Olura Read Free Page B

hotel and had come down ahead of him to assure herself that it really was the sort of
place where he could relax. Vigny’s uncharitable suggestion passed through my mind, for Mgwana was only in his early forties. Even though ruffled by slight jealousy, I was inclined to
disbelieve it. Olura’s attitude to Mgwana was not unlike that of a first-class personal secretary to her boss. Between them was easy and genuine friendship.
    His tranquillity impressed me. He did not in the least withdraw himself; but he was impassive as a shield of black steel, behind which roared a conveyor belt accepting, rejecting, always
obedient to a pattern of press buttons which his own deeper self had set. The pattern, I should guess, was defensible even when wrong. No politician, after all, can be sure that his objectives are
socially and economically valid. We in the universities are better qualified to tell. But what we cannot do and he can is to put such power into a creed that it digests his errors without doing
much harm to the ideal.
    Olura and he were sipping tomato juice—a drink which to me suggests recovery from a hang-over or a rarefied atmosphere of conscious virtue. On that first evening, a little unsure of his
surroundings, he had probably left the choice to her. My own refreshment during the protracted Spanish evening is invariably brandy and soda. By the time I had finished my second I found enough
impudence to tell Mgwana what I had heard of him from the last Governor-General of the colony.
    He had been sitting next to me at a college gaudy, rejoicing in his retirement from the cares of office but missing his Africa and eager to talk about it. He told me that when he had been forced
to put Mgwana inside—the law being what it was—he had been afraid of going down to history as a minor second cousin of the obstinate Pharaoh. Not, he said, that there was anything
whatever holy about Mgwana. Far, far from it. But the man was a power-house for all Africa, and his name would endure.
    ‘I couldn’t hate him,’ Mgwana said with a deep chuckle. ‘I knew that soon I should be responsible for law and order myself. And I too had my secret fears. I
wouldn’t have liked to go down to history as the leader whose followers had cut Sir Horace into pieces and sent little baskets of him round the villages.’
    Olura protested that he was exaggerating, this his followers would never have thought of it, that his own example was enough to prevent it.
    ‘But you must sometimes have felt hatred,’ I remarked to lead him on.
    ‘Yes. I did. The stupidity of policemen. The resentments. I still hate the—the polite condescension.’
    ‘There can’t be much of that left.’
    He smiled, but didn’t answer me. After all, he was fresh from a round of conferences and probably suspicious that, as soon as he left the room, European ministers would recover a sense of
ease and get on with the job on an old-boy basis.
    I ventured to touch on the question of the Portuguese colonies—my fondness for the Peninsula often makes me an untimely propagandist—suggesting that Portugal alone, with the example
of Latin-America close to its heart, was genuinely trying to create a multi-racial society.
    That instantly revealed Olura for me. Just as the loyal secretary loathes the rival firm more than the managing director does, so she would not even try to see the argument. But Mgwana by no
means rejected it out of hand.
    ‘They should have tried to make their Brazil faster and earlier,’ he said. ‘I grant that the idea is sincere, but I am bound to fight it. Do you find any dishonesty in
that?’
    I did not. Yet later in the evening of that stimulating day, when Olura and Mgwana had dined and gone out, I did feel that he had missed a subtle difference between European nations which I
could never tactfully explain.
    The Portuguese family who were my neighbours at table were fascinated by Mr Mgwana, and wanted to know who he was. I sensed that