A Sport of Nature

Credentials

The men who had shared pap and cabbage with her at Ma Sophie’s went to Algeria and the Soviet Union instead of China, now. Alliances changed; she moved on.

It may have been because she was back in a country where she could speak her own language and therefore range more widely, but she is difficult to keep track of once the Ambassador’s extended family moved yet again and settled in his next West African posting. So there is another lacuna; she is somewhere, of course, in momentary glances stored in those who must have passed her in the streets of Accra on a Saturday, colliding as she jostled between the mammy wagons and the street vendors’ jingling dinner-bells, the shouts and the splurt of tyres through overflowing drains, but there is little to attach in a contiguous, concrete identity. Her good friends in Dar es Salaam had no word. The passport her Aunt Olga carried was not recognized in the African countries Olga overflew on her way to Israel or Europe; anyone in that blank bush down there between the clouds was lost. Pauline would have written if she had known where to find her niece, as she would have sought out Ruthie. Carole once made the suggestion that enquiries might be made through the African National Congress — that idea surely could not have been little Carole’s own; could Sasha have been behind it? But Sasha never spoke of his cousin, he was bored by family connections, and now that his schooldays were over, lived at home in Pauline’s presence like an estranged lover, turning away from her assertion of their bonds as affines and spending all his time with friends made at the university. As he had predicted, his name had come up in the ballot; but Joe arranged a deferment of military service. Joe had Afrikaner nationalist colleagues whom, although they knew he and his big-mouthed wife disagreed with them politically, professional buddyhood obliged to put in a word for his son. Carole’s suggestion was out of the question (typically Sasha). The ANC was a banned organization with which any connection that could be traced was treasonable; its leaders from the Lilliesleaf house-party had been sentenced to life imprisonment, and the only man who might have been trusted with such an enquiry, the advocate Bram Fischer — whom Joe, like everyone who abhorred racism, loved and admired but would not go so far as to emulate — had been arrested, gone Underground, been recaptured and sentenced to life imprisonment, declaring that his conscience didn’t permit him to recognize laws enacted by a body in which three-quarters of the people of the country had no voice. In any case, Pauline was dourly, depressedly amused by the romantic notion that Hillela was a revolutionary. More likely she had fallen on her feet in some way: Pauline never saw her as Olga did, as lost — Hillela was not the helpless Ruthie. After all, hadn’t she had the advantage of being brought up to independence and self-respect along with Pauline’s own children? There was nothing vulnerable in that persistent image of the girl lying beside, the trembling schoolboy, composed in a — distorted, wrong — manifestation of the self-respect she had been taught.

Hillela herself, as they knew her, disappears in the version of a marriage that has a line in the curriculum vitae devoted to Whaila Kgomani in a Who’s Who of black 20th-century political figures. In 1965 he married in Ghana, and had a daughter. From this accident of geography reports assume he married a Ghanaian; a suitable alliance with a citizen of the first country in modern Africa to gain independence, a citizen of Nkrumah’s capital. With the fall, the following year, of the father of Pan-Africanism, the concept upon which black political exiles everywhere were dependent for their shelter, and the disarray of Umkhonto We Sizwe through police infiltration, back at home, exiles themselves had no heart to bother about which of them found consolation with (or even married) which girl. That this one was white and South African was slow to filter to those far away for whom such details had a gossip-column interest not extended to the great and terrible events happening in their midst and on the shared continent they overflew.

The girl is mother to the woman, of course; she has been acknowledged. In fact, the woman has generally chosen to begin her existence there, when asked about her early life: —I was very young, working at an embassy in Accra when I met Whaila at a reception given by the late Kwame Nkrumah.—

Well, it’s not impossible.

