A Guest of Honour (52 page)

Hjalmar Wentz wriggled confidentially in his chair. “Isn't that what it is?” His smile confirmed the shared experience of a generation. “Well, it's interesting to be there—you are lucky. Is that cinema all right? There was talk at the beginning they might want to hold it here, you know….”—a twinge of amused pride— “but I suppose we've got enough troubles.”

Emmanuelle, Ras Asahe, and a rumpled young white man were sitting in the residents' lounge. She hailed Bray as he left; he refused a drink but stood talking a moment. The young Englishman had the amiably dazed and slightly throttled look of one who has been sleeping in his clothes, in planes, for some weeks. He was from one of the weekly papers or perhaps a news agency correspondent (again, Bray was expected to know, from his name) and was on the usual tour of African states. Ras Asahe was briefing him on people he ought to see; stuffed in his pockets he had a great many scraps of paper from which he tried to identify various names recommended to him by other names: “Basil said not to miss this chap, wha'd'you-call-it.… Oh and do you know a fellow … Anthony said he's marvellous value….” He said to Bray, “I'm sure someone gave me
your
name?”

“Oh yes, Colonel Bray is one of the well—known characters,” Ras Asahe said.

Emmanuelle gave Bray one of her infrequent and surprisingly beautiful smiles, in acknowledgement of the slightly sharp imputation, due to Ras's equally slight misunderstanding of the nuance of the English phrase.

“You're the one who was imprisoned or something, with the President?”

“Just or something.”

“Don't snub him.” Emmanuelle put Bray in his place; it was perhaps her way of flirting with the journalist. She slumped in the deep
sofa with the broken springs, her little breasts drooping sulkily and apparently naked under the high—necked cotton dress.

“Colonel Bray knew that crowd well—my father, old Shinza.” Asahe, the man of affairs, turned to Bray with a flourish— “They ought to put Shinza inside, ay? The trouble is the President's too soft with these people.”

The journalist was still matching identities. “You don't know a man called Carl Church? I think he was the one who mentioned you. Used to be with the
Guardian
… about forty—five, knows Africa backwards.”

He did know Carl Church; but when he began to ask for news of him, it turned out that the young man didn't—they'd met for the first time in a bar in Libreville a few days before.

He said goodnight. “Why d'you want Edward Shinza imprisoned, Ras?”

“He ought to be expelled from the Party, at any rate. They say he's been to Peking with Somshetsi.… Anyway. Well, that's the story. But he was going round holding secret meetings with the gold miners, he gave them the blue—print for the rolling strike, masterminded the whole business. How could they've had the knowhow on their own? I had an idea to do a live documentary, interviews and such, talking to the strikers—but the new Ministry of Info' boss turned it down … it had to be played cool, so … If I'd've done it, Edward Shinza'd have been inside by now.”

Ras Asahe had the particular laugh of complete self—confidence (as Bray remarked of him to the Bayleys) guaranteed not to dent, scratch, or fade. No wonder the Wentz girl, who loved her father, the natural victim, was attracted to one in whom the flair for survival was so plain. One ought perhaps to comfort Hjalmar by pointing out that Emmanuelle, too—not only her brother—displayed an unconscious instinct of self—preservation.

Linus Ogoto's branch resolution condemning the high salaries of government personnel turned up the pitch of Congress early on in the morning session. A wary silence stalked his first few sentences, but concentration and alarm pressed in as he went on, scaling the abstraction of figures and suddenly coming up face to face with a petrol pump doling out free petrol; arranging percentages like a handful of cards; on behalf of Congress, inviting himself to take one—any one—and producing the dimensions of the weekly cut of cheap meat a labourer could buy his family on his contribution of man—hours as compared with the man—hours that brought the official his chicken—sometimes deductible as entertainment allowance into the bargain.

A woman near Bray sounded to these revelations, very low, like a cello accidentally bowed. Men who belonged to the income group under attack showed the wry superior patience with which the rich everywhere remark the poor's ignorance of the bravely borne burdens of privilege. When the debate opened two or three of them rose to the chairman's eye wherever he rested it; eloquence swelled against fountainpen—armoured breast—pockets. It was asked again and again whether high—ranking government personnel would be expected to clock in the hours of sleep that were lost while problems affecting the life of the nation kept them up far into the night? The claims of these men to a “modest remuneration” for their knowledge and untiring
work— “what a lie to talk about man—hours because the truth is that in a big position you can't knock off at five like any lucky workman”—almost defeated the motion, but Ogoto's innocent revelation that three—quarters of the delegates present themselves earned under six hundred pounds a year was enough to tip the decision in his favour. Ogoto's mouth was twitching; Bray saw he had to purse it to control an impulse of triumph. He kept smiling uncertainly in this direction and that like a short—sighted person who doesn't want to seem to ignore greetings. Up on the stage, Shinza smoked.

In a curious kind of contradiction of Ogoto's success, the Tananze branch's call for a freeze of earnings above six hundred produced uncertainty in Congress. Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, did not actually admit the whole basis of the political system might be challenged by more equal distribution of money, but warned that a wage freeze and levelling—off would endanger foreign investment; he got the matter referred to a select committee.

The beginning of the rural branches' offensive, asking for the organization of agricultural workers, and the demand for a minimum wage according to region with which it was linked, also took a little time to get under way. The chairman had first to clear the debate of speakers who wanted to ramble through local cases of the abuse of farm labour rather than speak to the issue itself; there was restlessness, and the sense of conflicting preoccupations. Shinza, Goma, looked stony. Then, emerging as though it had not been there all the time, the particular pattern of this Congress, the disposition of human forces present in the gathering, began to come clear. Bray knew the moment from all the conferences, talks, discussions of his life: there was always a time when what the gathering was really about came out strongly and unmistakably as the smell of burning. No conventions, evasions or diplomacy could prevent it. Since many of the Party officials and leaders were also in the government, there was always some member of the appropriate government department to give—in the guise of his presence as a Party delegate—the government line on each issue. The Under—Minister for Agriculture had been primed for this one. The seasonal nature of farm work, primitive farming methods, and the predominance of unskilled labourers who still keyed their efforts to subsistence rather than production, he said with almost bored urbanity, made the organization of farm workers
totally impracticable and “ten years too soon.” “The government's agricultural development schemes must first be allowed to make the land more productive. He warmed to the common touch. “It's always been traditional for people to hire themselves out for weeding or harvesting when the white farmers need them—are we going to say that these women and children and old people who can't work regularly must give up their chance to earn a little cash and help cultivate the lands, because the organization of farm labourers along the lines of factory workers will forbid it? You can't make a modern working community out of the most backward part of the country, overnight; not by a charter or any other bit of paper.”

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

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

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