— Whaila has taken you in hand.—
Once up the old splintered staircase, Whaila became again the obsidian of single purpose against which any personal attachment glanced off. He and Arnold were at one. She was not between them. There is no way of telling, ever, whether Whaila knew about the attachments of the girl on Tamarisk, because that kind of knowledge had no place in the purpose. The form of Hillela’s presence was Praetorian — the only way an outsider could describe it. Not only did she keep people at bay (her eyes flicking a warning when she handed over to Whaila a suspect telephone caller), she could be felt (some emanation of her, from the concentration of human destiny going on inside her, the creature turning from fish to biped) willing the direction of a discussion, seeing, moves ahead, what would put Whaila at a disadvantage. Her presence paced the borders, of his sense of self. She was there, with an intense fixing of her black eyes upon him, sometimes with an insignificant gesture — breath taken, hand filling a glass with water — a fidget over which his concentration tripped a moment and was regained with a new awareness. The alarm that closed her face when Arnold made a point Whaila might have made, amused Arnold: how slyly and expertly she turned him away, too — from his amusement and advantage, this time — by a relaxing of her lips and a resting of her gaze upon him that belonged to the borrowed room in a foreign news agency. She was not present at the most important discussions, of course; not yet, but she was there, outside the door, so to speak. When Arnold was back from his tour of Cairo, Algiers, Accra and Lusaka, Christa asked — How did you find Hillela? — A smile, confirming a private prediction: —Ambitious. — She laughed. — What do you mean, ‘ambitious’!—Well, she’d like to see Whaila where Tambo is. — That’s not too likely… yes. But Whaila’s a splendid fellow. He’ll go far. She’s right about that.—
There was a space round Whaila in the office even when the company were not his peers; James and Busewe were beguiled by Hillela, the three drank beer together while, entranced, her face tilted up at them from folded arms, she listened to the stories of their youth and childhood — the childhood of the children left at home by Bettie and Jethro when they came to work in white people’s houses. But they were conscious that a task requested by Whaila and scamped by them, a half-hour when they kept him waiting, a hesitation in carrying out anything he expected of them, came under her scrutiny. Feet put up unthinkingly on his table were withdrawn. Cigarettes stubbed in the ashtray, there, would stop her as she walked by. With her Busewe and James were familiar; whatever the balance had been before she came, there was no familiarity with Whaila, after. Yet they have said of her: She was okay, man. It didn’t matter. The denial is taken to refer to her being white. But it is more likely to have been an acceptance of her exigence; that it was the cause there was insistence on being served meticulously through Whaila: their cause, whatever her motive or impetus was.
Whaila liked to make statements that were really propositions to set off the others. He had the will to make everyone around him ‘think things through’ that ran beneath the perfectly orthodox version of policy and events he presented in public. He wanted to keep an historical perspective. — Tambo said the Defiance Campaign was ‘aggressive pressure’—it wasn’t just lying around waiting to be arrested, you know.—
Busewe pocked the dirty wood of his chair-arm with the point of a pencil. — But what did you really do, man? Going into locations without a permit, walking around after curfew, sitting on Blankes Alleen benches, trying to get served at the white counter in the post office. Je-suss! The only good result was the chance to use the courtrooms to make speeches.—
— Four months of keeping the police occupied, keeping a high profile for resistance? That amounts to nothing? — James was old enough to have boarded a Whites Only coach on a train when he was hardly more than a boy.
— I’m not saying nothing. Where did it get us? When everybody with the strength to carry on was in jail, that was the end. It was feeble, man! When the government made the sentences too heavy, people didn’t want to keep on any longer. If you start defying you can’t give up. You can’t say, go ahead, arrest me, and then say — but only if I don’t go to jail for too long. It was too much the idea of the Indians, that campaign … with the English in India, the whole thing had rules, man, the Indians would go so far, the English would give in so far. They knew they were getting out of India in the end. The Boere don’t accept any idea of giving over power, ever. Never. We know that, from the start. Why should we use campaigns that were worked out for a different kind of place?—
The ideas of others worked in Hillela’s blood like alcohol; when she was stirred or puzzled by or disagreed with what was being said she would breathe faster and faster until at last she broke in. — If the blacks won’t fight, it’s the government that makes them fight.—
— That’s it exactly. — Whaila acknowledged with a chairman’s impartiality; the interjection might just as well have come from James or Busewe. — That’s the stage we reached after the Defiance Campaign. The realization that we are forced to fight. But it doesn’t make the campaign a failure. The campaign simply proved that there is no way but to fight, because the government doesn’t know how to respond to anything else. It was a phase we had to complete, to convince ourselves, hey? Over fifty years passed before Umkhonto! Hell — maybe we needed too long for convincing! They were too slow, the old ones … More than fifty years! We might not even live that long!—
Busewe had punched a cross that was turning into a tree. — If they’d changed strategy earlier it would have meant Congress would’ve been banned earlier. And then? … But maybe before the Nats took over in forty-eight we’d have had a better chance of remaining above ground.—
Whaila had an unconscious habit of abruptly changing position in his chair when he had to correct an error of judgment. — D’you imagine Smuts would have been less tough with us than Verwoerd! Look at history, man. The English made an English gentleman out of a Boer general; but you know what the great Englishman Rhodes said: ‘I prefer land to niggers’. No. The problem of tactics and results is very much a question of timing. Timing. It worries me. We need to think a lot about the timing in any situation where we launch new tactics.—
—‘People in a privileged position never voluntarily give up that position’.— Hillela took opportunities to test the platitudes of her reading. She turned to the stranger, Whaila. — So there’ll never be a right time for that? D’you think there’ll be a right time for tactics to make them give up?—
— There’ll be many times along the way to that one … Many years, perhaps. That’s the side of strategy I’m talking about. Tactics must always be first matched against the situation. Taking too long before making a decision can be a disaster. You can miss out… But it’s no good getting frantic because nothing much is happening at home just now. What fits the present situation is to concentrate on getting support outside — foreign powers and international organizations are absolutely crucial to us, more important than activity down there. The whole movement will die without support. Collapse. So we have to run about … The front line is this end.—