Going Home
Going Home
Doris Lessing
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a compelling account of her return to the land in which she grew up.In 1956, some seven years after departed for England, Doris Lessing returned home to Southern Rhodesia. It was a journey that was both personal – a revisiting of a land and people she knew – and, inevitably, political: Southern Rhodesia was now part of the Central African Federation, where the tensions between colonialism and self-determination were at their most deeply felt.‘Going Home’ is a book that combines journalism, reportage and memoir, humour, farce and tragedy; a book fired by the love of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers for a country and a continent that she felt compelled to leave.
Copyright (#uc37f56b1-de3b-5440-bb74-278c20415c88)
Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1957
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1957, 1968
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006545156
Ebook Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN: 9780007499830
Version: 2017-02-06
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ae31001-64f4-51b4-8189-4021605e2b34) Title Page Copyright 1 (#ulink_e2971c45-f569-541c-9007-d385b9f29fb3)2 (#ulink_46a16f0a-7a3e-5557-a24d-f012dde71c59)3 (#ulink_b9d0e080-7342-5e9e-992f-5ef6f9759ee5)4 (#litres_trial_promo)5 (#litres_trial_promo)6 (#litres_trial_promo)7 (#litres_trial_promo)8 (#litres_trial_promo)9 (#litres_trial_promo)10 (#litres_trial_promo)11 (#litres_trial_promo)12 (#litres_trial_promo)13 (#litres_trial_promo)Eleven Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)Twenty-six Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Other Books by Doris Lessing (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher
1 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider’s egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling flocks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.
Here is where the sun regulates living in a twelve-hour cycle. Here the sun is a creature of the same stuff as oneself; powerful and angry, but at least responsive, and no mere dispenser of pale candlepower.
When I was first in England I was disturbed all the time in my deepest sense of probability because the sun went down at four in the middle of an active afternoon, filling a cold, damp, remote sky with false pathos. Or, at eleven in the morning, instead of blazing down direct, a hand’s-span from centre, it would appear on a slant and in the wrong place, at eight o’clock position, a swollen, misshapen, watery ghost of a thing peering behind chimney-pots. The sun in England should be feminine, as it is in Germany.
During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now. Recently I found some pages I wrote then: it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year; endless miles of heavy, damp, dead building on a dead, sour earth, inhabited by pale, misshapen, sunless creatures under a low sky of grey vapour.
Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home. Now London is to me the pleasantest of cities, full of the most friendly and companionable people. But that year of horrible estrangement from everything around me was real enough. It was because, bred in Africa, I needed to be in direct physical touch with what I saw; I needed the cycle of hot, strong light, of full, strong dark.
One does not look at London, but at a pretty house, a glimpse of trees over rooftops, the remains of an old street, a single block of flats. The eye learns to reject the intolerable burden of the repetition of commercialization. It is the variegated light of London which creates it; at night, the mauvish wet illumination of the city sky; or the pattern of black shadow-leaves on a wall; or, when the sun emerges, the instant gaiety of a pavement.
On that morning over Africa I learned that I had turned myself inwards, had become a curtain-drawer, a fire-hugger, the inhabitant of a cocoon. Easy enough to turn outwards again: I felt I had never left at all. This was my air, my landscape, and above all, my sun.
Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But – a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that the love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps.
On this trip home a man with whom I had been arguing bitterly about politics said to me suddenly: Where did I come from? I said Lomagundi. He knew it well, he said. He liked the highveld, he remarked, defensively. For the highveld is reaches of pale, dry grass, studded with small, dry, stunted trees – wide, empty, barren country. I said yes, and the Kalahari, too. Yes, he said; and the Karroo. The Kalahari and the Karroo are stages nearer desert of the highveld, full of bitter shrubs, cacti, lizards and hot stones. They are enormous, with a scarifying, barren beauty. They, too, are almost empty.
For a moment we shared the understanding of people who have been made by the same landscape.
But I am not sure whether this passion for emptiness, for space, only has meaning in relation to Europe. Africa is scattered all over with white men who push out and away from cities and people, to remote farms and outposts, seeking solitude. But perhaps all they need is to leave the seethe and the burden of Europe behind.
I remember an old prospector came to our farm one evening when I was a child. He had spent all his life wandering around Africa. He said he had just gone home to England for a holiday of six months; but left at the end of a week. Too many people, he said; a tame little country, catching trains and keeping to time-tables. He had learned his lesson; he would never leave the highveld again. ‘People,’ he said, shouting at himself – for he was certainly arguing against his own conscience – ‘people are mad, wanting to change Africa. Why don’t they leave it alone? A man can breathe here, he can be himself. And,’ he went on, getting angrier and angrier, ‘when we’ve filled Africa up, what then? The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it – millions of people all crowded together, fighting and struggling, but behind them, somewhere, enormous, empty places. I tell you what I think,’ he said, ‘when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.’
That’s what he said. I remember every word, for he made a great impression on me.
Next morning he went away, and we heard he had gone up over the Zambezi escarpment into the bush with his bearer. On the verge of one of the hills overlooking the river he built a hut and thatched it, and settled to live there, entirely alone. But he got black-water fever, and the news travelled back, as news does in these parts, and at last reached his wife in the city, who – a bush-widow these many years – got herself a lorry and went off after him until she reached the end of the road, and then inquired of some passing Africans who took her to the hill where her husband was. Between one bout of fever and another, he sat on a candle-box under a tree, an old man of fifty or so, looking at the gorges of the river and at the hills. Africans from a neighbouring village had set water and some meat by him, and were waiting at a little distance in the shade of a tree. He was very ill.
‘And now,’ said she, ‘enough of this nonsense: it’s time you came back and let me look after you.’
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I want to die alone.’
‘But there’s no need to die. You’ll get better in hospital.’
A look of revulsion came over his face, which she understood too well. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you myself.’
He turned his face from her, and looked out and down to the river. And so she went to examine the inside of the mud hut which had nothing in it but a case of whisky and a roll of bedding and some quinine and a rifle; and then went over to the young men, who got to their feet as she approached.
‘Now, look after the baas nicely,’ she said.
‘Yes, Nkosikaas,’ they said.
She walked away down along the Kaffir paths several miles to the road, climbed back into the lorry and drove back to town. And when he died, which was several days later, the people of the village buried him and sang their mourning songs over him.
That was the story as we heard it from a group of young men travelling through our farm on their way to find work in the gold mines of the Rand.
It seems to me that this story of the man who preferred to die alone rather than return to the cities of his own people expresses what is best in the older type of white men who have come to Africa. He did not come to take what he could get from the country. This man loved Africa for its own sake, and for what is best in it: its emptiness, its promise. It is still uncreated.
Yet it is only when one flies over Africa that one can see it, as such solitary people do, as the empty continent. The figures are eloquent enough – that is, if one possesses the kind of mind that makes figures live. In Central Africa there are seven million Africans and two hundred thousand white people. It sounds quite a lot of people from one point of view, if one tries to imagine the word million in terms of a crowd of people. And if one has lived in a city there, one remembers the pressure of people. Yet it seems seven million people are nothing, not enough – this enormous area could hold hundreds of millions.
But now, steadily flying south for hour after hour, one sees forest, mountain and lake; river and gorge and swamp; and the great reaches of the flat, tree-belted grassland. The yellow flanks of Africa lie beneath the moving insect-like plane, black-maned with forest, twitching in the heat. A magnificent country, with all its riches in the future. Because it is so empty we can dream. We can dream of cities and a civilization more beautiful than anything that has been seen in the world before.
It was over Kenya that a subtle change of atmosphere announced we were now in white Africa. Two Africans sitting by themselves had a self-contained and watchful look. Perhaps they were reflecting on the implications of the fact that this being a South African plane the covers on the seats they used would have to be specially sterilized before re-use.
