A Sport of Nature

A Perfect Circle of Sand

Hillela was conscious throughout. But the hard work going on in her body, which usually performed its functions without bothering her, engaged her completely during the birth. As if in a train crossing at full speed a landscape in the dark, she saw and heard nothing outside that body until the sudden cessation, the light moment after part of her body slipped free of her. There was a great uproar of shouting and rejoicing. The yelling sway of voices chanting, singing, at different distances. It was all for her; she put the heel of her hand on her trembling empty belly and tried to sit up, smiling. She had come all alone to the hospital and now everyone was celebrating her, everyone.

Whaila was away in their home country, his and hers, when his baby was born. Nkrumah was in Peking, and the celebration in the streets was a real one: the crowds rejoicing an army coup, and his fall.

She knew where Whaila was but no-one else did, not even Busewe and James — or if they did, acknowledgement was not made. They were supposed to accept that he was somewhere in Europe at a meeting of the alliance he had helped form, a few years earlier, with liberation groups from the Portuguese-colonised countries, FRELIMO from Mozambique, MPLA from Angola, PAIGC from Guinea. The father of Ruthie’s grandchild moved in the streets of South African cities within passing distance of Olga (in Cape Town at the tail-end of her summer holiday), Pauline and Joe (on their way to a lecture at the Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg) and Sasha (leaving the city’s reference library and taking a detour into the black end of town to buy an African jazz record for a girlfriend’s birthday). Whaila was just as close, at one time or another, to his children by his divorced wife, and to his mother’s house, 8965 Block D, in a black location. But he was also just as far, because he could make no attempt to see them; he carried a forged passbook with a false name, and that persona was under orders to see what could be done to revive the internal structure of the movement and accelerate recruitment of men for military training outside.

Hillela seems to have had no realization he might never come back. That he might be discovered or betrayed, and arrested, as Njabulo was when he infiltrated. Busewe had come to visit her bringing the standard African gift for a hospital patient, a bottle of orange squash. She rather mischievously wheedled to see if she could get out of him where she might send a letter that would reach Whaila ‘in Europe’. She wanted, above all considerations of life and death, to tell Whaila how the baby had come out: like him, like him. The white American nurse had been embarrassed when she was asked, amid the cheers in the streets pressing against the hospital windows, whether the baby would grow black? — of course it was pinkish-yellow, newly-hatched. The black nurse giggled and gave expert opinion. — It never be white (jutting her scarred chin). When they born that colour, nothing you can do to make it white. She goin’ to be a black girl. — Oh you think so? It is always like that? Are you sure?—

The American turned away in further embarrassment at the patient’s confusing joy, which was surely vulgar if not, in some peculiar way, racist?

Whaila came back, and saw that Hillela had never feared for him. She might be white, but she was the right wife for a revolutionary, who, ideally, shouldn’t have such ties at all. She greeted him with desire, not questions. Her eyes were on him impatiently when other people were around, drawing him to their bed. The baby had slept with her until he returned but she turned it out to a cot to yield him his place. She wanted him to ‘give her’—that was how she put it — another baby at once. He said it was too soon and added what he thought would be the last word for any woman he had known: —Anyway, I don’t want to see you swollen up all the time, I like you slim. — No, no she must have more children. There were distracting caresses for a while. — You don’t really want a whole lot of kids to cart around with us from country to country. God knows where we’ll have to go next. — Her open gaze contracted and dilated, holding him steadily. — An African wife isn’t a wife if she doesn’t produce children. — Oh my god, Hillela, is that what’s on your mind! — He kissed her for the foolishness. — I’ve got enough children, already, that I never see. I’m satisfied to have just this one here with us.—

She was not offended by the reminder that another woman had supplied him with sons. Had it really been impossible somehow to meet them, down there? — I’m sure I would have found a way. — He took the opportunity to teach her something she would have to learn, once and for all. — There are always ways. To do what you have to do, you have to forget about those ways.—