Though in conversation with Madame Sadat after the assassination of President Sadat, speaking as one who has known widowhood among so many other experiences, it was recalled differently: —You always remember the beginning, not the end. Fortunately. It was in Accra, a man passed me in the street and then turned around — Whaila: we recognized each other.—

Hillela was at least once taken to a reception at Christiansborg Castle, although by then Nkrumah’s party was in decline, even the adoring market women — his brides, he called them — had turned against him, and he seldom appeared in public. But after the break-up of the united front of four South African liberation movements, the Nkrumah regime favoured the Pan Africanist Congress, not the African National Congress; it seems unlikely that Kgomani would have been a fellow guest. The Ambassador and his wife took her everywhere — no party was complete without her, it is said. And she did go about with zest in the gregarious uproar of Accra streets. On Saturdays she was regularly at one of the hotels where, about eleven in the morning, a high-life band began to play for the weekend; everyone drank beer and danced among pretty prostitutes in wigs, children stuffing groundnuts, black businessmen in the company of the real financial establishment of the city, the huge female tycoons with their brilliant robes of plenty, sweat-gilded faces, weaponry of gold jewellery and imposingly planted feet. She may have sung and played the guitar in a nightclub; she would soon have picked up the West African beat. She does appear to have left the ambassadorial employ at some point before or not long after she began to be seen with the black South African revolutionary envoy; and she must have had to earn a living somehow.

The same kind of worn stairs. She went up that day while about town on an errand for Marie-Claude. As she approached the building she had passed many times without interest since being told some members of the organization — which did not yet have official representation — had an office there, that day she walked in as she might have turned aside into a shop that attracted her. Whether it was a sudden echo of the accents of Sophie’s and Njabulo’s flat, a flipping back of the pages of self, or whether it was a stir of something that couldn’t be sickness for a ‘home’ that was exile, she went up to be there, among the same posters and drawing-pin-stabbed cuttings, the framed Freedom Charter and photographs of the old Chief (of whom, a secret between them, she had the private picture of a stout black man in an army overcoat, met at dawn) and the younger leader whose voice Pauline had brought into the house on tape and who was now an even further-disembodied presence, looking down on second-hand filing cabinets from a distant prison island.

She did not know either of the two young men sitting in the room. She introduced herself through her familiarity with Njabulo, Sophie, Christa and the names of others who used to come to the flat; she had lived with them, it clearly was not a false claim. Yet the two were cautious, and not only because she was white: because she was from back home. What had she come for? Who was it she’d come to see? No-one. — Just to say hello.—

It was dangerous to believe anything open, while holed up in refugee status where everything is ulterior. They stared past, willing her to go. Then someone walked in whom she did know. She began from that moment to have credibility of her own: he came back, the man who had appeared so black, so defined, so substantial from out of water running mercurial with light. He had come between them, a girl and man in the sea, paling them in the assertion of his blackness, bearing news whose weight of reality was the obsidian of his form. A slight acquaintance seems more than it was when two people meet again in an unexpected place. Although he had not acknowledged her when he rose from the sea, and she had only put in a word here and there in the conversations he had led at Ma Sophie’s, he took her by the shoulders in greeting, shook her a little, comradely, and she was close enough to see the lines made by dealing with the white man, down from either side of his mouth, and the faint nicked scars near the ears made by blacks in some anterior life. — How did you find out I’d just arrived? — The shaking of her head, over the sweet warm drinks from a cupboard, became a sign to them both; she must have known without knowing. He was a man who did not laugh loosely but had a slow-developing strong smile when confirming something he was sure of.

He was not curious about her presence in the country; the norms of exile were constant displacement and emplacement on orders not to be questioned, or by circumstances over which the one in refuge had no control, either. The fact that she did have a refuge also gave her some credibility for him — what black man would believe a white girl would leave the luxuries of home without reasons valid for refuge? She wanted to introduce him to the people who had taken her in. But he had no use for diplomatic contacts with countries hostile to the organization, or which did not have, at least, an enlightened group which campaigned on its behalf. — I don’t know about their country … They’ve been wonderful to me. — And so, as Whaila (the white diminutives that diminished a black man in another way were being discarded, an African who spoke for his people before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights could not be called Johnny) assumed her loyalty to the cause, this became assumed by her as the reason for her presence, and the fact that the Ambassador’s family had taken her in both confirmed that she was an exile and that her protectors had some humanistic partisanship that might be useful. There followed a period when Whaila Kgomani was something of a prize guest. Emile and Marie-Claude did not usually entertain blacks other than those who were unavoidable through protocol — members and officials of Nkrumah’s government, and the representatives of other black states. — What pleasure is there? I don’t see the point of mixing just because they are black. What can you talk about with them? They serve us up the platitudes they think we want to hear because that’s what white people taught them. You never know what they think. Never give anything of themselves …—

Marie-Claude had a correction for her husband, this time. — Except when they are dancing. Or drunk. — She enjoyed the occasional boldness of one who didn’t know or chose not to know that European custom confines men and women to partners within their own party at a nightclub, and with a smile and flourish no-one could take offence to, sauntered her off into the rhythmical mob.