Until now the men making announcements over the loudspeaker had had the anonymous voices of officialdom. Now there was a new voice, unmistakably South African, stubbornly national. Jaunty and facetious, with the defensiveness of the Colonial who considers an attempt at efficiency as nothing but snobbishness, it began: ‘Well, ladies and gents, here I am; sorry about it, but I’m not a BBC announcer, but I’ll do my best. If you look down on your right now you’ll see the Aberdare Forest. You’ll understand why it took so long to bash the Mau Mau. See that thick bit over there? That’s where we got a whole bunch of them. Starved ’em out. Took six weeks.’ This man was not from Kenya, but he was white; and the problems of white Kenya were his, and – so he took for granted – ours too. He went on, swallowing his words, the ends of his sentences, most of the time inaudible. Once he clearly enunciated a whole series of sentences just to show that he could if he chose. ‘Down there is Masai country. Of course, I don’t know anything about the Masai, but they tell me the Masai are warriors. Or used to be. They like drinking blood and milk. They seem to like it. Or so I’m told. Of course, I don’t know anything about these things.’ Click, as the machine switched off, and we descended at Nairobi.
Nairobi airport is interesting for two things. One is that it is infested with cats of all shapes, colours and sizes. I have not seen so many cats since one year when my mother got into a mood where she could not bear to see a kitten drowned, so that very soon we had forty cats who almost drove us out of the house before we could bring ourselves to lay violent hands on them.
The other is that the lavatories are marked ‘European Type’ and ‘Non-European Type’. The word type, I suppose, is meant to convey to the critical foreign visitor that Non-Europeans prefer their own amenities. It was my first indication of how defensive the colour bar has become. Also, to what irrational extremes it will take itself under pressure. When I left no one thought ill of themselves for defending white civilization in whatever ways were suggested by pure instinct.
The two Africans sat in the restaurant at a table by themselves. The social colour bar is being relaxed here slightly. (The other day I asked an African from Kenya what he thought was the most important result of the war in Kenya; he replied grimly: ‘In some hotels they serve us with food and drink now.’)
It was at this point that I noticed the old attitudes asserting themselves in me again. If one went to sit at the same table, it would be something of a demonstration. Perhaps they would prefer not to be drawn attention to in the electric atmosphere of Kenya? Or perhaps … yes, I was certainly back home.
One of the reasons why I wanted to return was because so many people had asked me how it was I had been brought up in a colour-bar country and yet had no feeling about colour. I had decided that a lucky series of psychological chances must have made me immune. But it was surely impossible that I should be entirely unlike other people brought up in the same way. Therefore I was watching my every attitude and response all the time I was in Africa. For a time, the unconsciousness of a person’s colour one has in England persisted. Then the miserable business began again. Shaking hands becomes an issue. The natural ebb and flow of feeling between two people is checked because what they do is not the expression of whether they like each other or not, but deliberately and consciously considered to express: ‘We are people on different sides of the colour barrier who choose to defy this society.’ And, of course, this will go on until the day comes when self-consciousness can wither away naturally. In the meantime, the eyes of people of a different colour can meet over those formal collective hands, in a sort of sardonic appreciation of the comedies of the situation.
But what I did find was that while I am immune to colour feeling as such, I was sensitive to social pressures. Could it be that many people who imagine they have colour prejudice are merely suffering from fear of the Joneses? I dare say this is not an original thought, but it came as a shock to me.
In the Tropical Diseases Hospital in London, where I was last year for a few weeks, a middle-aged white woman was being treated in the same room. When she found there were dark-skinned doctors and patients, she suffered something not far off a nervous collapse. She got no sympathy at all from either nurses or her fellow patients about her dislike of being treated the same way as black people, so she became stiffly but suspiciously silent: bedclothes pulled up to her chin, like a shield, watching everyone around her as if they were enemies. And every bit of china she used, every fork or knife or spoon, was minutely examined for cracks or scratches. The presence of coloured people meant germs: germs live in cracks. Her worry about these utensils became an obsession. Before a meal, after she had sent back cups, plates, cutlery, several times to be changed, she would then wash each piece in the basin in strong disinfectant. Unable to express her dislike of coloured people through the colour bar, she fell back on the china. This is the real colour prejudice; it is a neurosis, and people who suffer from it should be pitied as one pities the mentally ill. But there is a deep gulf between this and being frightened of what the neighbours will say.
In writing this I am conscious of a feeling of fatigue and sterility, which is what I have to fight against as soon as I set foot in white Africa. For a long time I believed this was the result of being in a minority among one’s own kind, which means one has to guard against being on the defensive, which means one has to test everything one says and does against general standards of right or wrong that are contradicted all the time, in every way, by what goes on around one.
But I no longer believe this to be true. What I feel is a kind of boredom, an irritation, by all these colour attitudes and prejudices. There is no psychological quirk or justification or rationalization that is new or even interesting. What is terrible is the boring and repetitive nature of ‘white civilization’.
As soon as one sets foot in a white settler country, one becomes part of a mass disease; everything is seen through the colour bar.
‘The patient must get worse before he can get better.’ And I know this is a light phrase for human suffering and what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in frustration. I do not have to be told or made to feel what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in humiliation and frustration. I know it all.
But in thinking of the future rather than the bitter present, I believe I am one with the Africans themselves, who show their superiority to colour bars by their joyfulness, their good humour and their delight in living. People who imagine the ghettos of white-dominated countries to be dreary and miserable places know nothing about the nature of the African people.
Worse than the colour bars, which are more dangerous and demoralizing to the white people than to the black, for they live within a slowly narrowing and suffocating cage, like so many little white mice on a treadmill – worse than this is the fact that the Africans are being channelled into industrialization in such a way that what is good in European civilization cannot reach them. They are allowed to know only what is bad and silly. That is why I am so impatient that they should wrench themselves free before they have lost touch with their own rich heritage, before they have become exhausted by exploitation.
I long for the moment when the Africans can free themselves and can express themselves in new forms, new ways of living; they are an original and vital people simply because they have been forced to take the jump from tribalism to industrial living in one generation.
And yet – the stale patterns of white domination still exist. So because I was brought up in it I have a responsibility. And does that mean I must go on writing about it?
I have notebooks full of stories, plots, anecdotes, which at one time or another I was impelled to write. But the impulse died in a yawn. Even if I wrote them well – what then? It is always the colour bar; one cannot write truthfully about Africa without describing it. And if one has been at great pains to choose a theme which is more general, people are so struck by the enormity and ugliness of the colour prejudices which must be shown in it that what one has tried to say gets lost.
When I am asked to recommend novels which will describe white-settler Africa most accurately to those who don’t know it, I always suggest a re-reading of those parts of Anna Karenina about the landowners and the peasants – simply because colour feeling doesn’t arise in it.
For the interminable discussions and soul-searchings about ‘the peasant’ are paralleled by the endless talk about ‘the native’. What was said in pre-revolutionary Russia about the peasant is word for word what is said about the Africans – lazy, irresponsible, shiftless, superstitious, and so on.
And in the person of Levin one finds the decent worried white liberal who is drawn by the reserves of strength, the deep humanity of the African, but yet does not trust him to govern himself. Levin, in Africa, is always dreaming of going native, of escaping from the complexities of modern civilization which he sees as fundamentally evil. He philosophizes; goes on long trips into the bush with his African servant to whom he feels himself closer than to any other human being and to whom he tells everything; half-believes in God; knows that all governments are bad; and plans one day to buy a crater in the Belgian Congo or an uninhabited island in the Pacific where at last he can live the natural life.
All this has nothing to do with colour.
