A Guest of Honour (61 page)

“Yes?”

Shinza looked at him almost exaggeratedly anxiously, perhaps, being Shinza, a hint of parody of the seeking for reassurance that Mweta no longer showed. His half-smile admitted it. “There's going to be all hell in the unions. And even if I were to die tomorrow, I'm telling you, it wouldn't make any difference, there'd still be hell—I mean some of what he's got coming to him I wouldn't have anything to do with, it's absolutely contrary to our policy.… The miners, now. Already they're better paid than anyone else in the country. But there you are. You'll see, by the end of the month they'll come out, there'll be the biggest row ever, and we'll see what he'll do then. That's the one crowd everyone's afraid of. He won't hold them down so easily this time. The authority of the unions is broken, the government begins to run them itself, and then it turns out even government stooges ask the price for keeping quiet the one industry they're scared to manhandle. What's he going to do? If the miners get more there'll be new demands everywhere. If he gets tough, it'll run like wildfire, there'll be a solidarity between those who've followed the government yes—men and been let down, and those who've refused to follow and are put down.”

“And the rebels will have to be blamed for the whole thing.”

“Of course. -So-called rebels,” Shinza corrected automatically, with the politician's alertness never to be caught out in any semantic slip that could be construed to bely the legitimacy of one's position. “Agitators! Shinza and Goma and Nwanga were there!”

“A good excuse to put us all in jail.” Nwanga had never been in one; spoken aloud casually, the subject of fear loses some of its potency.

Shinza had, many times; for him it was irrelevant to waste time contemplating eventualities in which one would be out of action. “The basis for whatever happens is the corruption in the unions, eh—?”

“Corruption?”

“Government interference. Same thing. That's why I've been thinking, why not bring someone—some authority—who can show this up? Without taking sides in the political sense. Some opinion that no one can turn round and say … Well, I thought, while we're going ahead here, you could take a little trip, James, go and see the family”—he stretched himself, gestured ‘something like that'— “you could go by way of Switzerland, say; lots of planes make a stop there, don't they?”

For an idiotic moment to him the reference was to the money in a bank.

“Go on.”

“Oh nothing very terrible, nothing very difficult … you could go to the ILO and see if they would send someone—an observer, commission of inquiry—someone to look into the state of the unions here … what d'you think?”

It was his way to look at practical aspects first, to withhold other reactions until these were considered. “If the ILO did agree, don't forget there's no guarantee such a delegation would be let in. If I remember, there was the same sort of thing—in Tunisia, wasn't it?—and the government refused. Of course it would be awkward for Mweta to say no, a man of his reputation for reasonableness, but … Then there would have to be a proper report to present to the ILO

“Oh Goma's got all the stuff for that,” Basil Nwanga said, and Shinza added, “We'll knock that out, no problem.”

“—And what would my authority be?” Logical considerations were nothing but playing for time; they were overtaken by others. “Ex-civil-servant
busybody? Black Man's Best Friend?” And as they all laughed. — “Political mercenary?” Basil Nwanga's laugh became a deep delighted cluck and he hit his thighs. “—Yes, that's it, that's about the nearest definition we'd get for me—”

“Oh you'll be properly fitted out,” Shinza said airily, sweepingly.

“I'd have to have credentials. At least show I'd come at the request of a pretty representative string of unions—even then, it'd be going over the head of UTUC—”

“It'll all be fixed up, we'll get to work on it,” Shinza overrode. “That's nothing. That's easy. Nothing at all.”

He had the curious impression that this was the thoughtless insistence of assurance on a matter that has served its purpose and is no longer of much interest or validity. He said to Shinza, rather hard, “You say you're going ahead here.”

“Well, I want to talk to you about that.” Shinza clapped at the flies that kept settling on his dainty African ears; caught one and looked at the spot of blood and mess on his hand with disgust. He tore a strip off the morning paper Bray had brought and wiped his palm clean as he spoke. “We know who our friends are in the Party as well as the unions now. We've got to keep up the contact and work together.”

“Openly?”

