A Guest of Honour

Chapter 15

The Luxurama Cinema was owned by Ebrahim and Said Joshi, second generation of a family of Indian traders who came to the capital before the railhead. A Joshi brother was usually in the foyer at all performances, making sure the unemployed African youths did not push their way in without paying, but neither was to be seen the day of the opening of the PIP Congress and the expanse of red and green tessellated floor quickly being blocked out by feet in sandals and polished shoes, figures in trailing togas, in Mweta tunics, in dark suits and even in suits with a metallic sheen, and the intense gathering of voices in place of the apathy of cinema queues, gave the place the air of forced occupation. Fish lit up in ornamental tanks (the Joshis claimed theirs “the most lavish cinema in Central Africa”) sidled along the glass and gasped mutely at their beaded streams of oxygen, like the playthings of a vanquished people, left behind in panic. The popcorn machine was not working; the soda fountain had been taken over by a committee of Party mothers with hired urns for tea.

Out in the street women’s organizations in various quasi — uniforms — the only uniform thing about their dress was its combination of red — and-black PIP colours — sang full strength. One of the Young Pioneer groups had a tea — chest band going. Now and then, shouting Party slogans, holding their flags and banners tottering above people’s heads, these celebrants surged into the foyer and made it impossible for lobbying delegates to make themselves heard, or for traffic to move up- and downstairs to where the secretarial committee responsible for the agenda sat in the mezzanine. Press cameras rose like periscopes out of the crush; flash bulbs puffed and caught faces in sudden lightning. A countering surge of impatience rather than the efforts of Party stewards sent the singers and chanters giddying back into the street among children, icecream tricycles, and the motorcycles of the police.

The heat of October — the white settlers used to call it suicide month — held siege outside, but the Luxurama was air — conditioned; in this refrigerator smelling of smoke and chewing gum Bray heard every word fall, suddenly clear of the noise and thick — headed humidity. Mweta walking in to give his opening address matched the mood of confidence Bray felt all around in the quick eyes white against black faces, the tense composure of people who hold ready within them, untouched as yet by any blight of counter opinion, the speeches they have prepared, the points they are going to send home. And Shinza was up there somewhere on the stage among the Executive and Central Committees; slowly the face detached itself; the beard, the way of looking up easily, not out into the auditorium but to one side, as if some invisible confidences were being made to his inclined ear. There he was.

Mweta’s tunic had the variation of a small — patterned scarf in the neck; it made a reddish blur from a distance under the lights of the stage, and made one aware of his face among all others even when one was not looking at him. His skin shone; he was healthy and handsome. He began by speaking in his warmly confidential way of the instability of the government machine which was taken over less than a year ago, with the repatriation of the colonial administrative staffs greatly increasing an already chronic shortage of manpower. The country’s skills always had been largely provided by expatriates because the colonial power had “thought it unnecessary” to develop the skills of the local population — that was the well — known policy of colonialism. “We were not ‘prepared’ for independence by the white man and when we fought for it and won, we took our country into our bare hands.” From the very first day the fact had been faced that much of the administration and skilled labour would have to continue to be done by expatriates — with the difference that “we are the employers, and they are our employees, now: we pay the piper and call the tune.” Considering this difficult, this dangerous, this precarious state of the country when it fell at last into the hands of its rightful owners, how did it look now?

Mweta broke off and looked out and around into tiers of spread knees and faces that he must have been able to half — see in the dimness of the house lights beyond the glare that enveloped him on the stage. He bared his face, a Sebastian to many arrows. And seemed to pluck them, harmless, from his flesh, in advance: yes, there had been certain difficulties, labour troubles in industry and public works, all of which were really the direct consequence of the colonial legacy, the problems shelved and shirked under colonialism, always put aside for another day. “That day is ours”—he switched suddenly to his football — stadium, mass — meeting voice, so that for a moment it was too much for the microphone, and the phrase flew back and forth about the walls— “that day is ours and it has to be dealt with by us just as if the government had created those problems instead of inheriting them. It is easy to please people for the time being, to put something into their hands and send them away happy — for a little while. But what happens when they come back with hands outstretched again, and this time you have nothing to offer, because you have strained the country’s economy beyond its resources?” The needs of economic development, at this stage, must prevail over all others. The welfare of the country as a whole was what the government had in mind when it did not, could not and would not accede to the demands of the mineworkers, which were not based on the economy of an independent, developing country, but harked back to the economy that had existed in colonial times. It was understandable that this confusion could arise in the minds of the workers … and of course in this country everywhere there were individuals ready to take advantage of the confusion for their own ends. But “the PIP government has to stand tall and look over the heads of its people.” The PIP government was settling industrial disputes in the way that served the long — term interests of the workers better than they perhaps could realize — in fact in their best possible interests, as well as those of the country as a whole. “During the European war, the British government in the U.K. took special measures, including forbidding the right to strike, in order to keep up industrial output. We are at war, too — with the underdevelopment of our country, with backwardness and poverty. I will never take the easy way out, if it means losing that war. I will never put myself in the position where the people of this country must be turned away empty — handed.”

On the last syllable of the high — sounding phrase he produced his usual trick of confronting himself with another concrete accusation — there had been another problem that had had to be dealt with in these first few months. He had given a full statement to the nation at the time, but of course he would always regard it as a special responsibility to account to the Party for what was done in the Party’s name. A Preventive Detention Bill had been introduced; a measure to put a stop to any underhand attempts to throw the country off balance at the time when it was still finding its feet. As he had already pointed out, in certain sections of the community impatience for the fruits of freedom could temporarily overcome the people’s natural good sense. They were then in danger of falling victim to those sly disruptive forces that appeared all over the new Africa, trying to persuade people to sabotage themselves. It was easy to fan grievances; easier than to satisfy them through hard work and the controlled and orderly growth of the country. “When we have built our state we shall be able to tolerate the quibblers and the plotters as harmless madmen and we won’t need preventive detention. It is a temporary measure for our new kind of state of emergency — an emergency not of unrest but of the necessity to get on with the job, unmolested by pests.”

There had been a third problem, and this one also was not this country’s alone, but common to emergent Africa. Often there was instability and unrest in neighbouring states; stable and peaceful countries found themselves in the position of having to play host to refugees “of one kind and another.” These refugees knew perfectly well that they enjoyed the shelter of the country on the strict condition that they did not abuse it. No country could tolerate the presence of “plotting foreigners who violate the right of asylum by bringing arms into the country, and by using the ordinary, peaceful activities of the people as a cover for a traffic in weapons.” Fish trucks transporting food from the lake to the capital had been used in this way by refugees. He would not allow anyone to “conduct a war at our expense.” These people had been told to leave; and they could consider themselves lucky that they had not been tried in a court of law. The decision about whether such exiles should be tried for bringing in arms lay with the Attorney — General, and he would not fail to act if such incidents occurred again — other refugees could take note.

In spite of “all these troubles we were heir to when we took over” the country’s prestige today stood high, both among its fellow African states and in the rest of the world, and, what was more important, the people could see their hopes taking shape in daily life. Africanization was going ahead. In the civil service, nearly half the customs officials were now African. African Provincial Officers had replaced all white District Commissioners. Sixteen African magistrates had been appointed. The command of the police force was in the hands of an African — a reflection of the unity and loyalty of the country that he did not think any other new state could match. In two or three years, even the commander of the army would be “one of our own people.”

A new Apprenticeship Bill would see that the private sector of industry played its part in training youth as artisans. Of course the biggest step forward had already been taken — in two years, under the training scheme that had been put into operation immediately with the cooperation of the mining companies, all labour in the mines up to the level of Mine Captain would be African. He was happy to be able to announce for the first time, to this Congress, that he had just been told that the Minister of Education and the Minister of Development and Planning had made successful arrangements for the International Labour Organization to set up a management — training project in the capital. The specific aim would be to train Africans to bridge managerial gaps in commerce and industry, and take over middle — level and senior jobs now held almost exclusively by foreigners. A further aim would be to help expand the economy by motivating more Africans into business. The project would last five years, at the end of which time the United Nations experts would have phased themselves out. The United Nations Special Fund would bear eighty — five per cent of the costs, and the government the remaining fifteen per cent.

He had a way of waiting patiently for applause to end, his mind apparently already moved on ahead to what he was going to tell his audience next; but he gave a quick, wide smile of acknowledgement before he began to speak again. It was education now— “the whole position of education is being urgently reviewed with the object not only of making a full ten years’ schooling available to all children, but also of finding a new approach that will cut through the psychological barriers that colonial schools created in the education of our children by relating the learning process only to foreign cultures and putting the idea into their heads that they were being offered a smattering of something that didn’t really belong to them.” Then he turned to the development of natural resources — the successful negotiations for the vast hydro — electric scheme meant that “our children will know a life of plenty while we ourselves are still alive.” It also meant, since it was the joint project of two African states, that the country had taken the first important initiative in Pan — African cooperation, the building of a third world of African achievement, by Africans, for Africans, in Africa. In industry, the foreign mining companies’ investment over the next five years would be between thirty — five and forty million pounds. This was the answer to those people, still thinking in terms of dreams before independence became a concrete reality, who “talked nationalization” at this stage. There could be no talk of nationalization in an underdeveloped nation.

He raised both palms to stem applause. This first Congress since the Party had come to power was perhaps the most important one in the Party’s history. PIP had become, in effect, the government, and was itself responsible for carrying out the mandate it had been given by the people — it was no longer in the position of putting pressure upon others to do this or that. This called for certain changes. The Party could no longer be set to perform the old functions, the old activities of the struggle for freedom — these had become outdated and wasteful in some instances. It must realign itself in accordance with the functions and activities of a party firmly in power, a party that was not not only the inspiration of the people, but the consolidation and backbone of the government it had put in power. This was the spirit in which, as President, as leader of the People’s Independence Party, he had called for this Congress so soon after Independence, sooner than the Presidents of most countries would have cared to report back. He knew that now, just as in the early days of the struggle for freedom, he would find the Congress vigorously adaptable, and ready to offer “the courage and collective wisdom of a truly African leadership gathered from every corner of the country.”

The general applause first swamped the different currents of reaction. Then, as the various forms of applause became distinguishable from the general, they also became indicative of the differing forms of the reaction itself, as the instruments of an orchestra are indistinguishable in the crescendo in which they all are sounded, but can be identified when it dies down and some fall silent, while others sustain a theme or variation in which they at once become recognizable: the voice of the oboe, the collective plaint of the strings. Part of the hullabaloo was simply polite — everyone’s hands must be seen to move when the President has spoken — and died out, leaving the hard palms of a large section of enthusiasts to keep a heavy brass going, getting louder, backed by the muffled regular stamping of feet on the cinema carpet. This deafening, obliterating racket stirred the dust of an unrest in other sections; men who had been sitting merely resisting any show of accord since they had given their token acknowledgement of the speech, began to move about in their seats, to twist their heads around them, to surge subterraneously towards another solidarity, in opposition.

Bray rested his neck back against his seat for a moment. The air — conditioned spaces were filled with turmoil like the wheeling and counterwheeling of birds. He had the impulse to make contact; to spin a filament between himself and Roly Dando, sitting up there on the stage with his arms akimbo and his ankles crossed under the conference table, the position he had taken up in unconscious defensiveness at the moment when Mweta had referred to his powers as Attorney — General. (Like a member of a private bodyguard, a thug; little Dando.) — Or to catch Mweta himself, straight in the eyes, believing for a moment that Mweta could make him, Bray, out, from that distance. The few remarks about an education plan were almost word for word what he had written to Mweta; they came back to him from the public rostrum, an oblique claim on his anonymous presence there in the crowd. The Secretary — General — Justin Chekwe was Secretary — General of PIP as well as Minister of Justice — was beginning the interminable business of welcoming and introducing representatives of political parties who had come from other countries as observers. Spatters and squalls of applause followed the names: enthusiasm for the TANU man from Tanzania, the UNIP man from Zambia; a half — hearted acknowledgement for the Nasser delegation with their cropped crinkly shining hair, pleasant smiles and trancelike squinting gaze — the country people did not know quite who they were and for many of the others who did, they were too Left to be given the accolade. In the usual way, Mweta was elected President of the Congress and it was moved that the election of the Party President, office bearers and committees would be held at the final session.

Attention had drawn in momentarily as this formality was gone through: it was as though everyone ran his mind’s eye over the limits of the battleground, confirmed in the contours of time. Two and a half days in which to persuade, to rally, to group and regroup, trade favours, call in old scores and tot up new ones. In the pale — nailed dark hands scribbling notes and the unctuous, closed, hearty, determined or uncertain faces were embodied all the intentions gathered from townships, villages, lake, flood plains, road — side stalls, Freedom Bars, that cohere slowly in the interstices of daily life. Between ploughing, drinking, herding, labouring, loafing, dreaming on rush mats or iron bedsteads, arguing in wattle — and-mud church halls, lounging over pin — ball machines and planning over second — grade clerks’ ledgers, the formulation comes into being. I want. You want. He wants. We want. They want. The conjugation of human will. Because of it some of these heads about him were lit up within with a private scene in which this face ousted that and this name took away from that a prefix of office. Somewhere in the agenda there was the plan of campaign to be decided; he had some idea of it in advancehe must have a proper look before the sessions started in earnest. Already, while other formalities of procedure were being got out of the way, Mweta’s address was being sifted away into this memory and that — slotted, categorized, the intention extracted and the verbiage discarded. What was Shinza making of it? A thickly built man beside Shinza hid him from view most of the time.

At the lunch break Bray hung about near one of the fish tanks; his white face couldn’t be missed anyway. The delegates had the gaiety of boys let out of school before work has even begun; no one got farther than the chatter of the foyer. Several old PIP campaigners came up to greet him — Albert Konoko, once treasurer (not an entirely honest one but he was long ago relieved of the post and the early “irregularities” forgotten), old Reverend Kawira from the Ravanga district with his stick and his dog — eared briefcase, Joshua Ntshali, the mayor of Gala— “We should have made arrangements to come down together — why didn’t you give me a tinkle? Plenty of room in my car — some cold beer, too”—the one or two Indians who survived at delegation — level from the small band who had supported PIP openly from the beginning. People threw cigarette ends in the tank and with his rolled — up agenda he lifted out one at which a fish had begun to nibble. “Poor fish.” Shinza stood there. Shinza was good at private jokes derived from other people’s absent moments. “You know Basil? Basil Nwanga.” He had with him the heavy young man with the tiny hippo ears who had almost run Bray over outside the House of Assembly one day. They recognized each other, grinning. “I heard him put his word in, in the House, not long ago.” Nwanga went off after a few moments with the air of one who had been curious for an introduction, got it, and knows he mustn’t intrude. “Are you going to eat?” Bray said.

“Where’re you staying?” Shinza considered.

“With Dando.”

“Oh. Well there’s a café down the road. The one near the post office. I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”

As Bray was leaving Roly Dando came up level with him, but left the distance of two or three people in between. As white men, there was a tacit feeling they shouldn’t appear to stick together in any sense; a feeling based, in any case, below its social meaning, on the private inkling that their positions had become very different, although they were old friends. Roly said, “Having a good time?” His face was small with gloom. He had changed so much; the sexually spritely, dapper Dando of ten years ago really existed only as one remembered him; this was the aged, middle — aged face, completely remoulded by disappointments, desires and dyspepsia, that is more characteristic of a white man than his skin. No African ever transformed himself like that.

The shops run by Greeks had always been called “cafés” although they had little enough in common with the European institution from which they took their name. The one near the post office sold the usual fish — and-chips over the counter, for consumption in the street — a relic of the days when black people were not allowed to sit at the tables — and still served the staple frontiersman diet of eggs, steak, and chips. Shinza was already there drinking a glass of some bright synthetic juice that churned eternally in the glass containers on the counter. He held up a finger to settle an important question: “Steak and eggs? Sausage?” “Yes, sausage, I think.” Between them on the table was the usual collection of bottles, like antidotes kept handy — Worcester sauce, tomato sauce, bleary vinegar. “Could almost have been old Banda himself in some places, ay,” Shinza said; Mweta’s address was between them with the sauce bottles.

