Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“I’m not as brave as you are.”

“Oh, how do you know?” said Wentz. “We didn’t know what we were going to land up doing, either.”

She said quietly, “We certainly didn’t think we’d be the proprietors of the Silver Rhino.”

“Anyway, that’s another story. — I heard you were going to the Ministry of Education?” said Wentz.

“Oh, did you?” he laughed. “Well, perhaps I am, then. I should think the bar of the Silver Rhino’s as good a place as any to learn what’s really going on.”

“If you want to hear how much ugliness there is — yes.” Mrs. Wentz had the tone of voice that sounds as if the speaker is addressing no one but himself. “How people still think with their blood and enjoy to feel contempt … yes, the bar at the Silver Rhino.”

“Our son Stephen is looking after it tonight. It’s amazing how he deals with those fellows — better than I do, I can tell you. He keeps them in place.”

“We promised him a liberal education when we left South Africa, you see.” Mrs. Wentz had put down her food and she sat back out of the light of the fire, a big face glimmering in the dark, caverns where the eyes were.

“He’s at Lugard High, taking the A levels,” said Wentz, innocently. “—You’re not going to finish?” The white blur of her hand moved in a gesture of rejection—“You have it, Hjalmar.”

It rained and people felt chilly on the veranda and drifted indoors. There was a group in loud discussion round the empty fireplace where the beer bottles were stacked. “… banging on the Governor’s door with a panga when the others were still picannins with snotty noses …” Now Dando had the sulky outraged attention of a young patriot from the social welfare department, the glittering-eyed indifference of Doris Manyema, one of the country’s three or four women graduates, and the amused appreciation of a South African refugee whose yellow-brown colour, small nose and fine lips set him apart from the blackness of the other two. In the light, Margot Wentz’s head was the figurehead of a ship above the hulk of her body: a double-chinned, handsome dark blonde, the short high nose coming from the magnificent forehead, water-coloured eyes underlined with cuts of fatigue deep into each cheek. With an absent smile to Bray across the room, she took up, for a moment, an abandoned beauty. When he joined the group, they were listening to her. “We don’t have to argue; we can take it that colonialism is indefensible, for us, no? You think so, I think so — right. But the forty-seven—” “Forty-eight”— Timothy Odara’s eyes were closed; leaning against the wall he kept his lips drawn back slightly, alert. “—I’m sorry, forty-eight years you were under British rule, digging their mines, building roads for them, making towns, living in shanties and waiting on them, cleaning up after them, treated like dirt — now it’s all over, you really think there was any way at all you could enter the modern world without suffering? You think there was someone else would have given you the alphabet and electricity and killed off the malaria mosquito, just for love? The Finns? Swedes? The Russians? Anybody? Anyone who wouldn’t have wanted the last drop of your sweat and pride in return? These are the facts. From your point of view, as it luckily lasted less than two generations, wasn’t it worth it? Would anybody have let you in for nothing? Anybody at all? Wouldn’t you have to pay the price in suffering? That’s what I’m asking—”

“Oh you make the usual mistake of seeing the life of the African people as a blank — and then the colonialists come along and we come to life — in your compounds and back yards.”

She was shaking her head slowly while Odara was speaking. “All I’m saying, don’t wear the sufferings of the past round your necks. What does independence mean — I don’t use ‘freedom,’ I don’t like the big words — what does your independence mean, then?”

“The past is useful for political purposes only” said Hjalmar, as he might have said: she’s right.

Someone said, “Watch out for the man from the CIA.” “Down with neo-colonialism.”

“Of course, Curtis,” said Hjalmar. “But if you have to do it by keeping that forty years or whatever sitting at the table with you and your children — ach, it’s not healthy, it makes me sick. What do they want to hear how you had to go round to the back door of the missionary’s house?—”

Mrs. Odara had joined the group, ruffling a big, silver-nailed hand through Curtis Pettigrew’s crew-cut hair. “Oh God, Timothy, not that again.”

“—Let them hold up their heads naturally in their own country without having to feel defiant about it!”

Odara laughed. “But it always comes down to the same thing: you Europeans talk very reasonably-about that sort of suffering because you don’t know … you may have thought it was terrible, but there’s nothing like that in your lives.”

Bray saw Margot Wentz put up her head with a quick grimace-smile, as if someone had told an old joke she couldn’t raise a laugh for.

“Well, here you’re mistaken,” her husband said, rather grandly, “we lived under Mr. Hitler. And you must know all about that.”

“I’m not interested in Hitler.” Timothy Odara’s fine teeth were bared in impatient pleasantness. “My friend, white men have killed more people in Africa than Hitler ever did in Europe.”

“But you’re crazy,” said Wentz gently.

“Europe’s wars, white men’s killings among themselves. What’s that to me? You’ve just said one shouldn’t burden oneself with suffering. I don’t have any feelings about Hitler.”

“Oh but you should,” Mrs. Wentz said, almost dreamily. “No more and no less than you do about what happened to Africans. It’s all the same thing. A slave in the hold of a ship in the eighteenth century and a Jew or a gipsy in a concentration camp in the nineteen-forties.”

“Well, I had my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in the detention camp at Fort Howard, the guest of Her Majesty’s governor,” said Odara, “that I know.”

“Her two brothers died at Auschwitz,” Hjalmar Wentz said; but his wife was talking to Jo-Ann Pettigrew, who offered blobs of toasted marshmallow on the end of a long fork.

“For God’s sake, Timothy, stop baring your teeth and sink them into something.” Evelyn Odara spoke to her husband as no local woman would dare; yet he ignored it, as if turning the tables on her with his countrymen’s assumption that what women said was not heard, anyway. He said angrily to Wentz, directing the remark at the wife through the husband, “What did you get in return that was worth it?”

Margot Wentz said, looking at no one, “That one can’t say.” She waggled her fingers, sticky from the marshmallow, and her husband took his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her.

It was the evening when Bray, Neil, Evelyn Odara, one of the South African refugees, the Pettigrews, and a few others set off for the Sputnik Bar. While Bray was standing about in the group with the Odaras and the Wentzes, Jo-Ann Pettigrew, having failed to get him to eat her last marshmallow, put it in her mouth and signalled to everyone there was something they must hear. “Rebecca’s been to the Sputnik and she says it’s terrific now. They’ve knocked out a wall into that sort of yard thing and they have dancing. With girls laid on.”

Neil said, “Hey? And which one of us’s been taking Rebecca to the Sputnik?”

Laughter rose. “Well, why don’t we all go, that’s what I want t’know.” The young Pettigrew woman was always in a state of enthusiasm; her long curly hair had sprung out, diademed with raindrops, because she had done her marshmallow toasting outside over the spit fire. She was an anthropologist, and Bray accepted this as an explanation for her passion for arranging excursions, on which she carried her baby tied on her back, African style.