With the same conventions that carried it from any one piece of business to another, Congress came to the motion: “That the People’s Independence Party Congress views with grave alarm the intention to make the position of Secretary — General of the United Trades Union Congress a personal appointment by the President of the State, instead of an appointment voted by election within the United Trades Union Congress membership, as it has been since the birth of trade unions in this country. The People’s Independence Party moves that the President be respectfully informed that such usurpation of democratic procedure is contrary to the spirit of the State and the principles of free labour upheld by the People’s Independence Party and the United Trades Union Congress, on which the State was founded; and that the President be requested to affirm the unalienable right of UTUC to elect its Secretary — General.”
The legalistic jargon, the chairman controlling the order in which voices might be heard, the people sitting with that bit of paper, the agenda, token of the taming of their wildest and most urgent thoughts translated into symbols on cheap white paper; this ancient form of human discipline — frail cracked amphora, handed down by the Greeks, that it was — held. All the festive bonhomie of the gathering at its first meetings had worn off by now. Suits were rumpled with sitting and the smokers went through pack after pack, enduring the alternation of boredom and tension. In spite of the air — conditioning, or rather, circulated coldly by it, there was the smell of the herd, man — herd, brought about not by physical exertion but the secretions of determination, resentment, apprehension, nervous excitement, coming, Bray thought, from myself and all the others. We don’t speak, I don’t know what they’re thinking on either side of me, our arms touching on the chair — arms, but we give it off, this message that we no longer know how to read as animals do.
The first speaker to the motion had been carefully chosen: the trade unionist Sam Gaka was a man of the kind dubbed “painfully sincere”—that is, given a particular, insistent grasp of a certain set of facts without relating them to a hierarchy of other facts. In any society where it was possible, he would have been apolitical; here he simply failed to understand what his political position was. He was a believer (almost in the evangelical sense) in corporate trade unionism — the restriction of union activities purely to professional questions of the employer — employee relationship. And so, although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could never have practised, since from the beginning UTUC had been part of the nationalist political struggle, with the employer/white-colonial one and the same force against which the worker/black-subject had to assert his demands/rights, and although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could not practise now, because an underdeveloped country had to be able to “call upon” its workers in the old political sense to fight the State’s struggle for economic emancipation — he was able to argue for the election of the Secretary — General from the “pure” position of corporatism. For those who recognized it, gave a name to it; to the majority he was simply saying that UTUC’s members, representing the whole working force of the country, must always know the best person to speak for them to the government, that the whole idea of trade unionism was based on the workers’ selection of their own spokesmen, etc.
Clever Shinza, Bray thought, to pick this man. But there were statements to be twisted from this politically unaligned context, too. Ndisi Shunungwa, present Secretary — General of UTUC, was able to speak from another advantage — everyone knew he himself had been elected to office, yet he was reminding Party members that the man to be appointed in future by the President would not be an outsider — there were provisions that this could not happen — he would be a member of the executive of UTUC, and therefore someone freely elected to speak for them by the union members themselves, else how would he be in UTUC at all?
Basil Nwanga’s huge backside blocked the view of the men in the seats on either side of his as he rose. “Mr. Chairman, that’s all right as the nice and tidy answer of an incumbent who maybe feels confident he’ll stay where he sits if the Secretary — General is appointed instead of elected”—his sharply affable voice went on at once before the chairman could raise any objection— “Well, of course, personal views are not what interests us, we must decide on facts, hey, and the one that got left out here is that in UTUC itself there are people who represent different ideas in the trade union movement. It’s only the majority of members of UTUC who have the right to decide which man, representing which ideas, will serve the workers best as S.-G. If the appointment comes from outside it can only be seen to favour one set of views above another. It must be like that. — There will be trouble in the unions. Let the workers elect their own man — it’s the duty of the Party to support this right—” He spoke jerkily, in his heavily accented English that broke up sentences into unfamiliar stress — patterns, but he had a youthful bluntness that released spontaneity. Applause came like thrown pennies as he lowered his bulk out of the way again. Someone stood up to ask why the matter was being discussed at a PIP Congress at all — wasn’t it something for the trade unions to argue? — but was at once ruled out of order, to triumphant applause meant not for him but as self — congratulation on the part of the supporters of the motion.
Shinza had come slowly out of his concentrated withdrawal; he had applauded Nwanga, but merely smiled a moment at this affirmation. As the debate quickened Bray had the impression that Shinza was all the time keyed to something that he was listening for, watching out for, behind the echoing voices of the speakers, even behind the rather disorderly background murmur that rose in spite of the chairman’s censure. A sub — debate was going on among the delegates all over the tiers of seats; notes were being passed, people changed places, backs were hunched confidentially and as ears were inclined with bowed heads, eyes — eyes yellowish and veined with blood, eyes clear and prominent showing white, eyes marbled with ageing — met others with that gloss of inner — directed attention that gives away nothing.
Mweta folded his arms across his robe; unfolded them and sat back in his chair, hands loose upon the table. How few public gestures there were — and even these governed by the same set of conventions as, even if they were not actually set down by, the ancient form that held the gathering. Did Mweta have doubts about the power that was being questioned? Did he sit there, handsome little Roman emperor in his robes, knowing himself in the wrong but believing himself justified in accepting the rigging for power that he thought he couldn’t hold any other way?
Someone — a picked member of the Shunungwa — Mweta faction — was whipping up heat at the “insult to our great leader” shown by those who opposed his right to choose the S.-G. “These people should leave this Congress. This is a one — party state. We are one nation, we have one leader, he is the leader of the members of the Trades Union Congress and all the people—”
The uproar made the speaker inaudible though he went on bellowing. He was being applauded, shouted down — a great surge of opposing energies seemed literally to shift the cinema seats clamped to one another and the floor, so that Bray felt the pressure heaving at him. Roly Dando’s little sliver of a white face was moving on his neck like a roused bird’s. Party stewards were reinforced by the sudden presence of white — helmeted policemen who appeared through the curtained exits where the Joshi brothers’ smart mulatto usherettes usually waited with torches and trays of sweets. There was a scuffle up on the left of Bray somewhere, near the back of the cinema — a fight? — “Old man’s had a heart — attack,” someone repeated — but the white — helmeted men went up the aisle three steps at a time and swiftly brought down a young man with fury bunched in his face at being exhibited like this, and another man with the sleeve of his worn jacket torn out of the armhole. As they were pushed through the doors chanting of some sort came from out there, as if the dial of a radio twirled briefly through the wavelength of a station — the women again, no doubt — and a few red — sashed Young Pioneer “marshals” got in. The police did not seem to know what to do about them; but the young men’s self — styled authority wavered in the company of that more obviously vested in white helmets, leather boots, and holstered guns. They stood beside the police, their presence neither asserted nor rejected, looking sideways at each other.