Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“You’ve given the answer yourself!” He had been scratching the surprised dog energetically behind the ears while Dando talked, waiting an opening. Now he gave the dog a final thump. “You say that before Independence, even if the trade unions had found themselves in conflict with a less progressive — minded party, they couldn’t have set up a successful opposition because the country hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. The working class wasn’t big enough. But this still applies. There still hasn’t been industrialization on a scale nearly extensive enough to bring about any considerable increase in the size of the wage — earning class. UTUC simply hasn’t the numbers and consequently hasn’t the major economic resources to establish itself in opposition to Mweta’s government. Under Shinza or anyone else. Shinza’s been in the union movement since he was on the Boss Boys’ committees as a youngster on the mines, remember. He’s been around in other African states. Remember he’s an old buddy of Ben Salah; he knows who came off worst in Tunisia in the clash between the trade union organization and the Neo — Destour government … it’s the same sort of thing here. Shinza must know that at this stage it can’t be done.”

“It can be tried. Anyway, if Shinza could bring off even a Ben Salah here I’ve no doubt he’d consider himself lucky. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Perhaps he sees himself, the old union leader turning the screw on the government so successfully that he ends up making a gala appearance, à la Salah, as Minister of Planning and Finance a few years from now. And perhaps Mweta sees that in one of his teetotal cups and wants to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

While their voices grew louder and cut across each other vehemently the bats of early evening were flitting about them, an embodiment of things that went unsaid. In a pause — the air thickened quite suddenly with darkness, he could no longer see Dando’s small face clearly and felt his own to be hidden — he thought how they talked of Shinza as if he had been in another country, an interesting man in an interesting political situation one read about, instead of a mile or two away, in the Gomas’ house in Old Town. It was from Dando that this attitude imposed itself. He was an old man in an official position, and all his fiery objectivity was academic; as he had said himself, once, he worked for Mweta. Shinza could not enter into consideration, in his personal life.

After dinner he excused himself without saying where he was going and drove to Old Town. The approach had not been improved; streets were still untarred and streetlights irregularly few. He passed the bar in an old shop where he had gone with Bayley and the others, that time, during the Independence celebrations. It had been Rebecca’s discovery, but she was not with them; he remembered waiting in the car outside the shabby flat building where she lived, while Neil Bayley threw pebbles at her windows. But the flat was in darkness; another time, another Rebecca.

He made out Mrs. Okoi’s dry — cleaning shop in this present darkness and what must be the Goma house just opposite; there once had been numbers painted on the brick but they were long worn off. This was one of the more prosperous streets and there were no cooking braziers out, but children and gangs of youths occupied it with their yells, laughter, and games, the smallest ones standing about asleep on their feet like a donkey that stood quietly nearby. The core of the standard two — room house had been built onto all round and there was a strip of polished concrete leading to a front veranda; the gate was missing and a dog tied to a wire between two stakes that enabled it to run up and down, brought up with a strangling jerk at either limit, struggled like a hooked fish to get at him. He knocked a long time before someone came: a pretty small child in pyjamas. It looked at him and ran away. But he could hear voices, and Shinza’s laugh, beyond the tiny room the door opened on to. Straight — backed chairs in the room, a refrigerator and a Home Encyclopaedia, an old sofa made up as a bed for two more small children who were asleep under the bright light. At last the inner door opened with a glimpse of faces and gesticulation through cooped — up heat and smoke. A woman looked at him and at once looked back into the room for direction, but Cyrus Goma appeared impatiently, and as soon as he saw who was there came forward and shut the front door behind Bray in welcome. “Come right in. My mother … My younger brother … Basil Nwanga … Linus Ogoto …” It was full house, with Congress in town. Shinza was on his feet and standing pleasedly about; he put an arm on Bray’s shoulder. Two men were playing cards at the end of the table, oblivious, looking down at their hands and up at each other, not speaking. A lad was doing his homework in a corner he’d found for himself on the floor. The radio was playing. A young woman brought a pink glass with a gilt rim and Shinza poured Bray a beer. Cyrus Goma’s mother, like a household god in its shrine, sat a little apart on a strange dark wood chair, a sort of small pew that clearly no one else would ever dare occupy. On a second look Bray realized that it was an old — fashioned commode that had been adapted for less private usage; whatever member of the Goma family had acquired it probably had had no idea of its original purpose. The old woman was large and black as only people from the part of the country that bordered on the Congo were. The features Cyrus had inherited were a pencil sketch of the central motif fully developed here; the head blocked out massively, the nostrils scrolled, the wide downturned lips blue — tinged with age, the eyes bloodshot, one slightly bulging (a mild stroke, perhaps), the earlobes, now empty of the copper rings they had once held, hanging in self — ornament, contemptuous of all adornment, down to the thick shoulders. Under her long cotton dress her feet were bare. She did not speak, acknowledging Bray only with a deep breath and then, from that drawn — up height, a grand inclination of the head. Every now and then she hawked and took snuff with a noise that everyone ignored. This was both sad and a sign of respect commanded: she was not banished for the dirty habits of senility, but neither was she taken any notice of.

Shinza was in the mood that used to come to him on the eve of elections when PIP first began to contest settler seats. He made self — deprecating jokes, game rather than confident. A David rather than a Goliath. The man who had been introduced as Linus Ogoto went point by point through the resolution he was going to lead next day, that the salaries of government personnel were too high. He was a forceful man with a corrugated face and head — even the fleshy shaven scalp was quilted with lines so that the intensity of the changes in his expression were not confined to the face but ran over the whole head. He lectured Bray in fluent, heavily accented English: “You know what the estimated figure is? Forty — seven per cent of the budget. Ministers and shop — front managing directors like Joshua Ntshali—” “Careful, Ntshali’s a neighbour of James’s,” Shinza put in. “—They’re getting three to ten thousand a year. — Our unskilled workers earn between thirty pounds and seventy — two. — Wait a minute, I haven’t finished. I’ve got a few other figures. Free house, basic car allowance seventy — five pounds, special extra allowance of one shilling a mile on official trips, and any day they like, cheap petrol from the PWD pumps. Senior civil servants and officials of the corporations get very much the same privileges.”

Cyrus Goma and Nwanga were both M.P.s and had a good salary and some privileges themselves; but of course they were not cabinet ministers. It seemed taken for granted by them that they would accept cuts in their salaries; this surely would not fail to be noticed when they were lobbying among ordinary people. “I’ve got the figure for the average earnings of Congress delegates. Seventy — three per cent earn under six hundred a year, and of that seventy — three per cent nearly three quarters earn between thirty and a hundred a year. That’s all.”