A quirk dented one corner of the European-tailored mouth, so different from the soft African one that was looking for words that would say nothing.
— Personnel being shifted around in accordance with needs.—
— She has gone where?—
— To the United States. Eventually. Oh she might be in London now.—
— America! You get nothing from them! — (the laugh that has made him popular in Western diplomatic circles)— Where are your friends there! You’ve got rid of her!—
— I’ve told you. Transferred. Maybe somewhere else. I don’t make these decisions alone.—
One version of her departure was that she had left in a fit of temperament because she had quarrelled with a Russian lover she expected to marry her. This seems gossip’s inversion of the other, political theory, that the Africanists in the organization wanted to oust the influence of white communists, and, somehow, because she was white and was too close to the Russians living in the country that was hosting her, she had got swept up. Not in a purge, exactly; the worst that happened to Arnold — one of the important figures — for example, was that he temporarily lost his place on the Revolutionary Council.
Some gossip found the second story unlikely: for heaven’s sake, Whaila leaned towards the Africanist wing, why should his widow suddenly have become a communist? But there was the rumour that she had joined the South African Communist Party in London, on which of her stays there rumour could not specify: never mind ‘Whaila Kgomani’s widow’, she had her life in her own hands, apparently she had done well in Eastern Europe, even learned something of the cursedly difficult language. If that wasn’t devotion to the cause! Oh, maybe it was some other kind of devotion — the young widow had intimate friendships, it was said; she would never lack admirers, or the means of communicating with them.
These generalities have gathered the velvet of the years, befitting the past of someone who has achieved a certain position. Her Russian lover kept a house for her in a Black Sea resort where she would join him from all over the world, under an assumed name and false passport; or, if you prefer, the government of the host country had told Citagele’s mission she must leave because she had become the mistress of one of the dissident intellectuals intent on overthrowing the regime.
Who knows.
She has always been loyal, whatever (as Pauline might say) her lack of other qualities. A child in a Salisbury park, she quit the company of her buddies but did not betray the secrets of the shrubbery to the schoolmistress under the mnondo tree. She has never given a reason (even one that would reflect well on her!) for her sudden departure from the Eastern European mission. Maybe she left as she had hitched a lift to Durban one afternoon after school. That is a judgment that has to be considered. A harsh one.
Special Interests
Everything is known about her movements. Americans are such industrious documenters: the proof of her presence among them, like that of their own existence, is ensured by reports of symposia and conferences, prospectuses of institutes and foundations, curricula vitae, group photographs, videos, tapes, transcripts of television interviews. She and her child came to the United States under the auspices (that’s the vocabulary) of a political scientist who roved Africa as a new kind of white hunter. Dr Leonie Adlestrop’s trophies were causes, exiles, aid programmes and black political intrigues. In her sixties, in socks and sandals, floral dresses scoop-necked for the climate showing the weathered hide of her bosom as two worn leather cushions crumpled together, she bore her trophies from Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique, from Tanzania and Kenya, from little Swaziland and Lesotho, back to America. The university where she had tenure as a Distinguished Professor was merely a base. On first-name terms with the Presidents of African states already independent and the leaders of black liberation movements who would one day be presidents, she was also able to make herself accepted, motherly yet sexless (perhaps in the precedence of those post-menopausal women who are given a special, almost male, status in certain tribal rituals), into the confidence of all kinds of ordinary groups — religious, political, educational. These attributes brought her, first, lecture tours round African studies departments, then fellowships from foundation-funded institutes for social and political research, co-option to para-governmental commissions on international affairs, and finally a status where her name listed among trustees, executive members, advisers meant she was a consultant to a succession of Assistant Secretaries of State for African Affairs, and an influence on lobbyists in Congress.
There was not much American popular interest in Africa in the late Sixties. Preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, the neo-Gothic thrills of Weathermen terrorism and even with the great black civil rights pilgrimages to Washington did not distract Ma Leonie; she took up Africa long before the students and black Americans did, and maybe without her it would have taken even longer for America to do so. Her government did not recognize the liberation movements for whose exiles she obtained entry visas and totally unorthodox admission to her own and other universities. Those who were academically qualified had teaching niches made for them; others were given scholarships she could expect on demand from a roster of sources her secretary did not even have to call up on the computer — Dr Adlestrop had them all, under the first names of their directors, at hand in her head.
A beach girl would have been too marginal to have met Dr Adlestrop in Dar es Salaam. But Dr Adlestrop — Leonie, she asked at once that you call her Leonie — passing through Accra to add the officers of Ghana’s new National Liberation Council to her rotary card file, of course had called Whaila, and met his new wife. Leonie and Whaila made the easy elliptical exchanges of old acquaintances. She had just seen Julius in Dar, spent an hour at the airport with K.K. when he arrived from a state visit to Yugoslavia, unfortunately missed Oliver — and, landing in Accra, was quite overcome with grief to realize Kwame was no more … Whaila was anti-American as a matter of policy, since the United States government supported the South African government and gave neither overt recognition nor covert encouragement to the African National Congress. But apparently Leonie was different; Leonie was with him. She was supplying funds in a small way through some of her numerous private organizations, opening cracks that might widen into future access. — I’m keeping at it, Whaila, I’ll go on beavering away. — Like most Americans highly critical of their government, she was at the same time patriotic and anti-communist. — You know that I’ve never been able to stand the idea that you’re going to have to be grateful to the Eastern bloc.—
He teased her; she loved it. — But look at all those Marxists you smuggle into the USA.—
— He’s a great flirt, your man. We’re always like this together. — She bridled happily to the new wife. — Don’t you know, Whaila, it’s because I’m really intending to have the FBI brainwash them?—
The documentation begins only with arrival in the United States. Whether Hillela remembered Dr Adlestrop and got in touch with her from London, or if it was Leonie who made the approach, is not known. Whichever it was, Hillela’s instinct for calculation or Dr Adlestrop’s nose for a trophy, another form of power — the power of Leonie Adlestrop’s kindness — could be counted on. Without adequate papers, with a history of residence in an Eastern European country, Hillela Kgomani and child slipped in easily under the armpit of the Statue.
If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife’s eyes by a racist regime. The namesake’s small black hand in her mother’s white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King — this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they needed to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.