But this man from the south of the continent — her husband himself was the one who said it — he was a man with an intellect. — They may treat them badly down there in your country, Hillela, but it seems to sharpen their minds, mmh? — (The Ambassador always aimed exactly the right tone of banter at her, at the family table.) This one did not need wine to loosen his tongue but he knew how to drink it in a civilised manner, not swilled down because it was provided, free, by a white. His look, narrow eyes decoding the appearances of an embassy room, was not beguiled by the knick-knacks of European power — the coat-of-arms table silver, the humidor in which cigars were wheeled in, the royal portrait in which the face of the current incumbent fitted into the cut-out of medals and braid like the faces of revellers who have themselves photographed at a fairground. There was no predictable rhetoric, either. Hillela’s compatriot stood before the portrait, turned with the battle-lines of his mouth curving a civil smile. — That must be a great-great-grandson? His ancestor was the one who cut off hands when the workers in the plantations didn’t bring in enough rubber.—

Emile put up his own hands in mutual admission of the sins of the great-great-grandfathers. — Awful things happened on this side of Africa.—

— Well, he made his country estate over here, didn’t he …—

— It was only for a very short time. Then the other European powers got jealous, of course.—

— Of course. They were all the same family weren’t they? Cousins, uncles and that… Him, the English queen, the German king … we were their family property, man. But they were a cartel, really … We were talking about multinational companies just now; what’s new? Except that it’s not aunties and uncles banded together to own us, now, it’s foreign national economies. The extended family of the West …—

Here was a black man with whom one could talk of contentious matters in the European mode of scepticism and irony that makes communication possible between the social irreconcilables of power and powerlessness. In that mode, one can say anything, if one knows how to say it. The Ambassador, putting one arm round his beautiful wife and one round the girl: —I don’t know about the other whites in your country, but this one — we love her—

She went to them (‘almost as if to parents’ Marie-Claude remarked to her husband) and said she wanted to help the organization — clerical work. Never said right out that she was going away, leaving him; but the Ambassador knew her, knew it. He at once gave his wife a lead in generosity. — But Hillela can continue to live here. She has her room. We don’t need it … there’s no reason … — She did not stay on long. Just as well. It was not, after all, the right thing for the Embassy to open itself to complaints from her country that it was harbouring political dissidents from that country; wherever she went, it was not to diplomatic parties, now, and constantly in the company of the members of a banned organization.

Njabulo Manaka, under whose kitchen table she had been accommodated, had moved on again; he was on trial in the home country for having infiltrated after military training in Algeria. Sne moved on. As customary now with her, once she was no longer even a lodger at the Embassy, she did not go to visit the family there. The Ambassador saw her as he was passing the market; her profile with the light catching the cheekbone, her breasts swinging forward as she bent to test the ripeness of some fruit; her old poverty diet she had told him about in the sweet, light confidences of bed. He put a hand on his driver’s shoulder, the car drew up in the swill of the gutter. — Get in. — She paid for her mangoes, first.

She sat angled towards him, knees neatly together, presenting herself, smiling as if she had been at the Embassy only yesterday.

— Where are you living?—

They spoke behind the driver’s ears open to them under his braided cap.

— There’s a house where we all live.—

— So you’re with him.—

— We’re all together.—

— Tell me. Hillela? … Well, if it hasn’t happened yet, it will. You’re like me. You’ll try … It’s quite a novelty, isn’t it. I’ve had a few of his kind, myself. I always was attracted. And of course where I come from, it’s no crime. No, to be fair, it’s still (he made a familiar damping-down signal with his fine caresser’s hand) — not done …—

She took the hand. Her own was sticky with the juice and dirt that had dried on the fruit in her lap, her cheeks were the colour and smoothness of the rose-brown mango skin, the black eyes were those that had opened under him many times, holding for his reassurance the depth of pleasure he could plumb.

