A Sport of Nature

Special Interests

Everything is known about her movements. Americans are such industrious documenters: the proof of her presence among them, like that of their own existence, is ensured by reports of symposia and conferences, prospectuses of institutes and foundations, curricula vitae, group photographs, videos, tapes, transcripts of television interviews. She and her child came to the United States under the auspices (that’s the vocabulary) of a political scientist who roved Africa as a new kind of white hunter. Dr Leonie Adlestrop’s trophies were causes, exiles, aid programmes and black political intrigues. In her sixties, in socks and sandals, floral dresses scoop-necked for the climate showing the weathered hide of her bosom as two worn leather cushions crumpled together, she bore her trophies from Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique, from Tanzania and Kenya, from little Swaziland and Lesotho, back to America. The university where she had tenure as a Distinguished Professor was merely a base. On first-name terms with the Presidents of African states already independent and the leaders of black liberation movements who would one day be presidents, she was also able to make herself accepted, motherly yet sexless (perhaps in the precedence of those post-menopausal women who are given a special, almost male, status in certain tribal rituals), into the confidence of all kinds of ordinary groups — religious, political, educational. These attributes brought her, first, lecture tours round African studies departments, then fellowships from foundation-funded institutes for social and political research, co-option to para-governmental commissions on international affairs, and finally a status where her name listed among trustees, executive members, advisers meant she was a consultant to a succession of Assistant Secretaries of State for African Affairs, and an influence on lobbyists in Congress.

There was not much American popular interest in Africa in the late Sixties. Preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, the neo-Gothic thrills of Weathermen terrorism and even with the great black civil rights pilgrimages to Washington did not distract Ma Leonie; she took up Africa long before the students and black Americans did, and maybe without her it would have taken even longer for America to do so. Her government did not recognize the liberation movements for whose exiles she obtained entry visas and totally unorthodox admission to her own and other universities. Those who were academically qualified had teaching niches made for them; others were given scholarships she could expect on demand from a roster of sources her secretary did not even have to call up on the computer — Dr Adlestrop had them all, under the first names of their directors, at hand in her head.

A beach girl would have been too marginal to have met Dr Adlestrop in Dar es Salaam. But Dr Adlestrop — Leonie, she asked at once that you call her Leonie — passing through Accra to add the officers of Ghana’s new National Liberation Council to her rotary card file, of course had called Whaila, and met his new wife. Leonie and Whaila made the easy elliptical exchanges of old acquaintances. She had just seen Julius in Dar, spent an hour at the airport with K.K. when he arrived from a state visit to Yugoslavia, unfortunately missed Oliver — and, landing in Accra, was quite overcome with grief to realize Kwame was no more … Whaila was anti-American as a matter of policy, since the United States government supported the South African government and gave neither overt recognition nor covert encouragement to the African National Congress. But apparently Leonie was different; Leonie was with him. She was supplying funds in a small way through some of her numerous private organizations, opening cracks that might widen into future access. — I’m keeping at it, Whaila, I’ll go on beavering away. — Like most Americans highly critical of their government, she was at the same time patriotic and anti-communist. — You know that I’ve never been able to stand the idea that you’re going to have to be grateful to the Eastern bloc.—

He teased her; she loved it. — But look at all those Marxists you smuggle into the USA.—

— He’s a great flirt, your man. We’re always like this together. — She bridled happily to the new wife. — Don’t you know, Whaila, it’s because I’m really intending to have the FBI brainwash them?—

The documentation begins only with arrival in the United States. Whether Hillela remembered Dr Adlestrop and got in touch with her from London, or if it was Leonie who made the approach, is not known. Whichever it was, Hillela’s instinct for calculation or Dr Adlestrop’s nose for a trophy, another form of power — the power of Leonie Adlestrop’s kindness — could be counted on. Without adequate papers, with a history of residence in an Eastern European country, Hillela Kgomani and child slipped in easily under the armpit of the Statue.