Nkrumah would never come back. When she went to show Marie-Claude the baby, the talk round the Ambassador’s lunch table was of relief. Condemnation rose as the drawn corks squeaked out of bottles of wine. The Ambassador and his colleagues discussed the disasters of Nkrumah’s economic policy, the grandiloquent development projects that could be paid for only by borrowing at exorbitant rates of interest from overseas creditors, the catastrophic rise of Ghana’s external debt since 1963, the pretensions of the state buildings he put up to his glory. — This National Liberation Council can’t be worse; at least the military aren’t a bunch of romantic African Marxists like him. — The Ambassador did not look once at the baby, only at Hillela, as if its existence had no significance other than to wound him. He went on talking while looking at her, with his old skill at communicating in two different modes at once, the voice that belonged with the distinguished exterior shaped by the tailoring of his three-piece grey suit, and the other, speechless message from the body beneath it. — There was no choice between an army coup and complete anarchy. When the ordinary black can’t afford to buy food because of inflation, that’s good riddance to your Nkrumahs. But it’s not the end of the phenomenon. Ah, not at all, not at all. He has left behind the particular form megalomania is going to continue taking, in blacks, all over Africa. You’ll see. Inventing isms, quasi-religions with neo-colonialism as hellfire and a succession of Osagyefos as saviours leading the continent to starvation — but in unity, my friends, of course, in the name of African unity, and his famous way of life that ensures security, abundance, prosperity (a ladder climbed by a fluttering hand) — all through brotherly love!—

In the office up the splintering stairs the despotic decline of the man had been discussed in troubled private. Whaila, Busewe and James did not know what the attitude of the new rulers would be to their own movement. They had reason to expect that it might now come into full recognition and favour; some reason to celebrate. Yet they were quieted, retreated into themselves in a way they could not discuss even with one another by a defeat for something that was there, inside them. To them, the unity of Africa was not another ism; it was the dignity in brotherhood they had found, at last, in a world that had always denied them any other. However its prophet had destroyed himself, whatever he had denied their own organization, however quarrelsome the brotherhood, they mourned him for what he had given Africa, and what they could never denigrate, however many times or by whom it was to be betrayed. Whaila did not talk about this with his young wife, either; and she did what she had learned to do all her life — assumed instinctively from observance of those with whom she lived the appropriate attitude. The celebration outside the hospital windows was not acceptable. The only cause for rejoicing had been, as she in her dazed state had mistaken it for, her having given birth to Whaila’s daughter.

Nkrumah had not been seen in the streets when he was still Osagyefo and President, since she had been in Ghana. That single evening alone had he been an embodied personage, appearing for five minutes among the guests at Christiansborg Castle. He had not fallen, for her, as he had within themselves for the three men with whom she lived. It was when she was wheeling the baby about town for the first time and came upon a public square that he fell. A statue lay smashed upon the ground. People had brought him down. His people. She felt a strange dissolution; she suddenly understood fear, fear of the plans, orders, missions, the suppressed conflicts, the ambitions (her own) in the huge upheaval which she had placed herself astride as when a child she had revelled in the wild bucking of a playground’s mythological bull. Another had risen, out of the sea, Zeus disguised to capture Europa, coming between her and her sometime lover, Arnold, and carried her off, clinging to its legendary black back. Power, people said. Pauline said Olga (half-remembered; the children half-listened when Pauline talked of these things) was afraid of it. Olga was not afraid of the power within which she lived, but of the other one, that would heave under it and bring it down. But power could not be contained for that purpose alone — the just purpose of the plans, orders, missions; it shook and toppled those who wielded it, too. Hillela steered the pram away through the crowds in whose close streams of gregariousriess she had roamed so at ease when she had been alone in African towns; his people.

The pram was a present from Marie-Claude, specially imported from Europe. The baby went about like the offspring of diplomats, in a shiny navy-blue carriage with white-walled tyres, the infantine equivalent of an ambassadorial Mercedes-Benz. Whaila approved; this kind of comfort and safety was far preferable to Hillela’s first notion, that she would carry the baby tied on her back as he must have been carried as a child. She had begged to be allowed to choose the name. Since this was a girl, and, for her, the first child, he was amused to indulge her. So the baby was named after Nelson Mandela’s wife, Nomzamo.