— I’m pregnant.—

— Oh my God.—

She saw the pain that slid its blade into him; her face was that of a child confronted with the middle-aged rictus of an angina.

Not his! Not from him! Could not be from him. But what a regret? If it had happened when it would have been his, he would have been irritated by her, as usual with women, for not being more efficient.

But of course she was not like other women. He knew that. Young as she was, she understood her field. He had even reinterpreted an aphorism once, for her, but she probably hadn’t known the original and couldn’t really appreciate the point: —The proper study of woman is man.—

— Do you want me to arrange something? — He spoke now as he would to a friend who had got a girl into trouble; it was only natural to stand together when these nuisances occurred. He had to grant it to her, Hillela’s attitude to sex was that of an honorary man.

She shook her head. Then she lifted her throat; strangely, like a bird about to sing. Happiness is always embarrassing to onlookers. He gave her the mimed kiss, small sharp blows on either cheek, that marked both farewells and felicitations among people of his own kind.

Funerals and weddings are identical occasions when it comes to disguising in a generally-accepted façade of sorrow or celebration any previous state of relations between those taking part. If there was what can be called a wedding party at all when the black man married her (and there is no doubt that they were legally married, whatever the status of her other alliances) it was given by the Ambassador and his wife at their Residence. Because of the political implications represented by the bridegroom, it was not more than a small unofficial cocktail party, where the children who were so excited to be associated with their beloved Hillela in public kept racing up to touch her dress or lean against her, and the closer and less stuffy friends among the diplomatic corps came to make a show of wishing her well, no matter how they doubted this would help. The young First Secretary, coincidentally in the country on leave from the post elsewhere where he had been useful as a suitable public partner, was able to be present. He cut short any critical speculation among the champagne drinkers with a term that, in its particular British sense, was a high compliment. — We had a lot of fun together. She’s a really good sport.—

And it was Marie-Claude, pulling down the sides of her lovely mouth in dismissal, who had the last word when later the rumour went round that the man had another wife — and children — somewhere, probably back where he and the girl came from. — To be one wife among several, the way the Africans do it — that’s to be a mistress, isn’t it? So she fits in, in her way, with a black man’s family. Hillela’s a natural mistress, not a wife.—

Lying beside him, looking at pale hands, thighs, belly: seeing herself as unfinished, left off, somewhere. She examines his body minutely and without shame, and he wakes to see her at it, and smiles without telling her why: she is the first not to pretend the different colours and textures of their being is not an awesome fascination. How can it be otherwise? The laws that have determined the course of life for them are made of skin and hair, the relative thickness and thinness of lips and the relative height of the bridge of the nose. That is all; that is everything. The Lilliesleaf houseparty is in prison for life because of it. Those with whom she ate pap and cabbage are in Algeria and the Soviet Union learning how to man guns and make bombs because of it. He is outlawed and plotting because of it. Christianity against other gods, the indigenous against the foreign invader, the masses against the ruling class — where he and she come from all these become interpretative meanings of the differences seen, touched and felt, of skin and hair. The laws made of skin and hair fill the statute books in Pretoria; their gaudy savagery paints the bodies of Afrikaner diplomats under three-piece American suits and Italian silk ties. The stinking fetish made of contrasting bits of skin and hair, the scalping of millions of lives, dangles on the cross in place of Christ. Skin and hair. It has mattered more than anything else in the world.

— When you touched me at the beginning (she takes his black hand and spreads it on her hip) this was a glove. Really. The blackness was a glove. And everywhere, all over you, the black was a cover. Something God gave you to wear. Underneath, you must be white like me. — Or pale brownish, it’s my Portuguese blood. — White like me; because that’s what I was told, when I was being taught not to be prejudiced: underneath, they are all just like us. Nobody said we are just like you.—

The smile deepens. — That wouldn’t be true either. Then you’d have a skin missing.—