I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described in Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know. An enormous, under-populated, under-developed, unformed country, still agricultural in feeling and resisting industrialization.
For a novelist based in Africa it is discouraging that so much of what develops there is a repetition of the European nineteenth century. Time and again one seizes on a theme, looks at it carefully, discovers that unless the writer is very careful it will merely repeat what has already been said in another context – and then, trying to isolate what is specifically African, what is true of Africa at this time, one comes slap up against that complex of emotions, the colour bar. I believe it to be true that what unifies Africa now, what makes it possible to speak of ‘Africans’ as if they were the members of one nation instead of a hundred nations, is precisely this, that white domination has given them one overriding emotion in common, which makes brothers of them all from Cape to Cairo. Yet behind this, perhaps, there is something else that is more important. Perhaps in a hundred years, looking back, they will not say: ‘It was the century when we turned the white men out of our continent and regained our freedom,’ but … I don’t know. When a people struggles for freedom the struggle itself is always so much greater and more creative than what is being fought.
Perhaps they will say: ‘That is the century when we found we were not simply black men, but a company of peoples infinitely diverse, original, rich and varied. That is the century when we recovered the right to find out what we are.’
But now, for the writer, it is hard, because the infinite complexity and the richness always narrow into a protest against that monstrous thing, the colour bar.
In white Africa I do not think the Africans have yet produced types of people or forms of organization that have not been produced elsewhere. African nationalists speak the same language as congress leaders in any country; political leaders must reflect white domination as long as it remains: Generals China and Russia of the Mau Mau would not have been possible without Colonel Blimp.
As for the British, they either live as if they have never left Britain or proliferate into eccentrics or rogue elephants. Africa is full of colourful characters, adventurers, criminals, petty tyrants or solitaries. But I don’t think it can be said we have not seen them before – or read about them.
I think it is the Afrikaner who is the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. He is a tragic figure. The Africans are not tragic – they have the future before them; they are a suppressed people who will soon free themselves as Colonial people are freeing themselves everywhere in the world. The British are not tragic, they are too flexible. I think most of the British in Africa will be back in Britain inside twenty years. But the Afrikaners are as indigenous as the Africans. And since they insist their survival as a nation depends on white domination what possible future can they have? Yet they are not a corrupted people, as the Germans were corrupted by the Nazis – Afrikaner nationalism is not a falling-off from a high peak of national cultural achievement. The Afrikaners have remained unaltered while the world has changed, and that is their tragedy. Their history as a people has been a long, courageous battle for independence and freedom; yet they do not understand other people’s desire for freedom: that is their paradox.
They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black–white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid. But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the segregation created by Smuts, the Afrikaner who became a spokesman for the British Empire, and his British-dominated United Party. Passes, segregation, farm-prisons, pick-up vans and the industrial colour bar were not introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalists: the system was created by the white people, Afrikaner and British together, and financed by British and American capital. But the Afrikaner has been made the villain of the scene; Smuts was called a great statesman, but Strydom is hissed in the streets when he comes to Britain.
And so the drive towards national isolation and self-sufficiency which is the basis of Afrikaner nationalism is strengthened.
Sooner or later it will be the Afrikaner and the African who will face each other as opponents in the southern tip of the continent. And they are very alike. I have yet to meet an African who does not say that he prefers the Afrikaner as a man to the British. ‘The Afrikaner calls me a Kaffir, he says what he thinks, but he is more humane, he treats me better.’ I have heard that very often.
And inevitably the two people are becoming fast mixed in blood – if one may use that convenient word – in spite of all the laws and the bars and the barriers. There is no sadder or more bizarre sight than to see a group of ‘white South Africans’, each with the marks of mixed descent strong in face and hair and body-build, arguing about the necessity of preserving racial purity.
On an aeroplane in Northern Rhodesia I sat next to a young Afrikaner flying back home. He was immediately recognizable as one, first because of his open, simple face, and next because the marks of mixed parentage were on his hair and his facial structure.
We got into conversation.
‘I am sad today,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know what to do. I’ve just been up to the Copper Belt, and that’s the place for me, man, you can earn money there, not the Kaffir’s wages you get back home now. But if I go to the Copper Belt, man, my heart will break.’
‘But why?’
‘Because of my pigeons. They’re my little sisters. How can I take my fifty pigeons all the way to the Copper Belt? They will be sad there. I’d have to sell them. I wouldn’t like to do that. I’d feel sad all the time.’
‘Perhaps you’d get over it? And you could buy some more pigeons?’
‘How can you say that? That’s not right. No, man, the way I feel now, I’ll have to stay at home, even if I don’t like it.’
I noticed he had broken his thumb.
‘Yes, and that’s another thing. I got that last year. On the job I’m a policeman. A man was beating up a Kaffir. He had no right to do that. The Kaffir hadn’t done anything. So I broke my thumb on him. People shouldn’t go hitting Kaffirs when they haven’t done anything. Well, the next thing was I broke it again. You know how you have to beat up Kaffirs when you arrest them: they don’t tell the truth if you don’t give them a good hiding. But now I keep thinking about my thumb, and I can’t do my work properly. You can’t do the job without your fists. No, I’ll have to get another job. Besides, the police is no good.’
‘You don’t like the work?’
‘Hell, man, it’s not the work. But things are bad now. I know you’ll think I’m saying this because you’re English and I’m trying to make up to you. But it’s God’s truth, I like the English. There’s an Englishman in the office, and he’s fair, and I like him. He treats everyone the same. But our men there, man, but you can’t trust them! They tell you to do something, and then it goes wrong, and then it’s your fault. They don’t stand by you. And they tell on each other all the time. But the Englishman’s going. He’s going back to England, he says. And so I’ll leave, too. I’m not staying where things aren’t fair. Don’t think I mean anything about South Africa; it’s God’s country. Why don’t you come and see it?’
This being after I was proscribed, I said his Government would not let me in and why.
He looked at me long and earnestly. ‘Never seen a commie before,’ he said.
‘There used to be plenty in South Africa before it was illegal.’
‘Never heard of that. Well, look then, tell me, what is it about?’
‘In South Africa, what is important now is that we are against racial inequality.’
His face fell; he was a small boy. ‘Now look, man, hell! I don’t see that.’
‘Sooner or later you’ll have to.’
‘But they’re nothing but children, man! You must know that. Look how they live! It makes me just about sick to go into one of their locations. Besides, I don’t like their colour, I just don’t like it.’
He paused, very serious, wrestling with himself. ‘You think I’ve just been brought up to be like that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘It’s no good, I don’t see it. Now look here’ – and he turned earnestly towards me – ‘would you let a black man marry your daughter?’
‘If my daughter wanted it.’
He slowly went a dark red. ‘I don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. I just don’t like it.’ A pause. ‘Then I can see why they didn’t let you in, man. Women shouldn’t go around saying things like that. No, you mustn’t talk like that, I don’t like to hear it.’ His face slowly went back to normal. Then he said: ‘But I’ve enjoyed talking. I always want to know about these things. I’ve never been out of South Africa before. If I can leave my little pigeons and get up to the Copper Belt and earn some money, then I want to come to England. They say that Kaffirs are just like everybody else there?’
‘Just like everybody else.’
‘I don’t think I should like to see that. It wouldn’t seem right to me. But hell, man, that means they can go with the women? Sorry, talking like this, but it’s not personal. But you can’t have them going with the women. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t like …’
This is the stock South African conversation; and it goes on just as if nothing had happened. But what is happening is that the poorer of the white people are becoming more and more like the poorer of the Africans.
In the Lusaka airport there was a five-hour wait for the connection south to Salisbury.
