As Hillela passed through stalls where she paused to buy vegetables and fruit, market women to whom she was a familiar customer touched and admired the pram, the tasselled braid round the hood and the brown baby with the tiny, ivory-edged nostrils lying there. They teased her about motherly pride, compared the child’s progress with that of their own babies, exchanged complaints about childbirth, and asked what the child was called. They did not know who Mrs Mandela was; they knew about seasonal produce, prices, making money, and pregnancy, birth, death — the female Free Masonry or other tribalism that drew her into their warm shelter. She laughed, teased back, and folded the pram’s hood to show off the namesake to them.
The office car was old and shared between those who now officially staffed the mission. Busewe and James used it at night when they went off after girls; on Sundays, now that Whaila was a family man, it was understood that its use would be reserved to him — the old South African custom for black and white, whether on foot or by car, of the Sunday family outing, somehow finding its way into exile through trails of uprooted habit. Hillela liked to go to the beach. She formed a routine of scooping out of the sand a little bed for the baby. From that Whaila got the idea of digging a bowl big enough to shelter all three of them. The sand was cool and damp under its desert surface. An umbrella held off a sun that would put out their eyes. They lay there together, joined wherever they touched by the moisture of the sea evaporating on their flesh, the baby stirring the air with its toes and fingers like the small sea creatures themselves feeling at the currents of water. These Sundays at the beach were intensely private as the afternoons at Tamarisk had been public. In the house — it was the organization’s house, no-one’s home — the three were never without the contingent presence of Busewe and James, and transients who came and went; on the beach they were complete, Hillela and her man and their baby; in the hot shade, contained within their bowl of sand whose circle had no ingress for anyone or anything else and no egress by which oneself could be cast out. And each Sunday fitted over the last in an unbroken and indistinguishable circle.
One Sunday that was not to run together with the others, they drove to a beach she had once swum at with the Ambassador’s family. When she and Whaila got out of the car they saw it was deserted except for stick-figures, far enough off to be taken for driftwood until they bent to gather something when the surf drew back. The burning blue sea running its curling tongues over brown sugar sand was as she remembered, but there was a sign staked against the lovely sight she ran towards: CHOLERA AREA, NO BATHING. This was also the period when, like many young women with a first child, Hillela was obsessed with the idea of infections threatening this creature she had made. She raced back and would not touch the baby until Whaila had driven to a service station where she could wash her feet. She kept shuddering, beside him.
In place of the beach, they went to Tema. Without formulating this for himself or her, Whaila wanted them to see something that had been almost realized, a monument not fallen. They drove on an unfinished landscape model, a planners’ maquette. Splendid wide roads looped and bent round buildings and features that were not there. The cardboard trees, toy cars and plastic people of the planners’ board were missing; the roads debouched into weeds. Near the walls of an aluminium smelter there was life, the old familiar teem; a shanty town made of crates that had held the machinery imported for the plant. — An American company runs it, and the bauxite’s imported from Jamaica and Australia. We used to be only the suppliers of the world’s raw materials, and the buyers of the same stuff we’d dug for, as the finished product — if we could afford the price. Now even the raw material from other countries is brought to us to be partly processed by our cheap labour; we still have to buy back the finished product from someone else. — But the deep-water harbour was achieved, there under their feet. They were walking along great stone platforms that held half-circled the power of the sea. The waters tilted massively at them. The baby in her canvas carrier swung from Whaila’s hand over groundnuts spilled from a cargo; fangs of cranes were bared to the sky, their dragon necks crossed. The docks were deserted of workers on a Sunday, but the cargo ships in harbour from all over the world were tethered to something Africans had conceived and realized. The harbour dominated the sea as only foreigners’ fortresses — Christiansborg, the forts of Luanda and Mombasa — had done for centuries. Whaila stood before the sea as no black man could before the harbour was built. The salt-laden humidity in late sunlight was a golden dust on him, risen from the victory over those years. His closed lips were drawn back in the thin line that was the price of such victories, as well as failures. What Hillela saw at those times was how awesomely aged by experience he was, and at once how passionately attractive to her, how grandly handsome (it was the Hollywood word for male beauty she knew) he had been made, without knowing by what destiny. With him she went back to Christiansborg. They took the baby for an airing, walking around outside the walls. It was nobody’s castle, now, neither the Danes’ nor the Osagyefo’s; some kind of administrative block? He found the grave of Du Bois, that American black whose bones at least, as he believed they would, had witnessed an Africa rid of white masters. Whaila’s thin, strong black hands tugged out last year’s dry grasses that swagged across the tombstone. — D’you know a poem he wrote, long before he left America to come home to his forefathers in Africa? I’ve forgotten the beginning … it ends ‘I felt the blazing glory of the sun; I heard the song of children crying “Free!”; I saw the face of freedom … and I died.’—
*
The namesake grew up very black. This has been an advantage for Nomzamo although she does not live in Africa, since the vogue for black models, which had begun esoterically in Paris when Ruthie, Olga and Pauline were playing with golden-haired Shirley Temple dolls in Johannesburg, spread to the United States and Britain during African decolonisation and coincided with the period in which she took up modelling at sixteen. She also grew as beautiful as the woman she was named for. Her mother has never been one to make mistakes when following her instincts. Trust her, as her enemies would remark. The girl, described in an agency’s portfolio as exotic, is known as all the most successful models are simply by a single name — hers is Nomo — easily pronounceable by French, Italian, German, American and English couturiers and readers of fashion journals. An international model does not hamper her image with national politics; to the rich people who buy the clothes she displays or the luxuries her face and body promote, she is a symbol of Africa, anyway; one preferable to those children in the advertisements of aid organizations begging money to keep them from starving. She has not made use of the origin of her diminutive except, during a certain period, on occasions when she was hired by a committee giving a fashion show benefit for a cause such as aid for South African political prisoners — then she had a byline in the sponsored programme: ‘Appropriately, top model Nomo is named for the black leader, Mrs Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela’.
The baby became perfectly black. A year old, she would try to climb out of the perfect circle, the bowl her father dug out of sand with fingers strong as the tines of a gardener’s tool. Then she would tumble back, again and again, and fall asleep across the limbs of her parents. Hillela put the tiny cushion of a black hand, like something she had come upon, into her own pale palm; with her own pale foot dusted the sand off the little black wadge of a foot not yet shaped by the muscles used in walking. Satisfaction sank deep as the cool moisture that existed under the parched sand: not to have reproduced herself, not to have produced a third generation of the mother who danced away into the dark of a nightclub, the child before whom certain advantages lay like the shadow of a palm tree, the aunts who offered what they had to offer.