Bray smiled. “For example?”

Shinza fluttered his hands over the table impatiently. “ ‘This is the answer et cetera to those who talk of nationalization.’ ‘… no sense in talking nationalization in an underdeveloped country.’ That’s just what the mad doctor himself tells them in Malawi.”

“Not quite as bad. He always says you have to accumulate wealth before you can nationalize — something like that. ‘Nationalization as national suicide.’ No — Mweta’s was more Senghor’s line.”

“Senghor?” Shinza grinned at him to prove it.

“Oh yes. Senghor once said it — very much the same as Mweta. He rapped the trade unions over the knuckles and wrote an article saying there was no point in nationalization for an underdeveloped country.”

“Ah, I remember what that was about. Yes, I suppose it’s possible he did….” Shinza gave his snort, acknowledging himself a man of no illusions. “He’s always had it in for socialist — minded unionists. D’you know when that was? That was before sixty — one. When he was fighting UGTAN’s demands for the development of a publicly owned sector in the economy. He was busy calling the union boys a hypocritical elite and a lot of other names.” He nodded his head significantly at the parallel he saw he had stumbled upon there.

“I haven’t had a good look at the resolutions yet. How’ve you done with the secretarial committee?”

Shinza pressed his shoulders back against the uncomfortable formica chair and his pectoral muscles showed under his rather smart, long — sleeved shirt. He wore no tie but the shirt buttoned up to a pointed collar and there were stitched flaps to match on the breastpockets. The outfit ignored as fancy dress togas or paramilitary tunics (he had worn a Mweta tunic during the days of the independence struggle, so this was a sign that, for him, there was no dilly — dallying in the past) and disdained the terylene — and-wool prestige of the new black middle class. He said — one who knows his chances don’t look too good, but prefers to ignore this— “We submitted that the position of the Party in relation to trade union affairs be re — examined, but that was chucked out. But—so was the Young Pioneers’ one that the Party should support the government ‘in its efforts to consolidate the unions against disruptive elements in their ranks.’ A little bird told me that’s how it went. — I like that one, don’t you? I like that. As one disruptive element to another.” They laughed. “But we had a lot of smaller stuff — resolutions here and there that’ll give more or less the same opportunities … we had an idea the big one wouldn’t make it onto the agenda.… We’ve got quite a few that will do.”

“How did the committee manage to squirm out of the big blast?”

“Oh you know — the old formula: all matters that would come under that heading were actually being dealt with separately under other resolutions, so there was no point. Well, we’d thought of that, too.… And the Young Pioneers must’ve been asked to go easy and give in on theirs. No need to have Congress discussing what they’re allowed to get away with every day, after all.”

Shinza ate quickly and almost without looking at what was on his plate. He cleaned it with bread, like a Frenchman.

Bray paused often. “I see the business of challenging Mweta’s power to appoint the Secretary — General of the Trades Union Congress is coming up. How’d you manage that?”

“That’s a resolution from the Yema branch—”

“—Yes, so I noticed.” At Yema there were railway workshops and phosphate mines; the Party branch was one of the oldest established, started by trade unions organized by Shinza years ago.

Shinza gave his breathy chuckle; released his tongue with a sucking sound. “That was a tough one. They said it was a matter for the UTUC congress itself, not the Party Congress. But as it happened”—he raised his eyebrows and his beard wagged— “several other branches sent in exactly the same resolution … so … It made things difficult for the committee. They were forced to hear us.”

“I was surprised.”

Shinza nodded slowly.

“It could be very important,” Bray insisted; either a question or a statement, depending on the way Shinza took it.

“It could be—” Shinza was gazing off in absent curiosity at the waiter clearing the next table, and then his eyes came slowly back to Bray and were steady there, his nostrils opened slightly, and tensed.

“You knew about the ILO thing,” Shinza said, after a pause, watching Bray saw through his overdone sausage.

“You’re not impressed.”

“That’s what’s happening here. Management schemes. A training centre to make a petty merchant class. They’ll learn how to get extended credit from the white importers and how to keep a double set of books for when the tax man comes.” He tipped back his chair. “Everybody’s happy because they think what’s behind it is to get the Indians out. As if that solves anything. They think it’s a stroke of genius meant to avoid that stupid situation in Zambia when the Indians were told to sell and it turned out there weren’t any Zambians who had the money to buy or knew how to run a business. But anyway whatever they think, it’s beside the point. It’s not the race or the colour of the shopkeeper that needs changing. All middlemen are by nature exploiters; Africanizing the exploiting class isn’t going to solve our problems.”

It was not necessary for him to say he agreed, there; Shinza knew. “The training might come in useful for other things — running small retail co — ops and so on.”

“We should have had something like the Tanzanians got — the ILO’s establishing a national institute of productivity in Dar. Even the Ugandan scheme would have been better than this management thing. Small — enterprise training could be adapted along cooperative lines. They’ve got a fishing and marketing business going on Lake Albert, a carpentry shop in Kampala. Not bad. But you get what you ask for. That’s set down in the policy of this sort of international aid — naturally; they can’t go on and work against the policies of countries. So we’ve got a scheme that’s for Africanizing an old, free — enterprise society.” He turned round the bread — plate with the bill. “Well — let’s get on, I suppose. How much’s mine?”

“You can pay for me tomorrow.”

They screeched the chairs back. Shinza let Bray go through first and said as he passed, “You better not eat with me too often.” He stopped to buy cigarettes at the counter. He joined Bray in the glare of the street, putting on big dark glasses so that the secrecy of the beard was reinforced and his whole face was obscured. “Nobody here calls me ‘boy’ any more. Is it freedom or just I’m getting old?”

“You are not getting old,” Bray said. “You may be older, but you are not getting old, I can tell you that.”

Shinza pushed his shirt in under his belt, smiling. As they walked he took a match, broke it in two, and probed in his mouth. “My teeth are going.”

Shinza, despite his sophistication, remained very African; if you lost your teeth, it was in the nature of things: he probably would not think of going to a dentist to have the process delayed. But Joshua Ntshali had prominent gold — filled teeth; it was simply that for him — Bray — what Shinza did was significant. There are people in whom one reads signs, and others, on the surface equally typical, whose lives do not speak.

“Why shouldn’t we eat together?”

Shinza said nothing, threw the match away. “You stay at Dando’s place. He might not like it.”

“Poor Dando.” Roly, too, was an old friend of Shinza’s. He was about to say: Dando spoke to me about what happened to you, months ago, the moment I arrived. He got drunk and lamented you. “He’s a functionary these days.”

“That’s so. They might not like it.”

He wants to know whether I’m seeing Mweta.

“I don’t think my presence anywhere compromises me.”

“You don’t think.” It was not a suggestion that Bray was innocent of the facts of life; it was said almost bitterly, an accusation, a challenge. “But it has, it does, it will. We think.”

He was faintly riled by the imputation that he fell short somewhere. His defence was, as always, to get cooler and cooler, give more and more evidence of being what he was accused of. “We? You and Mweta?”

Shinza laughed, but it was not a laugh that let Bray off.

Before they reached the cinema Shinza left him with the remark that he had to see someone. “I’m at Cyrus Goma’s place,” he said.

“Old Town?” The African quarter had always been called Old Town.

“Mm. I think it’s number a hundred and seven, main road. Just by the Methodist Church.”

“Oh I know.”

“The dry cleaners’ on the corner will give a message. A Mrs. Okoi. Take the number.”

“Dhlamini’s mother? I remember her.” Dhlamini Okoi was Minister of Posts and Telegraphs; Mweta had just taken Information away from him and made it a separate portfolio.

“That’s it. It’s really the old Gomas’ place I’m staying.”

The secretarial committee had been careful to place no big issue on the first afternoon’s agenda. The question of the participation of women’s organizations produced hard words from the few women delegates — formerly they had attended congresses on a branch and not a regional basis — and they wanted their rights back. (This must have been the reason for the militant female singers outside.) The resolution that “strenuous” efforts be made to build up the State’s own diplomatic network instead of continuing to rely on services provided by the former colonial power was the sort of thing that gives an opportunity for people to ride their hobby — horses through — in terms of party politics — an unmined field. Conservative or radical, everyone wanted the country to have its own diplomatic representation; the resolution satisfied patriotic principles even though the government didn’t have either the money or personnel to carry it out. A resolution on the Africanization of social amenities, put by the Gala Central Branch, turned out to be Sampson Malemba’s baby — Sampson hadn’t said a word about it, coming down in the car. But there was no question which particular institution he, personally, had in mind when he spoke of the “white social clubs with valuable amenities, still existing in small towns where such things are not available to the community as a whole.” There was one instance he knew where the “dogs’ kennels were refused for a community centre workshop.” A chest — hum of laughter stirred, rose aloud against him. Malemba looked slowly surprised; he explained that this was no ordinary doghouse. This time the chairman had to call Congress to order. Heads went down at the press table and ballpoints scribbled. Sidelights of Congress: the white editors would transcribe the anecdote into European connotations — Congress Puts White Clubs in Doghouse — and Africans would be puzzled and rather offended at the choice of issues publicized. The women were in splendid form after the vindication of their right to attend Congress in full force. If the chairman evaded one pair of commanding eyes he looked straight into another. A large woman with a turban in Congress colours and a German print skirt down to her ankles cited the “powder rooms” of shops and garages as amenities to be Africanized. She spoke in her own tongue with the English phrase mouthed derisively. There were lavatories and water taps in these “powder rooms” but the keys were for white ladies only. If white women could put powder on their faces in there, why shouldn’t African women be able to go in and wash their babies?

After this, the resolution that wine and liquor be taxed more heavily to discourage excessive drinking wasn’t given the serious attention it perhaps deserved. The delegate who spoke to it had the facts and figures all right; fifteen times more liquor had been imported last year than in 1962. And this at a time when the European population was thinning out. The country must be careful not to follow the example of places like Madagascar, where one year liquor held second place of all imports, to the disadvantage of much — needed machinery and equipment. There was more laughter but faces were dutifully straightened when someone invoked the example of the teetotal president. Mweta himself grinned broadly in disarming self — parody of a strong — man showing his muscles. The resolution was carried and ended the day’s proceedings and as they edged slowly out into the aisles Bray’s neighbour remarked confidentially gaily, “And now we all go off for a beer.”

He was back where he started, in the rondavel room at Roly Dando’s. He lay on the bed and looked at the light hanging from the ceiling beam and the combed pattern of the thatch. Bluebottles bumbled hopelessly against the fixed central panel of the window and never found the open sections. They thudded and bounced against the unresisting, invisible barrier; at the drowsiness that overcame him. Behind closed lids in the swarming red — dark of himself she was there with her square — jawed, innocently belligerent face, the face of a woman who has always to fend for herself, some draggle — teated female creature whose head, above a well — used body, remains alert for her young. She suggested many things to him. Also an early Greek, in the inevitability that hung about her life. An Iphigenia who would have understood that Agamemnon must trade her for a favourable wind. He thought, perhaps it’s that she’s a commonplace girl, really, someone very limited, with courage but not the intelligence to use it for herself, and I’m just a middle — aged man enjoying the last kick of the prostate. It was a phrase he and Olivia used tolerantly, of friends’ affairs; he had forgotten who coined it. (He saw the girl’s breasts with the marks on them, her meaty thighs really too heavy for trousers.) It could happen to oneself, like cancer or a coronary; like dying. One connected it only with other people, but it could come. — Well, if this was what it was, no need to be tolerant — envy was more appropriate, if the superiorly tolerant ones only knew.

But Olivia would know that, too. Olivia had great intelligence; in the second sense as well, intelligence of everything: the body, too. At the beginning — for years, in fact — they had had that between them; Venetia and Pat, the young matron and the would — be actress, were made out of what had seemed unsurpassable intimacies. Olivia must remember them; but he was living them. For her, with her, they belonged to the past. The body has a short memory. His had forgotten her long before he began to make love to the girl. What had happened to Olivia and to him now seemed as useless to question as the result of an air crash; he was the survivor. He was aware of the sexual arrogance of this interpretation … a bird called out, persistently, overhead on the roof and he opened his eyes with a sense of having heard exactly that note before. He bunched the limp pillow behind his neck and set himself to read through the Party Congress agenda slowly, making faint pencil crosses here and there.

Roly Dando had had his operation and no longer interrupted the evening drinking with trips to the bushes, but the look of some annoying inner summons that twinges of the bladder had brought to his face had become permanent. With poor Dando, with everyone he met in the capital, Bray felt his own well — being must announce itself for what it was; that it would be as easily recognized, in its way, as the dark — ringed eyes of the adolescent masturbator. But Dando said nothing. The distance between them was difficult to analyse. Whether it was a matter of sexual energy, of age, of changing political and personal directions, was something that could not be separated from the atmosphere of the garden, which was not as it had been, although they sat there together just as they had always done.

Dando, too, had noticed that Mweta’s intention to take to himself the right of appointing the Secretary — General of the United Trades Union Congress was coming up on the PIP Congress agenda. He dismissed Bray’s surprise that it had got so far. “There isn’t anything that isn’t Party business. I suppose Shinza drummed up so much support, the secretarial crowd couldn’t avoid it. Just as by bringing the whole trade union affair under fire at Congress, Shinza can’t avoid showing his hand. He must have good reason to believe he’s going to be Secretary — General again himself, if it’s left to UTUC elections in the old way.”

“Mweta’s shown his hand too. If he’s going so far as to bring in a new act just to keep Shinza out of the unions.”

“Oh it’ll only be a proclamation, you don’t have to bother with a new act. The old Industrial Conciliation Act allows for it, it’s a piece of good old colonial legislation, tailor — made to keep the blacks in their place. It’ll do perfectly now.” Dando drained the bottom of his glass, where the gin had settled, and pulled the skinny tendons of his jaw wryly.

“If Shinza became Secretary — General of UTUC again it would provide a perfect opening.”

“For what, man, for what?”

“If Mweta would see it. A perfect opening to take Shinza back into the fold without loss of face. Shinza would have taken the step out of ‘retirement’ himself, he would have the one key position outside government; Mweta could simply put out his hand without patronage and without humbling himself in the least, and take him in. And the solution to labour troubles, the end of the split factions in the unions, at the same time. He would have a strong government then, all right.”

“With Edward Shinza breathing fumes down his neck.”

Bray smiled. “He isn’t drinking these days.”

“It’s not brandy I’m thinking of. The revolutionary spirit.”

“No harm in a bit of that.”

Dando settled back for attack, his chair a lair. “I should bloody well hope so. I should bloody well hope there is. I don’t know what mugs like me’ve wasted our time for on this continent if the ideas we brought to it haven’t any harm in them for the set — up the blacks took over from the whites.”

“Well, there you are.”

“Here I am, all right.” Dando’s look lunged hit — or-miss round his garden; caught, his old dog cautiously wagged its tail. “But Mweta isn’t going to have any continuing revolution stuff pressed on him by Edward Shinza or anyone else. When he talks about building on solid foundations and so on he means just that — not the peasants’ toil and all that, but also the two — bricks-high capitalist state that was already under way here. He may put on a few decent outbuildings of state — owned enterprise here and there, you understand — but there’ll be no change of style in the main structure. It’ll look a bit like a Swiss bank — or perhaps a West German one’s better. The extended family will have their huts in the grounds and they’ll get quite a few pickings from Golden Plate dinners, they’ll be better off than they were before, mind you, and they won’t mind. Mweta genuinely believes that’s the best he can do and he’ll certainly do it the best way it can be done. A little black Wirtschaftswunder. If he let Shinza near at all — if he let him climb up by way of UTUC, he knows quite well what he’d have on his hands — the risk of the trade unions setting up in opposition to the government. That’s what Edward Shinza’s after, that’s his comeback by constitutional means, that’s what he’s going to try for, and our boy knows it.” He poured another drink for Bray as if to stop his mouth.