Sitting in the little garden were a group of white people, toasting themselves in the sun, carefully accumulating pigment under their precious white skins.
The mystiques of sun-tanning are becoming as complicated and irrational as those of food and sex. What could be odder than to see people whose very existence depends on their paleness of skin deliberately darkening themselves on the preserved ‘white’ beaches of the coasts, or on the banks of ‘white’ swimming baths? But in a country where anyone who works in the open must become dark-skinned, and where it is impossible to distinguish between deep sunburn and the skin of a coloured person, one acquires a mysterious sixth sense that tells one immediately if a person is ‘white’ or not.
Having been in Britain for so long, I had lost this sense; and, sitting in a café in Bulawayo, I was pleased to see a group of people come in who had dark brown skins. The spirit of Partnership, I thought, was really relaxing the colour bar. A few minutes later a man came in who I thought was indistinguishable from those already sitting there. He went to sit at a table by himself. At once the woman behind the counter came over and said: ‘You know you are not allowed to come in here.’ He got up and went out without a word. It seemed that the first group were Italians.
In 1949, on the boat coming to Britain, where most of the passengers were elderly ladies playing bridge and knitting, were two attractive young women. They did not mix with the rest at all, were spoken of as ‘Durban society girls’. One was a tall, slim, pale creature with smooth, dark hair and intelligent, dark eyes kept deliberately languid. The other was a plump little yellow-head, not pretty, but as it were professionally vivacious. They were American in style, as most South African girls are: very well-kept, self-possessed, independent.
I got to know the cheerful little one, who told me that her friend was called Camellia. ‘She’s done well for herself if you like. She was just an ordinary secretary, working in the office, but the boss’s son married her. Then he got killed in an air crash. She’s married into one of the oldest families in Durban. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a damn for anybody.’ It seemed that this quality of not giving a damn was the bond between the girls; for Camellia had taken her typist friend Janet with her into society. Janet had consequently also done well for herself: she was engaged to a cousin in the same family. It seemed that the young widow had gone to Uncle Piet, executor of the estate, and said: ‘I’m fed up with life. I want a holiday in Europe.’
Janet said: ‘That silly old bugger Uncle Piet said she had a duty to her position in society, and she should set an example, and she wasn’t to go for more than four months. But he gave her a thousand. So that’s how I came too. She’s generous, Camellia is. And it’s not that she’s got all the money she wants. Actually she hasn’t got any money. Her husband didn’t know he was going to be killed, and anyway he was under age. They both were. When they got married the papers called it “the wedding of the beautiful children”. Because he was good-looking. So Camellia doesn’t get any money except what Uncle Piet lets her have, because she hasn’t any money by will. But when Camellia said I must come with her, Uncle Piet didn’t like it. He said it was my duty to stay with my fi-ance. But see the world before you get tied down with kids, that’s what I say.’
The two girls spent all day lying side by side in two deck chairs in the shade, refused to take part in the deck-sports, and at night did the few young men there were a favour by dancing with them. At least, this was Camellia’s attitude; though I think the little one would have liked to be less aloof.
Two years later I saw them in Trafalgar Square, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Camellia was with a man who was probably a West Indian; and Janet was tagging along. This set-up intrigued me for some days. Had they gone home to collect more money from Uncle Piet and then come back to Britain again? What had happened to Janet’s eligible fi-ance? And above all, how could a Durban society girl, even if she didn’t give a damn, get herself involved with a Negro? As I was on a bus when I saw the group, unfortunately there was no chance of finding out.
That was in 1951. In 1953 I was walking along the edge of the sea in the south of France, and there was the young man I had seen in Trafalgar Square with an extremely beautiful black girl. They were sitting side by side on a rock, arms and legs inextricably mixed, and on the sand watching them was Janet, who was her normal colour. Then I saw that the beautiful Negress was in fact Camellia. All that was visible of her – and she was wearing a minute red bikini – was burned a very dark bronze.
I went up to Janet and asked her how she did.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing well for yourself since I saw you last.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And how goes it with you?’
She looked at the couple on the rock. No doubt but that she was very upset. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘my mind is much broader since I came to Europe, but what am I to do? Tell me that?’
‘I can see your problem,’ I said. ‘But what happened to your fiancé?’
‘Which fiancé?’ she said, and giggled. ‘No, it’s not that. I can look after myself, but it’s Camellia. After we were here that time, we got a letter from Uncle Piet, asking when we were coming back. Camellia wrote and said she was still getting over her sad loss, so he sent her some more money. Actually, we were getting some culture. After all, you come to Europe to get some culture. South Africa has got everything, but it isn’t very cultured. So we got mixed up in artistic circles. I made Camellia do it, because at first she didn’t want to. There were coloured people, and she didn’t like that. But then she met Max and he and she quarrelled all the time. Besides, it intrigued her, you know how it is, you come here from South Africa and they just laugh at you. Max was always laughing at Camellia. The next thing was, my fi-ance came over, and said it was time I came home. But my ideas had changed. I said to him: “Now that I have been around a bit I am not sure that you and I are suited. My mind is much broader than it was.” So we broke it off and he went home.
‘Then Camellia and Max came here for a holiday. She said she couldn’t stick it without any sun any longer. She started lying about in the sun. And at home she never goes out without a big hat, and even gloves if the sun is hot, because she is so proud of her skin. I told her: “You are crazy to ruin your skin.” And Max said to her that the way everybody in Europe goes south to get sunburned every summer is an unconscious tribute to the superiority of the dark people over the white people. He said that a hundred years ago no one in Europe got sunburned. Max is very well educated and all that. But Camellia got mad, and they quarrelled badly, and so she and I went home. Camellia tried to settle down. Piet wanted her to marry cousin Tom to keep everything in the family. But Camellia said she wanted to go away to make up her mind about marrying Tom. So we both of us came back to England. Camellia met Max straight away. He is the son of a rich family from the Gold Coast. Did you know there were rich families among the natives in the Gold Coast? There are. He is a lawyer. Then they made it up and came here again for a holiday and when she came to England she might just as well have been born in the location. Just look at her.’
‘Luckily,’ I said, ‘there aren’t any locations here, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, but now Uncle Piet has written saying that if she doesn’t go home before Christmas he will no longer consider her one of the family. No money, that means. And so she is going back. I’m taking her. I promised Uncle Piet I would take her. Next month. She and Max have decided that she would not be happy in the Gold Coast. For about one week they decided to get married, believe it or not. Then Max said she has not got the sense of social responsibility he wants in a wife – can you beat it? And she said that as far as she was concerned, he was primitive. They quarrelled, I can tell you!’
‘So it has all turned out well in the end,’ I said.
‘Yes, but how can I take her back like that? The boat goes in a month. She says she is going to stay here until it goes. Everyone will think she’s a Kaffir, looking like that. I can’t understand her. The magazines used to call her the girl with the skin like petals. Actually Camellia was her christened name, believe it or not, but she was proud of them calling her that, even though she pretended she didn’t give a damn.’
‘There are bleaching creams,’ I said.
Janet began laughing. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said, and admittedly she sounded not far off tears. ‘But if I take her back like that, Uncle Piet will blame me. And I’m going to marry a nice boy who is one of the family. I said to Camellia, “If you had fair hair,” I said to her, “then it wouldn’t matter. But you’re crazy with your dark hair to have such dark skin.”’
‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.
‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’
And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.
On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.
In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.
Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’
This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.
But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.
‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’
‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’
She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’
‘Jolly good,’ I said.
‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.
‘And Caroline?’ I asked.
‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’
‘And Janet?’
‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’
Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.
‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’
‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.
‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’
2 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing – not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.
I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting – all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other – confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.
The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.
To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.
But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.
The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.
