“It’s a slow start, yes.”
“A start! Where’s it headed for?” Shinza waited as if for the echo to die away. “It’s not the start we planned at all. He’s forgotten! Forgotten what this country meant to do. What we promised. Bush politicians’ big promises. Now let them bottle cold drinks while they wear out their freedom shirts.” He gave a bellow of a laugh. “Couldn’t you sit down and cry?” he said. “James, couldn’t you howl like a bloody dog?”
“Shinza, I suppose I’m naturally more detached about it than you—” And then in the raw atmosphere Shinza had stripped down between them, he said aloud what he was thinking— “It’s a terrible clarity you have … you know …? But perhaps it’s easy … perhaps you expect too much too quickly, because you’re not in the dust that’s raised, you haven’t had to do any of it — I see that in myself now that I’m stuck with this education project. Mweta’s had only a few months.”
“—Yes, and the twenty per cent of the budget that was going to go into education, how does it look so far? You’re penny — pinching to get anything done, eh? Meantime another thirty thousand kids are starting to draw their sums in the dirt in our so — called schools. And soon another fifteen thousand youths will leave half — baked and wander off to the towns.”
“It won’t be more than twelve per cent of the budget, certainly.”
“A few months! James, we know that a few months is a long time for us. PIP has become a typical conservative party — hanging on wherever he can to ties with the old colonial power, Western — orientated, particularist. It’s a text — book example. His democracy turns out to be the kind that guards the rights of the old corporate interests more than anyone else’s — the chiefs, religious organizations, precolonial nations. Foreign interests. All that lot. In seven months you show which way you’re going. It’s right from the start or it’ll be never. Look around you. This continent, this time. You don’t get years and years, you don’t get second chances.”
It was said coldly, an accomplished fact; and yet also a strange mixture of threat and concern. At the same time as his argument carried Bray with him, the presence of Bray brought out in him an old responsibility for Mweta.
“I don’t agree he’s done as badly as you think. But the general direction—”
Shinza was watching him, fishing a cigarette out of the sagging breast pocket of the holiday shirt made of Japanese cotton, and the recognition of the admittance he had drawn from Bray — now appearing — grew beneath the control of his face as Bray was speaking.
“—The way he’s going, I’m inclined to agree about that.” Bray made a gesture of impatient self — dismissal. “I’m sure it’s not the way it should be. If you and he meant everything — then. I must judge by what was visualized then. The sort of state you had in mind, that I believed you to have in mind when I”—his voice disowned him, as it always did, fastidiously, when it came to defining his part in a struggle he did not claim his own— “decided to go along with you. It’s true — what you were absolutely clear about was that coming to power wasn’t going to be a matter of multiplying the emancipated, while the rest of the people remained a class of affranchised slaves—” He referred with a smile to the phrases from Fanon. “It’s never been put better.”
“—That’s been forgotten. And something else we got from Fanon: ‘The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’”
“I don’t remember …?”
“Look it up,” said Shinza. “Look it up.”
“It’s a long time since I read him. — I wonder now if you were clear enough in your minds about how to go about getting what we were so sure you wanted. The less simple objectives remained very much in a sort of private debate between you and Mweta—”
“—And you,” Shinza said.
“—A handful of others, not even a handful. It couldn’t be helped. Everything was hell — bent on the business of organizing PIP purely and simply as a force that would get independence. How many people could be expected to see beyond that. Well it’s an old story, not worth discussion — one of the results of the policy we”—he was suddenly speaking of himself as part of the colonial administration— “had of discouraging political parties until such time as they burst forth as mass movements — and then in due course they could be counted upon to become potentially violent and could be banned in the interests of law and order.… But the effect was to make parties like PIP miss out the vital stage of their function as political schools and ideological debating forums, a means of formulating the blind yearning to have into something that would hold good beyond the”—his hand spiralled through the air— “grand anticlimax of paper freedom. That really wasn’t touched on — a practical means of taking hold not of the old life out of the white man’s hands, but a new kind of life that hasn’t yet been. It just wasn’t touched on. Only among ourselves. And at the back of the minds of even the most intelligent and reasonable people there’s a vague intoxication of loot associated with seeing the end of foreign rule. Loot of one kind or another … it doesn’t have to be smashing shopwindows, you know. Even the imponderables can be loot. ‘We’ll shop around when the time comes.’”