Hillela seems to have had no realization he might never come back. That he might be discovered or betrayed, and arrested, as Njabulo was when he infiltrated. Busewe had come to visit her bringing the standard African gift for a hospital patient, a bottle of orange squash. She rather mischievously wheedled to see if she could get out of him where she might send a letter that would reach Whaila ‘in Europe’. She wanted, above all considerations of life and death, to tell Whaila how the baby had come out: like him, like him. The white American nurse had been embarrassed when she was asked, amid the cheers in the streets pressing against the hospital windows, whether the baby would grow black? — of course it was pinkish-yellow, newly-hatched. The black nurse giggled and gave expert opinion. — It never be white (jutting her scarred chin). When they born that colour, nothing you can do to make it white. She goin’ to be a black girl. — Oh you think so? It is always like that? Are you sure?—
The American turned away in further embarrassment at the patient’s confusing joy, which was surely vulgar if not, in some peculiar way, racist?
Whaila came back, and saw that Hillela had never feared for him. She might be white, but she was the right wife for a revolutionary, who, ideally, shouldn’t have such ties at all. She greeted him with desire, not questions. Her eyes were on him impatiently when other people were around, drawing him to their bed. The baby had slept with her until he returned but she turned it out to a cot to yield him his place. She wanted him to ‘give her’—that was how she put it — another baby at once. He said it was too soon and added what he thought would be the last word for any woman he had known: —Anyway, I don’t want to see you swollen up all the time, I like you slim. — No, no she must have more children. There were distracting caresses for a while. — You don’t really want a whole lot of kids to cart around with us from country to country. God knows where we’ll have to go next. — Her open gaze contracted and dilated, holding him steadily. — An African wife isn’t a wife if she doesn’t produce children. — Oh my god, Hillela, is that what’s on your mind! — He kissed her for the foolishness. — I’ve got enough children, already, that I never see. I’m satisfied to have just this one here with us.—
She was not offended by the reminder that another woman had supplied him with sons. Had it really been impossible somehow to meet them, down there? — I’m sure I would have found a way. — He took the opportunity to teach her something she would have to learn, once and for all. — There are always ways. To do what you have to do, you have to forget about those ways.—
Nkrumah would never come back. When she went to show Marie-Claude the baby, the talk round the Ambassador’s lunch table was of relief. Condemnation rose as the drawn corks squeaked out of bottles of wine. The Ambassador and his colleagues discussed the disasters of Nkrumah’s economic policy, the grandiloquent development projects that could be paid for only by borrowing at exorbitant rates of interest from overseas creditors, the catastrophic rise of Ghana’s external debt since 1963, the pretensions of the state buildings he put up to his glory. — This National Liberation Council can’t be worse; at least the military aren’t a bunch of romantic African Marxists like him. — The Ambassador did not look once at the baby, only at Hillela, as if its existence had no significance other than to wound him. He went on talking while looking at her, with his old skill at communicating in two different modes at once, the voice that belonged with the distinguished exterior shaped by the tailoring of his three-piece grey suit, and the other, speechless message from the body beneath it. — There was no choice between an army coup and complete anarchy. When the ordinary black can’t afford to buy food because of inflation, that’s good riddance to your Nkrumahs. But it’s not the end of the phenomenon. Ah, not at all, not at all. He has left behind the particular form megalomania is going to continue taking, in blacks, all over Africa. You’ll see. Inventing isms, quasi-religions with neo-colonialism as hellfire and a succession of Osagyefos as saviours leading the continent to starvation — but in unity, my friends, of course, in the name of African unity, and his famous way of life that ensures security, abundance, prosperity (a ladder climbed by a fluttering hand) — all through brotherly love!—
In the office up the splintering stairs the despotic decline of the man had been discussed in troubled private. Whaila, Busewe and James did not know what the attitude of the new rulers would be to their own movement. They had reason to expect that it might now come into full recognition and favour; some reason to celebrate. Yet they were quieted, retreated into themselves in a way they could not discuss even with one another by a defeat for something that was there, inside them. To them, the unity of Africa was not another ism; it was the dignity in brotherhood they had found, at last, in a world that had always denied them any other. However its prophet had destroyed himself, whatever he had denied their own organization, however quarrelsome the brotherhood, they mourned him for what he had given Africa, and what they could never denigrate, however many times or by whom it was to be betrayed. Whaila did not talk about this with his young wife, either; and she did what she had learned to do all her life — assumed instinctively from observance of those with whom she lived the appropriate attitude. The celebration outside the hospital windows was not acceptable. The only cause for rejoicing had been, as she in her dazed state had mistaken it for, her having given birth to Whaila’s daughter.
Nkrumah had not been seen in the streets when he was still Osagyefo and President, since she had been in Ghana. That single evening alone had he been an embodied personage, appearing for five minutes among the guests at Christiansborg Castle. He had not fallen, for her, as he had within themselves for the three men with whom she lived. It was when she was wheeling the baby about town for the first time and came upon a public square that he fell. A statue lay smashed upon the ground. People had brought him down. His people. She felt a strange dissolution; she suddenly understood fear, fear of the plans, orders, missions, the suppressed conflicts, the ambitions (her own) in the huge upheaval which she had placed herself astride as when a child she had revelled in the wild bucking of a playground’s mythological bull. Another had risen, out of the sea, Zeus disguised to capture Europa, coming between her and her sometime lover, Arnold, and carried her off, clinging to its legendary black back. Power, people said. Pauline said Olga (half-remembered; the children half-listened when Pauline talked of these things) was afraid of it. Olga was not afraid of the power within which she lived, but of the other one, that would heave under it and bring it down. But power could not be contained for that purpose alone — the just purpose of the plans, orders, missions; it shook and toppled those who wielded it, too. Hillela steered the pram away through the crowds in whose close streams of gregariousriess she had roamed so at ease when she had been alone in African towns; his people.
The pram was a present from Marie-Claude, specially imported from Europe. The baby went about like the offspring of diplomats, in a shiny navy-blue carriage with white-walled tyres, the infantine equivalent of an ambassadorial Mercedes-Benz. Whaila approved; this kind of comfort and safety was far preferable to Hillela’s first notion, that she would carry the baby tied on her back as he must have been carried as a child. She had begged to be allowed to choose the name. Since this was a girl, and, for her, the first child, he was amused to indulge her. So the baby was named after Nelson Mandela’s wife, Nomzamo.