A Guest of Honour (30 page)

But Bray was quite satisfied with the tie he had. Hjalmar was laughing loudly at Asahe's description of an exchange with the director of broadcasting programmes in English, whose deputy he was. Apparently the man was a South African—Asahe imitated the Afrikaner accent: like many educated men in the territory, Asahe had been to university for a time, down South, as well as having worked in broadcasting in England. “… It happens to be standard BBC pronunciation, I told him. ‘Hell, man, well it's not standard
our
pronunciation.'—I won't be surprised if the rumour goes round from him that I'm a neo—imperialist….”

Hjalmar kept glancing at his wife to see if she were amused. She held her eyebrows high, like an ageing actress. Emmanuelle was inwardly alight, flirting with her father and even her brother, calling her mother “darling”—for the benefit of Ras Asahe or perhaps to present for herself a tableau of family life as she imagined it to be for other people.

It was a warm, singing evening with the moon rising on one side of the sky while a lilac—grained sunset had not yet receded into darkness on the other. There was the smell of boiled potatoes given off all over Central Africa, after nightfall, by some shrub. By the time he got to the tobacco sales hall where the Golden Plate dinner was being held, it was dark. He had not wanted to go, really—Mweta embarrassed him slightly by the invitation—but the cars converging on the
grounds, the white shirt—fronts and coloured dresses caught in headlights, and the striped canvas
porte-cochère
with its gold—braided commissionaires created a kind of simple anticipation of their own. The warm potato—smell and the mixture of black and white faces in the formally dressed herd pressing to the entrance were to him evidence that this was not just another municipal gathering—this was Africa, and this time Africans were honoured guests, being met with a bow and a smile. There was a satisfaction—naive, he knew; never mind—in this most obvious and, ultimately, unimportant aspect of change. It did not matter any more to the Africans whether white people wanted to dine with them or not; they themselves were now the governing elite, and the whites were the ones who had to sue for the pleasure of their company. Fifty pounds a head for a ticket; he waited in line behind a rusty—faced bald Englishman and a lively plump Scot with their blond wives, and a black lady, probably the wife of some minor official, who had faithfully assumed their uniform of décolleté and pearls. She smelled almost surgically of eau—de-Cologne. The African Mayor and the white President of the Chamber of Commerce dealt jointly with the receiving line, dispensing identical unctuousness.

The tobacco sales hall had been decided upon because not even the Great Lakes Hotel's Flamingo Room was big enough to accommodate the guests expected. The bare walls were entirely masked by red cotton; an enormous coloured poster of Mweta hung amid gold draping above the dais where the main dignitaries were to sit; stands of chemically tinted lilies and gilded leaves stood between long tables and at the four corners of a specially constructed dance floor like a boxing ring.

The perfect reproduction of municipal vulgarity was softened by a homely and delicate fragrance of tobacco leaves, with which the building was impregnated and which prevailed, despite the smell of food and women's perfume. Bray was conscious of it when his mind wandered during the speeches. The Mayor spoke, the President of the Chamber of Commerce spoke, a prominent industrialist spoke, the chairman of the largest mining company spoke. Through grapefruit cocktail, river fish in a pale sauce
(Tilapia Bonne Femme,
in the illuminated lettering of the menu), some sort of beef evidently brought down on the hoof from the Bashi
(Boeuf en Casserole aux Champignons),
he sat between Mrs. Justin Chekwe, wife of the Minister of Justice, and Mrs. Raymond Mackintosh, wife of an insurance man who was one of the last white town councillors left in office. The white matron, like a tourist proudly determined to use her phrase—book sentences to demonstrate how much at home she feels, leant across him to say to the black matron, “Mrs. Mweta looks so young, doesn't she? What a responsibility, at her age. I'm sure I wouldn't be able to cope. Doesn't the hall look beautiful? One doesn't realize how much really hard work goes into these functions—you should have seen our chairwoman, Mrs. Selden—Ross, up a ladder hammering nails into that material.” She added in a lower tone to Bray, “We begged it all from the Indians, you know.” Mrs. Chekwe, sullen with shyness, her neck and head propped up on the bolster of flesh held aloft by her corsets, did not know what to do with the fish, since, unlike the more experienced Bray and Mrs. Mackintosh, she could not overcome repugnance and eat it. She murmured, “Oh yes,” and again, “Oh yes?” varying the tone to a polite question. For his ten minutes' attention to Mrs. Chekwe, he thought he might do better by talking in Gala, but decided it might be misinterpreted, on the one hand (Mrs. Mackintosh) as showing off and sucking up to the blacks, and on the other hand (Mrs. Chekwe) as patronage and the inference that her English was not good. However, he knew she came from the Northern Province and he managed a not too halting chat with her about the changes in the town of Gala and the whereabouts of various members of her family. Mrs. Mackintosh was talkative, one of those spirited colonial ladies— “It'd take more than this to throw me”: she was referring, of course, to her problems as a member of the ladies' committee, but she gave him a game look that swept in present company. She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country, and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive—economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered—that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

He had been placed at the main table, but right at the end—a name fitted in after the seating plan had been made up. The industrialist spoke of the huge new assembly plant for cars (a British—American consortium) that would employ five hundred workers, and said how stable government and “sensible conditions” for foreign investment were attracting capital that turned its back on neighbouring territories with their “impossible” restrictions on the foreign ownership of stock and “wild demands” for nationalization of industry; “here industry and the nation will go forward together.” Sir Reginald Harvey, chairman of the gold—mining companies, spoke in a tone of modest, patriarchal pride, “allowing himself boldly to say that the mining industry, whose history went back to before the turn of the century, “brought to this part of Africa the first light of hope after the centuries—long depredation and stagnation of the slave trade. On the basis of the auriferous rock discovered then, in the eighteen—nineties, the modern state of today has been founded….” It was not even necessary for him to mention that forty per cent of the national income came from the mines; everyone in the hall was aware of that as unquestioningly as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. The mining industry was continuing to open up new fields of endeavour … there had been a temporary setback at the old Mondo—Mondo mine—but the tireless research, on which the company spent over a million a year in its efforts to better mining techniques and raise production, might soon make it possible to overcome these difficulties and reopen the mine … the mining companies and the nation would go forward….

