precisely as that to himself, to hold his ground that what he believed was flatly reasonable.

Sometimes, as the dead silent interval (minutes? hours?) between the cessation of night — sounds and the beginning of predawn sounds was invaded by a shrill unison of birds chipping away the dark, the hard — edged facts in his mind arranged themselves differently. The importance of Shinza’s alliances sank; Mweta had only to reinstate Shinza beside him, placate Mpana with some provincial office, disengage PIP’s domination of the trade unions — it could be done. And Shinza had said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.” With his roster of allies — Mpana; perhaps even some of Nagatse’s people; a following in the trade union movement whose strength and numbers one couldn’t assess; that wild business of Somshetsi over the border — could he have any real chance?

But this was choosing to ignore, behind closed eyes where everything was present at once, other facts, boulders of facts. Tom Msomane, the Minister of Labour, said one day that industrial unrest was not based on “real demands” but “agitation,” and the next day was at pains to cover up this implication that there was political dissatisfaction among the workers. How many of the strikes and disputes were blown on by Shinza’s inspiration? One could be crediting him with too much or too little. And what was the sense of thinking that all Mweta had to do was lift PIP’s heavy hand off the back of the unions — Mweta believed that the way to expand the economy quickly for the benefit of the workers themselves, and everybody else in the country, was to support investor — employers by guaranteeing a docile labour force.

Surrounding this firmament of facts that could not be reconciled was its own atmosphere — emotion like the layer of spit an insect wraps round the great concern of its existence, its eggs: he resented Shinza because he thought Shinza was right, and he resented Mweta because he could not admit that Mweta was wrong. And at the same time (four o’clock, now, five?) he was ready to turn over, like a tombstone, his own judgement, and find there beneath only the sort of things that lie under stones.

He would get up and go to pee in the stuffy bathroom. He used the basin, running the water softly as a flush in order not to disturb her with the noise of the lavatory. Once he suddenly remembered with obstinate urgency something Shinza had said— “… people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’” What was the context? Shinza had said, look it up. He padded down the passage to the living-room and turned on the light. The ashtrays were coldly full. There were raisin stalks in the fireplace and a cup of scummy coffee on his table. He was naked and knelt, dangling, the wet touch of himself against his own ankle, searching through the government — issue bookshelf. He had brought Fanon to Africa with him, after all. The pages of the paperback had gone the colour of the shaded nicotine stain round a cigarette butt. He found the place: “ ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary way towards rational knowledge the people must …” He went back a few lines, for the sense. “… yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, the unreal, the idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi — darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of ‘Treason!’ But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary road towards rational knowledge the people must also give up their too — simple conception of their overlords.”

He went back to bed and lay again, awake, with her head on his arm and her leg slid up between his; if she rose anywhere near the surface of consciousness she moved her lips against the hair of his chest. All the hours of these nights when he was in turmoil he was also in the greatest peace. He was aware of holding these two contradictions in balance. There was once a crony of his mother’s who used to say gleefully of anyone who found himself suddenly subjected to extraordinary demands — Now he knows he’s alive.

He wondered if she had known what she was saying.

He saw the silver aerials of the two police jeeps lashing along through leaves and brush, full of Selufu’s men. He was coming home in the afternoon from a village that would one day be in the suburbs of Gala. That was how one got to know what was going on: one saw something, heard something. He mentioned it to Aleke when he called in at the boma, and Aleke must have telephoned Selufu once he was out of the room. Anyway, by next afternoon everybody knew what had happened. A labourer on the construction of the railway, now within forty miles of Gala, had been killed. The other workers downed picks in protest against working conditions; they threatened the Italian foremen. One of these drove to Gala half through the bush, half on forest track. When Selufu’s policemen got to the construction site they found that the people of the village of Kasolo, nearby, from where casual labour for this stage of the construction was recruited, had carried the dead labourer home for burial and in a kind of mourning frenzy gone straight from the funeral to join forces with the strikers. The foremen had locked themselves in the railway car they slept in; a freight car had been burned and equipment had been tipped into the river.