As Hillela passed through stalls where she paused to buy vegetables and fruit, market women to whom she was a familiar customer touched and admired the pram, the tasselled braid round the hood and the brown baby with the tiny, ivory-edged nostrils lying there. They teased her about motherly pride, compared the child’s progress with that of their own babies, exchanged complaints about childbirth, and asked what the child was called. They did not know who Mrs Mandela was; they knew about seasonal produce, prices, making money, and pregnancy, birth, death — the female Free Masonry or other tribalism that drew her into their warm shelter. She laughed, teased back, and folded the pram’s hood to show off the namesake to them.

The office car was old and shared between those who now officially staffed the mission. Busewe and James used it at night when they went off after girls; on Sundays, now that Whaila was a family man, it was understood that its use would be reserved to him — the old South African custom for black and white, whether on foot or by car, of the Sunday family outing, somehow finding its way into exile through trails of uprooted habit. Hillela liked to go to the beach. She formed a routine of scooping out of the sand a little bed for the baby. From that Whaila got the idea of digging a bowl big enough to shelter all three of them. The sand was cool and damp under its desert surface. An umbrella held off a sun that would put out their eyes. They lay there together, joined wherever they touched by the moisture of the sea evaporating on their flesh, the baby stirring the air with its toes and fingers like the small sea creatures themselves feeling at the currents of water. These Sundays at the beach were intensely private as the afternoons at Tamarisk had been public. In the house — it was the organization’s house, no-one’s home — the three were never without the contingent presence of Busewe and James, and transients who came and went; on the beach they were complete, Hillela and her man and their baby; in the hot shade, contained within their bowl of sand whose circle had no ingress for anyone or anything else and no egress by which oneself could be cast out. And each Sunday fitted over the last in an unbroken and indistinguishable circle.

One Sunday that was not to run together with the others, they drove to a beach she had once swum at with the Ambassador’s family. When she and Whaila got out of the car they saw it was deserted except for stick-figures, far enough off to be taken for driftwood until they bent to gather something when the surf drew back. The burning blue sea running its curling tongues over brown sugar sand was as she remembered, but there was a sign staked against the lovely sight she ran towards: CHOLERA AREA, NO BATHING. This was also the period when, like many young women with a first child, Hillela was obsessed with the idea of infections threatening this creature she had made. She raced back and would not touch the baby until Whaila had driven to a service station where she could wash her feet. She kept shuddering, beside him.

In place of the beach, they went to Tema. Without formulating this for himself or her, Whaila wanted them to see something that had been almost realized, a monument not fallen. They drove on an unfinished landscape model, a planners’ maquette. Splendid wide roads looped and bent round buildings and features that were not there. The cardboard trees, toy cars and plastic people of the planners’ board were missing; the roads debouched into weeds. Near the walls of an aluminium smelter there was life, the old familiar teem; a shanty town made of crates that had held the machinery imported for the plant. — An American company runs it, and the bauxite’s imported from Jamaica and Australia. We used to be only the suppliers of the world’s raw materials, and the buyers of the same stuff we’d dug for, as the finished product — if we could afford the price. Now even the raw material from other countries is brought to us to be partly processed by our cheap labour; we still have to buy back the finished product from someone else. — But the deep-water harbour was achieved, there under their feet. They were walking along great stone platforms that held half-circled the power of the sea. The waters tilted massively at them. The baby in her canvas carrier swung from Whaila’s hand over groundnuts spilled from a cargo; fangs of cranes were bared to the sky, their dragon necks crossed. The docks were deserted of workers on a Sunday, but the cargo ships in harbour from all over the world were tethered to something Africans had conceived and realized. The harbour dominated the sea as only foreigners’ fortresses — Christiansborg, the forts of Luanda and Mombasa — had done for centuries. Whaila stood before the sea as no black man could before the harbour was built. The salt-laden humidity in late sunlight was a golden dust on him, risen from the victory over those years. His closed lips were drawn back in the thin line that was the price of such victories, as well as failures. What Hillela saw at those times was how awesomely aged by experience he was, and at once how passionately attractive to her, how grandly handsome (it was the Hollywood word for male beauty she knew) he had been made, without knowing by what destiny. With him she went back to Christiansborg. They took the baby for an airing, walking around outside the walls. It was nobody’s castle, now, neither the Danes’ nor the Osagyefo’s; some kind of administrative block? He found the grave of Du Bois, that American black whose bones at least, as he believed they would, had witnessed an Africa rid of white masters. Whaila’s thin, strong black hands tugged out last year’s dry grasses that swagged across the tombstone. — D’you know a poem he wrote, long before he left America to come home to his forefathers in Africa? I’ve forgotten the beginning … it ends ‘I felt the blazing glory of the sun; I heard the song of children crying “Free!”; I saw the face of freedom … and I died.’—