Applause was regular and vociferous, descending on cue as each speaker closed his mouth. Black cheeks gleamed, the blood rose animatedly in white faces while in the minds of each lay unaffected and undisturbed the awareness that what the industrialist had said was, “You'll use our money—but on our terms,” and what the chairman of the gold—mining group had said was, “We don't intend to reopen the Mondo—Mondo mine because our shareholders overseas want big dividends from mines that are in production, not expansion that will create employment but take five or six years before it begins to pay off.” The director of the cold—storage company, whose butcher shops all over the country had served Africans through a hatch segregated from white customers until a PIP boycott three years before had forced a change, charmingly insisted that the black guest across the
table from him accept a cigar. “Put it in your pocket, then. Smoke it at home when you feel like it.” Mr. Ndisi Shunungwa, Secretary General of the United Trades' Union Congress, who had once said, “They got in with a bottle of gin and a Bible—let's give them back what they brought and tell them to get out,” solicitously fished under the table to retrieve the handbag of the wife of the Director of Medical Services. A plump and grateful blonde, she was apologetic: “Oh I am a nuisance … oh, look, you've got all dusty on your arm.… Oh I am …”

Mweta spoke very briefly. From where he was seated, Bray was presented with the profile, the high, round black brow, the little flat ear, the flash of the eye beneath womanish curly lashes, the strong lips that were delicately everted in speech. All who worked together for the country were countrymen, Mweta said. “From the earliest days of our struggle” he had never thought of citizenship as a matter of skin colour. If it was wrong to profit by the colour of the skin, it was also wrong to discriminate against a colour of the skin. He understood “this dinner was the most expensive meal any of us here has ever eaten.” There was laughter; he smiled briefly, but he was serious, candid, a man who had lived until less than a year ago in a tinroofed, two—roomed, black township house: “—but the cost is really much higher even than that, the price of this happy meeting has been paid over more than fifty years by the labour of the people of this country and the energetic foresight of those from outside who had faith in its development.”

Loud music unfurled over the talk and clink of plates, and the harrassed stump of sweating waiters. Joy Mweta was steered out onto the dance floor by one of the white men. Voices rose in adjustment to the noise; the Congolese band played their particular hiccuping rhythm, marked by South American rattles and clappers. Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter. Some of the white men began to drift together as they did at club dances, and the black men were drawn to the male camaraderie of whisky and business talk. White wives went off to the cloakroom close as schoolgirls, and came back with faces animated by a good laugh about the whole affair. Black wives sat patiently, born to endure the boredom and neglect of official occasions. Dancing with a dutiful Bray, Mrs. Mackintosh was made careless now by gin and tonic. She giggled at
the red bunting that covered the walls. “Bummed it from the coolies, my dear. They cheated the poor bloody native for so many years, they can afford to give away something now.”

He danced with Evelyn Odara. She dragged him off to be introduced to an elegant girl he had noticed passing with unseeing eyes the African wives dumped like tea cosies and the white women watching her with their men, a white dress and dangling glass earrings making her black satin skin startling. Doris Manyema. But he had met her before, during the Independence celebrations. She had just been appointed the country's cultural attaché at United Nations; she received congratulations with guarded, confident disdain—it was as if one could look at her only through glass, this beauty who would take her place neither in the white man's back yard nor in the black man's women's quarters. She was going by way of Algiers; they talked of Ben Bella and Boumedienne for a few minutes and then a young white man who had been waiting for an opportunity to join in, meanwhile looking at her nipples touching against the inside of her dress and touching at his own blonde moustache in a kind of unconscious reflex, passed some remark about Tshombe's death. “I lost my bet he'd get out of prison there. I worked out the chances—you know, how many times he'd survived by the skin of his teeth before—fed 'em to a computer. Marvellously wily fellow, he was. I'm in insurance—actuary, you see,” he said, a disarming apology for talking shop. Doris Manyema did not look at him, saying to Bray, “I hope Tshombe rots in hell.” “Oh come now.” The young man, jollying, bridling sexually. “I just took a sporting interest.” Her long eyes looked down along her round cheekbones, her small nose distended slightly at the nostrils. “We don't share the sporting instincts of you people. Your blood sports of one kind and another. They only kept him alive that long because of Mobutu. Otherwise he ought to've been thrown in a ditch the way he did with Lumumba.” The young man asked her to dance and led her off by the elbow, golden sideburns very dashing. “A handsome couple,” Evelyn Odara said, with her man's laugh. She was draped like a solid pillar in florid robes; Ndisi Shunungwa's rimless glasses were flashing as they did when he made a political speech, but he was dancing with his apologetic blonde, smiling down sociably with his head drawn back from her, while she had on her face the circumspect, wide—eyed look of a woman who is dancing with her pelvis
pressed against a strange man. As the evening went on, roars of laughter came from the groups of hard drinkers; they began to forget the presence of Africans and tell their obscene stories. The black men gathered here and there and spoke in their own language,
pas devant les enfants.
In the men's room, one of the white men standing beside Bray took a quick look round and said to a companion, “Thank Christ it's gone off all right, eh, Greg? Jesus, but it's heavy going with these chaps. And one mammy I had to push round the floor—I'm telling you, I needed to go into low gear to get that arse on the move.”