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife’s eyes by a racist regime. The namesake’s small black hand in her mother’s white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King — this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they needed to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Dr Adlestrop commandeered the frame house of a professor on sabbatical and a place in the primary school for faculty members’ children. These facts are recorded in the yearly newsletter, released at Commencement, Leonie had distributed by her Department to colleagues on the campus, to alumnae, and pandemically to friends and contacts. ‘Ms Hillela Kgomani and her delightful small daughter, Nomzamo (named for Ms Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela), joined us early this spring semester. I had the privilege of knowing, for some years, Ms Kgomani’s late husband, Whaila Kgomani, who was tragically killed in Lusaka. Ms Kgomani has been seconded to the Robert and Elsie McCray Program for African-American Social Research. REMASOR will make her available to special interest organizations — African studies, women’s studies, international relations and refugee studies — throughout the state. Her personal experience in having lived close to the needs of the people in a number of African countries will be invaluable to us. She and Nomzamo are presently occupying Professor Herbert Kleinschmidt’s house on College Walk, and Nomzamo has settled happily at our excellent school. We welcome mother and daughter most heartily.’

Nomo, when interviewed about her increasingly successful modelling career, sometimes varies replies to questions about her background by adding that she was, in fact, partly educated in America. Hillela stood at the double-glazed window in Professor Kleinschmidt’s study and watched the little girl chase squirrels with the stooping gallop of Groucho Marx. She couldn’t get the window open but she knew before she saw the parade that the child, forgetting the squirrels and turning her face in curious amazement, had heard something pleasing. Then through the glass it came, the singing and the wavering blare of music, as it had rejoiced the birth of the one who had come out just like him — him, lying on the kitchen floor. The alumnae parade advanced from under lettuce-green of spring elm trees and the little black face kept glancing back to her mother in bliss to confirm proudly what small children feel about all phenomena passing before them for the first time — that it was for her, for her delectation, the college band and the bannered ranks, class of ’40 grey-haired and smiling on false teeth, ’52 wearing well through sensible diet and exercise, ’60s, some pregnant, some got up in a kind of retrogression to college days, some lovely with the flyinghaired zest of having been qualified adult for a whole year.

The alumnae were the first group Hillela addressed in America. Her audience was mostly the classes of the ’40s and ’50s; the younger ones, her own age, were with their husbands and children on the lawns or drinking beer with their boyfriends. What should she talk about? — Oh, my dear, you have so much to tell them! The role of women in the new Africa, a few personal touches to lighten things up … but you know, lordy, you know— The winter-pink or cruise-tanned faces, the perfect coiffures and gold costume jewellery quickly made the lecturer change, as she went along, the talk that had been prepared for factory workers in peasant kerchiefs. Dr Adlestrop, mistress of the broadcasting medium of discretion, had ensured in undertone asides that everyone knew about this young woman; she stood there on the podium touched by eyes that wanted to search out the mark — suffering’s grace or Cain’s slash — that set her apart, as the eyes of larger crowds still did with the widow of their assassinated president. The college had acquired its own house-version widow: was endowed with her, this year, along with a poet-in-residence and a Japanese garden established in previous ones.

Americans take in each other’s children the way Africans do. The namesake had many temporary brothers and sisters, was made free of all the bunk-beds and milk-and-cookie sustenance she could possibly need. As Hillela had adapted her subject to the kind of expectations she sensed available in the alumnae, so she moved on to more exacting forums around the Eastern Seaboard, the Middle West and even California. The exaction was not only exercised upon her; it soon was exercised by her upon those who brought her among them. She had to go back to libraries (Leonie’s houseful of abstract Africa in words and statistics that shared the shelves with displaced ritual carvings and vessels, ceremonial beadwork and artisans’ tools) to find the supplement she had always said she could not trust: what she had not experienced for herself. It was necessary, for the practice of exaction. She had moved not merely on, but up; over academic elms to the Foundations and Committees with money to spend. People running development projects in Ghana were surprised to receive under her name, with the title of co-ordinating assistant or deputy director of this or that programme, letters offering and outlining the conditions of grants. (Good god, Hillela. Well! — Trust her.) Some working in Tanzania corresponded on these matters without making the connection between the colleague of Democratic congressmen and senators and the girl in the yellow swim-suit on Tamarisk Beach. It might have taken even old friends, old intimates, a moment or two to recognize her, if they could have come upon her at a conference table or head-down over an open briefcase on a shuttle flight. Christa, Sophie, Marie-Claude, Busewe — would they have found Hillela in this cropped-headed girl who had adopted Leonie’s practical socks and sandals, walked official corridors instead of dancing high-life, and carried reports, agendas and minutes instead of a guitar? Even Emile. He might have been tricked by the absence of obvious beauty women can’t help having. Only Udi would have known her instantly, for the signals this particular one could not help giving. And Sasha. Sasha would have known her anywhere, at any stage or age in any life.

