He did not take much notice of her, nor she of him, in the brownstone. Leonie was useful but he was too large in every way to be anyone’s trophy. At finger-suppers and colloquies, boredom dulled his male responses and the efflorescence of his strong ability to attract. It was far away from that, on an evening in Nairobi when he and Hillela were having a drink after Leonie had retired to write up her journal, that the recognition was there. — The only old women I like around me are my mother and my grandmother. They made me, êh, Hillela? D’you know what name my mother gave me, my African name — it means ‘God has done very well’.— Hillela laughed at his own estimate of himself, and he with her, confidently. — Isn’t it a good thing to have a name to live up to? We Africans always give names that mean something, not your Marys and Johns — what does it mean to be a Mary, that you’ll give birth without a man? Is that something you’d want for a daughter?—
— Good god, no. That’s why I called her after Mandela’s wife.—
— So you want to influence her to be an African liberationist, you want her to be a heroine?—
— God may have done very well with you … but it doesn’t always work out the way the parents intended. I’m named for a Zionist great-grandfather.—
— We’ll give you an African name — oh I know you have one, I mean the first name. What can we call you?—
— Well, what do you suggest?—
— I’d have to know you better to find out. You know that the name has to do with many things, the circumstances when it is given. Whether there’s been a drought, or a war.—
— What has already happened.—
— No, more important, what is going to happen. What the name will make happen. — The atmosphere between them took these swallow dips into seriousness, instantly skimming away. — D’you think I’d still be alive if God hadn’t done so well! — The commanding shine that was always on his full face and majestic jowl used the dim theatrical lighting of the bar as a star performer attracts the following beam of a spotlight. A big hand with a thick ring embedded in the little finger covered hers a moment in the pleasure of laughter. — We’re going to celebrate something — I don’t know what. — He ordered champagne; she read the label — South African. But they didn’t send the bottle back. They drank — to Mandela, to freedom. — Amandla! — The language was different from that of his people, but the meaning was the same: power. Their talk burrowed deeper and deeper into the night, safe from interruption. This was not West Africa, where a woman could be picked from any table as a dancing partner. — This kind of place isn’t Africanised — you see that? Dull. It’s still the European style, it belongs to the new white compound, businessmen, safari tourists, journalists instead of settlers, that’s all — and the local bureaucrats — what does Leonie call them? — fat cats — for them it’s just an extension of business lunches with foreigners at the Norfolk, it’s got nothing to do with having a good time our way. West Africans haven’t let the Muslims or the Christians tie them up inside themselves as they did on this side … That’s why I like them. You know how it is in West Africa, if some fellows spread a mat and pray five times a day, there’s still high-life in Ghana; if the nuns teach little black girls their catechism, there’re still girls in Brazzaville who know how a woman should show herself off to a man — and the places where you can dance and drink! The blacks have taken over the European nightclub and made an African party out of it, êh. But here. It’s the Arab religion more than the Christians. Can’t drink, hide the women behind that ugly black cloth. It wasn’t our way in Africa, we’ve always known how to enjoy life … even when they took us to sell as slaves, we sang and danced and the Arabs and the Christians only watched.—
— But you like the whites’ champagne.—
— Why not. Even what the Boers make. — He emptied his glass.
— But you don’t like the Arabs. That must be a difficulty.—
— Of course, we’re allies — and at the U.N., as you know, without them … they’re the ones who count with the European countries, East and West, and the Americans. What could we hope to do, on our own. But I’ll tell you … their style doesn’t appeal to me … not politically, either. Religious fatalism becomes fanaticism in politics. We Africans, we don’t go in for jihads and suicide missions. We’ll fight our enemies and die if we have to, but we’d rather kill and get away with it, êh, stay alive! — He laughed and filled their glasses with froth. — I don’t mix politics and religion. They didn’t get me and I’m going back to fight for my people, no gods. God changes sides too often, for me. The people can worship whatever they like — sacred crocodiles, Mohammed — we are all men and women, êh. We don’t know why we are in this world; we have religions to tell us why. So I’m a Catholic.—
— You’re a Catholic? — Her face kept changing with enjoyment, curiosity, flashes of disagreement or fellow-feeling.
— Of course I’m a Catholic. Brought up in it. I was going to train for the priesthood, at one time. That’s a fact! But once in this world, you have to decide what you are doing here. I became an African nationalist; but it wasn’t the church, it was Marx who told me why that was. So I’m a Marxist. My own kind. A Catholic Nationalist Marxist — African-made—
— Like the nightclubs in West Africa.—
— No, don’t laugh — it’s part of the same thing. Whether I’m inside, in our bush headquarters, or outside, making deals with our brothers (oh of course, Arab brothers, too) or in bed with a woman, it’s all part of my African-made — work, love-making, religion, politics, economics. We’ve taken all the things the world keeps in compartments, boxes, and brought them together. A new combination, that’s us. That’s why the world doesn’t understand. We don’t please the West and we don’t please the East. We never will. We don’t keep things separate. Isn’t that what orthodoxy is — separation? We make our own mess of things. They interfere; we ask them to interfere — what else am I doing? What else were you doing in Europe? I don’t know what you’re doing in the United States—
She turned her face towards her palm, covering her mouth in a gesture as if to grant whatever he thought. He passed his ringed hand absently, without intimacy, down her cheek.
— We ask them to interfere because power — the question of power — always divides again the combination that it brought together, looks for strength outside the unity, breaking it. Then the old gang — they come in again. The world powers. We fight their battles for them with our own. Everyone knows that. They send us guns and soup powder, êh. Some get the guns. That’s the important thing, to be the side that gets the guns. You will never come to power on soup powder.—
— So I’m wasting my time. — A swig of evidence, she swallowed the champagne.
— lf it’s really only on soup powder … That’s all right for Leonie, people are suffering. But it won’t stop the wars, and the wars make the refugees—
— Leonie knows that.—
— When I get back to the capital in my country, this time I’ll have not only the arms to take power again, I’ll have the money for development the other side can’t get. You have to be in power to be able to feed your own people. You get there with guns and you stay there with money.—
A crowded bar has no attentive faces, no ballpoints moving over scratchpads ready to record. Someone with fibre coarse enough to grasp at the high-tension cable of power will not be distressed by what would fuse the gentle lamplight by which evenings pass in a brownstone. — What I thought I was doing … I wanted to get rid of the people who came to the flat and shot Whaila. I knew who they were, by then. From him, and even before that, in Dar … although I didn’t realize. The farmers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers in parliament, sitting in that lovely old building at the Cape Town Gardens under the Mount Nelson Hotel, where I had such a good time as a kid, staying there with my aunt. The teachers in the girls’ school I went to, the people I worked for in Johannesburg, the doctor, the advertising agency ones. Even the others. My other aunt and her husband — Joe, he was so wonderful to me — who tried to show me I ought to resist what was going to kill Whaila. Although it was no good. Not only because I treated them badly — but because all of them, they let it happen. I never understood my life until there he was. In the kitchen. It happened in the kitchen.—