A Guest of Honour (53 page)

Applause and dissent clashed like the two halves of a cymbal; many who applauded did so in the hunch—shouldered, half—defiant way of those who fear disapproval. Country people whose characteristics and clothes had not seemed prominent in the ranks of knees and faces suddenly emerged in a distinctive force of numbers. Faces with tribal marks, stretched ear—lobes hanging to frayed shirt—collars—they seemed to be everywhere. Bray felt oddly elated; yet for the moment he had hardly taken in what Shinza had said—he had been gauging the faces around him, the faces on the stage. Mweta kept his head turned away while Shinza was speaking; no reaction whatever, except perhaps—revealed to Bray's nervously heightened observation—a slight lift of the chin that showed he was listening, all right, after all. The motion was very narrowly defeated, and the defeat greeted with a grumbling groan of resentment; the collective presence is a strangely emotional entity, whose combined voice has a command of expressive noises—nonsyllabic cries, warnings, keenings—that the people who comprise it have forgotten how to produce, individually. Cyrus Goma moved restlessly in the restriction of his own defeat. Shinza met nobody's eye, looking straight ahead with what, from Bray's distance, looked like a faint, private smile, or a delicate lifting of the lips in endurance. While Bray's eyes were on him he suddenly
scratched himself vigorously on the chest; a kind of comic signal, a sign of life.

He certainly had made an impression on Congress. If two sharply defined factions had never existed before, they did now. When those delegates hesitantly but irresistibly sounded their palms for Shinza, his support, his own popular following came into being once again for everyone present to see and hear. It existed now. Mweta must know that. He must have taken, too, the messages smoothly slipped into the speech that were meant for him; no turning away of the head could avoid them.

In the foyer Bray came out of the men's room and into Roly Dando and Shinza at exactly the moment they couldn't ignore each other. Dando said, “So that's your line now, Edward,” just as if they had been meeting every day. “I have no line, Roly. I'll support any resolution that constitutes action based on the workers' productive role, against economic imperialism. That's my policy. Always been the same. You know that.”

Dando's grin at the patness of it rearranged his wrinkles. “Oh yes, the party—within-the-party.”

“Let's have lunch and you can expand what he knows,” Bray said.

“You two can go off and enjoy your lunch. I've got work piling up in my bloody office. These circuses are just a waste of time for me.”

People gathered around Shinza openly, now. Goma, Ogoto, and huge young Basil Nwanga were racing about, marshalling his attention tensely here and there, with eyes that deftly selected and rejected among the crowd of delegates. Mweta, who had not appeared before outside the sessions but gone off at once in the presidential car, moved through the foyer surrounded by Central Committee people. He saw Bray and steered towards him, bringing his encirclement with him as he could not duck beneath it. Past heads and faces he called, “I'll see you tonight?” Bray's look questioned. “Didn't the secretary telephone you?” “Might have, after I'd left the house.” “Dinner. About eight o'clock. After the cocktail party. All right?”

It was awkward to go back to the orbit of Shinza after this singling out. Cyrus Goma had watched accusingly. Bray had to make a determined effort to overcome his own feeling of culpability and get Shinza aside for a moment, pushed to it by a mixture of excitement and anxiety over the motion condemning Mweta's power to appoint
the Secretary—General of UTUC, that was due to come up in the afternoon session. Shinza was not too hopeful; yet it was difficult, in the rush of vigour that the evidence of real support in the people gathering round him brought, for him not to feel heady with the chance. Anyway, talking to Bray, it seemed suddenly to make him make up his mind about something. His face stiff as a drunk's, he brought out calmly, “You remember old Zachariah Semstu? He still says the word and all five branches in the Tisolo district bleat back.… Cyrus's been chatting him up for days, but you know how it is …no matter what he thinks, the idea of a vote against Mweta sticks in his throat … well, it's understandable. But he knows that you—that so far as you're concerned—I mean, he'd always trust what you'd say. If you'd just have a word with him, there'd be no trouble.” And Bray said, so quickly that he heard his own voice, “All right. Where is he?”