— If you are white, there, there’s always a skin missing. They never say it.—

She says everything now. — When we are together, when you’re inside me, nothing is missing. — The train leaving Rhodesia behind, the Imari cat, the expectations of benefactors, the deserted beds — everything broken off, unanswered, abandoned, is made whole. She never tires of looking at his hands. — Not wearing anything. They’re you. And they’re not black, they’re all the flesh colours. D’you know, in shops — and in books! — ‘flesh colour’ is Europeans’ colour! Not the colour of any other flesh. Nothing else! Look at your nails, they’re pinkish-mauve because under them the skin’s pink. And (turning the palms) here the colour’s like the inside of one of those big shells they sell on Tamarisk. And this — the lovely, silky black skin I can slide up and down (his penis in her hand), when the tip comes out, it’s also a sort of amber-pink. There’s always a lot of sniggering about the size of a black man’s thing, but no-one’s ever said they weren’t entirely black.—

— And what d’you think of the size, now?—

— I suppose they vary, same as whites’ ones. — While he laughs, she is even franker. — I still don’t much like African hair. I couldn’t say that there, either. Once when I was with my cousins on holiday, some hairs from the black cleaner’s head had somehow dropped into the bath, and my Aunt Pauline was furious with me because I pulled a face and wouldn’t bathe. I don’t know why I felt like that… all sorts of muddled feelings — the kind you get down there, you know? I suppose they haven’t all worn off … I like the feel of your hair in the dark, oh I like it very much, but I don’t think African hair is as beautiful to look at as whites’ hair can be, d’you? Long blonde shiny hair?—

— I want you to grow your hair long, very long …—

— Then you also think European hair is nicer, on the whole? But you won’t dare say it!—

— What if the baby has my hair?—

— I told you, I love your hair. I wonder what colour the baby will come out, Whaila?—

— What colour do you want? — Len had let her choose her cold drink with that gentle indulgence.

— I love not knowing what it will be. What colour it is, already, here inside me. Our colour. — She buries her head on his belly.

Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn tight by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn’t exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful — but a creature made of love, without a label; that’s a freak.

One of her protectors took his texts not from the bible but from whatever book he chanced on in his library. Riding in a Ghanaian taxi she saw a legend placed for her on the dashboard: IT CHANGES. She was too big, for the time being, for the high-life on Saturdays. The dance of life didn’t have to be performed in a shop window: at that moment the jolting of the vehicle without shock-absorbers caused the foetus to turn turtle inside her. A queer feeling. It changes: exhilaration surfaced, as a wave turns over a bright treasure.

James and Busewe were suspicious of her when she appeared up the stairs; now she was installed among them, in their makeshift office, in their house. But it was not as they had thought it would be: teach me, she said, not only in words but in her whole being, that body of hers. And as she had picked up protocol in an ambassador’s Residence she picked up the conventions to be observed, signs to be read, manoeuvres to be concealed in refugee politics. She cultivated friendships at the university so that she could borrow the standard works of revolutionary theory she could have taken advantage of in Joe’s study, and whose titles had shone at her in vain in Udi’s livingroom. The application and shrewdness with which she studied all cuttings, reports, papers, journals, manifestos brought an intimate aside from Whaila: —Never mind Portuguese — that’s your Jewish blood. Studious people.—

— Is it bad for you … I mean, that I’m white?—

— But you know there are whites with us, Hillela — Arnold, Christa, the Hodgsons, Slovo—

— Yes but it’s agreed, ‘the leaders will come from our loins’. It’s written. It means black. It must.—

Comically, she put a hand on either side of her hard, high belly. He leaned over, felt the warmth and liveliness that always came to her face at his approach, and stroked the belly as if over a child’s head. — Hillela, Hillela, I can see you’re ambitious for your children, you’re worried in case you can’t make a future prime minister in there.—

Her mouth bunched in derision of herself. — No, no, I only wonder about you. You’re one of those who decided that. ‘From our loins.’ You’ve told me you were only eighteen when you joined the Youth League. And you’re still an Africanist, you’ve always been one, haven’t you?—

He was accustomed to a woman becoming placid while carrying a child; there were times when he did not know what to say to this one, in whom sexual energy was not quieted but instead fired a physical and mental zest that kept her working all day, racing about through the crowds in the stunning heat, and questioning him at night. He wanted to say: what have I done to you? What am I to you, that you transform yourself?