“I can’t see it. I don’t think Shinza’d stand a chance. If he’s making a bid for power through the unions, it’s to put himself in a position where, as I said, Mweta can recognize he needs him, as he always did. It’s strange, even now when he talks against Mweta, sometimes with pretty strong resentment — he has a kind of concern, a feeling of responsibility, for him; still. Anyway — feeling or no feeling — I don’t see he’d stand a chance of the other thing.”

“Why in God’s name not? Don’t you see? Do I have to spell it out, Bray? You know UTUC and the Party have always been virtually the same thing, all these years until now. They both drew members from the same class, they had a similar intellectual formation — as far as political methods and social and economic attitudes were concerned, there wasn’t any major difference between them. Some of the leaders of both were even the same people! Look at Shinza himself — first chairman of PIP and at the same time Secretary — General of UTUC. And Ndisi Shunungwa and a bunch of others. In spite of this, a situation could have developed early on where although they were in double harness the one could have pulled ahead of the other, eh? — you could have had the situation where a labour organization comes into conflict with a less progressive — minded political party. It didn’t happen — it couldn’t happen then because of two factors: the country wasn’t free of outside political domination and it hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. Eh? But now it’s a different story. We’re independent, the front line’s not at Government House any more. In theory, UTUC ought to give purely professional considerations priority, now — they ought to go for corporate trade unionism. But UTUC is also virtually an integrated trade union, eh, part of the state, supposed to carry out the state’s policy and aims — wasn’t there even a clause to this effect in UTUC’s constitution? I’m damn sure there was. UTUC’s the representative of the workers and the junior civil servants, but it’s also a kind of strong arm of the state department of labour — and that’s a hell of a balancing act to bring off, my lad. UTUC’s become a two — headed calf and there’s Shinza’s chance to make the killing. All he has to do is set himself up as champion of the rights of the workers against the state’s domination of the unions and subordination of the welfare of the workers to the demands of the state. He’s doing it. Look at his inspiration.” He chopped his upended palm on Bray’s agenda, with its marked resolutions. “He’s done it with a dozen wildcat strikes all over the country. They listen to him on the quiet and defy their own union officials because the contradiction with its built — in dissatisfactions is there already — the two — headed calf.”

“You’ve given the answer yourself!” He had been scratching the surprised dog energetically behind the ears while Dando talked, waiting an opening. Now he gave the dog a final thump. “You say that before Independence, even if the trade unions had found themselves in conflict with a less progressive — minded party, they couldn’t have set up a successful opposition because the country hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. The working class wasn’t big enough. But this still applies. There still hasn’t been industrialization on a scale nearly extensive enough to bring about any considerable increase in the size of the wage — earning class. UTUC simply hasn’t the numbers and consequently hasn’t the major economic resources to establish itself in opposition to Mweta’s government. Under Shinza or anyone else. Shinza’s been in the union movement since he was on the Boss Boys’ committees as a youngster on the mines, remember. He’s been around in other African states. Remember he’s an old buddy of Ben Salah; he knows who came off worst in Tunisia in the clash between the trade union organization and the Neo — Destour government … it’s the same sort of thing here. Shinza must know that at this stage it can’t be done.”

“It can be tried. Anyway, if Shinza could bring off even a Ben Salah here I’ve no doubt he’d consider himself lucky. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Perhaps he sees himself, the old union leader turning the screw on the government so successfully that he ends up making a gala appearance, à la Salah, as Minister of Planning and Finance a few years from now. And perhaps Mweta sees that in one of his teetotal cups and wants to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

While their voices grew louder and cut across each other vehemently the bats of early evening were flitting about them, an embodiment of things that went unsaid. In a pause — the air thickened quite suddenly with darkness, he could no longer see Dando’s small face clearly and felt his own to be hidden — he thought how they talked of Shinza as if he had been in another country, an interesting man in an interesting political situation one read about, instead of a mile or two away, in the Gomas’ house in Old Town. It was from Dando that this attitude imposed itself. He was an old man in an official position, and all his fiery objectivity was academic; as he had said himself, once, he worked for Mweta. Shinza could not enter into consideration, in his personal life.

After dinner he excused himself without saying where he was going and drove to Old Town. The approach had not been improved; streets were still untarred and streetlights irregularly few. He passed the bar in an old shop where he had gone with Bayley and the others, that time, during the Independence celebrations. It had been Rebecca’s discovery, but she was not with them; he remembered waiting in the car outside the shabby flat building where she lived, while Neil Bayley threw pebbles at her windows. But the flat was in darkness; another time, another Rebecca.

He made out Mrs. Okoi’s dry — cleaning shop in this present darkness and what must be the Goma house just opposite; there once had been numbers painted on the brick but they were long worn off. This was one of the more prosperous streets and there were no cooking braziers out, but children and gangs of youths occupied it with their yells, laughter, and games, the smallest ones standing about asleep on their feet like a donkey that stood quietly nearby. The core of the standard two — room house had been built onto all round and there was a strip of polished concrete leading to a front veranda; the gate was missing and a dog tied to a wire between two stakes that enabled it to run up and down, brought up with a strangling jerk at either limit, struggled like a hooked fish to get at him. He knocked a long time before someone came: a pretty small child in pyjamas. It looked at him and ran away. But he could hear voices, and Shinza’s laugh, beyond the tiny room the door opened on to. Straight — backed chairs in the room, a refrigerator and a Home Encyclopaedia, an old sofa made up as a bed for two more small children who were asleep under the bright light. At last the inner door opened with a glimpse of faces and gesticulation through cooped — up heat and smoke. A woman looked at him and at once looked back into the room for direction, but Cyrus Goma appeared impatiently, and as soon as he saw who was there came forward and shut the front door behind Bray in welcome. “Come right in. My mother … My younger brother … Basil Nwanga … Linus Ogoto …” It was full house, with Congress in town. Shinza was on his feet and standing pleasedly about; he put an arm on Bray’s shoulder. Two men were playing cards at the end of the table, oblivious, looking down at their hands and up at each other, not speaking. A lad was doing his homework in a corner he’d found for himself on the floor. The radio was playing. A young woman brought a pink glass with a gilt rim and Shinza poured Bray a beer. Cyrus Goma’s mother, like a household god in its shrine, sat a little apart on a strange dark wood chair, a sort of small pew that clearly no one else would ever dare occupy. On a second look Bray realized that it was an old — fashioned commode that had been adapted for less private usage; whatever member of the Goma family had acquired it probably had had no idea of its original purpose. The old woman was large and black as only people from the part of the country that bordered on the Congo were. The features Cyrus had inherited were a pencil sketch of the central motif fully developed here; the head blocked out massively, the nostrils scrolled, the wide downturned lips blue — tinged with age, the eyes bloodshot, one slightly bulging (a mild stroke, perhaps), the earlobes, now empty of the copper rings they had once held, hanging in self — ornament, contemptuous of all adornment, down to the thick shoulders. Under her long cotton dress her feet were bare. She did not speak, acknowledging Bray only with a deep breath and then, from that drawn — up height, a grand inclination of the head. Every now and then she hawked and took snuff with a noise that everyone ignored. This was both sad and a sign of respect commanded: she was not banished for the dirty habits of senility, but neither was she taken any notice of.

Shinza was in the mood that used to come to him on the eve of elections when PIP first began to contest settler seats. He made self — deprecating jokes, game rather than confident. A David rather than a Goliath. The man who had been introduced as Linus Ogoto went point by point through the resolution he was going to lead next day, that the salaries of government personnel were too high. He was a forceful man with a corrugated face and head — even the fleshy shaven scalp was quilted with lines so that the intensity of the changes in his expression were not confined to the face but ran over the whole head. He lectured Bray in fluent, heavily accented English: “You know what the estimated figure is? Forty — seven per cent of the budget. Ministers and shop — front managing directors like Joshua Ntshali—” “Careful, Ntshali’s a neighbour of James’s,” Shinza put in. “—They’re getting three to ten thousand a year. — Our unskilled workers earn between thirty pounds and seventy — two. — Wait a minute, I haven’t finished. I’ve got a few other figures. Free house, basic car allowance seventy — five pounds, special extra allowance of one shilling a mile on official trips, and any day they like, cheap petrol from the PWD pumps. Senior civil servants and officials of the corporations get very much the same privileges.”

Cyrus Goma and Nwanga were both M.P.s and had a good salary and some privileges themselves; but of course they were not cabinet ministers. It seemed taken for granted by them that they would accept cuts in their salaries; this surely would not fail to be noticed when they were lobbying among ordinary people. “I’ve got the figure for the average earnings of Congress delegates. Seventy — three per cent earn under six hundred a year, and of that seventy — three per cent nearly three quarters earn between thirty and a hundred a year. That’s all.”

“Cash earnings, of course—? Subsistence crops and so on don’t come into it, ay?” Under his levity Shinza was alert to holes into which opposition would poke its way.

“Cash earnings. What a cabinet minister gets from his garden in the land doesn’t come into the reckoning for him, either.”

Shinza nodded rapidly, satisfied.

Nwanga said to Bray, “The Dondo and Tananze crowd are going to back that up full strength. They want a freeze for all earnings above six hundred a year.”

“Well, nearly everybody in that hall earns less than six hundred. They shouldn’t feel like disagreeing.” Ogoto looked as if he were staring them all out.

“That was some detective work, Linus,” Shinza said aside. “How’d you do it?”—referring to the figures for delegates’ earnings.

“I was on it for months, man. People don’t answer letters, you know — you have to keep on at them. It’s cost me a lot in stamps.” Ogoto laughed suddenly, embarrassed, and his ears moved the hide of his scalp. Then once he had overcome the embarrassment of praise it went rather to his head; he couldn’t stop talking, with intense enjoyment, of the trouble he had gone to. He told one anecdote after another; everyone laughed except the card players and the schoolboy, burrowing down in their concentration, and the old woman.

Bray talked to Cyrus Goma about a resolution concerning peasant workers. He had noticed it was to come from the Southern Province’s regional council — Goma’s seat was in the Eastern — but Goma knew its terms precisely. “The idea is farm workers should be recognized as the personnel of an agricultural industry, and they should be organized, just like any other sector of industry. Seventy — one per cent of workers in this country are still on the land. They haven’t any proper representation, no properly laid — down conditions of employment, no minimum wage, nothing. Of course it’s a tricky thing to work outmost of them aren’t employed full time as cash wage — earners, as you know. They’re employed seasonally by white farmers; part of the time they work their own or tribal land; or they’re squatters allowed to work some of the white man’s land in exchange for a share of the crop….

“Is there good support?”

Goma gave a short laugh. “In principle. Who’ll get up and say he’s against improving the life of nearly three quarters of the working population? But people can hold back for other reasons.”

“Of course. Organize that seventy — one per cent of peasants and the trade unions increase their power out of all recognition.”

Goma shrugged. Whenever Bray approached the definition of policy behind the separate resolutions of Shinza’s faction, Goma presented a bland front. Shinza was back in discussion with Linus Ogoto and Nwanga, his cigarette waggling on his lip. “… In Guinea, I mean, don’t let’s forget the issue of Africanization didn’t arise … the French pushed off as soon as Sékou opted out of the French Community, there were no more expatriate civil servants earning fat salaries for local people to compare themselves with. They were on their own. It was easy to introduce drastic salary cuts. But you must be very careful how far it goes … if you get deteriorating wage scales and fringe benefits at the level of, say, the teachers, it’s a boomerang”—he yawned, now and then, with excitement— “you get their union campaigning for a review of salaries again—”

Shinza was disturbed at the fact that the question of Mweta taking power to appoint the Secretary — General of UTUC was placed early on the next afternoon’s agenda. A man in a grey suit with tribal nicks on his cheekbones said, “They want to get it out of the way.” Shinza ignored him, ignored Bray’s eyes. He leaned his elbow on the table, put his hand over his mouth and gave a heavy sigh through distended nostrils: “Out of the way.” Of course, he wanted to have time to make an impression on Congress, to demonstrate over several days his return to active leadership and his claim to support before the issue came up. He was half — forgotten and he must remind PIP of what he still was and could be. Then whichever way it went — if the motion were to be defeated and Mweta took to himself the right of appointing UTUC’s Secretary — General and overlooked him, or if it succeeded and UTUC’s executive retained the right to elect him — Shinza’s political stock would rise.

Cyrus Goma said something to Shinza about the time. The little group took on the wariness, eyeing each other, of people expected elsewhere. Shinza scorned the mystery. “If you feel like it, come along …? If you wanted to …” Goma with his hunched head frowned down at himself; the others stood awkwardly. Shinza sensed the pressure of disapproval and passed over the invitation as if Bray had already refused, “I’m sorry … we’re just pushing off to see Dhlamini Okoi.” So Okoi, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, was in the Shinza camp too, now. Shinza smiled lazily to see that conclusion in Bray’s face. But Goma looked sharply, gloomily annoyed. Bray paid his respects to the old woman again. Now that Bray was on his way out, Cyrus Goma was pleasant with relief, chatting to show that there was nothing personal. “… after all these years. And how’s Mrs. Bray? She’s happy out there in England? When you write please give her my greetings, I don’t know if she remembers me….” He still had on the West African cotton robe that was his form of dress for public appearances. “Let’s go.” Shinza gave the word. He said to Bray, as if in confidential amusement at the attitude of the others— “Till tomorrow morning. Don’t get into trouble in the big city.”

It was not yet ten o’clock and the darkness was thickly hot. A flying cockroach got into the car and slid itself, flattened like a knifeedge, under the torn floor mat when he swatted at it. Well, there were probably tasty pickings beneath the seats and in crevices, left over from journeys with the children. They had made the car as homely with crumbs and broken toys as Rebecca’s always was. He didn’t feel like bed, or drinking with Roly; he thought he would go round by way of the Silver Rhino and say hello to the Wentzes. They would expect him some time and he didn’t mean to linger in the capital after Congress was over. The Rhino was full; “Reduced rates for delegates — what can you do,” Hjalmar said. “We have to pay the staff the same, no matter what the guests pay.” Margot was in bed; “Not ill?” “Who knows, with Margot? She says she’s tired; and she’s ill. She says she’s ill; and she’s tired. I want her to go on a holiday. She says why don’t I go away for a few days.” He left the office unattended and they sat in the little private sitting — room with its round table under the cone of light from the low — hanging shade, the windows of this Vuillard interior pushed gasping — wide into the hot night smelling of red dust and grass fires. Hjalmar Wentz always generated the immediate intimacy of someone who has no one to talk to; he gave the impression, tonight, of a prisoner of whose cell Bray unknowingly had sprung the lock. The son Stephen had taken his A levels but there was no question of a university — it was the first time for as many generations they knew of in either his (Hjalmar’s) family or Margot’s that anyone simply left school and became one of the half — educated petite bourgeoisie. “He is a natural colonial — the adaptable kind who enjoys the sort of popularity you get when you run a bar and everybody calls you Steve — you know what I mean. There’s nothing you can do about it. Everybody likes him. Margot finds it disgusting. Of course I don’t exactly rejoice … but I see it as a solution to the problem of survival, nhh? We brought him here, in this world and this place, and that is how he’s worked things out for himself. Not intellectually, you understand — he has only instincts. Margot in Europe never knew such people. Her father, the old professor — when they went to a spa, he took all his meals in a private room. They were taught that solitude and contemplation develop the human faculties and wasting time with stupid people prevents them from — inhibits them. He was a great Hegelian; they were made to turn every accepted idea round about and think the opposite before making up their minds — you know, negative thinking and all that. He had a great contempt for middlemen … well, who hasn’t, specially if you have to become one. But he never did … he died before that might become necessary. Ah — ja-a-ah!”—it was not the German exclamation, but the unmistakable longer — vowelled Scandinavian one, with a rising cadence at the end— “All very Jewish — intellectual, although he hardly considered himself a Jew. If he’d been in Eastern Europe instead of Germany the old man would’ve been one of those Talmudic holy men who don’t have anything to do with earning money — part of the rabbinical tradition that to him was a much worse kind of ghetto than the real ones.”