“He's down in the carpark. Linus's just passed him. Near the fence at the back of the building. Just stroll down as if you're going to your car, and you'll see him.”

Bray left the Luxurama unheeded and came out into the heat. He was walking over the humpy ground with the momentum of a push in the back. A hundred suns revolved at him from the cars he approached and passed; every now and then his feet crunched over patches of clinker that had been used to fill up hollows. A single tree left standing was covered with a whole dry season's dust like a piece of furniture shrouded in an empty room. The little boys who hung about with dirty rags, pestering to clean windscreens, were gambling for pennies around its exposed roots.

He saw some men sitting half—in, half—out of an open—doored car. They were eating fish and chips and one of them crushed his paper packet in his fist and aimed it at the rest of the rubbish that had collected under the tree. The old man Zachariah Semstu was sitting neatly on an upturned fruit box, smoking a pipe with a little tin lid on a chain. As Bray came up the old man gestured at the children to point out where the packet had fallen, and, not recognizing Bray for a moment, said testily to the others, “Let them eat if you don't want to.” Bray was greeting him formally in Gala, he called him “my old friend.”

The old man's ears recognized what his eyes had not. A look of joyous amazement wakened his face. The business of greeting went on
for five minutes. “But you have seen me in there,” Bray said, with a tilt of the head. “Well, well … I had heard you were back in the country. I had heard it. But we thought you had left us forever … you stayed away so long.”

“I had no choice. As you know, I wasn't allowed in, all those years.”

“And I have grown an old man,” Semstu said.

The others had the look of people who have heard it all before; they were inert under his authority. He introduced two of them, both apparently office—bearers in Tisolo Party branches, but presented the less important ones collectively, with an encompassing movement of a hand whose fingers, Bray saw, had the characteristic sideways slope away from an arthritically enlarged first knuckle. Ten years is a long time; depends which stage of life you were in at the start.

Both standing, they talked about Tisolo. There were brickfields there, good deposits of clay, the best in the country. For the rest, subsistence farming of the poorest kind. “Your brickfields must be expanding? So many government building projects coming up?” Yes, but the new clay deposits were in the eastern end of the district, and a rail link was needed before they could be worked to full capacity. “The Ministry of Public Works and the radio station building are going up with bricks from Kaunda's country,” the old man said. “I wrote to Mweta. He's a very busy man. It's not so easy to see him these days. —But he answered. Yes, a very good letter in answer.”

The man who had thrown away the packet of food spoke. “It told us what we know. Bricks will have to be imported until the railway is made.”

“And the railway link is on the Number One list,” Semstu said, saying “Number One” in English. They all laughed a little, Bray as well. Semstu said, “I think the Number One list is a very long one. I would like to know where the railway is, on that list.”

“And was that the cause of the trouble,” Bray said. There had been a strike at the brickfields the previous month. There was a second's pause of indecision: the implication that this was not a matter to be spoken of with an outsider. But Semstu had known Bray before he had known any of the others. “People were told either wages must stay the same, or some men must be put off work. The union said that. Then when trouble started, the government sent someone down
from here to tell them: the new brickfields are losing, until the railway comes, they ought to put off men anyway. But they will keep them on in the meantime if they don't ask for more pay.”

“But from what I read in the papers, the union itself was already negotiating for a wage increase when the trouble started?”

“Yes, yes—first the union was asking the company for a wage increase, then the union turned round, you see, turned round again—and told the men at the new brickfields they would be put off if the men at the old brickfields went on asking for increase—”

Bray nodded vehemently; none of the men looked at each other. The man who had spoken before identified himself as the one whose eyes were being avoided. “What else could we do. After we started talking with the company”—the brickfields were a subsidiary of the gold—mining consortium— “we got called up to the Ministry of Labour's place, we were told by the Secretary there, look here, boys

If someone could tell Mweta,” old Semstu pressed. “If we could get the railway. When
you
are talking to him perhaps you can tell him, next time?”