— If you look for contradictions in individuals you’ll always find them. I’m not any different. There’s never been anything laid down about marrying a white. It’s of no importance.—

— What about the people in the camps. The things that are being said by some of them about the way the leaders are living.—

He smiled to catch her out. — So it’s a luxury and a privilege to have a white woman?—

Her black eyes shamed him. — Like whisky and nice houses and big cars — the things white men have at home. People can’t help judging by the way it was for them at home.—

— Well I haven’t got any whisky or big house and posh car, I’ve only got you. There are plenty of real problems to worry about. I don’t know what we’ll find when we go to Morogoro next week… The trouble is, the life in the camps is so monotonous, and we can’t send many people back down South to infiltrate yet. We’re not ready. The men want to get out and get on with it. That’s the real dissatisfaction. It’s not whether the leaders eat meat while they get food they don’t like. And Tanzania’s own people are poor, you can’t expect them to give ours more than they have for themselves … It’s the isolation. There’s nothing to do every day when the training’s over. You’re miles from anywhere. Think of being in a remote hole like Bagamoyo.—

— I was almost there. It was beautiful. — She smiled at an old life where one caught butterflies.

Arnold was the first to meet, hatched from the cocoon of the little tramp on Tamarisk Beach, Mrs Whaila Kgomani. There she was in the office, sitting on the edge of the head-of-mission’s table, arguing over the telephone with the owner of the building about responsibility for unblocking a drain. Huge, her belly and those wonderful breasts like elaborate vestments serving to emphasize the alert composure of that bright head, and those black eyes that absorbed all gazes, as they did his. Pregnancy did not blunt but made more powerful the physical presence that had once drawn him after her into the sea. On the bare boards of this no-place, no-time, she was an assertion of here and now in the provisionality of exile, whose inhabitants are strung between the rejected past and a future fashioned like a paper aeroplane out of manifestos and declarations. She got up and she and the dignitary from the Command kissed, not in the style of a foreign embassy, but as comrades in the cause, smiling.

— Whaila has taken you in hand.—

Once up the old splintered staircase, Whaila became again the obsidian of single purpose against which any personal attachment glanced off. He and Arnold were at one. She was not between them. There is no way of telling, ever, whether Whaila knew about the attachments of the girl on Tamarisk, because that kind of knowledge had no place in the purpose. The form of Hillela’s presence was Praetorian — the only way an outsider could describe it. Not only did she keep people at bay (her eyes flicking a warning when she handed over to Whaila a suspect telephone caller), she could be felt (some emanation of her, from the concentration of human destiny going on inside her, the creature turning from fish to biped) willing the direction of a discussion, seeing, moves ahead, what would put Whaila at a disadvantage. Her presence paced the borders, of his sense of self. She was there, with an intense fixing of her black eyes upon him, sometimes with an insignificant gesture — breath taken, hand filling a glass with water — a fidget over which his concentration tripped a moment and was regained with a new awareness. The alarm that closed her face when Arnold made a point Whaila might have made, amused Arnold: how slyly and expertly she turned him away, too — from his amusement and advantage, this time — by a relaxing of her lips and a resting of her gaze upon him that belonged to the borrowed room in a foreign news agency. She was not present at the most important discussions, of course; not yet, but she was there, outside the door, so to speak. When Arnold was back from his tour of Cairo, Algiers, Accra and Lusaka, Christa asked — How did you find Hillela? — A smile, confirming a private prediction: —Ambitious. — She laughed. — What do you mean, ‘ambitious’!—Well, she’d like to see Whaila where Tambo is. — That’s not too likely… yes. But Whaila’s a splendid fellow. He’ll go far. She’s right about that.—

There was a space round Whaila in the office even when the company were not his peers; James and Busewe were beguiled by Hillela, the three drank beer together while, entranced, her face tilted up at them from folded arms, she listened to the stories of their youth and childhood — the childhood of the children left at home by Bettie and Jethro when they came to work in white people’s houses. But they were conscious that a task requested by Whaila and scamped by them, a half-hour when they kept him waiting, a hesitation in carrying out anything he expected of them, came under her scrutiny. Feet put up unthinkingly on his table were withdrawn. Cigarettes stubbed in the ashtray, there, would stop her as she walked by. With her Busewe and James were familiar; whatever the balance had been before she came, there was no familiarity with Whaila, after. Yet they have said of her: She was okay, man. It didn’t matter. The denial is taken to refer to her being white. But it is more likely to have been an acceptance of her exigence; that it was the cause there was insistence on being served meticulously through Whaila: their cause, whatever her motive or impetus was.

