“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.”