Bray had seen working towards expression the realization that he was someone who might be able to be used. The old man said, “Of course you see him.”

“Yes, I see him. But as you said, he's a very busy man. Everybody wants something.”

Semstu considered, but his face remained closed to any attempt to put him off. He settled his old hat back on his head; he dressed still in the reverend's or schoolmaster's black suit with a watch chain looped across the stomach, the early robes and insignia of literacy. “Letters are no good. They are written on the machine by someone.” His arthritic hand, holding the pipe, flourished a signature at the bottom.

The others were looking at Bray and him with eyes screwed up against the light. The union man jutted his bottom lip and blew a lung—full of cigarette smoke before his own face. Bray said to him, “Your union will have to press UTUC to bring up the business of the railway with the Development Plan people.”

The man grimaced up the side of his face, as at one who doesn't know what he's talking about. He shook his head and laughed, wary to commit himself, even to a fool.

“But of course you've done that already.”

“And then?” the man said.

Bray smiled. “Well, you tell me.”

“UTUC doesn't say what we want, it tells us what the Company wants.”

Silence. A deep inhalation of smoke drew both in together—company, development plan, all the same.

Now that the exact moment had presented itself, Bray almost took his opening as a casual question to the man he was already in conversation with, but turned in time to Semstu. “Well, I'm sorry to hear things are not going so well in your district,
Mukwayi,
my old friend — What do you think, anyway, of this idea of the S.-G., of the United Congress of Trade Unions being appointed instead of elected? It's a very important post—I mean, so far as troubles like yours are concerned, the S.-G., if he's the right man, he's the one to get the government to see—”

“Oh but it's Mweta who'll say who it is.”

“We were just saying—Mweta's got so many decisions to make. Mweta has so many things to think about.”

The old man said, “Mweta's not going to choose a fool or a bad one.”

“No, of course not. But as we were saying, he can't keep in touch with what everybody thinks these days. He would have to take advice from someone, now, don't you think—”

“Yes, yes. But who?” The old man implied that it could only be the members of Mweta's own cabinet, people of his own choosing.

“People from the Ministry of Labour. Perhaps the Planning and Development people.” Bray added, to the union man, “The ones you ran up against.”

“And who can know better than Mweta which is the right man?”

The other men left the car and began to draw nearer, cautiously. Bray appealed to them all, simply, openly— “Well, I'd say the workers themselves. They must know whom they want to speak for them. That's what trade unions are for.”

“The Secretary—General should go on being elected.” The old man set out the statement in order to consider it.

“It's always been like that until now,” Bray said. “Since Shinza and Mweta started the unions and got the colonial administration to recognize that the workers had rights. Ever since then.”

The old man suddenly pulled back against the direction of the talk. He seemed to be warning himself. “Ah, now we have Independence. Mweta knows what to do. If he decides to choose the man, he knows why he wants to do that.”

After a moment he cocked his head sideways under his hat at Bray, a man unsure of his hearing, and pointed the pipe at Bray's middle. “But you are a clever man. You went with Mweta and Shinza to get us Independence. We don't forget you. People will remember you as they remember our fathers. You are not saying it, but what you are saying now is that you don't think Mweta is right.”

“I'm saying that whoever Mweta chooses, it's not right that he should choose. UTUC must elect its own Secretary—General.”

“Yes, that too; but you are saying Mweta is wrong.”

“Yes, I am saying Mweta is making a mistake. And I will tell him. Because he is a great man I always tell him when I think he is wrong.”

The old man liked that; grinned. “Oh I see you are still strong. —When the British made him go away, we said here they will have to tie him down to their ship like a bull—” but the younger men were not interested in these legends of colonial times.