Whaila liked to make statements that were really propositions to set off the others. He had the will to make everyone around him ‘think things through’ that ran beneath the perfectly orthodox version of policy and events he presented in public. He wanted to keep an historical perspective. — Tambo said the Defiance Campaign was ‘aggressive pressure’—it wasn’t just lying around waiting to be arrested, you know.—

Busewe pocked the dirty wood of his chair-arm with the point of a pencil. — But what did you really do, man? Going into locations without a permit, walking around after curfew, sitting on Blankes Alleen benches, trying to get served at the white counter in the post office. Je-suss! The only good result was the chance to use the courtrooms to make speeches.—

— Four months of keeping the police occupied, keeping a high profile for resistance? That amounts to nothing? — James was old enough to have boarded a Whites Only coach on a train when he was hardly more than a boy.

— I’m not saying nothing. Where did it get us? When everybody with the strength to carry on was in jail, that was the end. It was feeble, man! When the government made the sentences too heavy, people didn’t want to keep on any longer. If you start defying you can’t give up. You can’t say, go ahead, arrest me, and then say — but only if I don’t go to jail for too long. It was too much the idea of the Indians, that campaign … with the English in India, the whole thing had rules, man, the Indians would go so far, the English would give in so far. They knew they were getting out of India in the end. The Boere don’t accept any idea of giving over power, ever. Never. We know that, from the start. Why should we use campaigns that were worked out for a different kind of place?—

The ideas of others worked in Hillela’s blood like alcohol; when she was stirred or puzzled by or disagreed with what was being said she would breathe faster and faster until at last she broke in. — If the blacks won’t fight, it’s the government that makes them fight.—

— That’s it exactly. — Whaila acknowledged with a chairman’s impartiality; the interjection might just as well have come from James or Busewe. — That’s the stage we reached after the Defiance Campaign. The realization that we are forced to fight. But it doesn’t make the campaign a failure. The campaign simply proved that there is no way but to fight, because the government doesn’t know how to respond to anything else. It was a phase we had to complete, to convince ourselves, hey? Over fifty years passed before Umkhonto! Hell — maybe we needed too long for convincing! They were too slow, the old ones … More than fifty years! We might not even live that long!—

Busewe had punched a cross that was turning into a tree. — If they’d changed strategy earlier it would have meant Congress would’ve been banned earlier. And then? … But maybe before the Nats took over in forty-eight we’d have had a better chance of remaining above ground.—

Whaila had an unconscious habit of abruptly changing position in his chair when he had to correct an error of judgment. — D’you imagine Smuts would have been less tough with us than Verwoerd! Look at history, man. The English made an English gentleman out of a Boer general; but you know what the great Englishman Rhodes said: ‘I prefer land to niggers’. No. The problem of tactics and results is very much a question of timing. Timing. It worries me. We need to think a lot about the timing in any situation where we launch new tactics.—

—‘People in a privileged position never voluntarily give up that position’.— Hillela took opportunities to test the platitudes of her reading. She turned to the stranger, Whaila. — So there’ll never be a right time for that? D’you think there’ll be a right time for tactics to make them give up?—

— There’ll be many times along the way to that one … Many years, perhaps. That’s the side of strategy I’m talking about. Tactics must always be first matched against the situation. Taking too long before making a decision can be a disaster. You can miss out… But it’s no good getting frantic because nothing much is happening at home just now. What fits the present situation is to concentrate on getting support outside — foreign powers and international organizations are absolutely crucial to us, more important than activity down there. The whole movement will die without support. Collapse. So we have to run about … The front line is this end.—

— Man, I still think they have to keep up the sabotage down there somehow. Even if it’s with wire-cutters and choppers.—

— What I think — symbolic targets are the idea — all right. But sabotage is correct tactically for another reason. What is sabotage? — James was quoting a formulation, too. — Sabotage is violence to property. And whites are the ones with property — it’s something blacks don’t have. So sabotage is dead right in the situation. The results can be calculated, hey, Whaila; you’re talking to whites in a language they’re going to understand.—