It was at this stage that he wrote the first letter. Seven years since you left this country. Not that I saw you for the year or so before that, but at least you were here. We could always still have bumped into each other somewhere.

I can imagine — or I think I can — something of what your life is like, extrapolate from what I pick up in newspapers and books and even in the office about the kind of situation(s?) you must be living in. (I work with Joe, articled — I didn’t go back to university after the army.) I imagine it quite well but there’s a sort of cut-out shape in the middle — I can’t quite put you in. But I suppose you’ve changed enough, outwardly anyway, to fit.

They heard you’d got married — the family. You’ll be able to read off the predictable reactions like a hand of cards. The queen declared: It solves nothing. The king isn’t played; he always loved you for yourself, as the saying goes, didn’t want anything else of you. Loved you more than he does our namby-pamby sister but could not show it. I knew, though.

I know your husband was killed. Hillela’s husband. I was angry with the others because I was the one who should have felt the most for you and I couldn’t feel anything. It was because I couldn’t believe in his wife. If you really haven’t changed, you’ll laugh at that, at me. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Hillela, that’s the fact of it. I’m sorry Whaila Kgomani was killed. That’s lame but what other way is there to approach what happened to you, one can’t walk right up to it. Pauline pronounced you’d be all right. And of course what Pauline says is definitive. On the other hand, you’re the only one of us who didn’t let it be. So I don’t know. But my mother’s no fool, and you made her respect you. No matter what she did. No, ‘made’ is not true; you never entered into the wrestling game she and I have, to the last gasp — she or me. You never recognized its existence, so you didn’t have to. I continue to wound her savagely. I’ve told her: she sneers at her sister Olga, the Jewish mother, and certainly she herself is no Jewish mother, she’s the Medusa. I live with a girl but I keep going back to the house. Pauline is not the explanation for this.

What would you want to know? I went with my girl to England, France and Italy last year but I don’t suppose you were there. Or we might have bumped into one another. I have part of a house with her on the old Crown Mines property — you might remember Crown Mines, no longer being worked, although I’m not sure the former staff houses were for rent when you were still around. Seven of us share, two more — nice queers — live in what were the servants’ quarters. No prejudice involved, just that they wanted to fix up their own place in housewifely style, everything just so. The seventh tenant has an unofficial eighth, a black girl who works for some church organization — so we have our token or totem or whatever you want to call it. Big whoopee, as we used to say to bring each other down a peg or two, when we were kids. Alpheus had three more children and had to leave the garage. He never completed his articles with Joe, but him I did bump into recently, and he’s making a good living as a furniture salesman. I won’t complete my articles, either. You probably won’t read this (I haven’t any address for you) so you won’t be able to tell anyone, even supposing there were to be someone around who might be remotely interested. I’m a champion at writing letters that never get sent.

What else? Well, I still read a lot. The other day l read a story, a translation from the Hungarian writer, Dezsö Kosztolányi, where the girl dies and the man longs for her for years, wants to see her again for only half-an-hour. His concentration is so fervent that he actually brings her back from the dead. There she is, just as she was, in his room, and they have nothing to say to each other. All they can think about is how much of the half-hour is still to pass. Eventually, she leaves after twenty minutes.

Why can’t I end off? I never know how to end off. I did my year in the army, you know. A good thing. Good thing to learn how easy it is to be one of them. To you, one of those who killed him; I can come up very close to that fact. My god, that story about the dead was tactless; I didn’t think. Another thing I won’t do — I won’t go to the army camps I’m supposed to spend a month in each year. So far I’ve managed by lying, aided and abetted by my girl, by Pauline and Joe, who approve finding ways of getting round things. When the call-up telegram comes my girl replies I’m no longer at this address, and when another comes to Pauline’s, she does the same. I disappear for a while, and the army calls up a substitute, putting my name down for the next camp. So far, military police came round only once, and my girl put on the innocent act and dealt with them. So that’s where I am: between call-ups. The alternative is to be like the Seventh Day Adventists and go to jail for conscientious objection on holy-roller grounds. But we kids were brought up without all that mumbo-jumbo, weren’t we, to cope with this world, not the next. I’m doing useful work helping prepare defence material for Joe’s cases, when I’m not hiding away. He has had a coronary but still slaves in that study night after night. He has pale moon-rings round his pupils although he’s only about sixty.