Bray remembered the daughter was named after that remote and forbidding European. To distract Hjalmar from his son, he turned his attention to the girl he was much closer to. “And Emmanuelle? How’s her musical career on the radio going?”

“She broadcasts regularly every Thursday evening.” Hjalmar looked slightly taken aback; surely that was something everyone knew. But Bray never listened to anything except the news and was oblivious of his neglect.

“Oh, jolly good.”

Hjalmar rejected his own easy pride in her as contemptible. “She should be at the conservatoire in Copenhagen. In Paris. Blowing little flutes made of sticks and pinging away at bits of tin over a calabash. Ahh, I can’t talk about it. And now Margot with her ideas”—he took a breath and held it; let go hopelessly— “now Margot goes and brings her to the doctor, to fix her up. You take a pill and you take a man just like an aspirin, too.” He was addressing the absent Margot. “Who are you to decide for her whether she’s going to sleep with any man who comes along? She didn’t ask for it; you decide. You decide that’s how girls live these days.” He turned away from himself. Accusations followed him. “And I’m the one who is out of touch with reality, I’m the one who lives in a dream world. Oh yes. Any man with five or six children and a wife at home in the bush is all right for her, there’s nothing to worry about because Emmanuelle is protected. Against what? Can you tell me? Are there no miseries and sorrows left once a woman knows she will not risk a child?”

“We do what we can, that’s all,” Bray said.

“Your daughters are married.”

“Yes. That’s no form of immunity, either.”

There was an easy pause; Hjalmar tugged the rim of his wellshaped ear. “You know, often I’ve felt I’d like to come up to your place for a couple of days — just a break, just to have a look. I’ve seen nothing of the country.”

“Well, why don’t you.”

“An idea to play with.” He shrugged. “You can’t get away half a day, in this game. It’s becoming more impossible to get staff, all the time. Margot’s just been back in the kitchen again — the cook was stabbed in a fight. Well, what can I do? You can’t call up cooks from thin air. I’ve told her, what we should do is get someone out from Europe, an immigrant. Advertise in Italy or Germany.”

Emmanuelle appeared, at once the expression on her face registering: on about that again. She held out her slender sallow hand, shaking it like a tambourine. “Keys, keys, please. — Hullo, Colonel Bray, I didn’t know you were here.”

“Unfortunately he’s snubbed us this time, he’s with Mr. Dando. We’re deserted.”

What did one say to girls of Emmanuelle’s age? Not you’ve grown … although it seemed she had. She looked taller than when he had seen her last, and even more elegantly thin. They chatted a few moments; but she asserted an equality of adult status that, of course, they had established last time. He had forgotten the talk in the garden. “Come and have a drink with us,” she said, leaving the invitation open, as if he would know the company she had temporarily left. She shook her hand for the keys again, standing legs planted apart, before her father. “What do you want?” “Never you mind.” He smiled, giving in. “No, Emmanuelle, what is it?” “I’m going to unlock all the family secrets and display before the jealous eyes of the populace all the family jewels, that’s what.” Her dark, narrow face was still bare of any make — up but her hair was grown and hung forward on either side of her long neck from the pointed peak of her skull, straight, coarse and shiny. She looked at him with love and pity, a strangely ruthless and devouring look. So one might make the decision to put down a faithful and beloved horse, when the time came. Then she was gone, with her sloppy stalk, very female in its disdain of femininity.

Hjalmar Wentz was another person when speaking of matters outside his private life. In a curious reverse, his public self was preserved as a retreat where he felt himself to be most himself, shored up against attrition. He leant intensely forward (he still wore espadrilles and rumpled linen trousers, as if he had been kidnapped on holiday from Denmark on the Costa Brava) while they talked of the strikes and disturbances of the last few months. “Behind every good man in the politics of reform, there is a gang of thugs. — No different for him. In a country of illiterate peasants they know the arguments to persuade where reason isn’t understood.” Mweta’s opening address was in the evening paper; this day is ours — president mweta. “What does it mean to people when he says the needs of economic development come before anything? What does it mean if he says work, and more work, and still more work? But when the Pioneer boys beat them up when they defy the unions and strike, then they understand. They know then that the union is the Party and the Party is the country. It’s all one and anybody who squeals at what the union bosses decide is a traitor. Between ourselves, I hear the fact is the Pioneer hooligans are the only active link left between the Party and government in lots of places. The pity is that he’s let Party organization in the bush go to pots”—Hjalmar didn’t always get his English idioms right— “the branches are neglected … if the youths didn’t kick up a row plenty of country branches would feel they had no connection with the PIP government at all.… It’s a mistake.… But what can you do. He’s had to centralize for efficiency. Well, these are teething troubles.”

“The trouble is many of the Young Pioneers are already a bit long in the tooth.”

“Yes, well, that’s the paradox of these countries — a shortage of manpower and a surplus of unemployables.”

“We’ll need two and a half thousand school — certificate holders, alone, next year, and thirteen thousand in fifteen years’ time. On a hopeful estimate, there won’t be more than a thousand next year. But in fifteen years it should be possible to make it.”

“That’s what you’re working on, eh?” Hjalmar acknowledged the comfort of figures, perhaps spurious. “You are right. I still believe education’s the only hope. I still have to believe it, in spite of everything”—he meant Germany, the failure of the knowledge of human sciences to make people more humane; that axis his life had turned on. “Nowadays it’s love, eh? Back to love. And not even Christ’s formula. I don’t trust it any more than I would hate.”

Bray said, “In Europe we’ve talked from time to time of a lost generation, but in Africa there really is one. What’s going to happen to them?”

“They help to make the coups, I suppose. Who knows? — They’ll get old and go home to grow cassava somewhere. We won’t be here to see.”

“But even now you’d say things aren’t going too badly?” Bray asked, curiously.

“No. No. On the whole. He’s keeping his head.”

“And his promises?”

Hjalmar took on the look of an old woman giving a confidence. “He made too many. Like everyone. But if they give him time. If they don’t squeeze him from all sides, the British and Americans, the OAU.”

“I’m afraid the involvement of the Young Pioneers is simply something on the side — a circumstantial phenomenon. They’re there; they’re idle; as you said, their very hooliganism has a certain function in being just about the only dynamic participation in the country’s affairs left to some PIP branches. But forgetting about them for a moment — what happened in the rolling strikes at the gold mines, the dispute on overtime at the iron-ore mine, that affair at the Kasolo railway: they are all signs that the workers are losing confidence in the unions. They don’t feel the unions speak for them any more. All the way from the smallest local matters right up to federation level decisions affecting them are being made over their heads. If the Secretary — General becomes a presidential appointment, UTUC will be more or less part of the Ministry of Labour. — It’s no good bringing in PIP chaps to break the heads of people who strike against wage agreements and so on made without proper consultation. The split in the unions is the real issue.”

“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.

Chapter 16

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.”

Cyrus Goma, his robe hitched up on his one high shoulder, agreed that agricultural development schemes were essential— “Of course most of them, too, are still bits of paper. But agrarian backwardness can’t be changed only by giving people dams and lending them tractors and sending out someone to teach contour ploughing. However backward and unskilled people are they have to live now in a modern money economy, and the first step is to recognize that their labour must be assessed in terms of that economy. The money they have to have to buy things with is the same as anyone else’s; the work they do to earn it must be valued in terms of that money, not as what the white farmer thinks is enough for old women and children. This principle will never be established until the farm workers are organized like any other worker. And the haphazard working of the land — the persistence of the old ways of our grandfathers who burned down enough trees for space to plant just enough crops to feed themselves, and moved on to another place when that soil was worked out — this won’t become a high — production, modern agricultural industry until the farm worker is an organized worker. How can there be an industry without proper wage scales, conditions of work, social benefits? Without these things the farm worker remains a serf.” The deeper his accusations went the drier his voice became. “I want to ask Congress whether the pledges that were made by the Party for the whole population are now for the people in the towns alone?” He paused but was rejected by silence. “—If you don’t want to ask yourselves that, then perhaps you’ll let me tell you that experts of very different political opinions all agree on one thing: agrarian backwardness always slows and sometimes prevents entirely any possibility of rapid economic expansion as a whole. In England the agricultural revolution, the enclosures of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, greatly facilitated the industrial revolution. In America, in Japan as recently as a hundred years ago, it was rapid agricultural reform that made the industrial miracles of these countries possible. In France, the land tax of the movement known as the physiocrats …”—Bray recognized a string of quotations from the fashionable agronomist René Dumont.

“What a cruel thing, to come along to us on the farms with meetings and ask money to pay membership for union and tell us we will get all sorts of things we will not get.” A young man was on his feet; whether he actually had caught the chairman’s eye or not was too late even for the chairman to decide — heads turned as if to track the passage of a hornet among them. “What a cruel thing to make the people on the lands think they can live like in town just because they will have unions … we dig the mud and not the gold … we plant in the time when others are in school … why tell us that can change because we pay two — and-six and the United Congress of Trade Unions will say so….” People tried to interrupt and the chairman’s head bobbed on disorder. The speaker switched suddenly from an illiterate eloquence to conventionally phrased committee — room English, with the effect of sweeping up an advantage for himself from the consternation. “—The rural branches of PIP have been misled into pressing for this motion. Agricultural workers’ wages will rise and their conditions of employment improve as a result of improved production through government assistance schemes and nothing else. The farm workers are being used, they stand to benefit nothing by their demand, because there’s nothing in it for them. All there is in it is the attempt of a certain section of the trade union movement to extend its influence and funds, for reasons of its own. — I don’t want to say anything about those reasons.… The unions can’t do anything for the farm workers that the department of agriculture can’t do. This Party started as a people’s party, a peasants’ party, because that’s where we all come from, from the land”—applause, especially from those whose dress suggested they had moved furthest from it— “and there is no need for this nonsense about the people on the land being forgotten because there is still no difference between the people on the land and the people in the towns. We are the same. The idea of a different class of person in town, I don’t know where any of our people get it from. It is not an African idea. It comes from somewhere else and we don’t need it. Our Party was simply a people’s party and our Party in power is simply a people’s government.”

Now Shinza spoke for the first time. He wore the same shirt as the day before, a cigarette pack outlined in the buttoned breast — pocket. Bray, who had heard him so many times, felt a bile of nerves turn in his belly, found himself alert for the silent reactions emanating from the mass, intent and yet moving with the calm tide of breathing around him. Shinza, like Mweta (Mweta had begun by modelling himself on him) let them wait a moment or two before he spoke, a trick of authority, not hesitancy. Then he opened his mouth once — the broken tooth was an ugly gap — and let it close slowly, without a sound. The voice when it came seemed to be in Bray’s own head. “The People’s Independence Party grew from bush villages and locations in white people’s towns where villagers came to work. It grew from the workers’ movements in the mines, where the mineworkers were also people from the bush.” The voice was quiet and patient; a little too patient, perhaps — they might think it insinuated that they would be slow to follow. “It is true that it was a peasant movement and that we are all sons of peasants. But it is not true that this is enough to ensure for all time that the ruling party remains the people’s party, and the government a people’s government. Looking back to the face of our youth will not take away the scars and marks it has now.” A hand absently over the beard that hid his own. “For some thousands — less than a quarter of the population — life has changed. They work in ministries, government departments, offices, shops and factories. Those at the top have cars and houses; even those at the bottom know they have a regular pay packet coming in every week and can make down payments on their stoves and radios, those things that are the quickest way to show a higher standard of living.” A small shrug. “But for tens of thousands, very little has changed. Three — quarters of the population is still on the land, and although industrialization — provided it is something more than a growing foreign concession — will absorb a good percentage in time to come, tens of thousands will always remain — on the land. We are all the same people, in town and country, yet they have no cars and brick houses, no fridges and smart clothes.… We are all the same people, yet they have no regular pay coming in twelve months a year, no unemployment insurance, no maximum working hours, no compensation for injury, and no redress for dismissal. We are the same people? — The same but different? Yes — the same, but different. We must face the fact that big talk about un — African ideas is a stupid refusal to see the truth. Industrialization itself is an un — African idea — if by that you mean something new to Africa. A political party is an un — African idea. This beautiful cinema we’re sitting in is an un — African idea, we ought to be out under a tree somewhere.… The recognition of the fact that we have developed an urban elite, that there is a fast — widening gap in terms of material satisfactions as well as other kinds of betterment between that elite and the people in the country, that the few are racing ahead and showing nothing but their dust to the many — this recognition isn’t un — African or un — anything, it’s a matter of looking at what’s actually happening. If we were a classless people, we are now creating a dispossessed peasant proletariat of our own. The lives of the people in the rural areas are stagnant. If PIP as a ruling party is to remain the people’s party it was through the Independence struggle it must recognize what it has allowed to happen. Just now we heard members of Congress opposing a motion that asks for elementary rights for farm labourers as a working force. Can we believe our ears? Is this the voice that PIP speaks with, now?” He paused to goad interjection; but again there was a sullen silence. His voice strode into power. “Well, we are here at the seventh Congress of PIP, the first since the Party formed a government; we must believe. Yesterday our women’s organizations had to protest because they were shut out from Congress. We had to believe our ears then, too, when we heard that women who from the beginning worked for Independence alongside the men, our women who have always been full members in a party pledged not to discriminate against any human being on grounds of tribal affiliation or sex — our women have been left outside to make the tea while Congress debates decisions that will affect their lives and their children’s lives. — We have heard, and what we have heard can mean only one thing: the lines of communication between Freedom Building in this town and Party branches in the villages and the bush are breaking down. That is why the Party discusses the position of farm workers as if they were strangers, people living somewhere else — men from the moon. That is why. The Party remains a people’s party and the government remains a people’s government only so long as the people know that the government and Party are at their service. There should be no forgotten districts, there should be no forgotten sections of the population. The task of the Party is to be the direct expression of the masses, not to act as an administration responsible for passing on government orders. The Party, whether ruling or not, exists to help the people set out their demands and become more aware of their needs, not to make itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders. If PIP is prepared to ignore the demand of the farm workers for organization as a recognized labour force with the right to negotiate its own affairs, PIP is guilty of the contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves — an attitude we thought we had got rid of forever when Government House became the President’s Residence. This Congress must face the fact that the Party is in danger of becoming a party of cabinet ministers, civil servants, and businessmen.”

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.

“I hear that Shinza wants to be the Secretary — General.” Instinct told him to be bold; for the first time in his life he did not seem to have much else to go by.

He could not tell whether or not they knew about Shinza all along, whether it was the factor they balked at inwardly. “Shinza, eh?” the old man said. “And do you agree with that?”

Bray said offhand, “He was S.-G. before. If UTUC wants him. Nobody knows trade union work better than Shinza.”

“I want to talk to you about something.” The old man looked round at the others. They drifted off in a group, taking their time about it, holding their smart jackets over their shoulders. Bray and the old man got into the back seat of the car; although the doors were open it was no cooler than standing outside. There was a vase of wax roses in a holder beside the rear mirror. Semstu said, “Will it not be a bad thing …”

He might mean that it was bad to cross Mweta’s will, or he might mean he did not like the idea of Shinza in office at this time. It would have made sense to have found out a bit more, from Shinza, about his more recent relations with the old man. “You want to know what I think? I think Mweta needs Shinza in a position like that. He needs Shinza”—Bray made a measuring gesture—” ‘up there.’ Shinza has become too far away.”

