Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

He was waiting for the OK, as he said to his brother, the future Prime Minister, to go back to their country and take up his position as commander-in-chief of the new state’s Defence Force. His title would become an official rank, the highest, like that of army chiefs in Britain and the United States — General Zwedu.

His brother turned solemn, dark in his mind; couldn’t be followed there. He said the future of the army was a tremendous problem at present under discussion. The two armies, black and white, who had fought each other, would have to be made one. What the discussions were also about remained in the dark: the defeated white government, the European powers by whom the new black state was promised loans for reconstruction, had insisted that Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu be relieved of all military authority. His personality was too strong and too strongly associated with the triumph of the freedom fighter army for him to be anything but a divisive reminder of the past, in the new, regular army. Let him stand for parliament in the first peacetime election, his legend would guarantee that he win the seat. Then the Prime Minister could find him some safe portfolio.

What portfolio? What? This was in the future Prime Minister’s mind when General Giant couldn’t follow him. ‘What he knows how to do is defend our country, that he fought for’, the future Prime Minister said to the trusted advisers, British lawyers and African experts from American universities. And while he was saying it, the others knew he did not want, could not have his brother Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu, that master of the wilderness, breaking the confinement of peacetime barracks.

He left him in Europe on some hastily invented mission until the independence celebrations. Then he brought him home to the old colonial capital that was now theirs, and at the airport wept with triumph and anguish in his arms, while schoolchildren sang. He gave him a portfolio — Sport and Recreation; harmless.

General Giant looked at his big hands as if the appointment were an actual object, held there. What was he supposed to do with it? The great lungs that pumped his organ-voice failed; he spoke flatly, kindly, almost pityingly to his brother, the Prime Minister.

Now they both wore dark blue suits. At first, he appeared prominently at the Prime Minister’s side as a tacit recompense, to show the people that he was still acknowledged by the Prime Minister as a co-founder of the nation, and its popular hero. He had played football on a patch of bare earth between wattle-branch goal posts on the sugar farm, as a child, and as a youth on a stretch of waste ground near the Catholic Mission Hall; as a man he had been at war, without time for games. In the first few months he rather enjoyed attending important matches in his official capacity, watching from a special box and later seeing himself sitting there, on a TV newsreel. It was a Sunday, a holiday amusement; the holiday went on too long. There was not much obligation to make speeches, in his cabinet post, but because his was a name known over the world, his place reserved in the mountain stronghold Valhalla of guerrilla wars, journalists went to him for statements on all kinds of issues. Besides, he was splendid copy, talkative, honest, indiscreet and emotional. Again and again, he embarrassed his government by giving an outrageous opinion, that contradicted government policy, on problems that were none of his business. The party caucus reprimanded him again and again. He responded by seldom turning up at caucus meetings. The caucus members said that Zwedu (it was time his ‘title’ was dropped) thought too much of himself and had taken offence. Again, he knew that what was assumed was not quite true. He was bored with the caucus. He wanted to yawn all the time, he said, like a hippopotamus with its huge jaws open in the sun, half-asleep, in the thick brown water of the river near his last headquarters. The Prime Minister laughed at this, and they drank together with arms round one another — as they did in the old days in the Youth Group. The Prime Minister told him — ‘But seriously, sport and recreation are very important in building up our nation. For the next budget, I’ll see that there’s a bigger grant to your department, you’ll be able to plan. You know how to inspire young men. . I’m told a local team has adapted one of the freedom songs you made up, they sang it on TV.’

The Minister of Sport and Recreation sent his deputy to officiate at sports meetings these days and he didn’t hear his war song become a football fans’ chant. The Jamaican singer had arrived on an engagement at the Hilton that had just opened conference rooms, bars, a casino and nightclub on a site above the town where the old colonial prison used to be (the new prison was on the site of the former Peace Corps camp). He was there in the nightclub every night, drinking the brand of Scotch she had had in her London flat, tilting his head while she sang. The hotel staff pointed him out to overseas visitors — Sinclair ‘General Giant’ Zwedu, the General Giap, the Che Guevara of a terrible war there’d been in this country. The tourists had spent the day, taken by private plane, viewing game in what the travel brochure described as the country’s magnificent game park but — the famous freedom fighter could have told them — wasn’t quite that; was in fact his territory, his headquarters. Sometimes he danced with one of the women, their white teeth contrasting with shiny sunburned skin almost as if they had been black. Once there was some sort of a row; he danced too many times with a woman who appeared to be enjoying this intimately, and her husband objected. The ‘convivial minister’ had laughed, taken the man by the scruff of his white linen jacket and dropped him back in his chair, a local journalist reported, but the government-owned local press did not print his story or picture. An overseas journalist interviewed ‘General Giant’ on the pretext of the incident, and got from him (the minister was indeed convivial, entertaining the journalist to excellent whisky in the house he had rented for the Jamaican singer) some opinions on matters far removed from nightclub scandal.

When questions were asked in parliament about an article in an American weekly on the country’s international alliances, ‘General Giant’ stood up and, again, gave expression to convictions the local press could not print. He said that the defence of the country might have been put in the hands of neo-colonialists who had been the country’s enemies during the war — and he was powerless to do anything about that. But he would take the law into his own hands to protect the National Independence Party’s principles of a people’s democracy (he used the old name, on this occasion, although it had been shortened to National Party). Hadn’t he fought, hadn’t the brothers spilled their blood to get rid of the old laws and the old bosses, that made them nothing? Hadn’t they fought for new laws under which they would be men? He would shed blood rather than see the party betrayed in the name of so-called rational alliances and national unity.

International advisers to the government thought the speech, if inflammatory, so confused it might best be ignored. Members of the cabinet and Members of Parliament wanted the Prime Minister to get rid of him. General Giant Zwedu? How? Where to? Extreme anger was always expressed by the Prime Minister in the form of extreme sorrow. He was angry with both his cabinet members and his comrade, without whom they would never have been sitting in the House of Assembly. He sent for Zwedu. (He must accept that name now; he simply refused to accommodate himself to anything, he illogically wouldn’t even drop the ‘Sinclair’ though that was the name of the white sugar farmer his parents had worked for, and nobody kept those slave names any more.)