A Guest of Honour (26 page)

But I ought to know it—what I should do. “I'm your visitor here.”

Mweta said emotionally, “You're home.”

Bray said, “What happens when the Party Congress comes up? Next month?”

Mweta was still chairman of PIP, and Shinza, as a regional chairman, was on the Executive.

“We meet. If he comes.”

“How do you mean?”

Mweta waited a second and then said, “He's not always at his place, these days. So they say.”

“But he'd come for the Congress, of course.” Bray's tone changed; he made it sound almost as if he were joking: “Maybe you'll have it out, then. Eh? Something very down—to-earth about Party congresses. —Tell me, what sort of people are you going to detain with your new Act—are they all kids like the fish factory one I picked up? What do you hope to hear from them?”

“That's Onabu's affair. He's got men who know the right questions.”

“All the fish—factory lad did was explain the fishing concession to some people at the hostel. Of course the Union found this annoying. Or out of order, or something. But it hardly seems to call for two months and seventeen days in jail. Time to ask a great many questions.”

Mweta said, “Well, all that will be looked after now, thank heavens, local police people won't be able to do what they like. There are proper provisions and checks in the Act—Chekwe worked it out with Dando very carefully. —That silly boy wasn't badly treated?”

Bray said, “He was beaten. There doesn't seem much point in testifying to that, now. —You don't really mean that every time a workman grumbles this is at the instigation of Shinza? Granted, his ideas may influence the Bashi people in our part of the country. But what about people elsewhere? Can everything that bothers you be laid at his door?”

“That's what the questions are for—to find out whose door. And if it's Shinza's—you wouldn't believe it?”

“I'd have to. It wouldn't change my belief that it didn't—doesn't need to happen. You don't have to make an enemy out of Shinza.”

Mweta was shaking his head against the words as they came at him. “Believe me, James, believe me.”

Yet he didn't want Bray to go; there was always, between them, the
sense of being held in a strong current. Out of it, in opposition, they floundered, and were drawn back.

Bray said suddenly, “You're not going to arrest Shinza?”

“If that should ever be necessary it would be a bad day for us.” It was parenthetic, a private reference to the old triumvirate: himself, Bray, and Shinza.

Bray felt a useless resistance and alarm: Mweta retreated, out of reach, into the old relationship, as if what the President did was another matter. Bray was led, stumbling and reluctant, to talk of other things: “And Aleke? What do you think of Aleke?” “Oh, quite competent, I think.” “A bit easy—going, mm?” “Oh … I can't fairly judge that. It depends what you want of him, anyway. He's got a good civil—service temperament.” “Exactly, exactly. That's just what I mean. But he gives you what you need?”

Bray stopped, and smiled. “I don't know whether I'm doing what you need from me.”

“But how's it going, James?”

Bray kept the smile, answering slowly and politely. “I've covered the whole province. I've made my own census of the educable population, you might say, a pretty broad age limit. Now I must collate the stuff and write a report. That's it, more or less. It should be a fairly accurate sample guide for the rest of the country. Once it's done, it'll be easy to do the same sort of thing for the other provinces, the work could be allotted to local people. Then I shouldn't have to spend more than a few weeks in each. I don't know how much longer I'll need to stay in Gala; I'll see Kamaza Phiri.”

“Good, you'll see Phiri …”

“He wrote with some suggestion that I ought to put what he calls pilot schemes into operation in Gala. Before moving on. I'd written him a note on an idea I had for a technical school of a kind. I thought we might take over the club”—they both laughed— “but I think I'd better do what I have to do to complete the report—I'd better move off to the other provinces soon.”

Mweta said, “But if Phiri wants to set up something in Gala. There's no hurry to leave Gala.”

“Sometimes I feel I've never been away; but that's when I'm alone, you know. It's something to do with the atmosphere of the place, the smell of it and so on. But my old house and the
boma
—they leave me
cold. I suppose leaving the old life the way I did … Sometimes I feel I've never been away; sometimes I feel I've never come back.”

“I don't think you should be in any hurry. Is the house you're in all right, there? We really ought to be able to get you a decent house, James. If you hear of any people who are leaving, any settler's house you know about, you must write—the government could buy a house like that for you.”