Shinza slowly unbuttoned his shirt. “As far as you can expect.”

“Which isn't very far, is it.”

The creases under Shinza's breast were shiny lines of sweat, he passed one hand over the hair and nipples. “Oh I don't know. You can put a few union men in jail, you can't arrest the whole labour force.” Again and again, the hand skimmed the flesh.

“But you and Goma and Nwanga won't last long.”

Shinza caressed his bared, vulnerable chest. “Goma and Basil've got their seats in parliament to protect them a bit—I'll have to make myself hard to find.”

“Until you surfaced at Congress, you were rather that way already weren't you. But no one was looking for you all that hard. I have the feeling it's all going to be different now. You'll be arrested the moment you move.”

Shinza looked at the ceiling and smiled; turned to Bray. “Because he won't have to explain it to anyone any more?”

A small boy with the beer arrived skittering barefoot onto the veranda
and stopped, dead-shy, panting in the doorway. Shinza got up and took from him the plastic container that had once held detergent for washing Boxer's dishes. He gave him a coin and teased him about the strength of his dusty little arms. “Why isn't he at school, James? You know that there's no place for him in the school? Put it in your report.”

“It's all there, don't worry.”

“Your last word,” Shinza said.

“Possibly.”

“I mean on the subject—there won't be anything left to say.” Shinza was pouring the beer. “Which was yours, Basil?”

“Thanks I won't—I don't know, my bowels are not right today—”

“Come on. It's good stuff, this!”

Shinza filled Bray's glass. “Of course—needs money, to keep going. I don't suppose any of my old friends at the ILO would do anything about that, though …? I'll have to see what I can find. Goma wants to print a paper … we need a couple of cars … everything takes money.”

“Who's been providing it so far?” Bray said.

Shinza was eager to be frank. “We've been depending on my pain-law, Mpana. But that's a nothing. That old car of his is just about a write-off, ay, Basil?”

“Needs a new engine, to start with.”

“It depends how far you want to go,” Bray said. “ ‘Openly'—that mayn't take you there.”

“You heard me.” Shinza meant at Congress. “That's where I'm going. To see this country given back to our people. You know me. I've never wanted anything else. Yes, I think I know what's good for us”—his fingers knocked a response from his own breastbone, angrily— “just as he's decided what's good enough for ‘them.' That's the big difference between him and me. I hope I'm stinking in the ground before I come to what he's settled for. Stinking in the ground. Only I was cunt enough to believe all those years that we'd taught him what independence was—cunt enough.” Nwanga sat dead still. Bray saw with amazement Shinza's tears shining at him, holding him. “If this bloody country ends up belonging to the Company, the cabinet ministers, the blacks who sit on white men's boards, after all the years we've eaten manioc and presented our arses for the kicking and asked
and begged and had our heads cracked open and sat it out in jail”—his voice reeled, saliva flew from his teeth— “then I blame myself—myself. And you, Bray. I blame you, and you'll never get out of it, never! So long as I'm alive, you'll know it, I don't care whether you sit in England or the end of the world, I don't care if you're white. So long as I'm alive!”

The room was a vacuum for a moment. Outside children must have been playing with Chief Mpana's car; there was a blast on the hooter, then shocked silence. Shinza stalked out. He could be heard chasing the children. He came in again with his walk of an embattled tomcat.

Shinza was looking at him and slowly buttoning his shirt.

He said, “Shinza, what would you do with him?” There was the strong feeling between them that Nwanga had no place in their presence; huge Nwanga, caught in this very current, was unable to leave.

“But I could not kill him,” Shinza said.

“You will lock him up somewhere for years, or give him over to some other state so that he can waste his life plotting to oust you.”

“… Oh God knows.”

“But the others around him—they'd have to go?”

“They'd have to be locked up, certainly.”

A feeling of distance, like faintness, came over him. Without pause, he said matter-of-factly, “You are still seeing Somshetsi and the others. Am I right in thinking you have a deal—they would help you with men and arms in return for some promise that, afterwards, you would give them a base?”