*

The namesake grew up very black. This has been an advantage for Nomzamo although she does not live in Africa, since the vogue for black models, which had begun esoterically in Paris when Ruthie, Olga and Pauline were playing with golden-haired Shirley Temple dolls in Johannesburg, spread to the United States and Britain during African decolonisation and coincided with the period in which she took up modelling at sixteen. She also grew as beautiful as the woman she was named for. Her mother has never been one to make mistakes when following her instincts. Trust her, as her enemies would remark. The girl, described in an agency’s portfolio as exotic, is known as all the most successful models are simply by a single name — hers is Nomo — easily pronounceable by French, Italian, German, American and English couturiers and readers of fashion journals. An international model does not hamper her image with national politics; to the rich people who buy the clothes she displays or the luxuries her face and body promote, she is a symbol of Africa, anyway; one preferable to those children in the advertisements of aid organizations begging money to keep them from starving. She has not made use of the origin of her diminutive except, during a certain period, on occasions when she was hired by a committee giving a fashion show benefit for a cause such as aid for South African political prisoners — then she had a byline in the sponsored programme: ‘Appropriately, top model Nomo is named for the black leader, Mrs Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela’.

The baby became perfectly black. A year old, she would try to climb out of the perfect circle, the bowl her father dug out of sand with fingers strong as the tines of a gardener’s tool. Then she would tumble back, again and again, and fall asleep across the limbs of her parents. Hillela put the tiny cushion of a black hand, like something she had come upon, into her own pale palm; with her own pale foot dusted the sand off the little black wadge of a foot not yet shaped by the muscles used in walking. Satisfaction sank deep as the cool moisture that existed under the parched sand: not to have reproduced herself, not to have produced a third generation of the mother who danced away into the dark of a nightclub, the child before whom certain advantages lay like the shadow of a palm tree, the aunts who offered what they had to offer.

It was the reversal of parental feeling as it is supposed to be. Naturally! Trust Hillela! Incommunicable to the one who had fathered the child because no matter where in the world he was removed physically and no matter how his way of life diverged, he was in his line — the house-servant mother, the butcher’s ‘boy’ Sunday preacher father, the night-class alumni — teachers and nurses and welfare workers — who were his brothers and sisters, the Second Class taxi drivers, watchmen and farm labourers who were his uncles and cousins; all the people without advantages for whom he had become what he was. From the first words a parent speaks down to the new-born whose sensory responses are still attuned only to the sound of the mother’s heartbeat and gut noises, Whaila spoke to the baby in his language — theirs. Hillela picked up a little from them, as the child learned to speak; but the child always, from her first words, spoke to her mother in English. When he was away, the child never spoke their African language, even in the games she played with herself; later she lost it altogether at a nursery-school in Eastern Europe. It would not be much of an advantage, anyway, now when she flies out to spend a week with her mother at State House, because the African language spoken there is a different one.

Where Hillela appears next, of course, is where her husband was sent. For a time they were based in London. It was not more than that; Whaila came and went across borders, barriers of a kind that divided Europe insurmountably in the minds of most Britons and Europeans.