“Oh the house is perfectly all right for my purpose. There's a magnificent fig in the garden.”

“There should be a really nice house for you and Olivia. It worries me. Not one of those British shacks. She can't come to live like that.”

“There's nothing wrong with the house! For a few months, it's perfectly adequate. I don't know whether Olivia will come, now. She's hung on so long, you know.”

“Don't be in a hurry,” Mweta said, looking at him, open. “You know, it's a funny thing, all these years—I always thought of you as if you were still there, in Gala. And even when I went there; I expected you. I think of you in Gala. Like myself. I'm in Gala, too. That was the time”—he drew first his lower lip under his teeth, then his upper lip. “Now I must rely on Simon Thabo.” Thabo was Provincial Minister for Gala. “You can't talk to him, James. If I send for him he says to me, don't concern yourself, Mr. President, everything is under control. You know how some Africans are, James, you know how we are? He has certain ways of saying things, certain words he repeats. And he always talks in English, the special English he learnt at that public administration course run by the mission down in Zambia. I say to him, don't tell me what the police chief said, saluting in front of you, don't tell me that. Tell me what people said, what you heard. … I could get more from five minutes' talk with you, James, than I get from all his reliable sources and what—not.”

Bray thought of the boy who had been locked up, while he was living in the house with the fig tree less than five miles from the prison. “I'm in the dark.”

“Thabo is not a person you can talk to,” said Mweta. “With you there, I … I know that whatever you say to me, you have this country”—his fingers knocked at his breast— “inside—and you will see, you will see, I can't let personal feelings in this. And you won't either. I have to know what's happening there. From someone who understands.”

—Shinza. Shinza. “I didn't even know that Lebaliso had people in jail,” Bray said.

“It's a big country. Impossible to prevent these things. Little policemen feeling big. We will learn.” He meant it, in spite of his Detention Act. Bray watched him. He said, in a rush, “James, we are disappointing you. Good God.” Bray sheltered for a moment, like a match alight between his palms, an idiotic vanity; conscious that it was so: prime ministers and presidents as confrères now, and still he turns this way. To me. Mweta was saying, “You must help us, James. We need you, just like always.” That's why he is where he is; the politician's unfailing instinct for taking up the advantage he's put you at. Bray was fascinated, as a man who knows he has had a lot to drink does not realize that the judgement is arrived at under the influence. He answered what was not at issue; Mweta could regard it as a code: “If only this education thing of mine makes sense.” And Mweta let him talk. “After all, I'm not an expert, I go by what I see to be necessary, a very home—made pragmatism, and the shortcomings of education as I know it. Must it be a white—collar affair? Do the lake people need to produce lawyers? What about literate fishermen, able to run their own cooperative from top administration to control of spawning grounds? If we've got nothing, if we're starting from scratch, then can't we escape the same old educational goals? I wish I knew more. I feel the answer lies somewhere in educational techniques as much as in organization. I don't know enough about them.”

The talk turned to the fishing communities Bray had visited. Bray criticized the terms of the new concession without further mention of the boy who had been detained for doing so, and Mweta listened with that flickering of the eyelids of a man to whom words are whips, blows, and weapons, taken on the body and given on the bodies of others. He agreed that the concession was hardly an improvement on colonial times, so far as direct benefit to the fishermen was concerned, but argued that the increased royalty made it worth while. “Five years, James. Five years is nothing. By then we'll be in a much better position to take over the fishing industry not as an isolated thing, but as part of the whole development of the lake country. I'm hoping for a fifteen—million loan or a new road up there, some of the money coming from the company itself, and the rest from the countries the company represents. Then none of our surplus fish will go up the lake for small profits, but down here and to the markets in the South.”

“The fishermen have to wait.”

Mweta said, at one with him, “I know. But that's what we are having to do all the time—strike a balance. I don't want anybody to have to wait a whole generation, that's all. That's the aim I set for us.”

“The pity is that there will be preventive detention to deal with impatience.”