I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls – even parks and gardens – are an urban shell.
But in Africa the wildness of the country is still much stronger than the towns.
But even so, this house was wrong; it was not this that I had come home to find. For me all houses will always be wrong; all bungalows, cottages, mansions and villas will be uncomfortable and incongruous and confining. I only like blocks of flats, the most direct expression of crammed town-living. I did not understand why this should be so for a long time, until I took to dreaming nightly of the house I was brought up in; and then at last I submitted myself to the knowledge that I am the victim of a private mania that I must humour. I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. In order to find a place I live in tolerable, I have not to see it. Or rather, I work on it until it takes on the colouring suggested by its shape, and then forget it. If, in an unguarded moment, I actually see it, all of it, what it is, then a terrible feeling of insecurity and improbability comes over me. The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. I suspect more people are in this predicament than they know.
But that first house crumbled long ago, returned to the soil, was swallowed by the bush; and so I was glad after we had had dinner to go out again in the car, ostensibly to look for someone whose address we did not know, but hoped we might find by chance – in fact to get out of the town into the bush.
In five minutes we were there.
And now for the first time I was really home. The night was magnificent; the Southern Cross on a slant overhead; the moon a clear, small pewter; the stars all recognizable and close. The long grass stood all around, tall and giving off its dry, sweetish smell, and full of talking crickets. The flattened trees of the highveld were low above the grass, low and a dull silver-green.
It was the small intimate talking of the crickets which received me and made me part of that nightscape.
Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady, solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.
It was only so the first night; for at once habit took over and erected its barriers; and if I had had to fly back to England the next day, I would have been given what I had gone home for.
For to stand there with the soft dust of the track under my shoes, the crickets talking in my ear, the moon cold over the bush, meant I was able to return to that other house.
There are two sorts of habitation in Africa. One is of brick, cement, plaster, tile and tin – the substance of the country processed and shaped; the other sort is made direct of the stuff of soil and grass and tree. This second kind is what most of the natives of the country live in; and what I, as a child, lived in. The house was not a hut, but a long, cigar-shaped dwelling sliced several times across with walls to make rooms.
To make such a house you choose a flat place, clear it of long grass and trees, and dig a trench two feet deep in the shape you want the house to be. You cut trees from the bush and lop them to a size and insert them side by side in the trench, as close as they will go. From the trunks of living trees in the bush, fibre is torn; for under the thick rough bark of a certain variety of tree is a thick layer of smooth flesh. It is coloured yellow and pink; and when it is still alive, newly torn from the tree, it is wet and slippery to the touch. It dries quickly; so it is necessary to have several labourers stripping the fibre, with others ready immediately to use it for tying the trees of the walls into place. At this stage the house will look like a small space enclosed by a palisade – tall, uneven logs of wood, greyish-brown in colour, laced tightly with yellow and rose-coloured strips. The palisade will have spaces in it for doors and windows.
On this frame is set the skeleton of the roof. More trees have been cut, slimmer ones, and laid slantwise from the tops of the wall-poles to a ridge in the centre. They are tied with strips of the fibre to this centre pole, which is an immensely long gum tree or thorn tree made smooth and slim, lying parallel to the ground.
Now the house will look like an immense birdcage, set in the middle of the bush. For the trees have not been cut back around it yet; and the grass is still standing high all around, long swatches of grass, a browny-gold in colour. One cannot build this sort of a house save when the grass is dry, at the season for thatching.
Standing inside the cage of rough poles, the sun comes through in heavy bars of yellow. Strips of fading fibre lie everywhere in tangles; chips of wood send off a warm, spicy smell.
Now it is time to make the walls.
From an ant-heap nearby earth is cut in spadefuls and laid in a heap. Ant-heap earth is best, because it has already been blended by the jaws of a myriad workers.
It is not always easy to find the right ant-heap, even in ant-heap country; for even ants cannot make suitable wall-earth where the ingredients are not right at the start. And, having found a properly composed heap, there may be snags. For instance, when we were building our house, the ant-heap we were working had three skeletons laid side by side, in such a way that showed these were the bones of chiefs of a tribe. Earthen cooking-pots buried beside the skeletons still showed traces of white meal mingled with the earth.
Our labourers would not go near this ant-heap again, for they feared the spirits of their ancestors. So we had to choose another. But meanwhile, some of the earth had already been pounded into mud for the walls; and so the walls of our house had in them the flesh and the blood of the people of the country.
To make mud for walls, a great heap of ant-worked earth is built up and wetted. Then the feet of the builders squelch it into the right consistency. Also, in this case, the feet of my brother and myself, who were small children.
To lay the mud on the poles it is carried in petrol tins from the men who are softening it to the men who are plastering; great handfuls are taken up quickly from the tins, before it can dry out, and slapped on to the poles. Sometimes there are gaps between the poles too wide to hold the mud; and then handfuls of grass are caught up and inserted and worked in with the mud. The smell of this mud is fresh and sweet, if the water used is good, clean water.
Soon all the walls are covered with a thick, dark mud-skin; and this is quickly smoothed over with trowels or flat bits of tin. Now the house is a house and not a frame of tree-poles; for the walls cannot be seen through.
Next, the long, pale grass is cut from those parts of the farm where it grows best and tallest, and is laid in piles ready for the thatchers. It is laid swathe over swathe beginning from ridgepole and working downwards, and each swathe is tied into place with the bush-fibre. The grass is laid thick, 18 inches deep; and finally the loose, long tips that draggle almost to the ground are cut off straight and clean with long, sharpened bits of metal.
And now the roof of the house is a gleaming golden colour, laced with rose-pink and yellow; and so it stays until the rains of the first wet season dim the colours.
Meanwhile, the doors have been hung and the windows fitted; and this is not easy when the poles of the walls are likely to be uneven. Nor are those doors and windows ever likely truly to fit; for the wood of lintels and frames swells and contracts with the wetness and the dryness of the time of the year.
The floor is done last. More ant-heap earth is piled, and on it fresh cowdung; and it is wetted with the fresh blood of an ox and with water, and is stamped free of lumps. This mixture is laid all over the earth inside the house and smoothed down. It has a good, warm, sweet smell, even when it dries, which takes about a week.
Now the house is finished and can be lived in. The mud-skin of the walls has dried a pleasant light-grey, or a yellowish-grey. Or it can be colour-washed. The mud of the floor is dark and smooth and glossy. It can be left bare, or protected with linoleum, for after a time this kind of floor tends to scuff into holes and turns dusty, so linoleum is useful, though not as pleasant to look at as the bare, hard, shining earth-floor.
A pole-and-dagga house is built to stand for two, three, four years at most; but the circumstances and character of our family kept ours standing for nearly two decades. It did very well, for it had been built with affection. But under the storms and the beating rains of the wet seasons, the grass of the roof flattened like old flesh into the hollows and bumps of the poles under it; and sometimes the mud-skin fell off in patches and had to be replaced; and sometimes parts of the roof received a new layer of grass. A house like this is a living thing, responsive to every mood of the weather; and during the time I was growing up it had already begun to sink back into the forms of the bush. I remember it as a rather old, shaggy animal standing still among the trees, lifting its head to look out over the vleis and valleys to the mountains.
I wrote a poem once about a group of suburban town houses; which I could not have written had I not been brought up in such a house as I have described:
THE HOUSE AT NIGHT
That house grew there, self-compact;
And with what long hopeless love
I walked about, about –
To make the creature out.
First with fingers: grainy brick
That took its texture from the earth;
The roof, membranous sheath
On rafters stretched beneath.
Yet, though I held the thing as close
As child’s toy gathered in my hand –
Could shatter it or not;
No nearer truth I got.
Eluded by so frail a thing?