I remember when we read it: ‘I want to know you, and then to say goodbye’.

Sasha

They say you did have a baby. I can’t remember whether you liked children.

There were no scandals. Memoranda carefully prepared, files of cuttings up-to-date. No-one could catch her out in inaccurate statistics; she could always support her strongest and most challenged assertions, breaking down in a way new to her any resistance she encountered. At finger-suppers she convinced minority-report dissenters. Before a Senate committee she placed the long-term consequences, for United States interests, of backing repressive regimes in Angola, South Africa, Namibia, when these countries inevitably would become independent black states before the end of the century — and to whom would they supply their oil, gold, platinum, uranium, titanium, then? Those who had recognized them in their struggle for human rights (‘freedom struggle’ was not in the preferred vocabulary for the West) or those who had ‘actively ignored’ them? She showed a quick aptitude for the invention of euphemisms so like that the State Department could have taken them for their own; this one was to be understood to mean that although it might have to be accepted that no ‘military hardware’ would be forthcoming, no ‘humanitarian aid’ was being given, either.

A senator, seated beside her drawing right-angled shapes while she talked, flourished a circle round them. — Mr Chairman, experience has shown that there is no way of controlling how so-called humanitarian aid is used. If it’s given in the form of money, it goes to buy arms, not medicine. We are meddling in destabilization. If it’s given in kind — look what happened to the famous Congo chickens: I’m told it’s a fact that the ‘starving’ Congolese sold the cans to specialty stores down in Rhodesia.—

But the circle was not closed. Hillela took something out of the wallet in her attaché case. — Mr Chairman, may I have permission to pass this round?—

They had already received from her several information sheets; the bush schools run by FRELIMO in the area of Mozambique where it was in control; clinics run for the refugees in Tanzania; figures for the number of villagers harassed out of their homes by the South African army in Namibia. But this was a photograph of the family kind those present themselves had in their wallets. The spokesman for the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs twitched his small moustache like a scenting rabbit; the namesake, her ecstatic black face under a stocking cap, looked out at him from snow. She went politely from hand to hand. What on earth was the purpose? The company was able to glance over human features as if over statistics, as accustomed to concealing embarrassment as to concealing lack of interest. The speaker’s dark and brilliant eyes let her colleagues off nothing. She looked at them all with an acceptance of what they were thinking; with a confidence against which there was no defence. — That black child is plump and cared-for in the United States. She was born a refugee who has never seen her father’s and mother’s country. She’s mine, so she’s lucky. If she were one of those in Africa, her life would depend on a handout of soup powder, the installation of a well to give her clean water, and a clinic to immunise her against disease.—

Leonie embraced her after such triumphs. Though it was not at all certain whether it was this emotional retrogression — intentional or not — or the hard work that went into the rational case presented, that succeeded. Funds were voted. Hank (as the Assistant Secretary of State’s African Affairs man was known to his friends) was quoted at cocktail parties: —Lust is the best aid raiser.—

Not the breath of a scandal, nevertheless. Hank never had the good fortune to pursue further the possibilities he was sensitive to in Mrs Kgomani. Professor Kleinschmidt, a divorced man, returned from his sabbatical and would have liked to let the young woman stay on in the house but could not tolerate the noise of the child. The child was over-indulged by everybody, precocious and spoiled. The brat already knew how to exploit being black. So he had to make the choice. People invited him as Hillela’s dinner partner from time to time but it was apparent that those who schemed to match them failed. Herbert Kleinschmidt was lonely, yes; but who could think of Hillela Kgomani as lonely? She was Leonie’s promotion, Leonie’s working partner; and Leonie’s friendships were thickly gathered in, Leonie’s emotions ran grandly as cables under the oceans back and forth between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. Leonie and Hillela had no nuclear family but their distant ties, obligations, dependants, held them fast.