“Down in the Bashi, yes. It’s far. And Shinza understands the trouble — he was in the mines himself.”

“Exactly. Shinza is another pair of eyes and ears for Mweta, and he knows what he sees and hears, too.”

“The man they sent down to the brickfields”—Semstu’s tongue — click cracked like a whip in disgust. “He had passed his school, yes—”

Bray let him alone to think a minute.

“Goma’s been worrying me about the vote. All the time he comes to me.”

“Well, it’s important. The five Tisolo branches, you know.”

“But I was worried it was a bad thing … because Mweta wants to choose.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing.” Even in Gala, he heard the English habit of authority and self — assurance in his voice; just as a whore turned respectable retains a professionalism in her manner towards men.

Semstu talked on, about Goma— “his head is pressed into his shoulder like a vulture, it’s hard to trust a man who looks like that bird”; jealousy of Mweta, jealousy of Shinza— “someone must have talked between them”; the comfort of the Luxurama seats, the first Congress — did Bray remember? — when the police had seized the agenda. When all this preamble was over and he could do so with independence, he said, “You can tell Goma I will do it.”

“All five branches?”

“All five.”

That was all there was to it. He saw himself saying to Shinza, that was all there was to it. I have done my errand. As easy as that. He went to the café where he and Shinza had eaten sausages but was not hungry. His feet and hands had swelled, after the chill of the Luxurama, standing in the heat. His watch stuck to his wrist and gave way from wet flesh and hairs with a sucking pull as he shifted it. The artificial fruit juice was moving round and round in its container, bright and cloudy. The Greek proprietor and his wife were drinking Turkish coffee in tiny cups. “Could I have a cup of that?’

The little man had two dimples in his greenish — pale face as he smiled at the big Englishman. “Oh, we don’t sell this kind of coffee, it’s what we Greeks drink ourselves.” “I know. I like it very much. Could I have a cup?” The man was amused. “Oh if you want. I’ll give you.” The pregnant wife, very young, with wisps of black hair showing in the white arches of her underarms, fetched a cup, unsmiling. In the cupola between the body and the arm he tasted always the sweety — scentedness of something smeared there to disguise sweat, and the slight gall, as of an orange pip bitten into, of the sweat itself, and his tongue, moving one way smoothly, felt the nap of shaven hair — roots when it moved the other. The coffee was boiling hot, thick and delicious. Rebecca had not been in his mind at all; only this one part of her, suddenly, claimed him with an overwhelming sense of reality of its own. Cunt — struck, they call it — never mind that it wasn’t the right part — he thought deeply lovingly, not minding what they called it. He was at once swollen in the other way, too. He ordered a bottle of soda water because the man wouldn’t take money for the coffee: it was he, Bray, who had done him the honour of appreciating the customs of the country — a country thousands of miles away.

Every day in October at this time a strange transformation of elements took place. The sky was no longer colour or space but weight of heat; it pressed down upon figures, trees, and buildings. The streets of two o’clock in the afternoon looked squat and beaten. He felt his height hammered towards the ground, where only the big red ants moved lightly and freely. He took a taxi the few blocks back to the Luxurama. The taxi drivers of the capital were in the euphoria of good business — Congress brought plenty of customers to town. The driver wore a white golfer’s cap and sunglasses, and at the traffic light played the drums with flat palms on his thighs in time to loud music from his radio.

The foyer had almost emptied itself back into the auditorium already; Bray saw that he could slip in without seeing the Shinza contingent. He didn’t want to talk about Semstu. But Shinza himself came out against the stream of delegates going in; he was hurrying somewhere with papers in his hand.

“Well, how did you get on with your old friend Semstu?”

“You will have the Tisolo branches.”

A parody of his own thought, it came from Shinza: “Easy as that.”

Bray said nothing. Shinza was in that state when the imminence of a decisive event becomes unbearable and the mind seizes upon some trivial detail to be completed, some half — phrase to be added, putting into the performance of these useless things all the urgency that is turned back by the event itself: here; now; carrying with it the oracle of its outcome. Whatever the bits of paper were, he held them as if they were his destiny, his eyes already impatiently past Bray, his lips clamped with a sort of smile on a dead cigarette. “I wish they’d trust me easily as they trust you.”

“They trust me because I haven’t got any power. That wouldn’t be much good to you, would it.” He took from his pocket the little gas lighter Rebecca had given him, and the tiny flame spurted with the roll of his thumb: “Here.”

“You haven’t got a box of matches for me? — I’m out.” Mechanically, Shinza bent his dark fleecy head and relit the cigarette.

“Keep this.” A few scribbles of white, like threads of white cotton you’d pick off woolly cloth, there on the crown. Bray had never had with Shinza the sense of affection he had with Mweta, the affection that of course meant a certain physical affinity, too, which is to say a tolerance for the other person’s body, its essences and characteristics. That was partly what the girl meant when she said once that he “loved” Mweta; he would have used Mweta’s razor or put on a garment of Mweta’s (not that he could ever fit into anything Mweta wore!) as unthinkingly as he would use a towel streaked with the black stuff that washed off Rebecca’s eyelashes. But with Shinza, who knew him so much better than Mweta did — Shinza, matched with him in mind, locked with him in generation — between Shinza and himself there was something of physical hostility. He remembered once more the moment the day he had first seen Shinza again, with the boy — child he had begotten on a young girl, feeble in his hand. A moment of pure sexual jealousy. And no woman involved; no individual woman, only woman as the symbol by which a child was fathered. Well, the genie was out of the bottle these days; his feelings, that whole flood of nervous responses, had somehow pushed forward into daily use, overwhelmingly available and alert, a kind of second intelligence. Looking down on Shinza’s head for a second, he thought, was that when it began — when he was holding his son?

Someone had forgotten to turn up the houselights in the Luxurama and only the red exit lamps glowed. After the daylight he saw little in the dimness and was aware of all the eyes there, turned not upon him but in quiet tension upon what was to come. There was not much talk. He felt his way to a seat. Then the lighting was corrected and everyone was discovered by it in a kind of dreamy impatience, waiting for the Executive and Central Committees and the President to file in.

Mweta had put on the robe he had worn for his investiture. It left his neck free of collar and tie for the October heat — but that didn’t prevail in here. The robe made him look much taller and the muscles running to a V at the base of his throat showed in a streak of shine along the smooth black skin as he turned his head. Shinza was hunched at the table, his raised shoulders keeping out his neighbours, his two fists supporting his chin and covering the lower part of his bearded face. Bray kept looking at him to see if he would look up; to make him look up. He felt curiously anxious that Shinza should do so, anxious about what the delegates were thinking of this image. Shinza did not move. The familiar gesture with which he fished in his breastpocket for a cigarette was missing.

With the same conventions that carried it from any one piece of business to another, Congress came to the motion: “That the People’s Independence Party Congress views with grave alarm the intention to make the position of Secretary — General of the United Trades Union Congress a personal appointment by the President of the State, instead of an appointment voted by election within the United Trades Union Congress membership, as it has been since the birth of trade unions in this country. The People’s Independence Party moves that the President be respectfully informed that such usurpation of democratic procedure is contrary to the spirit of the State and the principles of free labour upheld by the People’s Independence Party and the United Trades Union Congress, on which the State was founded; and that the President be requested to affirm the unalienable right of UTUC to elect its Secretary — General.”

The legalistic jargon, the chairman controlling the order in which voices might be heard, the people sitting with that bit of paper, the agenda, token of the taming of their wildest and most urgent thoughts translated into symbols on cheap white paper; this ancient form of human discipline — frail cracked amphora, handed down by the Greeks, that it was — held. All the festive bonhomie of the gathering at its first meetings had worn off by now. Suits were rumpled with sitting and the smokers went through pack after pack, enduring the alternation of boredom and tension. In spite of the air — conditioning, or rather, circulated coldly by it, there was the smell of the herd, man — herd, brought about not by physical exertion but the secretions of determination, resentment, apprehension, nervous excitement, coming, Bray thought, from myself and all the others. We don’t speak, I don’t know what they’re thinking on either side of me, our arms touching on the chair — arms, but we give it off, this message that we no longer know how to read as animals do.

The first speaker to the motion had been carefully chosen: the trade unionist Sam Gaka was a man of the kind dubbed “painfully sincere”—that is, given a particular, insistent grasp of a certain set of facts without relating them to a hierarchy of other facts. In any society where it was possible, he would have been apolitical; here he simply failed to understand what his political position was. He was a believer (almost in the evangelical sense) in corporate trade unionism — the restriction of union activities purely to professional questions of the employer — employee relationship. And so, although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could never have practised, since from the beginning UTUC had been part of the nationalist political struggle, with the employer/white-colonial one and the same force against which the worker/black-subject had to assert his demands/rights, and although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could not practise now, because an underdeveloped country had to be able to “call upon” its workers in the old political sense to fight the State’s struggle for economic emancipation — he was able to argue for the election of the Secretary — General from the “pure” position of corporatism. For those who recognized it, gave a name to it; to the majority he was simply saying that UTUC’s members, representing the whole working force of the country, must always know the best person to speak for them to the government, that the whole idea of trade unionism was based on the workers’ selection of their own spokesmen, etc.

Clever Shinza, Bray thought, to pick this man. But there were statements to be twisted from this politically unaligned context, too. Ndisi Shunungwa, present Secretary — General of UTUC, was able to speak from another advantage — everyone knew he himself had been elected to office, yet he was reminding Party members that the man to be appointed in future by the President would not be an outsider — there were provisions that this could not happen — he would be a member of the executive of UTUC, and therefore someone freely elected to speak for them by the union members themselves, else how would he be in UTUC at all?

Basil Nwanga’s huge backside blocked the view of the men in the seats on either side of his as he rose. “Mr. Chairman, that’s all right as the nice and tidy answer of an incumbent who maybe feels confident he’ll stay where he sits if the Secretary — General is appointed instead of elected”—his sharply affable voice went on at once before the chairman could raise any objection— “Well, of course, personal views are not what interests us, we must decide on facts, hey, and the one that got left out here is that in UTUC itself there are people who represent different ideas in the trade union movement. It’s only the majority of members of UTUC who have the right to decide which man, representing which ideas, will serve the workers best as S.-G. If the appointment comes from outside it can only be seen to favour one set of views above another. It must be like that. — There will be trouble in the unions. Let the workers elect their own man — it’s the duty of the Party to support this right—” He spoke jerkily, in his heavily accented English that broke up sentences into unfamiliar stress — patterns, but he had a youthful bluntness that released spontaneity. Applause came like thrown pennies as he lowered his bulk out of the way again. Someone stood up to ask why the matter was being discussed at a PIP Congress at all — wasn’t it something for the trade unions to argue? — but was at once ruled out of order, to triumphant applause meant not for him but as self — congratulation on the part of the supporters of the motion.

Shinza had come slowly out of his concentrated withdrawal; he had applauded Nwanga, but merely smiled a moment at this affirmation. As the debate quickened Bray had the impression that Shinza was all the time keyed to something that he was listening for, watching out for, behind the echoing voices of the speakers, even behind the rather disorderly background murmur that rose in spite of the chairman’s censure. A sub — debate was going on among the delegates all over the tiers of seats; notes were being passed, people changed places, backs were hunched confidentially and as ears were inclined with bowed heads, eyes — eyes yellowish and veined with blood, eyes clear and prominent showing white, eyes marbled with ageing — met others with that gloss of inner — directed attention that gives away nothing.

Mweta folded his arms across his robe; unfolded them and sat back in his chair, hands loose upon the table. How few public gestures there were — and even these governed by the same set of conventions as, even if they were not actually set down by, the ancient form that held the gathering. Did Mweta have doubts about the power that was being questioned? Did he sit there, handsome little Roman emperor in his robes, knowing himself in the wrong but believing himself justified in accepting the rigging for power that he thought he couldn’t hold any other way?

Someone — a picked member of the Shunungwa — Mweta faction — was whipping up heat at the “insult to our great leader” shown by those who opposed his right to choose the S.-G. “These people should leave this Congress. This is a one — party state. We are one nation, we have one leader, he is the leader of the members of the Trades Union Congress and all the people—”

The uproar made the speaker inaudible though he went on bellowing. He was being applauded, shouted down — a great surge of opposing energies seemed literally to shift the cinema seats clamped to one another and the floor, so that Bray felt the pressure heaving at him. Roly Dando’s little sliver of a white face was moving on his neck like a roused bird’s. Party stewards were reinforced by the sudden presence of white — helmeted policemen who appeared through the curtained exits where the Joshi brothers’ smart mulatto usherettes usually waited with torches and trays of sweets. There was a scuffle up on the left of Bray somewhere, near the back of the cinema — a fight? — “Old man’s had a heart — attack,” someone repeated — but the white — helmeted men went up the aisle three steps at a time and swiftly brought down a young man with fury bunched in his face at being exhibited like this, and another man with the sleeve of his worn jacket torn out of the armhole. As they were pushed through the doors chanting of some sort came from out there, as if the dial of a radio twirled briefly through the wavelength of a station — the women again, no doubt — and a few red — sashed Young Pioneer “marshals” got in. The police did not seem to know what to do about them; but the young men’s self — styled authority wavered in the company of that more obviously vested in white helmets, leather boots, and holstered guns. They stood beside the police, their presence neither asserted nor rejected, looking sideways at each other.

There were calls for Mweta but he gave no sign that he would speak. Bray, putting himself in his place, wondered why he left it to Shunungwa and his other lieutenants to argue the case. — You don’t want to be in at the kill? — He wouldn’t hear the question from me, now, even if I could be there right next to him, asking it for his ear alone; wouldn’t hear. And he was far away on the other side of this sounding — place vibrating as if they were all within a vast bell with the ringing of speakers’ voices and the numberless thought — waves spreading, overlapping, looping among echoes: a single intention towards him drowned out before it got there; he became, to Bray, as Bray tried to hold him in sight, in mind, something that stood for Mweta — the familiar face, the robe. Justin Chekwe, Secretary — General of PIP as well as Minister of Justice, had apparently been chosen as big gun against the motion. He was an eloquent speaker (ex-Oxford Union, as a cocky black scholarship student) and while he didn’t descend to emotional appeal, the very sight and sound of him, enhanced by the power of his portfolio since Independence in the way a woman is made more sexually attractive by her private knowledge that she is conducting a love affair, drew confidence. Every villager in his scraped — together best could see what — if it were too late for oneself — a son could become. There was no austerity in Chekwe’s manner; he wore the white man’s expensive clothes as he used the most expensive words, words that came only at the price of the most expensive education. And in this he remained African in a way that was recognized instantly without any need of explanation, such as was necessary to reassert a pride in things reinstated from Africa’s own neglected scale of values. What he was saying, of course, was aimed directly at Shinza; it was based, for tactical reasons, on a deliberate misinterpretation of motives. Was Congress being urged to approve the adoption by African movements of a purely professional trade unionism? Supporters of this attitude refused to allow trade union participation in any form of governmental activity. The late Tom Mboya once argued the case for this and, indeed, in theory, it was admirable … “for countries whose economies are sufficiently highly developed to afford it — though if we look at some of them, England, for example”—he allowed himself a sympathetic smile at the Labour government’s troubles— “we wonder if anyone can afford it.” … But even the most ardent supporters of this theory had come to realize through experience in Africa that the trade union movement could not concern itself solely with the defence of the workers’ immediate interests, and “let the country go hang.” Even the most ardent advocates of so — called “corporate” trade unionism today realized that the only way to further the interests of the workers was to assist the government in every way to achieve its economic goals. It was absolutely necessary for the trade union attitude to take into account long — term economic planning and ensure that this was carried out “with the closest possible trust and cooperation between the government and the unions. The President’s appointment of the Secretary — General of UTUC is the most important recognition of this cooperation. It is the government’s guarantee that this cooperation will take place on the highest level and will never be endangered by such petty internal dissensions as might arise from time to time within trade union movements themselves….”

