Hjalmar Wentz was another person when speaking of matters outside his private life. In a curious reverse, his public self was preserved as a retreat where he felt himself to be most himself, shored up against attrition. He leant intensely forward (he still wore espadrilles and rumpled linen trousers, as if he had been kidnapped on holiday from Denmark on the Costa Brava) while they talked of the strikes and disturbances of the last few months. “Behind every good man in the politics of reform, there is a gang of thugs. — No different for him. In a country of illiterate peasants they know the arguments to persuade where reason isn’t understood.” Mweta’s opening address was in the evening paper; this day is ours — president mweta. “What does it mean to people when he says the needs of economic development come before anything? What does it mean if he says work, and more work, and still more work? But when the Pioneer boys beat them up when they defy the unions and strike, then they understand. They know then that the union is the Party and the Party is the country. It’s all one and anybody who squeals at what the union bosses decide is a traitor. Between ourselves, I hear the fact is the Pioneer hooligans are the only active link left between the Party and government in lots of places. The pity is that he’s let Party organization in the bush go to pots”—Hjalmar didn’t always get his English idioms right— “the branches are neglected … if the youths didn’t kick up a row plenty of country branches would feel they had no connection with the PIP government at all.… It’s a mistake.… But what can you do. He’s had to centralize for efficiency. Well, these are teething troubles.”
“The trouble is many of the Young Pioneers are already a bit long in the tooth.”
“Yes, well, that’s the paradox of these countries — a shortage of manpower and a surplus of unemployables.”
“We’ll need two and a half thousand school — certificate holders, alone, next year, and thirteen thousand in fifteen years’ time. On a hopeful estimate, there won’t be more than a thousand next year. But in fifteen years it should be possible to make it.”
“That’s what you’re working on, eh?” Hjalmar acknowledged the comfort of figures, perhaps spurious. “You are right. I still believe education’s the only hope. I still have to believe it, in spite of everything”—he meant Germany, the failure of the knowledge of human sciences to make people more humane; that axis his life had turned on. “Nowadays it’s love, eh? Back to love. And not even Christ’s formula. I don’t trust it any more than I would hate.”
Bray said, “In Europe we’ve talked from time to time of a lost generation, but in Africa there really is one. What’s going to happen to them?”
“They help to make the coups, I suppose. Who knows? — They’ll get old and go home to grow cassava somewhere. We won’t be here to see.”
“But even now you’d say things aren’t going too badly?” Bray asked, curiously.
“No. No. On the whole. He’s keeping his head.”
“And his promises?”
Hjalmar took on the look of an old woman giving a confidence. “He made too many. Like everyone. But if they give him time. If they don’t squeeze him from all sides, the British and Americans, the OAU.”
“I’m afraid the involvement of the Young Pioneers is simply something on the side — a circumstantial phenomenon. They’re there; they’re idle; as you said, their very hooliganism has a certain function in being just about the only dynamic participation in the country’s affairs left to some PIP branches. But forgetting about them for a moment — what happened in the rolling strikes at the gold mines, the dispute on overtime at the iron-ore mine, that affair at the Kasolo railway: they are all signs that the workers are losing confidence in the unions. They don’t feel the unions speak for them any more. All the way from the smallest local matters right up to federation level decisions affecting them are being made over their heads. If the Secretary — General becomes a presidential appointment, UTUC will be more or less part of the Ministry of Labour. — It’s no good bringing in PIP chaps to break the heads of people who strike against wage agreements and so on made without proper consultation. The split in the unions is the real issue.”
“But is that a fact? The President would never encourage a fascist situation here. No one can tell me that. He would never allow it. He doesn’t like totalitarianism of the left or the right, it’s all the same to him.… But this man Edward Shinza — you used to know him? — people say he’s behind the whole thing.”
Bray had forgotten that he was the one who was asking questions. “But it’s a real thing. He hasn’t invented it. All these issues are coming up openly at the Congress. It’ll be a great pity if they’re fought down as a power bid.”
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.”