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.
Chapter 16
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.