The arguments were being taken down at the press table, recorded on tape, but rising and falling decibels would not capture what was really happening. Beneath this graph was another, the shift back and forth of a balance between Shinza and Mweta. And beneath that, yet another: and of the nature of that, even Bray wasn’t sure. All this afternoon’s clamour and talk would become part of a small curve in the rise and fall of forces over the whole continent, would be swept up in the historian’s half — sentence some day— “towards the end of the decade, there could be discerned a certain paradigm of alignment into which apparently dissimilar states….” It isn’t signifying nothing, this clamour, that’s too easy, too. Its significance is something to be listened for, reached by parting a way through words, presences, the cramp in one’s knees, and the compulsive distraction of lighting another and another cigarette.

Still Mweta made no sign. He could have spoken if he wanted, even if it had been agreed that he wouldn’t. He had done it before; it was part of his impulsive naturalness, the political sense he had had that went beyond the stale concept of politics as a “game” in which all moves must be plotted and adhered to. Politics had always been concrete to him, a matter of bread, work, and shelter. He sat there in his robe; a piece of popular political art, Bray thought — just as there is popular religious art, plaster figures painted blue and gold.

The other faction had their plan of action, as well. Shinza was to have their last word. When he stood up he waited for silence and got it; but then those who had given it as a due exacted found that he was looking round as if he wanted to remember them all, everything; he lingered on the thugs and the policemen, awkward presences that had no dealing with words, in a gathering whose meaning depended on the binding validity of the word or was nothing — he looked at them with the beginnings of a dry, playfully pitying smile, the smile men give jailers. And then he began to speak. “In our country, as in most other African states, before independence nationalism was given priority in trade union activities because the economic and social situation of the African worker was a direct consequence of colonialism. Now that independence is gained, economic and social problems come to the fore again — look at them all around us in the strikes and riots on the mines, the fisheries, the railways. The African trade union movement has to reformulate its policies to deal with these problems. Now let us be clear about one thing. This reformulation can only take place within a framework limited by the legacy of the colonial system, the trade unions’ role in the political growth of the State, and the size of the social and economic problems which face us. — That is what the Yema resolution is about; that is what the Honourable Minister Mr. Chekwe is talking about; that is what I’m talking about.” All the mannerisms that his eager pupil (robed, shoulders back like a bust on a coin) had learned from him; but, in Shinza himself, without that concession known as charm: done with that. “The label of professional trade unionism, corporatism, won’t stick on UTUC. Not even the ‘enlightened’ professional trade unionism that Mr. Chekwe is prepared to flatter it with … Because what he is saying in effect is that trade unions can support any government whose policy favours the workers, no matter what that government’s over — all policy is. Well, we know where this reasoning can lead. In Europe it led to Mussolini, it led to Hitler — it led to fascism. Africa is making enough mistakes of her own; one of the last hopes of the world and ourselves is that at least she will not have to repeat all Europe’s. In Africa, Mr. Chekwe quotes the example of Mboya. Yes, the late Tom Mboya did follow ‘enlightened’ corporatism as a union man and later as Minister of Economic Planning and Development, and we respect his memory as one of the great men of our continent; but there are people who say he used this argument to justify his blind attachment to the Western bloc, abandoning the principles of positive neutralism to which the People’s Independence Party and our country are committed; and at the time of his death foreign business interests were flourishing while the Kenyan people remained poor.… No, the label of professional trade unionism, of an evasion of the realistic and proper role of the unions in a developing state, won’t stick on UTUC because what UTUC has stood for since the days when our Party grew out of the trade unions is the fullest participation of the worker in the formulation of the policies of the state. In 1959 when I came out of jail I hardly had time to look for a clean shirt”—splendidly casual reminder that he had been in and out of prison for PIP— “before UTUC sent me off to Conakry to the UGTAN conference — one of the first important attempts to create pan — African trade unionism — with a mandate to support trade union involvement in political action as the only way to achieve social and economic progress. During the years, later, when PIP was banned and for a time UTUC acted as our front organization, the trade unions reaffirmed this conviction in actions”—perhaps he said “louder than words”—his own were beaten out by a swell of aggressive applause somewhere— “The trade unions saw then that the workers’ greatest need was the country’s need to struggle against colonialism and imperialism. The reason why now their Secretary — General should not be appointed over their heads is not because they think their role after independence is to be less involved at government level, but on the contrary, because it is to be more involved, because the workers’ greatest need now is to ensure that the government continues the struggle against neo — colonialism and all that it means to the workers. This thing neo — colonialism is not, as some people would like to tell us, a catch — phrase, an honest investor from Europe or America or wherever, dressed up by the Communists in sheets and an evil spirit’s face. It is with us now in the form of ‘disinterested’ help given by the great powers; in the domination of our national resources by international companies; and in the perpetuation of our economic inferiority as the eternal producers of raw materials at low prices and customers for the finished product at high prices.”

Two fingers went into the pocket of the rumpled shirt, as if, carried away in discussion with a friend, he were looking for the usual cigarette. But what he encountered there with the package was the realization that he was on a public platform, talking for his political life; Bray saw the hand become absent, withdraw. “After independence, trade unionism is the population’s means of defence against foreign capital. You don’t believe me? — We only hear about the need to attract foreign capital. But the fact is that we need a defence against it, too. We need to make sure it doesn’t own us.… We have valuable resources in our country and of course we’ll have to go on seeking money to develop those resources for some time to come. But the conditions under which that foreign capital is invested and the type of development for which it’s used — these are matters where we need the active involvement of independent trade union opinion, not the rubber stamp of a government appointee”—and he brought down his fist so that the water carafes all along the table shook and this was visible right to the back of the cinema in the wobble of light off their contents. “—And it’s not only as a watchdog that trade unions in a newly independent country defend the population against foreign capital. Julius Nyerere was speaking to his people in Tanzania, but it could have been meant for us when he said, ‘We have made a mistake to choose money, something which we do not have, to be our major instrument of development … the development of a country is brought about by people, not by money.’ Where a government admits vigorous cooperation with the trade unions, there are possibilities for types of development we haven’t even touched on, here. I’m not talking of structural changes in the country’s economy — nationalization of mining, banks, insurance companies and so on — though we mustn’t forget, in our fear of frightening off the rich man from over the sea, that nationalization is, after all, a post — colonial measure to restore the national economy and give a democratic base to independence.… What I am saying is that it’s possible, through cooperation at the highest level between government and trade unions to establish such things as a fishermen’s cooperative on the lake, cooperatives among peasant farmers. — We could get help from the Histadrut, for example, the Israelis, with this, as other countries have done. And why don’t we go into the possibility of the government purchase of the farms of departing white settlers for the benefit of the people who worked the land for the settlers? There’s the autogestion scheme that was first started in Yugoslavia and then taken up in Algeria — the word means self — management, the idea that the land is handed over to the farm workers, the people who know how it was being made productive in the first place, and then the farms are run by committees of the farm workers themselves. A better idea than setting up big brand — new government plantations from scratch, as our agricultural services are busy borrowing money to do now; those plantations the experts find in the end they’re unable to turn over to the management of inexperienced villagers.… The self — management system has a very important side effect, too. It helps the integration of the unemployed into a permanent work — force by discouraging the use of casual labour and putting all agricultural work on a permanent basis.

“And in the towns — in industry — where are the profit — sharing schemes for African workers? Many international companies operating here have stock purchase plans or profit — sharing plans for their employees in other countries, outside Africa. Why must Africa be the exception? These companies should develop appropriate schemes for our workers, incorporated in bargaining agreements with the trade unions. There are many other possibilities and they all need recognition of trade union initiative at government planning level. A workers’ investment corporation could be set up as a prelude to other business activity, to get Africans into the sector of our economy at present dominated by expatriates. It makes more sense than throwing stones and looting foreign shops, as some Young Pioneers did last month at Temba.… Why shouldn’t we have a people’s bank, a state — aided bank to help our small farmers and shopkeepers who can’t raise loans from ordinary banks? The self — management scheme can be adapted to small factories, too; you can set up in towns a system parallel to that of the rural areas. Factories, shops — a whole industrial unit can be controlled by the workers who run the management through their own board of administration, while managerial staff and engineers are appointed by the government. The foreign investor doesn’t own those factories and shops. They may not run as efficiently as the foreign firm would have run them, the profits may not be as high as they would have been, but there are no shareholders in other countries waiting to take the profits away. I know a small foundry that’s just closed down because it wasn’t making enough money to satisfy the white man. But it was earning enough to satisfy the twenty — six men who worked for him.… They have now joined the unemployed …

“When we vote on this motion, there are two things to remember, and both show the state appointment of the Secretary — General of UTUC as something to be condemned by this Congress. One — whatever the avowed position of the trade unions in relation to political power, UTUC can’t avoid fulfilling its main function, which is to convey the discontent of the workers it represents. No appointed S.-G. will get round that. Two — the role of the trade unions in an independent state is not to become purely functionary, a branch of the Ministry of Labour, but to see that the type of society being planned based on the people’s labour is in accordance with the aims of the people. In the United Trades Union Congress constitution there is laid down as one of its aims ‘the maintenance of the UTUC as one of the militant branches of the movement which will build the socialist state under the political leadership of the People’s Independence Party.’ I call upon Congress to defend that branch of the Party, or betray the Party itself.”

Shinza’s supporters battered the assembly with their hard — heeled acclaim. A flash of acknowledgement lit across his face, a taste of something; but the sort of sustained applause that comes strength after strength, from every corner and tier, and sweeps a man higher and higher above opposition, was not there. Instead there was a strange atmosphere of consternation. He sat down. The debate went on but there was the feeling that nobody listened; yet a crystallization was taking place in every creak of a seat, every uneasy shift of position, in the echoes stirred like bats when voices came from certain quarters, and even — Bray felt absurd portents press in — the boredom of the thugs from the Young Pioneers. Others were talking and now Shinza like Mweta said nothing. But Mweta’s silence, his presence, was growing, spreading over the people who sighed, scribbled absently, avoided each other’s eyes, sat forward tensely, or back, waiting. And before the vote was taken it was there: Mweta’s silence had spoken to them. It was that, then, for which Shinza had been listening, from the beginning, behind the debate. Now Bray heard it, felt it — no word for how it was apprehended — as Shinza must be doing. The waverers were overcome with their hands, so to speak, in midair for Shinza. They voted for him, seated there asking nothing of them in his robe, because he expected it of them.

Shinza took the cigarette out of his pocket now. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth and was lighting it with Rebecca’s present, that always worked first try.

So that’s my man Bray thought; that’s my man.

Chapter 17

He found himself with Dando and Shinza in one of the bars of the Great Lakes Hotel; if it were true that anyone ever “found himself” anywhere: by haphazard more purposeful than would appear, the pull of a fascinated reluctance had brought them slowly from group to group at the cocktail party going on in the Golden Perch Room. He hadn’t known whether to expect Shinza to turn up at all; Dando’s was the first voice he heard— “What sort of sex symbol, without a between to its legs”—declaiming over the latest piece of redecoration, the huge stuffed lake perch that had given the room its name and now had the upper half of a woman’s body, in gilded plaster, in place of its own fishy head.

Many of the delegates had never seen the inside of a place like the Great Lakes before. They stood about overcome by unfamiliarity with the required manner of eating and drinking in such surroundings and were ignored by waiters who disdained to initiate them, hurrying past with gins and whisky — sodas for those who knew how to appreciate these things. When Mweta (in a correct dark suit) moved among them lemonade in hand, and himself pressed them to the plates of tidbits and drinks, they sat down solemnly to the treat they were bidden and blindly ate the bits of shrimp on sticks; some even became roistering among themselves, as the drinks went down, while the professional politicians and the people who sat on company boards drank steadily and achieved nothing more than the glowing self-importance associated with social drinking. The triumphs and resentments of all factions seemed to be contained this way, a feast following a funeral as it does a wedding.

Shinza was wearing the same crumpled holiday shirt, as if he had come with the object of making his presence a jarring note. He was seen with various knots of people, never in the vicinity of Mweta, apparently talking detachedly. Now he was surrounded by a few young men like a dangerous object that may go off any moment. One, older and a little drunk, was the leader in boldly taking him up — they were asking questions about autogestion—“Was that the blacksmith’s place in Kinshasa Road you’re talking about? — But one of my in — laws worked there and he’s got a job at a boiler — makers’ place now.” “So what, man.” Someone was ashamed of the level of the question. “—But who owns these farms and factories, then — the government?”

Roly Dando had had a great deal to drink; his companions were head — down, entranced over their glasses while poker — faced he talked louder and louder until his voice reached out into the neighbouring discussion— “of course, respect for trade union action’s just a pious hope in African states. You know that, for God’s sake, don’t you, Shinza? — Of course he does. Knows it as well as I do.”

Faces opened up to make way, gleaming. Shinza smiled slowly with closed lips and ran his first finger along them in a parody of apologetics. “Well, I’m learning — fast.” They were pleased with him; they laughed. Ras Asahe, who had dragged Bray off to the bar, addressed Shinza through Bray. “Oh yes, we believe you, my friend. There’s only one way to make you learn, though.”

“… talking into your beard, this business about the workers and the government building the socialist state for the benefit of the workers,” Dando was saying. “In African states the economy can only be developed to the detriment of the workers. For a hell of a long time to come. That’s a fact. I don’t care what political creed or economic concepts you want to name, the realities of production and distribution of wealth remain the same, just the same, right through the continent. No, no — I know what’s coming — don’t trot out what happened in Europe a hundred years ago, because you know the answer to that one, too. The sacrifices squeezed out of the European working classes in the nineteenth century enabled Western economies to reach a point where they could acknowledge the demands of the poor bastards who’d sweated their guts out. It was possible for one reason only: the point had been reached without disturbing the pattern of growth. Within limits, they’d come to a stage where increased consumption leads to greater investment.”

Shinza and Dando were shoved into the cockpit by the smallness of the bar, the drink in their veins, the curiosity of their companions — and also something else, an awareness of each other in the same room. Shinza took up the exchange with the air of a man who has done with argument. “And why is that impossible?”

“Because, my dear Shinza, in Africa today internal saving’s nonexistent. Nonexistent or unproductive. A few quid stuffed into a mattress along with the bugs. And consumption’s so low it’s impossible to restrict it any more to encourage increased investment, so your salary freezes won’t help. Wealth is distributed in an irregular and morally unjustifiable way, but I’m damned if anyone knows what to do about it. Trade unionism’s all trussed up because it’s come on the scene long before complete industrialization has taken place.”

“Spouting Marx to defend black capitalism! Remember who you’re working for these days, Dando.” Shinza pulled down his bearded mouth, half — humouring, half — patronizing. “—All you’re saying’s the workers won’t feel the benefit right away—”

“—Not Right away or Left away or Middle — of-the-road away — you can talk till kingdom come. Have a drink, Edward. — Come on, man, look after the gentlemen,” he berated the barman. The circle drew in closer. “Edward and I were talking about these things when you were all a lot of snotty — nosed kids … he knows what I’m saying.”

“What’s this rubbish about trade unionism being ‘tied up.’” Shinza took a swallow of Dando’s round of whiskies. “Listen — what it has to do is make a choice. For the sake of economic development, it can become an organ of the government’s policy — making machinery — which means any criticism of government incompetence is out — finished. Then union activity’s restricted to one thing — ensuring the allegiance of workers in productive industries. Now that’s something that perpetuates your famous inequitable distribution of national income, all right. You hand out the big money to dignitaries, you foot the bill for a massive police force to keep everyone quiet. And all that represents unproductive expenditure, ay? So the trade unions’ll be able to congratulate themselves on consolidating the political power of the elite. — But there’s another way—”

Dando started shaking his head while Shinza was speaking. “—Defence-of-the-workers’-interests line. Tell me another one, do. Inevitably leads to a slowing of economic growth. All your ideas about activities based on the workers’ productive role can have only a very limited effect. Either you get the workers to buckle down and shut up—”

Shinza was waving an arm at him— “That’s what you’ve tried to do, that’s what you’ve tried!”