“James,” Mweta said. He was seated again; he leant forward and put his hand on Bray's big knee. “It will not be used for that. I promise you. It was not intended for that.” He sat back. His face shone like the faces of black schoolchildren Bray had seen, tense with effort and enlightenment.

Bray felt the corruption of experience; perhaps things happen here as they do because we bring from the old world this soiled certitude that makes anything else impossible. He said, “Once the law is there, there's no way of not using it.”

In the old days they would have sat down to stew and bread and strong tea supplied by Joy, or not eaten at all until there was time for such a meal, but Mweta must have had to accept along with the turning of night into day on planes and the suitability of any hour as a working hour, the stodgy snacks that fuelled that sort of life. They had sandwiches and coffee on a tray; washing down the triangles of bread like labourers they discussed Mweta's ministers, Mweta confiding doubts and Bray making observations that neither would speak of to anyone else. Mweta still wanted Talisman Gwenzi for Finance, he was a better economist than Jason Malenga and generally much shrewder, but who else would there be for Mines who understood as Gwenzi did that looking after Mines was purely a matter of a grasp of international finance, on the one hand, and handling local labour relations on the other—it wasn't a knowledge of ores and mining techniques the Minister needed, all that was the affair of the companies. “If I had two more Gwenzis!” Mweta said enviously, “Just two more!” “One for Finance and one for Foreign Affairs, eh?” “That's it.” And Gwenzi had pushed ahead the Africanization ideal magnificently—and put the onus on the companies. In two years, through intensive training courses devised and taught by the companies, all labour up to the level of Mine Captain would be African. Mweta swallowed his
coffee. “A few years ago we weren't even trusted to use dynamite down there.” They both laughed. “—Of course there may have been other reasons for that.” “Last time I was here Phiri was talking about training people for mining administration at the School of Further Education.” “The trouble is once you start a course like that, you're going to get a lot of teachers resigning from the ordinary schools. They've got the basic education to qualify—and of course what an administrative job on the mines will pay compared with what you'll get as a teacher … I think something like a Mine Secretary would get twice as much as a school headmaster … ? We can't afford to drain our resources in one place to fill up in another.” “The best thing to do would be to channel people off at high—school level—have scholarships for the school—leavers to go on to the course at F.E., just as you have scholarships for teacher—training.”

Mweta crunched a paper napkin into a ball and aimed it at the wastepaper basket. “Time, again, time. In the meantime, we've got to keep the Englishmen.” Mweta called all white men Englishmen: South Africans, Rhodesians, Kenyans, and others who sold their skills up and down Africa. “Talk to Phiri about it, though, it's an idea.”

Mweta's mind moved among problems like the attention of a man in charge of a room full of gauges and dials whose wavering needles represent the rise and fall of some unseen force—pressure, or electricity. He spoke now of the move he had taken a few weeks before, the surprise expulsion of the leader in exile and group of refugees from the territory adjoining the western border of the country. These people had been living in the country since before Independence; in fact, one of the first things he had done when he got responsible government as a preliminary to Independence was to insist that Jacob Nyanza, David Somshetsi, and their followers be given asylum. He couldn't receive them officially, for fear of the reactions from their country; but they had a camp, and an office in the capital, financed by various organizations abroad who favoured their cause. Outwardly, he maintained normal though not warm relations with the president of their country (there was an old history of distrust between them, dating from the days when Mweta and Shinza were seeking support from African countries for their independence demands); from time to time there had been statements from President Bete vaguely threatening those “brother” countries which sheltered
their neighbours' “traitors.” Mweta explained how it had become impossible to let Nyanza and Somshetsi stay. Of course, he had publicly denied President Bete's assertion that Nyanza and Somshetsi were acquiring arms and preparing to use the country as a base for guerrilla raids on their home country. … He turned to Bray, pausing; Bray gestured the inevitability. “They didn't care any more” Mweta said. “They didn't even take the trouble to conceal anything. Nyanza flew in and out and there were pictures of him in French papers, shaking hands all round in Algiers. They kept machine guns in the kitchen block the Quakers built for them at the camp—yes, apparently there were just some potatoes piled up, supposed to be covering—” He and Bray had a little burst of tense laughter. “So there was nothing else I could do.”