But if touch fails then sight succeeds.
But windows shadowed in
My face that peered within.
And through my shadowing face I saw
A room where someone lived, and there
The glow of hidden fire;
A secret, guarded fire.
Should I fail by closeness? Then
Move back and see the house from far,
Gathered among its kind,
No unit hard-defined.
And there a herd of houses! Each
Brooding darkly on its own,
Settled in the shade
That each small shape had made.
Till suddenly a mocking light
Flashed on from that one house I’d searched,
As if a beast had raised
His head from where he grazed.
And brilliant to my blinded face
As if with laughter openly,
These dazzling panes comprise
All dazzling gold eyes.
The house was built high, on a kopje that rose from a lower system of vleis and ridges. Looking from the windows you seemed on a level with the circling mountains, on a level with the hawks which wheeled over the fields.
My room was the third down from the top or end of the house; and it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window, and a door which I kept propped open with a stone. The stones on the kopje were not of the quartz which cropped up all over the farm, but tended to be flattened and layered, and were brown, a light, bright brown, and when they were wet with rain, yellowish. To the touch they were smooth and velvety, because of the dust surface. Such a stone I used to prop my door open, so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields, and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air with their stretched wings motionless. The great mountain ten miles off was the chrome mountain, scarred all over with workings; and it was part of the chain of hills and peaks over which the sun rose. The big field below the house was a mealie field. Newly ploughed it was rich reddish-brown, a sea of great, tumbling clods. From the path which ran along its edge, the field showed a pattern of clods that had fallen over from the plough-shares one after another, so that walking slowly beside it avenues opened and shut, lanes of sunlight and shadow. And each clod was like a rock, for the interest of its shape and colour: the plough-share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean, shining surface, iridescent, as if it had been oiled with dark oil.
And sometimes, from the height of the house, looking down, these clean, shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment so that a hundred acres of clods glittered darkly together, flashing off a sullen light; and at such times the hawks swerved off, high and away, frightened.
Then the harrows drove over the field, side by side, the heavy, shining oxen plunging and scrambling over the great earth-boulders; they drove over it again and again, till the beasts walked easily, setting their feet down in soft tilthed soil; and the field was flat, without shadows, an even reddish-brown. And so it stood a while, waiting for the rains. During this time the air was full of dust, for the wind-devils danced and played continuously over the field; and sometimes columns of whirling, fiery red dust mingled with fragments of last year’s mealie-stalks that glittered gold and silver, stood in the air higher than eye-level from the house; and the hawks were gone out of the dusty air into the clean air-currents over the far bush. Through the dust that shone a soft red at sunset and sunrise, the great soft-stepping oxen moved, two by two, in front of the planters; Afrikander oxen with their long, snaky horns; and behind the planting machines the small, white, flat seeds popped into the earth and were covered. The flocks of guinea-fowl moved down out of the bush at dawn and at sunset after those precious mealie-grains, flocks of sometimes fifty, a hundred, two hundred birds; and my brother and I, waiting in the bush with our rifles, saw them as industrious as farmyard birds over the hidden mealie-seeds.
Now the long tension of the dry season had built up into a crescendo of bad temper and irritability and anxiety that means the rains will come soon; and at night, lying in bed, I saw the lightning dance and quiver over the mountains while the thunder growled. The long stretches of bush and field were dark; this was the only time of the year the fields were dark, for all the light had gone into the electricity that darted along the edges of the cloud-masses.
And then, one night, I would wake and hear a rushing and a pouring and a rustling all around; the rains had come. Over my head the old thatch was soaking and swelling, and in the weak places the wet seeped through, so that from half a dozen patches of roof over my room came a soft dulcet pattering. I crept out from under the mosquito net to set basins and jugs to catch the drops; and looking out from the door into the wet darkness a battering of rain ricocheting up from the earth came as high as my waist so that I had to step back fast into dryness. But until the lightning drove down through the wet and broken cloud-masses it was dark; when the light came, it drove down the shining rods of white rain, and showed the trees crouching under the downpour and a thick dance of white raindrops like hailstones a foot deep all over the earth.
So I would go back to sleep, lulled by the roar of the rain outside and the splash of the roof-leaks into the basins. In the morning I was woken not by the warmth of the sun on my bed but by a new intenser glare of light on my eyelids: the air had been washed clean of smoke from the veld fires and of dust, and the skies had lifted high and bright, and the trees were green and clean. The sun had come close again, shining free and yellow direct on to the big field, which was now a dark, rich, sodden red, a clear, red space among rich, sodden foliage. The thatch was still dropping long stalactites of shining water, and it was as if the house was enclosed by a light waterfall.
By midday the wetness had been whirled up into the air in clouds of steam; the big field steamed and smoked; and it was as if one could feel the growth being sucked up out of the mealie-grains by the heat and the wet.
During the first days of the wet season the storms and the showers advanced and retreated, and we watched the drama from the kopje-top; the now rich green bush stretching all around for miles would be blotted out suddenly in one place by a grey curtain, or the clouds would open violently overhead, enclosing us in a grey, steaming downpour. Below, the field was already showing a sheen of green. From the path beside the field, walking, the field was again opening and shutting, but now in avenues of green. Each plant was an inch high, a minute, green, divided spear, as crisp as fresh lettuce, and in the heart of each a big, round, shining globule of water.
Now the farmer would be pleased if the rain stopped for a week or ten days, so as to drive the roots down into the earth and strengthen the plants. Sometimes he was obliged; and the field of mealies stood faintly wilting, limp with thirst. But however the rain fell, the green film over the dark earth thickened, so that soon there were a hundred acres of smooth, clear apple-green that shimmered and rippled under the hot sun.
In the moonlight, looking down, it was a dim green sea, moving with light.
Soon the plants put out their frothy white crests; in the moonlight there was foam on the sea; and in the daytime, when the winds were strong, the whole field swayed and moved like a tide coming in. At this time the hawks hung low over the field with bunched, ready claws, working hard, so that from the house you looked down on their wide, stiff wings.
The rainy season passed; and the brilliant green of the field dimmed, and the sound of the wind in it was no longer a wet, thick rustle, but more like the sound of an army of tiny spears. Soon all the field was a tarnished silvery-gold, and each mealie-plant was like a ragged, skeleton scarecrow, and the noise of the wind was an incessant metallic whispering.
From the house now the field could be seen populated with black, small figures, moving between the rows and laying them flat. Soon the dark, dry earth was bared again, patterned with mealie-stooks, each a small, shining pyramid; and all over the soil a scattered litter of soft, glinting, dead leaf and stalk. Then came the heavy wagons behind sixteen oxen led by the little black boy who pulled six inches in front of the tossing, curving, wicked horns, with the driver walking behind, yelling and flickering his long whiplash in the air over their backs.
The field was bare completely, the stooks stripped of maize-cobs, the stooks themselves carried off to make manure in the cattle-kraals. It was all rough, dark-red earth, softly glinting with mealie-trash. In came the ploughs, and again the earth fell apart into the great shining clods.
This cycle I watched from my bedroom door, when I was not absorbed by what went on in the room itself. For after a decade or so of weathering, the house had become the home of a dozen kinds of creature not human, who lived for the most part in the thatch of the roof.
