Voices in altercation from the kitchen, Rebecca's, Aaron's. The priest called out, 'Rebecca, Aaron must be fed.' The voices stilled. ' It's getting hot, let'sgoin.' He went in, she followed, and on the table Rebecca was setting down the tray with the early morning tea.
' He has eaten all the bread I baked yesterday. '
' Then, Rebecca, you must bake some more. '
‘Yes, Father. ' She hesitated. ‘I think he meant to put back the picture. He wanted to look at it while Sylvia was away. '
‘I know. I beat him too hard. '
'Okay.' 'Yes.'
' Sylvia, who is that old lady?' asked Rebecca. ' She has a nice face.'
'Julia, her name was Julia. She is dead. She was my – I think she probably saved my life when I was very young. '
'Okay.'
A man may be austere by temperament rather than as a result of a decision to punish the flesh. The Leader was hardly one to examine his life with a view to improving his character, feeling that having been accepted by the Jesuits was enough ofa guarantee for Heaven; and when it did come to his attention that frugality was supposed to be a good thing, he remembered an early childhood where he had often been short of food and everything else. In some parts of the world the virtues of abstinence come easily. His father worked on a Jesuit mission as a handyman, and was often drunk. His mother was a silent woman, usually sick, and he was the only child. When drunk his father might beat him, and his mother was beaten because of her inability to have more children. He was still not ten years old when he confronted his father, shielding his mother, and the blows meant for her reached his arms and legs, leaving scars.
He was a clever little boy, was noticed by the Fathers, and chosen for higher education. Thin as a stray dog – Father Paul's description of him – short, physically clumsy, he could not play games and was often a butt, and particularly of Father Paul, who disliked him. There were other Fathers, teachers and curers of souls, but it was Father Paul who was the child's experience of the white world, a meagre little man from Liverpool, formed by a bitter childhood, with a tongue that ran contempt for the blacks. The kaffirs were savages, animals, not much better than baboons. Even more than the other teachers, he did not spare the rod. He beat Matthew for obstinacy, for insolence, for the sin of pride, for speaking his own language, and for translating a Shona proverb into English and using it in an essay. 'Don't quarrel with your neighbour if he is stronger than you. '
It was a major responsibility, so Father Paul saw it, to rid his pupils of such backwardness. Matthew loathed everything about Father Pauclass="underline" his smell revolted him, he sweated freely, did not wash enough, and his black robes had a sour animal odour. Matthew hated the reddish hairs that sprouted from his ears and nostrils and on the backs of his thin bony white hands. The boy's physical dislike was sometimes so strong, waves of pure murder rose up in him, and he contained them, trembling, his eyes burning.
He was a silent boy. At first he read devotional books, and then a pupil from a fellow mission came on a Retreat and Matthew fell under the spell ofan ebullient joky personality, but even more, of his opinions. This boy, older than him, was political in the unformed way of that time – long before the national movements – and gave him black authors to read, from America, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the pamphlets of a black religious sect that advocated killing all the whites as the devil's progeny. Matthew, still brilliant, still silent, went to college, leaving Father Paul behind, and there he was described long after, when he had become the Leader, as 'a silent observing youth, an ascetic, always reading political books, clever, not able to make friends – a loner'.
When the national movements exploded, Matthew found his place, and quickly, as a leader of his local group. Because he did not find it easy to join in argument and discussion, because he often sat rather out of things, really longing to be like the others, so easy and companionable, he acquired a reputation for cool judgement and political nous, and, of course, for information, since he had read so much. Then he was leader of the Party, after a nasty little jostle for power. The end justifies the means: his favourite saying. The Liberation War began and he was head of one of the rebellious armies. He made promises of every kind, as politicians do, the most productive of later harm being that every black person in the country would be given enough land to farm. Minor absurdities, like saying that to dip cattle was a white man's devilry, and to maintain contour ridges merely kowtowing to white prejudice, were trifles compared to this primal deception – that there would be land for everybody. But then, he did not know he would end up as the Leader of the whole country. When at Liberation his party came first, he secretly found it hard to believe that he could be chosen over more charismatic candidates for power: he did not believe he could be liked. Respected... feared... oh, yes, he needed that, the stray dog needed it and would for the rest of his life. When he had become converted – by, again, a strong and persuasive personality – to Marxism, he made rhetorical speeches copied from other communist leaders. He admired to the depths of his nature strong and brutal leaders. When he was head of a nation he travelled all the time, as Leaders do, always in America or Ethiopia or Ghana or Burma, seldom choosing the company of whites, for he disliked them. Because he had to put on the front of a statesman he had to conceal what he felt, but he loathed the whites, disliked even
being in the same room. Abroad he gravitated by instinct to dictators, some of whom would soon be dislodged from power, like the statues of Lenin that would litter the former Soviet Union. He loved China, admired the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, had visited there more than once, taking with him in his entourage Comrade Mo who had instructed him in the necessities of power long before he had attained it.
No sooner had he got power than he became a prisoner of his fear of people. He was meeting no one but a few cronies, and a young woman from his village, with whom he slept; he never went out of his residence without an armed escort; his car was bullet-proofed – the gift of one dictator – and he had a personal guard offered to him by the most hated despot in Asia. Every evening, as the sun went down, the street outside his residence was closed to general traffic, so that the citizens had to drive streets out of their way. Meanwhile, while he was immured as much as any victim in a story who is compelled to build the wall around himself with his own hands, there was no Leader in all of Africa more loved by his people, and from whom more was expected. He could have done anything with the populace, for good or ilclass="underline" like peasants in former times they looked up to him as a king who would put right everything that was wrong; where he led, they would follow. But he didn't lead. This frightened little man cowered in his self-made prison.
Meanwhile, too, the 'progressive opinion' in the world adored him, and all the Johnny Lennoxes, all the former Stalinists, the liberals who have ever loved a strong man, would say, ' He's pretty sound, you know. A clever man, that's Comrade President Matthew Mungozi. ‘And people who had been deprived of the soothing rhetoric of the communist world found it again in Zimlia.
Into this fortress buttressed by fear, it might have happened that no one could find a way, but someone did, a woman, for at a reception for the Organisation of African Unity he saw her, this handsome black Gloria, who had all the men clamouring around her while she flirted and bestowed smiles, but really she had her eyes on the man who stood well to one side, following her every movement as a hungry dog watches food being conveyed to mouths not his. She knew who he was, had known, had laid her plans, and expected it would be a walkover – as it was. Close to, she fascinated, every little thing about her enthralled him. She had a certain way of moving her lips, as if she was crushing fruit with them, and her eyes were soft and they laughed – not at him, he was making sure of that, so convinced was he that people did. And she was so at ease where he was not, in the flesh, in that magnificent body of hers, in movement and in pleasure in movement, and in food, and in her own beauty. He felt that he was being liberated simply by standing next to her. She told him he needed a woman like her, and he knew it was true. He was in awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics. She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him, though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult – no, often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts and cuddled it.