Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“But is that a fact? The President would never encourage a fascist situation here. No one can tell me that. He would never allow it. He doesn’t like totalitarianism of the left or the right, it’s all the same to him.… But this man Edward Shinza — you used to know him? — people say he’s behind the whole thing.”

Bray had forgotten that he was the one who was asking questions. “But it’s a real thing. He hasn’t invented it. All these issues are coming up openly at the Congress. It’ll be a great pity if they’re fought down as a power bid.”

Hjalmar Wentz wriggled confidentially in his chair. “Isn’t that what it is?” His smile confirmed the shared experience of a generation. “Well, it’s interesting to be there — you are lucky. Is that cinema all right? There was talk at the beginning they might want to hold it here, you know….”—a twinge of amused pride— “but I suppose we’ve got enough troubles.”

Emmanuelle, Ras Asahe, and a rumpled young white man were sitting in the residents’ lounge. She hailed Bray as he left; he refused a drink but stood talking a moment. The young Englishman had the amiably dazed and slightly throttled look of one who has been sleeping in his clothes, in planes, for some weeks. He was from one of the weekly papers or perhaps a news agency correspondent (again, Bray was expected to know, from his name) and was on the usual tour of African states. Ras Asahe was briefing him on people he ought to see; stuffed in his pockets he had a great many scraps of paper from which he tried to identify various names recommended to him by other names: “Basil said not to miss this chap, wha’d’you-call-it.… Oh and do you know a fellow … Anthony said he’s marvellous value….” He said to Bray, “I’m sure someone gave me your name?”

“Oh yes, Colonel Bray is one of the well — known characters,” Ras Asahe said.

Emmanuelle gave Bray one of her infrequent and surprisingly beautiful smiles, in acknowledgement of the slightly sharp imputation, due to Ras’s equally slight misunderstanding of the nuance of the English phrase.

“You’re the one who was imprisoned or something, with the President?”

“Just or something.”

“Don’t snub him.” Emmanuelle put Bray in his place; it was perhaps her way of flirting with the journalist. She slumped in the deep sofa with the broken springs, her little breasts drooping sulkily and apparently naked under the high — necked cotton dress.

“Colonel Bray knew that crowd well — my father, old Shinza.” Asahe, the man of affairs, turned to Bray with a flourish— “They ought to put Shinza inside, ay? The trouble is the President’s too soft with these people.”

The journalist was still matching identities. “You don’t know a man called Carl Church? I think he was the one who mentioned you. Used to be with the Guardian … about forty — five, knows Africa backwards.”

He did know Carl Church; but when he began to ask for news of him, it turned out that the young man didn’t — they’d met for the first time in a bar in Libreville a few days before.

He said goodnight. “Why d’you want Edward Shinza imprisoned, Ras?”

“He ought to be expelled from the Party, at any rate. They say he’s been to Peking with Somshetsi.… Anyway. Well, that’s the story. But he was going round holding secret meetings with the gold miners, he gave them the blue — print for the rolling strike, masterminded the whole business. How could they’ve had the knowhow on their own? I had an idea to do a live documentary, interviews and such, talking to the strikers — but the new Ministry of Info’ boss turned it down … it had to be played cool, so … If I’d’ve done it, Edward Shinza’d have been inside by now.”

Ras Asahe had the particular laugh of complete self — confidence (as Bray remarked of him to the Bayleys) guaranteed not to dent, scratch, or fade. No wonder the Wentz girl, who loved her father, the natural victim, was attracted to one in whom the flair for survival was so plain. One ought perhaps to comfort Hjalmar by pointing out that Emmanuelle, too — not only her brother — displayed an unconscious instinct of self — preservation.

Linus Ogoto’s branch resolution condemning the high salaries of government personnel turned up the pitch of Congress early on in the morning session. A wary silence stalked his first few sentences, but concentration and alarm pressed in as he went on, scaling the abstraction of figures and suddenly coming up face to face with a petrol pump doling out free petrol; arranging percentages like a handful of cards; on behalf of Congress, inviting himself to take one — any one — and producing the dimensions of the weekly cut of cheap meat a labourer could buy his family on his contribution of man — hours as compared with the man — hours that brought the official his chicken — sometimes deductible as entertainment allowance into the bargain.

A woman near Bray sounded to these revelations, very low, like a cello accidentally bowed. Men who belonged to the income group under attack showed the wry superior patience with which the rich everywhere remark the poor’s ignorance of the bravely borne burdens of privilege. When the debate opened two or three of them rose to the chairman’s eye wherever he rested it; eloquence swelled against fountainpen — armoured breast — pockets. It was asked again and again whether high — ranking government personnel would be expected to clock in the hours of sleep that were lost while problems affecting the life of the nation kept them up far into the night? The claims of these men to a “modest remuneration” for their knowledge and untiring work— “what a lie to talk about man — hours because the truth is that in a big position you can’t knock off at five like any lucky workman”—almost defeated the motion, but Ogoto’s innocent revelation that three — quarters of the delegates present themselves earned under six hundred pounds a year was enough to tip the decision in his favour. Ogoto’s mouth was twitching; Bray saw he had to purse it to control an impulse of triumph. He kept smiling uncertainly in this direction and that like a short — sighted person who doesn’t want to seem to ignore greetings. Up on the stage, Shinza smoked.

In a curious kind of contradiction of Ogoto’s success, the Tananze branch’s call for a freeze of earnings above six hundred produced uncertainty in Congress. Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, did not actually admit the whole basis of the political system might be challenged by more equal distribution of money, but warned that a wage freeze and levelling — off would endanger foreign investment; he got the matter referred to a select committee.

The beginning of the rural branches’ offensive, asking for the organization of agricultural workers, and the demand for a minimum wage according to region with which it was linked, also took a little time to get under way. The chairman had first to clear the debate of speakers who wanted to ramble through local cases of the abuse of farm labour rather than speak to the issue itself; there was restlessness, and the sense of conflicting preoccupations. Shinza, Goma, looked stony. Then, emerging as though it had not been there all the time, the particular pattern of this Congress, the disposition of human forces present in the gathering, began to come clear. Bray knew the moment from all the conferences, talks, discussions of his life: there was always a time when what the gathering was really about came out strongly and unmistakably as the smell of burning. No conventions, evasions or diplomacy could prevent it. Since many of the Party officials and leaders were also in the government, there was always some member of the appropriate government department to give — in the guise of his presence as a Party delegate — the government line on each issue. The Under — Minister for Agriculture had been primed for this one. The seasonal nature of farm work, primitive farming methods, and the predominance of unskilled labourers who still keyed their efforts to subsistence rather than production, he said with almost bored urbanity, made the organization of farm workers totally impracticable and “ten years too soon.” “The government’s agricultural development schemes must first be allowed to make the land more productive. He warmed to the common touch. “It’s always been traditional for people to hire themselves out for weeding or harvesting when the white farmers need them — are we going to say that these women and children and old people who can’t work regularly must give up their chance to earn a little cash and help cultivate the lands, because the organization of farm labourers along the lines of factory workers will forbid it? You can’t make a modern working community out of the most backward part of the country, overnight; not by a charter or any other bit of paper.”