Of course Hillela had the body. The old, like Leonie, have no body except in its necessities for food, drink and shelter, and its creakings of pain. The body quickly knows — is the first to know — it has not been shot. It is still alive, alive in the Eastern European snow as in the tropical sand-bed. But it also knows when it is being ignored. Neglect of the body doesn’t mean not washing or cutting toe-nails. It’s a turning away from its powers. It’s using it like a briefcase, to carry oneself around, instead of living through it.

Hillela Kgomani travelled; even to Africa sometimes with Dr Adlestrop, those years; the interests of their commissions coincided or Leonie contrived that they should. With the pride of a teacher leading a school outing Leonie arranged for unmarked planes, boarded on hidden airstrips shaved out of the bush, to take them behind the guerrilla lines in several countries. They ate with bearded commanders who were old (scholarship) students of Leonie, but had had to finish the kind of education they needed in the Soviet Union, Cuba or China, depending on the alliances of their movements. Some had known Whaila; the grip of the hand, when Leonie introduced the young woman, tightened; she had been taken out of the ranks of useful onlookers and silently accepted among the commanders in their garb composed of distinguishing styles of many liberations, from the Risorgimento to the Thousand Days, from Liebknecht to Castro. She watched men — like those who had shared the hospitality of the Manaka flat, drinking beer and grumbling because they couldn’t buy the brand of razor blade they had used in Soweto — drilling in a mismatch of captured fatigue dress, and sitting about tending their weapons, talkative and expert as the tinsmiths in Lusaka market fashioning their buckets and braziers. There were women among them. Enclosed in third-hand battledress, the generous breasts (like her own) characteristic of black girls seemed to have atrophied to meet conditions; their chests were the hard shields of males’. Only their feet escaped, bare. Hillela pushed off her sandals and socks while she sat in the hot, paper-bag glow of a tent, writing notes for a report. All became typed paper. The voices that brightly skimmed the surface above sleep in the early morning were at first puzzling, then — again, as always — the most familiar assurance; words that meant nothing (a language not understood), and everything; the rep’s ‘boy’ talking in a dorp street outside the car, Jethro heard while face-down beside the pool, and the spill of harassed chatter flying through the service doors as the waiters served the schoolgirls. It was a home. An audile, sensory home like that soundmen provide for the sequences of film where there is no human speech, holding up their microphones in an empty room where the quality of silence contains vanished voices, vanished heartbeats.

Single-file paths behind the training camp had been made by bare soles and the brush of heads against twigs. They were so tentative they disappeared into the bush here and there or came to a stop at the obstacle of a red earth funnel higher than a man, built by ants. There was no concept of ‘place’ in this wilderness, fiercely undefined in reconquest by its original inhabitants of territory defined on maps of colonial possessions. She and Leonie found their way not to a place but a presence of several hundred people there in the bush like companies of storks or cranes come upon when insects surface in one area or another. They had no more possessions than scavengers. They waited; or at least the only aspect they had was that of waiting; as Hillela saw human beings do when they have lost everything of the past, have no hold upon the present, no sign that there is a future. They appear to be waiting because there is no state appropriate to their existence. Leonie picked a baby like a phoenix from ashes of a small fire; its whole small being was fascinated by the gingerish hairs, flashing with sweat, at either corner of her smiling lips. Family love casts out squeamishness. She touched scabby heads and called out cheerfully. — Scurvy. And look at the belly — oh you potbelly, you — kwashiorkor as well.—

Hillela returned with the freedom fighters who brought maize porridge or beans by way of the paths, once a day. When the children had eaten, they roused from the dust and began to play; they slowly began to chase and laugh, make weapons out of sticks. When she smiled at them, they pointed the sticks and stuttered machine-gun fire. And then the fuel of food was burnt up, they lay about on their mothers again, and the women searched for lice in their hair, whether there were lice or not. The ritual was all that was left of providing for their children’s needs. A feeble old man fought the children for the roll of peppermints Hillela found in her pocket. She grabbed the stick he was wielding — but whom was she to defend? He was so thin that pulses beat visibly at his temples and jumped beneath the skin on his hands.