“Oh nobody’s denying there’re plenty of doubts about the unions’ ability to put their policies into practice. We know that.” Bray, also on Dando’s whisky, found himself borne into the argument. “Until now, the trade union leader’s metamorphosis into a political’s forced him to compromise … that’s one of the principle causes of weakness here. But the fundamental weakness is a mixture of the two — industrial underdevelopment plus the political responsibility trade unionists have had to assume.”

“Oh for Christ’ sake. The only thing is, take that political responsibility properly—” Shinza’s hands extended under something invisibly heavy— “No holds barred,” Dando said. Bray turned on him— “You’d agree that a big say in the drafting of an economic development plan is one of the basic demands of most African trade unions, Roly?”

“Listen to it: demands, demands—” Dando began showing off, appealing to his audience.

But to them Bray was as much a part of the performance as he was. “… it’s the only way to overcome the contradiction between demands that aim at short — term results, and measures you’re going to have to take if you want to establish a real development policy. Of course the difficulties are enormous … it’s risky …”

Every now and then Dando momentarily lost grip and talked out of some hazy response twitching through the alcohol in his brain— “Risking your life every time you cross the road, feller.”

“… the position of the unions and the government could become irreconcilable.”

“Ha-ha, ha — ha-ha.” Dando wasn’t laughing; he shadow — boxed above the bar. “Tread lightly, Bray, eggs underfoot, y’know.” His attention lashed back, drawn to Shinza. “You get your trade union membership largely from public administration, apart from the mines. If you start cracking down on bureaucracy, there’ll be cutbacks. How’re you going to get these people to agree without losing hundreds of members?”

“I couldn’t care less about your few hundred bloody bureaucrats if we can gain thousands of peasants. Forget it, man—”

Two or three people had started singing PIP songs, at first raggedly, and then, with the African inability to sing out of tune even when drunk, in noisy harmony. Roly had become defiant without knowing what about; he looked very small and white, his thin greased hair standing up sparsely at the crown, his glasses turning on this target or that. “Better than the whole damn bunch of you, I can tell you that. More guts than some of you’ll see in a lifetime … I don’t trust him as far as the door, old bastard … but you, wet behind the ears, the lot of you, you won’t see another one like him, not for you to start telling me—”

Bray felt an old affection for poor Dando, never standing on the dignity of his office but keeping for himself the exactions of personal response, no matter how battered or ridiculous he might emerge. Only an African state would employ a man like that; anywhere else, his professional ability would be lost against considerations of professional face.

Ras Asahe was talking of the strikes at the mines and Bray was only half — listening— “not such a push — over to stop production now that the Company’s got the hardware to crack down on them!” The phrase was an arrow quivering: “Hardware?”

“Yes, they won’t have to stand around biting their fingernails any more when the boys cut up rough. I saw it the other day, very hush — hush — but, man, it’s all there! A nice little fleet of Ford trucks converted into armoured vehicles—”

“The Company police are being armed?”

“Well, what do you think? They’re going to stand around waiting for the space men” (the regular police were called this because of their helmets) “to come? Or for the President to decide whether or not it’s time to call in the army? Apparently the Company went along to him and said, look here, if you can’t do it, you must let us.… And he gave them the green light.”

“They’ve got guns?”

Ras spread his elegant hands. “The full riot — squad outfit. Tear gas, guns — helicopters so they can move a dozen or so men where they’re needed, fast. It’ll be a great help wherever there’s trouble … even if it’s not the mines … the Big Man knows they’re there if he needs them.”

At the same time there was some sort of sensation in the knot round Dando and Shinza. All Bray saw was Dando putting his arm round Shinza’s shoulder in a flamboyant gesture, a lunge, and — distinctly — Shinza avoiding it quietly and swiftly as a cat slips from under a hand. Shinza wasn’t looking at Dando, he was turned away talking to someone else at that particular moment; he must just have become conscious between one instant and the next of the arm claiming him. But Dando, already over — reached from the bar — stool, was unsteady, and the movement tipped his balance. He fell; there was a scuffle — people picked him up in the confusion that looks the same whether it represents hostility or concern.

Asahe said disgustedly, “That old man’s the best argument for Africanization I know. They should let the two of them finish each other off; this place needs streamlining.”

“What a prig you are, Ras. Perhaps you should send for some tear gas.”

But Asahe was flattered to be thought tough; Bray was aware of being under the smile of a man who felt he could afford it. He went quickly to Roly Dando. Dando was on his feet again, somehow rather sobered. “Shall we go home?”

“Why the baby — talk, Bray. Anyhow, aren’t you eating with Mweta?” He had the look of a fowl taken unharmed from the jaws of a dog.

“There’s time to go home first.”

“Good God no, I’ve got a date.” He went off with two young men who had dusted him down, a cheerful, short — arsed little Mso — they were a dumpy people; Batwa blood trickled down from the Congo, there, in some forgotten migration — and a talkative, stooping man who, in addition to the Party tie, wore various insignia from colonial times — Boy Scout and Red Cross buttons.

He left behind him raised voices and exaggerated gestures; the confusion had released private antipathies and post — mortem tensions over the day’s business in Congress. Shinza was surrounded solidly by his own men, now; Nwanga, Goma, Ogoto were drinking round a small table with an air of not being anywhere in particular, as if they were in a railway waiting room or on an airport. But Shinza said to Bray over his shoulder, “The old man’s all right?”

He had dinner alone with Mweta, late; those guests at the Great Lakes who had not gathered in the bars took a long time to disperse from the Golden Perch Room. Mweta was troubled, as always, by the choice of a cocktail party as a way of entertaining people— “Specially Congress.”

So Congress deserved something better. Yet he had sat there, in his robe that symbolized their coming into their own, and allowed himself to take from them consent to his rigging himself into a position of more power. Bray smiled. “Cocktail parties and democracy go together.”

“Is that so?”

“In dictatorships, it’s banquets.”

Mweta grinned. “Do you want this, James—” There was a bottle of wine on the table.

“No, no, you’re right, I’ve had enough—” They were served unceremoniously with steak and potatoes, and Mweta told the servant not to wait. The big dining — room had been air — conditioned since Bray was last in it and felt chill and airless. Mweta impatiently opened the windows and let in the thick warm night, like a signal of intimacy between them. He knew that Bray thought it a mistake for him to make the Trade Union S.-G. his appointee; he himself brought up the subject at once so that it should not seem an obstacle; they talked with Bray’s attitude assumed. The cosy clink of fork on plate accompanied the emptiness of an agreement to differ. Mweta ate with unaccustomed greed, getting the steak down with a flourish.

“Of course one can’t deny it, in many countries the trade union organization is subordinated to the government’s policy. But these are countries whose economic development is slow, they have the greatest difficulties to face in overcoming their initial disadvantages … reasons that don’t apply here.”

Mweta took in what he was saying with each mouthful, nodding not in agreement but to show that he was attentive. “—Yes, but trade unions in the most advanced African countries must be careful not to become radical opposition movements as their position is consolidated — that’s a serious danger to the success of any economic development policy.”

Bray was aware of his own cold smile and shrug; he reached for the wine after all. “It depends where you draw the line — what does and what does not constitute opposition? There’s a difference between a radical approach to labour problems and radical opposition to the government. That’s where the confusion comes in. In the choice of economic priorities, can a government afford to take action without the support of the majority of an organized labour movement?”

Mweta smiled as a man does when dealing one by one with objections for which he is prepared. “We have the support.”

“That’s not borne out by what’s been happening in the last few months.”

Mweta didn’t believe that was what he meant. He answered words put in Bray’s mouth. “That business today was a perfect example — an attempt to push the unions into the position of political opposition. Well, as you saw for yourself, it failed. That answers the question whether or not we have the support.”

He said dryly, kindly, “Edward failed. You won.”

Mweta showed no signs of distress. He no longer said, trust me. He no longer urged to explain himself. “So you think it’s between Shinza and me — never mind economic prosperity.” He was half — joking, in his new confidence.

“I think that’s the way you see it.”

“Opposition — especially political opposition — from trade unions can only be allowed when it’s clear the governing class is working to consolidate its own benefits rather than for the development of a progressive economy,” Mweta said, confining himself to concern to be exact. “When it’s only an attempt to discredit the government, the government has no choice except to break these people, ay? — even to use force, probably.”

“—I wonder what it was you won.”

But they both rendered the remark harmless by a kind of nostalgia, regretful, giving way to each other; what’s-done-is-done.

He had held in himself the necessity ever since the mission was accomplished in the glare of the carpark that morning— “my old friend, Semstu”—that he would have to give an account of himself on that behalf this evening; here. Why? — now the whole intention was irrelevant. And by the same token it was not necessary for Mweta to admit to him that he was allowing the Company to equip a private army. The evening passed. Each had what he left unsaid. Yet they talked a great deal. Mweta was eager to discuss some mistakes he admitted, difficulties, some doubts — particularly about members of his cabinet. The frankness was a substitute for a lack of frankness. It was perhaps not calculatedly ingratiating — an unconscious appeal (to loyalty? sympathy?) that did not yield an inch. The business of whether Bray was staying on in the country was not mentioned either; Mweta merely remarked that he supposed the work in Gala must be nearly finished? He did not ask why Olivia hadn’t come. And if he had? — what answer, what hastily offered and hastily accepted lie?

Congress remained restlessly divided on everything it discussed. The margin of order at each session was very narrow. Shinza stared out over the auditorium, disdainfully unkempt. He looked more and more like a stranger who suddenly appears from the wilderness and takes up a place to the discomfiture of other men. Even his supporters seemed to approach him at the remove of Goma, the cheerful Basil Nwanga — men more like themselves. Bray wrote to England (he took advantage, these days, of having something objectively interesting, such as the Congress, to tell Olivia about, to make a long letter to her possible) describing Shinza as “an uncomfortable reminder that ideas are still on the prowl. Beyond the charmed circle of the capital’s glow, the whole country …”

It was a letter that would be read aloud to the family or friends. “Interesting,” and nothing in it that anybody couldn’t read. What was happening between himself and Shinza, Mweta — there was no word of that; one confidence, like another, was not possible. Yet — reading it over (he sometimes read over his letters to her several times, now) — he saw that the remark about Shinza reflected some truth about his attitude towards him that had come unconsciously through the studied tone.

He was included in discussions at the Goma house in Old Town. Of course it was his talk to Semstu — using the claim “my old friend” that day sitting in that oven of an ancient car with the plastic rose at eye — level — that, to the rest, made him proven and acceptable; Shinza, no doubt, banked on things more durable and of longer standing. But maybe they were right: the smallest act can be more binding than the largest principles. Shinza’s group themselves continued to attack, through every issue debated, what Goma called “the ossification of Party leadership,” although, gathered in the Goma house, they knew that the defeat of the Secretary — General motion was their defeat at this Congress. They seemed determined that delegates should have in their ears, even as they voted this opposition down, demands for more initiative for the basic units of the Party and a transformation of antiquated social and economic institutions. They pressed the need for simple living, discipline and sacrifice, instead of what they called the careerism of the new ruling elite. Bray remarked privately to Shinza that they were beginning to show the symptoms of puritanism typical of a pressure group. Shinza smiled, picked at his broken tooth; “That’s what’s wrong with pressure groups in the end, ay — it’s all they’ve got to do with themselves.”

But in the closing day’s debate on the President’s opening address, he made a brilliant assault on Mweta’s position without appearing to attack him personally, and pleaded passionately for a rejection of the “false meaning of democracy that sees it in the sense of guarding the rights of the great corporate interests and the preferential retainment of ties with the former colonial power.” He summed up the “spirit of dissension” that had “sprung up everywhere at Congress, because it is in people’s hearts and minds” by pronouncing with a turning from side to side of his bushy — maned head like a creature ambushed, “Independence is not enough. The political revolution must be followed by a social revolution, a new life for us all….” And he quoted, his hands trembling, not quite resting on the table in front of him,

“Go to the people

Live among them

Learn from them

Love them

Serve them

Plan with them

Start with what they know

Build on what they have.”

It was audacious; this Chinese proverb was, after all, the favourite quotation of Nkrumah, who had both professed socialism and set himself up as a god … but Shinza could hardly be reproached, through association, with similar aspirations, because Mweta, like Kaunda, had continued for some time to recognize the deposed Ghanaian head of state. Later, interviewed by a visiting English journalist and referred to as “the fiery political veteran whirled back like a dust — devil from the Bashi Flats,” Shinza was quoted as asking, “When we have built our state, are we going to find the skeletons of opposition walled up in the building?” (Olivia sent the cutting at once.)

The man chosen for the closing address to Congress was traditionally a right — hand man of the Party leader; now that the Party leader was the President, the choice was generally taken to signify a coming man in the government. There was talk that John Nafuma, Secretary of Presidential Affairs, was going to be the one. But it was Ndisi Shunungwa, Secretary — General of UTUC, who gave the address.

On the Sunday there was a big Party rally; many delegates stayed on for it and people came by lorry and on foot for miles. The Independence Stadium, used for the first time since the Independence celebrations, had been tidied up for the occasion; the weeds, the damage done by the rains and by people who (it was said) had removed parts of the stands to use as building material — all this was cleared and made good, apparently by the generosity of the Company, using the gardeners and workmen who still maintained Company property with the green lawns and beds of cannas that had created a neat, neutral environment for white employees in colonial times. Bray was there with Hjalmar Wentz and his daughter Emmanuelle, and heard the Chairman thank the Company, among others that he referred to as “sponsors”—an international soft — drink firm had provided delivery trucks to transport old people and parties of school children.

Hjalmar had been so eager for the outing, and Emmanuelle was more or less in attendance on Ras Asahe, who was directing a recording and filming of the event for both radio and one of the rare locally made television programmes. The girl wore a brief tunic made of some beautiful cloth from farther up Africa, and, all legs, clambered about among the throng with Asahe, looking back now and then to where her father and Bray sat with a radiance that came from a presentation of herself to them as a special creature, much at ease among these black male shoulders showing through gauzy nylon shirts, these yelling women with faces whitened for joy. In her own way she was so exotic that she was part of the spectacle, as in the Northern Hemisphere a cheetah on a gilt chain does not seem out of context at a fashion show. Bray remarked on the fact that Ras Asahe was making films as well, now, and Hjalmar said, almost with grudging pride on his daughter’s behalf— “Whatever he touches seems to go well.” He spoke in a close, low voice; this was the sort of remark he would not pass in the presence of his wife, Margot.

Shinza had gone straight back to the Bashi — had left the capital, anyway: “—I’ll see you at home, then,” presumably meaning Gala. Without him, it was almost as if nothing had happened. All these people before Mweta, old men in leopard skins with seed — bracelets rattling on their ankles as they mimed an old battle — stride in flat — footed leaps that made the young people giggle, church choirs with folded hands, marching cadets, pennants, bands, dancers, ululating women, babies sucking breasts or chewing roasted corn cobs, men parading under home — made Party banners — the white — hot sun, dust, smell of maize — beer, boiling pluck and high dried fish: the headiness of life. Bray felt it drench him with his own sweat. If he could have spoken to Mweta then (a gleaming, beaming face, refusing the respite of the palanquin, taking the full glory of sun and roaring crowd) he would have wanted to tell him, this is theirs always, it’s an affirmation of life. They would give it to another if, like a flag, you were hauled down tomorrow and another put up in your place. It’s not what should matter to you now. And he wondered if he would ever tell him anything again, anything that he believed himself. The other night was so easy; how was it possible that such things could be so easy. Suddenly, in the blotch of substituted images, dark and light, that came with the slight dizziness of heat and noise, there was Olivia, an image of a split second. It was easy with her, too. She did not ask; he did not broach. It made him uneasy, though, that she and Mweta should be linked at some level in his mind. Of course, there was an obvious link; the past. But a line between the stolid walk down the carpark to lobby for Shinza (“Semstu, my old friend”), and the presence of the girl — always on him, the impress of a touch that doesn’t wash off — could only be guilt — traced. And guilty of what? I have gone on living; I don’t desire Olivia: something over which one hasn’t any control; and the things I believe in were there in me before I knew Mweta and remain alive in me if he turns away from them.