“Along those lines. It need not be too—not cause too much—” Shinza struggled, suddenly flashed, “Not much more damage than he'll do whenever he lets his Company guerrillas loose among the workers. It need not—if the time's right.”

“You're going to try to make the time right.”

Nwanga's presence had slowly become accepted again. Shinza was silent while the young man, looking to Bray, nodded heavily.

“If I come through Gala one night and want to see you, that's all right—you're alone at your house, h'm?” Shinza remarked.

“I'm not alone.”

Shinza said, “Oh then I'd send a message, okay? Come let's move—I want to take you to this fellow Phiti, disappeared after the ironmine case was dropped, been in detention all this time while those
bastards from PIP went scot free. —That's Chekwe and our old friend Dando.”

The tall, protruding—eyed man's nose had been broken while he was under interrogation. He was at once listless and yet loose—tongued, the real misery he had suffered came out mixed with the obvious lies of self-dramatization. There were two hundred men in the prison camp-three hundred-five hundred. He had been kept in solitary confinement; he had been locked in a shed with fifteen, twenty others. They were half-starved, they had lived on cane rats from the sugar fields, their shoes were taken away. “Why the shoes?” said Shinza, cold at this poor showing before Bray. “Why? Why?—Look at this, they hit me with the leg of the chair that was broken.” The man kept feeling the crooked saddle of his nose and looking round at them all to see if they were reacting properly.

Shinza need not have been embarrassed before Bray; as a magistrate he had come to know that suffering was not the noble thing that those who had never seen it thought it ought to be, but often something disgusting, from which one's instinct was to turn away. The man sat in a hut full of relations who had come to be there as if at a sick bed; more squatted among the chickens and dogs outside, the old and the children. A tiny girl crawled into the doorway in a rag of a garment that showed her plump little pubis with its divide; every time Phiti touched his nose her small hand went up with his and felt her own face.

Compassion was too soft a thing anyway. Anger came of disgust, and was of more use, most of the time.

The camp where Phiti was held was at Ford Howard; the old “place of safety” where the colonial government had “confined” Mweta. Shinza was alert to Bray all the time, intent to be one jump ahead of his mind. He said dramatically, “We'll plough that place over and plant it. It just mustn't be there, any more.”

A tremendous dust-storm blew up on Boxer's ranch, coming through the pass from the Bashi Flats. Feathers, leaves, maize-husks, ash and rubbish from people's fires danced in the vortex of dust-devils that swayed toppling columns up into the sky. The wind was hot. In place of the sun an apocalyptic red intensity moved down the haze; people sniffed for rain in the turbulence, although it might not come
for weeks yet. They sat tight in their huts. Bray stayed the night after all, sleeping naked in a stifling room closed against the wind with Shinza, Nwanga, and the schoolmaster. He could just as easily have driven home through the night, but he had a strange reluctance to step outside the concreteness of the atmosphere between himself and Shinza; these men. They talked until very late: the unions, Vietnam, the Nigerian war, the Arabs as Africans, Wilson's failures in Africa, and Nixon's cooling towards its white-dominated states; about the unions again. He had allowed himself to forget, for years, the superiority of Shinza's intellect. Lying there in the room that smelled of the sweat of all their bodies, the dregs of their beer, and the bitterness of cigarette ends, hearing the man snort, turn on the cheap iron bed uninhibited in acceptance of himself in sleep, as he was always, Bray thought how it was a remarkable man, there—like many of the other remarkable men on this continent who had ended up dead in a ditch. Then the blacks blamed the white men for manipulating power in a continent they had never really left; the whites blamed tribalism and the interference of the East (if they themselves were of the West) or the West (if they themselves were of the East). The remarkable men talked of socialism and the common man, or of glory and Messianic greatness, and died for copper, uranium, or oil. Mweta was one of them, too. Mweta and Shinza. For him-Bray-the killing had been made, for Mweta, already. The phrase in political jargon was “yielding to pressure”; it's finished him off, as I knew him. Couldn't say how Shinza would go, yielding to another kind of pressure (but I couldn't kill him, he lied; and I lied, accepting it?).