Leonie knew better. — First your peppermints, then your clothes, then your malaria prophylactics — and what use will you be to anybody, then? What they need is what we’re going to go back and get sent out here, high-protein foods and basic medicines. What they need is for the U.S. to stop giving covert aid to keep those gangsters down in the capital in power.—

One of the freedom fighters who perhaps understood a little English watched the old woman with something of the incredulity with which the filthy children had surrounded the distributor of small discs sweet and strong, the taste of a whole other existence. His gaze fingered Dr Adlestrop’s assurance as if she were a magic crone from a life he used to know — someone who brushed with others in city streets, who saw clothes in shop windows, travelled in taxis, drew pay once a week and walked into the fanfare of talk and music in the rich fermented scent of bars.

‘In addition to the large number of fighting personnel, which includes women as well as men (no figures available because these would provide useful information to the government forces), there is the added logistical burden of feeding and providing minimal care for hundreds of refugee families. These have been victimised by the government forces for aiding freedom fighters, or in some cases were simply caught up in areas where fighting was intense and no normal life — planting of crops etc. — was possible.’ In hotels and planes all was transformed into reports, studies and working papers. The phrasing of a banality could make the difference between approval or rejection in a committee room thousands of miles away from the bush, the dry seams of river-beds, the deserted sands and green-massed forests passing under the plane’s belly. The inclusion of an observation better left out could give the high-minded (Lord save us! Those are the dangerous ones, worse than the open reactionaries, my dear Hillela) the chance to carry a ‘no’ vote.

The self-same sight of people in a place that was no place, waiting: these were over the border where they had fled to another country, saying they had been beaten and robbed of their cattle when they would not help the freedom fighters. That sight would not be transformed into typescript and serve as self-righteousness for people who experience nothing for themselves and have not the courage to distinguish between ends, only to condemn the ugly necessities to which means are driven. Lines crossed out, the sight crossed out with a finger tapping on the upper case X. If she could have found the ones who ran away down the corridor of Britannia Court, would she not have shot them with her souvenir Makarov?

Leonie Adlestrop’s special position in Africa made it possible for her to move with ease back and forth from conservative to radical regimes, in fact, everywhere except to South Africa and Namibia, where she had been declared a prohibited immigrant — and so proudly joined the status of political refugees from that country. — We can’t get in, but we can kick up a heck of a lot of dust outside, can’t we, Hillela? — They were in Dar es Salaam for a day or two, and Hillela, keeper of the papers and briefcases, was part of Dr Adlestrop’s gatherings of useful contacts in the bar of the Agip Hotel. Neither Udi nor Christa encountered her, she was not available — in meetings, when Christa phoned — and Udi she called from the airport only just before she left; a voice he could attach only to the flamingo-girl in the pink skirt.

— How do you look now? — It was his way of asking many things.

— I don’t know. — The line drew a long hum of passing time between them. — I really don’t know. I’m so busy.—

— I didn’t know where to reach you — well, I could easily have found out from the office here. But I just wanted to tell you you’d be all right. That time. And it might have been the last thing you could bear to hear.—

— Udi, I’ve got to go now.—

— Yes of course. But if you suddenly phone when you know the flight is going to be called, it means you want to say something, Hillela.—

— Udi? No … just to say hello. I’m too tired to think of anything — and there are meetings to prepare for the moment we arrive back in the U.S. So much I haven’t written up.—

— You, a bureaucrat. I didn’t think that was the way you’d be all right. Well.

— What other way is there. If you’re not carrying a gun in the bush you have to do it with documents and committees. I’m not a bureaucrat, I have to use bureaucracy.—

— You must be formidable. You sound it. But I can’t imagine … Hillela, your voice is just the same, you know.—

— You have to dig up bad consciences and good intentions and put them both on the line. Give them no out. Confront them with the way you’ve calculated they can give you what you want while they’re using this in their own interests. That may be to build up one of their ‘caring images’ before some election or get them promoted to responsibility for a funded project. You have no idea what it’s like, Udi.—

— I hope not. You didn’t ever use those kinds of words … And your child, the little boy—

— Nomzamo. For Nelson’s wife. Oh she’s got the Americans wound round her fat finger, all of five years old now …—

— She must be just like you.—

— The time I wasted. I should have learned the things I need now. I’ve had to teach myself how to prepare budgets and estimates—

— What are you going to do, Hillela?—

— What d’you mean?—

— You know what I mean. Is it going to be for the rest of your life … oh Hillela.—

— Do what I’m doing. Looking for ways to free Whaila.—

That was why she had not been able to go away without reaching him: he was the one who would understand what she had just said. That was his place. He was ashamed to think she could hear the weakness of emotion that changed his voice. — That drudgery … for you … and what can that sort of thing achieve. It will be the big powers who’ll decide what happens to blacks. And the power of other black heads of state influencing the big powers. A waste, yes… it’s this that’s a waste of your life — The line cut off. He waited, but she did not ring again. She must be walking to the plane with that old ghoul who grinned as if from a bridal group in newspaper photographs of people who would kill or be killed when she had gone.

