A Guest of Honour by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page B

Dando had the sulky outraged attention of a young patriot from the social welfare department, the glittering-eyed indifference of Doris Manyema, one of the country’s three or four women graduates, and the amused appreciation of a South African refugee whose yellow-brown colour, small nose and fine lips set him apart from the blackness of the other two. In the light, Margot Wentz’s head was the figurehead of a ship above the hulk of her body: a double-chinned, handsome dark blonde, the short high nose coming from the magnificent forehead, water-coloured eyes underlined with cuts of fatigue deep into each cheek. With an absent smile to Bray across the room, she took up, for a moment, an abandoned beauty. When he joined the group, they were listening to her. “We don’t have to argue; we can take it that colonialism is indefensible, for us, no? You think so, I think so—right. But the forty-seven—” “Forty-eight”— Timothy Odara’s eyes were closed; leaning against the wall he kept his lips drawn back slightly, alert. “—I’m sorry, forty-eight years you were under British rule, digging their mines, building roads for them, making towns, living in shanties and waiting on them, cleaning up after them, treated like dirt—now it’s all over, you really think there was any way at all you could enter the modern world without suffering? You think there was someone else would have given you the alphabet and electricity and killed off the malaria mosquito, just for love? The Finns? Swedes? The Russians? Anybody? Anyone who wouldn’t have wanted the last drop of your sweat and pride in return? These are thefacts. From your point of view, as it luckily lasted less than two generations, wasn’t it worth it? Would anybody have let you in for nothing? Anybody at all? Wouldn’t you have to pay the price in suffering? That’s what I’m asking—”
    â€œOh you make the usual mistake of seeing the life of the African people as a blank—and then the colonialists come along and we come to life—in your compounds and back yards.”
    She was shaking her head slowly while Odara was speaking. “All I’m saying, don’t wear the sufferings of the past round your necks. What does independence mean—I don’t use ‘freedom,’ I don’t like the big words—what does your independence mean, then?”
    â€œThe past is useful for political purposes only” said Hjalmar, as he might have said: she’s right.
    Someone said, “Watch out for the man from the CIA.” “Down with neo-colonialism.”
    â€œOf course, Curtis,” said Hjalmar. “But if you have to do it by keeping that forty years or whatever sitting at the table with you and your children—ach, it’s not healthy, it makes me sick. What do they want to hear how you had to go round to the back door of the missionary’s house?—”
    Mrs. Odara had joined the group, ruffling a big, silver-nailed hand through Curtis Pettigrew’s crew-cut hair. “Oh God, Timothy, not that again.”
    â€œâ€”Let them hold up their heads naturally in their own country without having to feel defiant about it!”
    Odara laughed. “But it always comes down to the same thing: you Europeans talk very reasonably-about that sort of suffering because you don’t know … you may have thought it was terrible, but there’s nothing like that in your lives.”
    Bray saw Margot Wentz put up her head with a quick grimace-smile, as if someone had told an old joke she couldn’t raise a laugh for.
    â€œWell, here you’re mistaken,” her husband said, rather grandly, “we lived under Mr. Hitler. And you must know all about that.”
    â€œI’m not interested in Hitler.” Timothy Odara’s fine teeth were bared in impatient pleasantness. “My friend, white men have killed more people