Outside in the street his family was passed from arms to arms in the huge embrace that is the reverse of the hostility a mob can generate. The mother of Thabo was clinging to Joe, weeping with pride and sorrow, and he held her head to him, like a lover. Viva!, coming by way of Cuba, Mozambique and Nicaragua, had joined the old litany of freedom cries. They flew back and forth, exciting the police dogs and bringing the white shop assistants to the doors of the chainstore and Greek-owned supermarket in the maize-belt town. Political trials were no longer held in the cities, in order to avoid mass gatherings of blacks, but trade unionists had come by the busload and they were joined by local black delivery men wheeling their bicycles, farm workers with their small purchases of soap and sugar, unemployed youths — all those people from a nearby ‘homeland’ who gravitated towards the streets of the town where they were forbidden to live. Petrified among them was the equestrian statue that stands in every Transvaal dorp, the Boer War general with the trunk of a stone tree growing up into his horse’s belly to solve the sculptor’s problem of supporting his work. Press cars and several chauffeur-driven ones with diplomatic number plates (these cases attracted foreign observers at a high level) made through the crowd a passage which flowed closed again. Pauline was swept away but Joe heard her: —Those sentences don’t mean anything! They’re not going to be all those years inside! The end to all this will come long before then!—
Trust Hillela; she chose well. The President was able to achieve in his one-party state what the handbooks on and surveys of Africa concede as ‘impressive development’ during the years when oil prices were high, and by the time oil resources were no longer such a profitable source of revenue had succeeded in diversifying the economy so that, in comparison with most neighbouring countries, his people are reasonably well off and there has been no serious ‘crisis of expectation’ to threaten the stability of the regime. The oil fields, mining industry and banks are nationalized, land has been redistributed and there are co-operative farms, but agriculture, learning from the disasters elsewhere, has not been collectivized. The General within the President has never forgotten the subversive power of hunger. The petty shopkeepers have not been touched. The Lebanese still constitute what is best referred to as an informal banking structure; so long as the back-of-the-shop deals in foreign currency stay within reason, it is best to ignore them. The country rarely has any entry under the list of violations of human rights published by Amnesty International; imprisoned cabinet ministers and officials of the previous regime were amnestied one by one in the yearly celebrations of the President’s reaccession to power which take place in State House, country-wide sports stadia and schools. Of course there is a prison where individuals designated Enemies of The People are held. As a prisoner in another country once wrote, there surely have to be such places? The rendezvous just and unjust keep, in turn. Every power has to put away what threatens it? Habeas corpus is entrenched in the constitution, and the occasional expulsion of a miscreant foreign journalist intent on finding a story discreditable to African regimes in grievances of the sort malcontents and anti-social elements have in all societies, scarcely is to be regarded as suppression of freedom of the press. The President’s son, the Colonel, is Director of National Security. But no-one can accuse the President of nepotism in this case; the Colonel is immensely capable, a man with a particular silence suited to conscientious discharge of his duty. It is a silence that came to him in the room of an Arab house, developing with the pattern of light and dark that played over him there, as a photographic negative fixes a phenomenon of place, time and experience. He is greatly feared and known by the designated Enemies of The People as the President’s hit man. There is no amnesty from his surveillance. He is married to a young woman from the Ministry of Works and has provided the President with the eldest son of an eldest son — in his less formal photographs the President in an open-neck shirt is often shown with his good-looking white wife (or is she half-caste, she has an African name), and this favourite grandson on his knee or restrained by the hand — he’s an exuberant child.
The President has some unwelcome guests in his country. It is not only in Africa, of course, that there are deposed tyrants nobody, not even their former friends, wishes to harbour. And even the just men among the Amins, Bokassas, Shahs, Baby Docs and Marcoses can be an embarrassment in terms of international relations. When the President has had no choice but to grant asylum, those whose statues have been brought down in their former capitals are confined to residence in one of his provincial towns and know they are under the surveillance of the Coloneclass="underline" It’s not an ideal life, but one can manage, as both the President and the President’s wife know, having experienced it in previous existences. Since the beginning — that is to say, the beginning of the President’s second access to power, with his new wife (he likes to joke and call it the Second Empire) — there have been some taking refuge, however, who seem to be in a special category. His country is too far removed, geographically, to have been any use as a base for incursion to South Africa; not even the government there in its wildest accusations against him could have suggested that. But safe houses were provided and the experienced lobbying ability and growing prestige of the President were brought into play in the world to obtain increasing support for those who temporarily occupied the safe houses. The President’s wife — never has been like other presidents’ wives among members of the OAU, even the other white ones, such as old President Senghor’s — was always present at these negotiations, whether they were with the American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, the director for Africa from the French Foreign Office, the East German Ambassador or the heads of African states: a small but quite voluptuous, bold-eyed woman, one mustn’t be misled, by her perfect grooming and elegant clothes, into dismissing her as the ornament of the President’s sexual tastes and prowess. She offers hospitality to many old friends at State House. She understands well the exhaustion of exiles, flying from country to country with the responsibility of arguments, strategies, methods of presentation and persuasion to be carried from offices up rickety stairs to State anterooms, from bush camps to Intercontinental Hotels. There are many who have found a day’s revival — a moment recovered from responses put aside — in the swimming pool at State House which she has had made private even from the peacocks and guinea-fowl by a surrounding trellis covered with the orange-flowered bignonia that grows at all latitudes in Africa. Tambo came but did not swim; neither did Thabo Mbeki. Arnold was there at State House sometimes, between planes, and Busewe, and young people who were not at the Lusaka headquarters before the assassination took place. The President’s wife and Arnold were in the water together, again, he saw the shape of her body, her legs and arms wavering under water like coloured flags and streamers, then rolled up into flesh and a bright swimsuit as she surfaced, pushing back from her face her long, wet curly hair. Only it was dark bronze now — something fashionable, no doubt. The year he was the Nobel Laureate, Bishop Tutu and his wife Leah were guests and walked in the gardens with her. The Bishop’s laugh sounded from out of the animated chatter, a trumpet from home; he would not have known anyone there the President’s wife remembered, it was too long ago, but he and his wife had about them the kind of bloom of a particular air and place that is unmistakable and that those in exile had lost.