This other, a taxidermist’s, version of the leopard gives it flanks hard and hollow to the touch as cardboard under the bright-patterned tight silky fur, and a tongue like congealed sealing-wax in its snarling mouth. There are a small rock and clumps of dried grasses glued to the plinth with which it was supplied; the whole tableau a gift of homage to the State given by the oil concessionaires when the country became independent and the General was President for the first time, before the civil war. The entrance is an atrium, with wings of the house led to by open, white-pillared passages on either side. State House was originally Government House, and built to the standard design of one of the sovereignties of hot climates in the imperial era which, of course, flourished and declined before that of airconditioning. The President has wanted to brick up walls and extend to the whole place the airconditioning system he long ago installed in the public and private rooms, but Hillela’s early exposure to the stylistic graces and charms of the past, spending school holidays with a collector aunt, left latent in her an appreciation that has emerged in the mistress of the Presidential residence. She has insisted that State House appropriate Government House, not destroy its architectural character. She has been in charge of all extensions and structural alterations. A style of living commensurate with the dignity of the State, she persuaded the President, is not expressed in the idiom of the Hilton and Intercontinental (with which both have a strong emotional tie as the places where his return into his own was bargained for and planned). As for luxury — a measure of which every Head of State, even one as determined to live as close to his people as Nyerere was, must have in order to symbolize some estate now attainable to the people, since every head of a black state was once one of its oppressed people — real luxury is expressed in gardens and the indulgence of individual notions of comfort, idiosyncratic possessions. Behind the leopard of black independence, the atrium opens across the reception area from which official visitors waiting to be received by the President can watch, in the park, peacocks from the last governor’s tenancy trailing worn tails. Hillela would not touch, either, the collection of votary objects that surrounds the coat-of-arms that has replaced an imperial one: plaques beaten out of the country’s copper, the carvings by local artists of heroic agrarian couples, faithfully but subconsciously reproducing as an aesthetic mode the oversize head and spindly legs of undernourishment, and the toadying gifts of white visiting artists or the multinational firms who commission them — heroic animals, more leopards, elephants, lions — paintings as subconsciously reproducing the white man’s yearning for Africa to be a picture-book bestiary instead of the continent of black humans ruling themselves. She knows the strings of cheap pearls and pressed-tin miniature human limbs that encrust walls round the ikon in Eastern Europe called the Black Virgin — whether 14th-century anticipation of Black Theology or time and the grime of worshippers’ breath had made her so, the admirer who took Hillela on a weekend expedition to the shrine could not say.
The President’s passage of heroes is also intact. Strangely, even his usurper did not remove them during the period of the counter-coup. When one of the aides with the thick squeaky shoes of policemen leads an official visitor to the President’s study, they pass under the photographed eyes of Lenin, Makarios, Gandhi, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah and Kennedy.
The first few years could not have been all honey — to appropriate Ruthie’s phrase. Power is like freedom, it has to be fought for anew every day. The ousted president found refuge with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. He was far enough off not to be able to gather supporters in any number around him — and Mobutu knew he couldn’t get away with allowing that; it was by a secret accommodation, arrived at between the OAU and the General, that Zaïre had become an agreed place of exile for that gangster. But the now rebel forces — government forces when the General’s had been the rebel army — regrouped under the command of three ambitious officers who had escaped imprisonment by the General. They established themselves in the South-West of the country and for a time the civil war burned on. The General — now President — could contain it but not put it out. Not militarily. Now he had the advantages of the solid bases and heavy equipment of a conventional army (his former rebel one, enlarged by a sullen ‘reconciliation’ with and absorption of large numbers of surrendered troops) and the rebels had the disadvantages of makeshift command posts in the bush; but in the pursuance of guerrilla war the unconventional fighting conditions — as the President as General had so victoriously proved — often favour the apparently disadvantaged. The President thickened in the sedentary obligations of State House; in every way, he was not as quick on his feet as he was when he slept among grenades in the farmhouse. He had to begin to go abroad a lot, again; not as an exile, but as Head of State with an entourage in his private jet aircraft, he had still to seek friends, to importune, and to trade in the currencies of power. His white wife was no ordinary wife who would go along just to take advantage of a European shopping trip. She had the experience that fitted her for conclave; long ago, when she was very young, she had developed, along with the love-child inside her, a feminine skill of guardianship, an ability to see, moves ahead, what the opposition tactics were revealing themselves to be, and to intervene warning with the signal of a gesture or a look. Later, empty of love, taking notes of negotiations in cold countries, she had learnt to read more in the ellipses than the dictation. The President’s trusted advisers knew that the most trusted, the only one indispensable so far as the President was concerned, was one not of their number.
She did perhaps find the odd hour to shop, as well. Quite soon after their alliance began the President had made it clear that his companion could not go about with him in cotton shifts, jeans, and sandals made by street cobblers. Fortunately, she knew fine fabric and good cut; as a child performed the equinoctial rites of storage, carrying silk and suède garments against her cheek.
The collapse of the rebel forces which finally ended the war was brought about not by the President’s military victory but by the victories in conclave. The French were persuaded into embarrassment over the arms that were being supplied to the rebels through Chad; the Americans debated in Congress a cut-off of their ambiguous aid to the rebels, aid which at first the Under Secretary of State defended as a policy of bringing peace to the region. The cut-off was implemented and after the shortest decent interval the President successfully negotiated a $3 billion loan from the United States for the rehabilitation of war-devastated areas in his country. It was all as he had said: he had to win his war with arms from the East, and to win his peace with money from the West. The world press was amazed to report that only a rainy season after his troops still had been monitoring the physical surrender of arms in the South-West, his Ministry of Agriculture held an agricultural show in the region and the President was rapturously received when he addressed rallies there. His pithy style of comment on the event made a good quote: —My popularity comes from the full stomachs of my people. — He was accompanied by a military brass band from the capital, but not by Hillela. Absent in exile and occupied by war, he had not visited the people in the South-West for a long time, and it would not have been wise to reinforce any sense of his having alienated himself by bringing to them a white wife.