Rats, mice, lizards, spiders and beetles, and once or twice snakes, moved through the thatch and behind the walls; and sometimes, when the oil-lamp was flickering low, which it did in a steady, leaping rhythm till it flared up and out – in a way which I am reminded of by the pedestrian-crossing lights in the street outside my window, flicking all night on my wall in London – sometimes, as the yellow glow sank, a pair of red eyes could be seen moving along the top of the wall under the thatch. A mouse? A snake perhaps? For some reason they seldom came down to the floor. Once I saw a pair of eyes shining in the light coming through the window from the moon, and called for my parents to kill what I was convinced was a snake, but it was a frog. In the wet season, the frogs from the vlei two miles away were so loud they drowned the perpetual singing of the night-crickets; and the irregular pattering of frogs on the floor of my room was something I learned to take no more notice of than the pattering of rain from leaks in the roof. It must not be imagined that I am a lover of wild life. I am frightened of all these creatures – or rather, of touching them by accident in the dark, or putting my foot on one; but if you live in a house which is full of them, then your area of safety contracts within it to the bed. I never went to bed without taking it completely apart to make sure nothing had got into the bedclothes; and once safely in, with the mosquito net tucked down, I knew that nothing could fall on me from the roof or crawl over me in the dark.
The family attitude towards the role of mosquito nets is illustrated by a dialogue I overheard between my parents in the next room.
It was the first rains of the season, and the roof had begun to leak in a dozen places. I had already lit my candle and set out the pails and basins; and I knew that my father was awake because I could see the fluctuating glow of his cigarette on the wall through the crack of the door which did not close properly.
I knew that he was waiting for my mother to wake up. At last I heard him say in a sort of hushed shout: ‘Maud, Maud, wake up!’ Nothing happened and the rain roared on.
‘Maud!’
She woke with a crash of the bedsprings. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I can hear that it’s raining.’
‘The roof’s really bad this year,’ he said. ‘Like a sieve.’
‘When the grass swells, it won’t be so bad.’
‘It’s worse than it was last year.’
‘We’ll get the thatching boy up in the morning,’ she said sleepily, and turned over.
‘But it’s raining,’ he said desperately.
‘Go to sleep.’
‘But it’s raining on me.’
‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just …’
‘Well then, go to sleep.’
‘But I’m only just …’
‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
‘Almost anything, I should think.’
‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
A stir in my mother’s bed.
‘Shhhhh,’ my father would say hastily. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Or: ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘You know the centre of the earth is all molten, so they say?’
‘Well?’
‘Suppose they sank down a borehole and tapped it. Power. Much more effective than all these dams and things. Do you think they have thought of that yet?’
‘Bound to.’
‘You’re not much good, are you? No imagination. Not a scrap of imagination between the lot of you, that’s your trouble.’
Walls are by nature and definition flat; and having lived for so long in London, when I hear the word wall I see a flat surface, patterned or coloured smooth.
But the wall that faced my bed was not flat.
When the workmen had flung on the mud, naturally it was a little bumpy because no matter how you smooth on mud over poles, if there is a knot on the pole where a branch was chopped off, or if the pole had a bit of a bend in it, then the mud settled into the shape of bump and hollow. Sometimes, because of the age of the wall, a bit of mud had fallen out altogether and had had to be replaced, much to my regret, for the exposed poles showed themselves riddled with borer holes and other interesting matters. Once there was a mouse-nest in the space between two poles. There were five tiny pink mice which fitted easily into about an inch of my palm. The mother mouse ran away, and I diluted cow’s milk and tried to drop it off the end of a bit of cotton into the minute mouths. But a drop is always a drop; and for a baby mouse as if someone had flung a bucket of milk into its face. I nearly drowned those mice, trying to work out a way to make a drop of milk mouse-size. But it was no use, they died; and the jagged space in the wall was filled in with new mud.
The wall had been colour-washed a yellowish-white; but for some reason I have forgotten, after the brown mud had been filled in, it was not painted over, so that there was a brown patch on my wall.
I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red. The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.
High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to fragments of mud from the wall flopping down on to the floor.
And if the wall was in a continual state of disintegration and repair, an irregular variegated surface of infinite interest, then the floor was not at all the flat and even surface of convention.
Long ago, the good, hard surface of dung, mud and blood had been protected by linoleum; and this in its turn had hollowed and worn as the earth beneath had hollowed or heaved because of the working of roots or the decay of old roots. A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season. There was a crack in the mud there; the linoleum began to bulge upwards, and then split; and out came a pale, sickly, whitey-yellowish shoot which immediately turned a healthy green. We cut it off; but it sprouted up once or twice every wet season. As soon as the rains stopped, the shoot sank back, sullen and discouraged until next year, biding its time. One year I decided not to cut it. The first thing every morning I put my head out from under the mosquito net, over the edge of the bed, to see how the shoot was getting along. Very soon it was a small, green bush, pushing up against the wire of the mattress. The next thing, it would have split the mattress as it had split the linoleum. I moved the bed, thinking it would be attractive to have a tree growing in the middle of my bedroom, but my mother would have none of it. She had it chopped down, and a lot of fresh mud laid and stamped hard and flat. Next season the shoot came up at the side between the fresh bit of floor and the old, near the wall. It came pushing up with a watch clutched in its leaves. This was because my father, who had many theories about life, had a theory about watches. Foolish, he said, to buy watches costing 5 or 10 guineas which, being delicate and expensive, were bound to break soon. Better to buy a dozen turnip watches at a time, at 5s. each, from the Army and Navy Stores; and then when they broke it would not matter. He ordered a dozen watches, but they never broke: they were indestructible. As a result we had watches propped all over the house; and I had one by my bed. When it fell into a crack in the mud, I did not bother, because there were plenty more. But it reappeared in the first rains of that year, from the mud of the floor, held in the green arms of the little tree, like a Dali picture.
The only creatures that were really a threat to this house were the white ants. All that part of the country was full of ant-heaps. They can be 10, 20 feet high. After the rains, a grass-covered peak of earth which has looked dead will suddenly sprout up an extra foot or so overnight of new red granulated earth, like the turrets and pinnacles of a child’s fairy castle.
A good, hard kick will send the new earth flying and expose a mass of tunnels and galleries leading down far, far into the earth. There is always water under ant-heaps. People digging wells look for a good, old, well-established ant-heap. They follow down the tunnels. Sixty feet, a hundred feet, sometimes deeper, they are bound to come on water.
There was an ant-heap in front of the house, and another to one side; most of the time the ants remained there, but occasionally they sent outriders into the house.
On my white bedroom wall, for instance, would appear a red winding gallery, like an artery, irregularly branching. These galleries were wet at first, and granular, because each particle of earth is brought in the mouth of an ant. It is a mistake to wipe these galleries off while they are still wet, for all you achieve is a smear of red earth and crushed ants on the wall. Once dry, they can be easily brushed off, leaving only a faint, pinkish mark on the white. It is exciting to see a new gallery where none existed three hours before, and to shrink yourself ant-size and imagine yourself scurrying along under fragrant tunnels of fresh, wet earth.
It was the ants, of course, who finally conquered, for when we left that house empty in the bush, it was only a season before the ant-hills sprouted in the rooms themselves, among the quickly sprouting trees, and the red galleries must have covered all the walls and the floor. The rains were heavy that year, beating the house to its knees. And we heard that on the kopje there was no house, just a mound of greyish, rotting thatch, covered all over with red ant-galleries. And then in the next dry season a big fire swept up from the bush at the back, where the kopje fell sharp and precipitous over rocks into the big vlei, and there was nothing left of the house. Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.
One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.
Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush – supposing then that the house was still there after all?
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live.
Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.
It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls – I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.
One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.
On the left stretched some lower hills. There appeared a small white vapour glistening in the moonlight in a gap between the peaks. Over the edge of the gap came a wisp of white cloud, a small tendril, curling down. Then the sky on that side was a whirl of moonlit mist, and instead of one curling finger, cloud came pouring down and through the gap like a flood of celestial milk. It sank as it came, covering first the flank of the mountain, then blotting out the lights of the houses on that side. The lights went out swiftly, and the mist came pouring steadily in, and soon half of the city had gone, and the sky on that side was a high bank of white and shining cloud. Then all the city was gone and the ships and the sea, and below a great white floor of moonlit cloud heaved and rose, and over on the right side the stars were dimming. Then there was cloud overhead, and cloud at my feet, rising. The fir trees just below sank in mist till only their black tops showed. As the cold dampness came up, the trees went.