If Hillela Kgomani had not a spare moment to see old friends, she found time to meet people from the African National Congress. Not in their office (which was why she missed running into Christa) but at a private house. This suggests that if it were true she had been expelled from the movement while in Eastern Europe, she was back in favour. Maybe had earned her way by turning some of the paper-rustling drudgery to the organization’s advantage in the unpromising conditions of the United States. It is also possible she was never expelled at all, but that this was a planned pretext to get her into the States in the status of disaffection (as the euphemism for defection goes) so that she could work secretly on the prospects of getting a mission opened there. Certainly in the early Seventies offices were opened in New York, for the first time. Probably she was working for the organization all along, under the spread breast-feathers of mother hen Leonie and her aid and research projects in many African countries. Bradley Burns, who is given to quiet analysis of the time when he was the man in a position to know, says she confused him. Deliberately. At times it was clear that for her only sexual love — and oddly this included her feeling for the little girl — was to be trusted. All the rest (his phrase) was shit and lies. And he did not know whether she was thinking of the killing of her husband, or some other kind of treachery that happened to her while she was in exile politics in Eastern Europe. Then at other times she could also say love ‘can’t be got away with’; or it wasn’t ‘enough’. What she seemed to mean by this last was that in spite of all evidence against it, another kind of love had to be risked.

Acronyms the language of love. United States Institute for African-American Cooperation, USIFACO; Third World Committee for Africa, TWOCA; Operation Africa Education, OPAD; Co-ordinating Committee for Africa, COCA; Commission for Research into Under-development, CORUD; Foundation for Free People, FOFREP. The child plays with alphabetical blocks on the floor, builds houses with them. A career can be built out of acronyms; everyone here must have a career, you fulfil yourself with a career, there are books that specify what a career is by listing what is available. Pauline would be happy, she was more than willing to supply the advantage of a career, whatever Sasha said. Leonie couldn’t have done more if it had been for her own daughter; Leonie will go on with her promotion, beavering away. Leonie knew him. Leonie is the only person in the board rooms, at the working breakfasts in motels, at the Thanksgiving dinner, who knew him — the one who came out just like him does not remember. Not even a trauma to know him by; she was carried away with a towel across her eyes so that she would not see what was on the kitchen floor.

Twenty, forty years after they have received the advantages of a career they still form their version of a songololo, singing their songs as they stride along under the same elm trees in the same avenue. Everything remains in place, for them. The storm windows will be put up, as theirs are, every late autumn and removed to let the smell of spring in. The namesake will grow up as a little black American with civil rights and equal opportunity to protect her, like everybody else, and the distinction of her African names to assert that individuality everyone here says is so important in making a career. She won’t have to have engraved on her bracelet, I am me; she’ll say, I’m Nomzamo Kgomani, and that will impress.

No need ever to run out of acronyms. There is a career of continued useful service ahead; there is the example of Leonie, loverless lover of all those she is entitled to call by their first names, fulfilment (as they sum up, here) shining out of every group photograph in which she appears. But no need to emulate entirely. The documentation will be read in bed beside a young man advancing well in his own career, ready to help with the dishes and to perform — woman, man, and the little black daughter he regards as his own — the safe and pleasant rituals of a family, here; parent-teacher co-operation, playing games, going to the lake shack and Cape Cod house.

The real family, how they smell. The real rainbow family. The real rainbow family stinks. The dried liquid of dysentery streaks the legs of babies and old men and the women smell of their monthly blood. They smell of lack of water. They smell of lack of food. They smell of bodies blown up by the expanding gases of their corpses’ innards, lying in the bush in the sun. Find the acronym for her real family.