— Well yes. But it’s a tactic that’s not going to have much chance to succeed from the point of view of timing. We just don’t have the manpower to do the job. Too many in prison, or here, outside. Our people are getting arrested and rearrested all the time. You’ve got a hundred-and-eighty days’ detention, now, not just ninety. And the sentences — they’re getting five or ten years for nothing. We don’t have the sophisticated weapons to be effective. Have to keep running about … we need new sources of supply. The government has all the weapons, all the spies to make the sabotage campaign fail, as things stand now … I don’t know … and maybe we haven’t thought enough about the way the enemy will react. We know the reaction to mass action, okay, since Sharpeville — but the type of action the government will take against a sabotage campaign, not only against our Underground but also the people … the people! How much more repression can the townships take without expecting more positive results from us? There’s also the question of training. — He stopped himself. — How much training our men have had and how good it was. In real military battles experts decide which weapons are right for which purpose, their striking power and so on. It’s something I want to go into … When it comes to guerrilla operations in the bush, the throw-outs from other countries’ hardware aren’t going to do. — They knew this must be what they had heard as a blur of voices when he and Arnold were behind a closed door. — And then there’s timing again … Things’ll be easier next year when Basutoland and Bechuanaland become independent. If we can get in there, we’ll be just over the fence from our people …—

— Only Smith to worry about, then; our men will be able to come with ZAPU* down from Zambia right to Gaborone. You can just about wave over to the folks from there!—

— Not yet, Bra James, not quite yet.:—

Hillela took the freedom under turns of talk, to follow any aspect of the kind for which, as her cousin had complained in childish confidences long ago, all the advantages she had shared with him never gave an explanation. She would surface suddenly with her preoccupation, laying it before them. — There are people who have given up being white.—

Busewe pretended to be jolted from his chair. All three men laughed at her.

— You know exactly what I mean. What it means, there. Bram Fischer, the Weinbergs, Slovos, Christa, Arnold. And there are others … another kind. I knew them, I was in a family … they wanted to but they didn’t seem to know how?—

*

— It solves nothing. — Pauline served her family at table. Carole had her boyfriend to lunch. Sasha was there but he did not bring girls home. — Back here his kind still carry a pass. Feeling free to sleep with a black man doesn’t set him free.—

Carole’s boyfriend knew one mustn’t expect small-talk at that table. And the merciless intimacy with which each member of the family knew the context of subjects raised meant that he could not expect to follow anything more specific than the emotions roused. Carole squeezed his thigh comfortingly under the table. Her mother lifted her head, two streaks of grey, now, at the hairline, like Mosaic horns, to challenge; but no-one was drawn. Carole had told Bettie the news in the kitchen. — Hillela? A black man? What, is that girl mad? Black men are no good for husbands. He’ll run away, you’ll see. Ah, poor Hilly. We must bring her back home to us.—

Sasha in his room tore some sheets out of an exam pad and began to write: She’s jealous. Saturday classes for kids. Reformers are (take pride in being) totally rational, but the dynamic of real change is always utopian. The original impetus may get modified — even messed up — in the result, but it has to be there no matter how far from utopia that result may be.

Utopia is unattainable; without aiming for it — taking a chance! — you can never hope even to fall far short of it.

Instinct is utopian. Emotion is utopian. But reformers can’t imagine any other way. They want to adapt what is. You move around, don’t you, bumping up against — brought up short every time! — by the same old walls. If you reform the laws, the economy defeats the reforms. (That’s what my father tells you, so you must admit it’s true), If you reform the economy, the laws defeat the reforms (out of your own mouth, to him, a hundred times, when you’re on that war-path of yours with a neat hedge Alpheus clips on either side). Don’t you see? It’s all got to come down, mother. Without utopia — the idea of utopia — there’s a failure of the imagination — and that’s a failure to know how to go on living. It will take another kind of being to stay on, here. A new white person. Not us. The chance is a wild chance — like falling in love.

Sasha did not know what it was he had written: a letter? He did not keep a diary, having too frequently a revulsion against his own thoughts to want to be able to turn back to them. He would not tear up the pages. He would put them away yet at the same time leave them around somewhere easily come upon. She might read them. She was always so eager, secretly, to understand what she couldn’t, ever; so nosey.

*Zimbabwe African People’s Union