Her aunt — the rich one — had had every intention of taking Hillela to London. She certainly would have given the girl the chance to go abroad at least once. She would have seen the West End shows and the special art exhibitions at the Royal Academy and she would have stayed at the Royal Garden Hotel, where Olga herself always did. Whaila came and went, leaving Hillela in the kind of basement flat buried under a terrace of identical Victorian houses, contiguous as the street run along in a dream, that has been the traditional habitation for political exiles since the 19th century. Heirs to kingdoms and the revolutionaries who plotted their downfall — they have climbed the area steps to put out the dustbin, and have gone to the British Museum to read, out of the cold. She walked with a bundle of wool on two stubby legs that was her child, among other people whose features showed from what countries they were exiled. But — with her knack for such things — she did not stay among them long. Although the British government, like that of the Americans, would not give to the movement the backing in money and arms it needed, so that Whaila was constantly absent seeking this in the Soviet Union and other countries not so easy to guess, there were charming English people who supported the cause personally and socially. Some were even influential in the press, Labour or Liberal Party, useful friends of Whaila. To them, Hillela as a white South African was part of the scatter of white revolutionaries from that country they invited to parties, although, in fact, for these exiles the girl was a nobody. As a white South African actually married to a black South African, she remained for her hosts at these same gatherings an embodiment of their political and ethical credo, non-racial unity against the oppression of one race. Whenever they came across a white South African a black had taken as mate, there was to be seen in the union assurance that they, too, could be given absolution for their country’s colonial past. Hillela became the favourite of that alternative court, the shabby-affluent liberal livingroom, filled with books and generous with wine and food. She was also, of course, very pretty — vivacious, the women called it, sexy, the men agreed, amused at their concurrence. Once again, no party was complete without her. She was not slow to make use of these contacts; someone got her child into a private day-care centre and paid the fees; she and the child were rescued from the basement flat and moved into the guest room of a Holland Park house, with the run of it. It was the least one could do, the television producer told his lawyer wife, and repeated in the bedroom quarrels (it was the only place where their guest or her child would not walk in on them) when the wife wanted to know if they were never to have their home to themselves again, without someone constantly chattering on the telephone and baby food boiling over on the Aga. Whether or not Hillela was aware of the tensions she caused, she gave no sign of understanding what, in their English way, presuming upon the coded communication of their own kind, had been an offer only of temporary hospitality. Some people claim to remember that particular young woman with her black baby (an updated chocolate-box image for people proud of being without colour revulsion) as one who made a play for the men. But in those years there were so many young women, white and black, from Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary as well as from Africa, who fluttered into the livingrooms for a while like escaped birds in whose faces there were to be read the descriptive plaques of their distant, caged origins, and found their quickest welcome in the eyes of appreciative men present. It is easy — when it seems one of these girls can be matched with another image, and so comes up out of the obscurity into which all have moved on — to confuse Hillela with someone else.

Thick-skinned. And even the husband, defending her against the accusation, shaming his wife for making it, is mistaken: —Think of the danger and suffering that poor girl has been through under that bloody government. No wonder she can’t be sensitive like you, no wonder she doesn’t understand that people like us could be selfish enough to begrudge her a corner of our soft lives.—

Tensions behind closed doors; nothing new to breathe, coming from there. Sometimes Olga and Arthur are quarrelling, sometimes it’s Pauline and Joe analysing, even once Len and Billie, and, maybe, when they were left behind, the sibling cousins — all discussing what is to be done about the one they took in. As for the men; is it the fault of women that they are, or seem, beautiful? That the African cottons over breasts that no longer are hot, tingling, and heavy with milk, but still keep the shape and fullness of it, draw more attention than Liberty silks? That one who has been a beach girl never loses what she found durable in herself while making out? And it was a mentor, not lover, who once remarked that every movement, look, turn of phrase, was flirtatious whether or not innocently so.

No one else knows — maybe not even the disguised god from the sea himself, who is wise enough (or too preoccupied with matters greater than themselves) not to suspect his wife — that although this invitation of the body is written in eyes and mouth and stance, it keeps no rendezvous in London with any man but him.

Only — something new has been learned, on the side, in the context of making out. One can offer, without giving. It’s a form of power.