He felt, with the friendly Hjalmar at his side and the amiable crowd around him, absolutely alone. He did not know how long it lasted; momentary, perhaps, but so intense it was timeless. Everything retreated from him; the crowd was deep water. A breeze dried the sweat in a stiff varnish on his neck.

They went to the Bayleys’ house for a drink afterwards. Roly was there, Margot Wentz, and a few others. “How’ve you survived?” Neil Bayley meant the tedium of Congress. Bayley was “worried about the Big Boss”; “But you should have been there,”—Hjalmar was comforted somewhere within himself by the contact with the crowd of simple people at the rally. “They love him, you know, they love him.” An expression of impatience passed over Margot’s face; it recurred like an involuntary nervous twitch, these days, when Hjalmar was talking. Bayley said Mweta was being “ridden hard” by Chekwe, his Minister of Justice, and others. They wanted Tola Tola out of Foreign Affairs, for one thing. “Well, I know Mweta wasn’t too happy with him at the beginning — you remember that question in the House about his globe — trotting”—Bray smiled— “but he’s done pretty well, in fact, I’d say — wouldn’t you?”

“Yes — but those very people who accused him of spending too much time up in jets — they’re the ones who’re too friendly with him now, for Chekwe’s liking. Chekwe says he’s got contacts with Shinza’s crowd.”

Hjalmar deferred the company to Bray. “Is there anything in that?”

“We’ve seen this week what Shinza’s support consists of.”

Roly Dando waved his pipe. “Bray for one.”

Neil said, “You found him impressive? — When I read what he says I think what a bright guy, he’s right, most of the time. But if he’s talking to me — I mean if he’s there in the flesh and I’m listening — he makes me bristle. I don’t like the chap.”

Vivien’s body had the collapsed — balloon look of a woman who has recently given birth. In its frame of neglected hair that lay stiff as if sculptured, a verdigris blonde — her beautiful face kept its eternal quality through the erosive noise of children and transient talk. “He’s a very attractive man. I’m surprised none of us has taken him for a lover.”

“You’ve never met him. Schoolgirl crush.” Her husband did not let the remark pass.

“I have. I met him at a reception the first year we were here.”

“—Once her passion is roused, she never forgets, my she — elephant

“And I talked to him three days ago. We met at Haffajee’s Garage.” Everyone laughed, but she remained composed.

“Delightful rendezvous—”

“We were buying petrol. He remembered me at once.”

“This positive neutralism is a very fine idea and all that, but we have to be a little practical, nnh?” Hjalmar said. “Wherever it’s attempted the Russians or the Chinese or the Cubans come in and you’re back in the cold war; it’s like driving a car, nnh — if you stay in neutral, you can’t move. … He wouldn’t be any more nonaligned than Mweta. And as the West is frightened of ideas like his, the East would be the ones to get him. It’s between two sets of vultures.”

“Ah well, that’s the art of it. Keeping the flesh on your bones. That’s what our bonny black boys’ve got to master.”

Bray said to Dando, “Do you think Mweta’s having a try?”

Dando chewed on his pipe with bottom teeth worn to the bone. “We’ve talked about it a hundred times. You know quite well what I think; what you want is to confirm what you think. Because you’ve woken up out of your bloody daydream at last … I don’t know what did it … now you don’t like what you see. I’m in the stronger position because I’ve never expected to see anything I’d like”—there was laughter; even Margot smiled— “Mweta’s not a man to take great risks, he’s not a radical in the smallest fibre of his body. To make great changes here you’ve got to take the most stupendous risks; he’s chosen to play for half — safety for the simple reason he isn’t capable of anything else and in his bones he’s the sense to know it. He’s chosen his set of vultures because he thinks he can gauge from experience the length of their beaks; all right — now he’s seeing how much flesh he can keep from them.”

He found himself speaking to Dando, to them all, looking at the faces, one to the other. “Why are we so sure one set of beaks is so much more dangerous than another? — Because of the prisons, the labour camps, the thousands of dead in the Soviet Union over the years; because the Great Leap Forward’s been overtaken by civil wars in China; because of Hungary, because of Czechoslovakia, Poland — yes, I know. But we’re people who know what’s wrong with the West, too, the slavery it practised with sanctimony so long, the contempt it showed to the people it exploited — and still shows, down south on this continent. The mirror — image of itself that it sets up in the privileged black suburbia that takes its place … The wars it perpetuates in the cause of the ‘free world’ … If positive neutralism is the ideal, but the third world boils down to Roly’s art of living between two sets of vultures, why can we be so sure it mightn’t conceivably be more worth while to see how much flesh one can save in an association with the East? Why? Because we ‘belong’ to the West? Express our views — hold them — by the permissiveness of the West? … tied to it by that permissiveness? Roly — myself — I don’t think he’ll say he’s ever believed anything else — would you agree we’ve always accepted what Sartre once wrote, that socialism is the movement of man in the process of re — creating himself? — Is that or is that not what we believe? — Whatever the paroxysms of experiment along the way — whether it’s Robespierre or Stalin or Mao Tse — tung or Castro — it’s the only way there is to go, in the sense that every other way is a way back. What do you want to see here? Another China? Another America? If we have to admit that the pattern is likely to be based on one or the other, which should we choose?”

“You’re saying socialism is the absolute?” Neil loved strong sentiments, as a form of entertainment. He at once took charge. “The standard of reference by which any political undertaking is to be judged?”

“Yes! Must be, if we believe, people like Roly and me, what we’ve been saying all our lives — the lawyer and the civil servant. Yes! What else?”

“But I am still a lawyer and you are no longer a civil servant,” Dando said, looking at him. Their eyes engaged; and then he withdrew, under Dando’s gaze of a man who stands watching another go out of sight.

The talk had gone back to Tola Tola, the Foreign Minister. “But what about the Msos,” Hjalmar was insisting. “Neil — how will Mweta get him out without causing trouble for himself there?”

Neil Bayley stood about among his seated guests like a ringmaster, running his hands up through his bright curly aureole of beard and hair. “Ah, there’s the advantage of the strange position of Tola Tola — although he’s nominally Mso, it seems he actually comes from the Congo … someone’s dug that up. It’s clearly not an Mso name … is it, James? Tola Tola?”

“Probably not; you don’t get the two — syllable repetition …”

“—So even though he’s got an Mso seat, there’s some”—he swivelled his hand right and left, fingers fanned stiffly— “ambiguity about the whole business. But Mweta’d have to put an Mso in his place, that’s the snag. Apparently the Msos would want Msomane. Or rather Msomane would want to make sure he was the man. He’s mad keen to get rid of Labour, which is hardly surprising.”

Bray said, “Neil, would you say Mosmane was one of the people who’re pushing Mweta?”

“Depends what way. It’s always a tricky business to keep the Mso faction happy. Without making too much of them.”

“I don’t mean that. Would he have had enough influence with Mweta to get him to approve the Company setting up its private army?”

“Is that story true?”

“Hjalmar has to be told twenty times if it’s something he doesn’t want to believe,” Margot said. “You’d have to run him over with a tank first.”

“My source of information only mentioned armoured cars,” Bray put in lightly to protect poor Hjalmar. And Vivien’s clear commanding voice that stamped her origin as undeniably as any princely birthmark on the backside of a foundling: “Hjalmar, I’m just like you. I wouldn’t have believed it if one of the Company mothers who picks up children at Eliza’s school hadn’t told me how much safer she feels now. — I told her how much less safe I feel.”

Neil still held the floor. “Cyprian Kente’s more likely to be the one who’s done the pushing, and even Guka, maybe. If your Interior and Defence boys give advice, it’s difficult not to take it.”

“And no one’s asked any questions in the House.”

“It’s been done so discreetly … the first anyone heard was when these men appeared out of the blue last month at Ngweshi Mine — the report was that ‘police’ reinforcements had come down from here. Then it leaked out that they were a new kind of police.… But when the House sits again”—his mind went back to the “worry” about Mweta he had begun with earlier. “Of course, it looks so sinister. I don’t doubt that he’s tough enough to keep it under control. But it would have been better to keep the Company in the background — could have been called a force of civilian reservists, some such. He’s been badly advised to let the Company’s name come in openly — I wouldn’t agree that he shouldn’t use the resources of the Company if he needs them, one may have to use existing resources—”

“It doesn’t help me to talk about the Company as if it were a natural phenomenon,” Vivien said. “It still looks like the old days we read about down in Zambia and Rhodesia, with the old Chartered policing the place for the Great White Queen.… What sort of thugs will the Company recruit, anyway? It’s terrifying. All those mercenaries from the Congo wandering around Africa looking for a job …”

“I gather it’s a black affair, mainly, no whites—” Neil dismissed her.

“And the Company administrators are running an army? You believe that?” Vivien laughed at him.

“Well I suppose they’ve borrowed a few people from George Guka. Anyway, you’re exaggerating as usual.”

Vivien’s speckled blue eyes balanced the two men in a sceptical challenge, inquiringly. “Tell Rebecca I’m keeping my riot bag packed. … I am so glad that Gordon’s disappeared again, everyone is always much more content without him.” Perhaps Rebecca had made a confidante of her; Bray didn’t know. But she spoke so easily, linking him naturally with Rebecca as a friend who lived in the same place; it might have been — as this was Vivien — a way of showing him her acceptance of his relationship and her calm and capable intention to protect Rebecca and him from the others.

He said, “Oh the children didn’t seem to think so. They loved having him around.”

“Yes, exactly, Gordon rouses expectations and that’s always exciting — he makes people feel all sorts of things are going to be changed. But if he stays, they aren’t. So it’s always better for him to move on, you know. Now they’ll see him in the school holidays, and that will be fun for them without lasting long enough for any damage to be done. Rebecca shouldn’t worry about them. She’s managed awfully well. I really ought to send our young to my mother or somewhere for a while; they’ve been too unrelievedly in my company. Neil objects for some reason or other.” He knew she didn’t believe it; she was establishing, in this company, the ordinariness of Rebecca’s situation. But her husband said swaggeringly, “I’m here, my girl, not digging some bloody dam for Vorster and Caetano at Cabora Bassa.”

Ras Asahe and Emmanuelle burst in with a few of Ras’s satellites. One was a lecturer at the university, a young black man who caught a pink end of tongue between his perfect teeth in amusement as Neil, his registrar, mimicked the staff at a recent meeting, drawing him into a professional privilege of burlesquing their institution. The gathering began to change character, with more drinks and disjointed chatter. The subjects they had been talking about were dropped; whether this was a matter of mood, or because it was not possible, once again now, for black and white to talk in a general way of these things without seeming to extract from the blacks secret loyalties and alliances that might be dangerous for them. It had been like that before; before Independence, when the Governor’s hospitality in detention camps and prisons waited at the other end of candour become indiscretion. The ease in between — the ease of a few months ago — belonged to a time when the people from Europe were neither in a position of power on their own behalf, nor as witnesses of a situation in which the Africans had something to fear from each other. He felt a wave of impatience with the capital. While he was drinking and lending himself to the air that it was “marvellous” to be back among these friends again, he wanted to be off, driving alone through the night for home, Gala.

Before he left he telephoned Rebecca at the boma and told her to send him a letter granting him her power of attorney. She sounded chastened, on the other end of a bad line, as people often do at the idea of urgency. He prepared himself to be kept a few days, hanging about in Roly’s house. But she must have made some arrangement for the letter to come up by air courier in the government bag — he hoped she had not discussed the contents with Aleke — because it was delivered to him at Roly’s very promptly, by government messenger. Folded as an afterthought round the formal letter whose wording he had dictated, was a half — sheet of green copy — paper with a foolish password of endearment scribbled on it; exclamation marks. She was an awkward letter — writer; the things he got from her reminded him of his daughters’ letters from school. He carefully burned the half — sheet and smiled, aware that the other document was the kind that would be best burned, too.

But he took it to the bank and withdrew the money from the sale of the house Rebecca’s parents had built for her when she married Gordon, the man everyone was more content without. Half the sum would have equalled the maximum amount exchange control regulations permitted to be taken out of the country, and then only by people leaving permanently. In breakfast table conversations with Roly about foreign exchange, Roly was easily led to turn his tongue on the officials who didn’t seem able to put a stop to money going out of the country illegally, just the same. He said it was well known how these things were done; there was one crowd, a South African white man and a couple of Congolese, who had agents in the capital and just plain smuggled the cash over to Lubumbashi and thence wherever the client wanted it, and there was a certain Indian down in Old Town who was known to have more reliable ways and means — a relation of the people who had taken over the garage since old Haffajee died. How was it done? Well, travel allowances for one thing; poor students going off on scholarships to study abroad; they were allowed a maximum allowance that was invariably in excess of the money they had, so they were paid a small percentage to take out someone else’s money as their own. Businessmen; the wives of white Company officials going “home” on leave; Moslems going on a pilgrimage to Mecca — lots of people one wouldn’t think it of were happy to earn their profit on the side.

He thought it might easily be that the Congolese would turn out to be Gordon’s friends. It was not too difficult, through casual inquiry at the garage, to find out where to go in Old Town. Again with the sun on his head and purpose at his back he tramped over waste ground. If the elderly gentleman in the grey persian lamb fez knew who he was he showed no surprise; and perhaps he had long ceased to be surprised at the people he recognized. It was all satisfactorily concluded. Rebecca’s name would never appear, in fact the elderly gentleman would never know it. The money, nearly four thousand pounds in English currency, twice that figure in local currency, would become Swiss francs in a numbered account. In due course Rebecca’s signature would be lodged with the Swiss bank as the one required to draw on that account. He explained that delays in the transfer of the money — a piecemeal transfer, for example — would not do. This too, was accepted as a matter of routine practice: then the commission rate would be higher, of course. The money would be deposited within two or three weeks at most.

After it was done he walked back to the empty lot where African and Indian children were playing together with hoops made of the tin strips off packing — cases. For the first time he could remember, the Volkswagen was reluctant to start, and they made a new game of helping him push it so that he could take advantage of a downward slope. As he got going and turned into the street a young man in the usual clerk’s white shirt and sunglasses greeted him. He did not feel worried that he had been seen; such a worry had no reality for him because it had never seemed it could ever apply to him, have relevance to his way of life. He felt the commonplace peace of being on one plane of existence alone, for once: his mind was entirely occupied with practical matters to be ticked off one by one through a series of actions, before he could get away. The dentist; resoled shoes to be collected; wine as a present for his host.

On the way back to Dando’s to pick up his things he was held up, as he had been once before, by the passing of the presidential car. The outriders on their motorcycles rode before and behind — the car was borne on the angry swarm of their noise.

He saw only the black profile of Mweta’s face rushing away from his focus. The next time, next time they met — it was difficult to realize that it had ended like that, this time. But human affairs didn’t come to clear — cut conclusions, a line drawn and a total added up. They appeared to resolve, dissolve, while they were only reforming, coming together in another combination. Even when we are dead, what we did goes on making these new combinations (he saw clouds, saw molecules); that’s true for private history as well as the other kind. Next time we meet — yes, Mweta may even have to deport me. And even that would be a form of meeting.