It took only ten minutes, from the time that the city lay open and glittering to the time when it had gone, gone completely.
And so, when this dream began to recur, together with the dream of the heap of red, sinking earth and dead grass with the trees growing through it, I first restored the house, and then forced the mist back, rolled it back off the city and the sea and the lighted ships and back through the gap in the mountains. It took a long time, but at last the city was free and illuminated again.
3 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.
I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.
‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can – if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’
Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.
I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.
At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.
I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.
And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.
The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.
‘In short,’ we concluded, ‘we are seeing a process whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’
But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.
After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.
My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.
But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.
Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.
That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.
Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen – driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.
Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.
That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.
What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man for all that, because in this country there is no class feeling, only money feeling.’
Again, just as America is permeated with the values and attributes of the two groups of people supposedly non-assimilable – the Negroes and the Jews – so the white people here who think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, but the qualities they ascribe to the Africans are inevitably absorbing those qualities.
It is a society without roots – is that why it has no resistance to Americanism? Or is being rootless in itself American?
The myths of this society are not European. They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman homemaking in lonely and primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents; the simple and brave savage defeated after gallant fighting on both sides; the childlike and lovable servant; the devoted welfare-worker spending his or her life uplifting backward peoples.
Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa.
On that first morning I went shopping to try to get the feel and atmosphere of the place.
First into a vegetable shop. Shopping has certainly changed: now the counters are refrigerated, self-service shops everywhere, and above all Coca-Cola has moved in. The Coca-Cola sign is on every second building, from the high new blocks of offices and flats to the scruffy little store in the Native Reserve.
In the vegetable shop were three white people and two Africans. Two of the white people were serving behind the counter; then two African men, with shopping baskets. Then me. I waited my turn behind the two Africans to see what would happen. The woman behind the counter eyed the Africans coldly, and then in the cool, curt voice I know so well said: ‘Can’t you see the white missus, boy? Get to the back.’ They moved back, I moved in and was served. Another white woman came in; she was being served as I went out. The Africans patiently waited.
And for the thousandth time I tried to put myself in the place of people who are subjected to this treatment every day of their lives. But I can’t imagine it: the isolated incident, yes; but not the cumulative effect, year after year, every time an African meets a white person, the special tone of voice, the gesture of impatience, the contempt.
In the next shop, which was a bakery, a young girl in jeans, striped sweat-shirt and sandals, was greeted by a boy in sweat-shirt and jeans. ‘Hiya, Babe!’ ‘Hiya, Johnny.’ ‘See you tonight?’ ‘Ya, see you at the flicks.’ ‘Bye.’ ‘Bye.’
The main street is crammed with cars, with white women drifting along, talking, or standing in groups, talking. They wear cool, light dresses, showing brown bare arms and legs. The dresses are mostly home-made, and have that look of careful individual fit that one sees in the clothes of women in Italy and Spain.
These are the women of leisure; and, having been one of them for so long – or at least expected to play the role of one – I know that their preoccupations are in this order: the dress they are making for themselves or their daughter, the laziness of their servants, and an infinite number of personal problems. Or, as the Americans would say, Problems.
Their husbands are now busily engaged in getting on and doing well for themselves in the offices; and their children are at school. The cookboy is cooking the lunch. They will take back the car laden with groceries and liquor, dress-lengths, bargains. Then there will be a morning tea-party. Then lunch with husband and family. Then a nap. Then afternoon tea, and soon, sundowners. Then the pictures. And then, bed. And, in the words of a personal servant of a friend of mine: ‘The white man goes to bed, he makes love, twice-a-week, bump, bump, go-to-sleep.’
Though this did not occur to me until later, at the end of my trip, when my mind had cleared of the fogs induced by the word Partnership, is it possible that the white men of Central Africa are so anxious to create a class of African in their own image, equally preoccupied with getting on and doing well for themselves – is it possible that one of the reasons for it is that other anxious white myth, the potent and sexually heroic black man? Is it possible that (of course in a very dark place in their minds) they are thinking: ‘Yah, you black bastard! You start worrying about money, too! That’ll fix you!’
A group of these slow-moving, heavy-bodied women turned: one advanced towards me. Another school-friend. ‘My old man heard it from his boss, and he heard it from a friend at the airport, so I knew you were back. Things have changed here, don’t you think so? I hope you are going back to write something nice about us for a change. Hell, man, what have we done to you? You were always doing well for yourself before you left, weren’t you, so what are you getting excited about? Hell, man, what have we done? I’ve had my cookboy for fifteen years, since I got married, and I’ve always treated him right. And what do you think of the lights of London? I was there last spring, did you know? But we went to Paris. Man, I don’t know what they see in Paris. It cost ten pounds for a cabaret and a bottle of some champagne and some night-life.’
‘They were cheating you,’ I said.
‘Is that so? Well, next time we are going to Johannesburg. We’ve got just as good night-life there. And the Belgian Congo, too. They’ve got some night-life just as good as Paris. And if my old man wants to go and see some nudes, then he can go and see them there, because those nudes in Paris haven’t got anything we haven’t got. And it only costs half. Seen our new nightclub? Seen our new restaurant? Jesus, we’ve got as good here as you’ve got in London, I’m telling you. Things have really changed since you’ve left, they have. It’s a fact.’
After this conversation, I walked down First Street. On the pavement, sitting with their feet comfortably in the gutter, five African women, knitting, watching life pass by. They looked relaxed and happy. They wore good print dresses, crocheted white caps, sandals. Clothes have changed much for the better in a decade. Gone are the old blue-printed cottons, which were almost a uniform for African women. A man I know who imports for the African trade said: ‘The days of “Kaffir-truck” are over. Now we import quantities of cheap, bright stuff for the native trade. But already some Africans buy as good quality as the Europeans. In five or six years they won’t be manufacturing special goods for the African trade.’
In Meikle’s lounge, a place where I spent a good part of my adolescence, I drank beer and watched what went on. Women having morning tea, farmers in for the tobacco auctions, everything the same.
At the next table, two women, an American and an Englishwoman. It appeared they were both making trips through Africa, had met in Durban, were travelling back to England together for company. They knew each other previously. Now they were discussing some mutual friend who, it seemed, had come to no good.
AMERICAN: So now I don’t know what he’ll do. You can’t start all over at fifty.
ENGLISH: It seems such a shame. And what can it have been? Yes, of course he always drank too much, but why suddenly … I mean, he never drank too much.
AMERICAN: Well, dear, he had problems.
ENGLISH: But no worse than usual? And there was that nice wife of his. She always pulled him together when – I mean, I remember once, when they were visiting us in London, he was rather depressed, and she pulled him together. It was not that they needed to worry about money.
AMERICAN: He was basically unstable, that’s all.
ENGLISH: But suddenly? There must have been something definite, something must have happened. Of course, people don’t drink too much for nothing. But everything must have suddenly piled up? Perhaps he was working too hard. He always did, didn’t he?
AMERICAN: Now Betty, there’s no point in going on. He had a character defect.
ENGLISH (slightly irritated, but persistent): I dare say, but his character couldn’t suddenly have got all that much more defective? There must have been some reason?
AMERICAN: I keep telling you, he was psychologically maladjusted.
ENGLISH (after a pause, drily): You always put your finger straight on to a thing, dear.
AMERICAN (very faintly suspicious): What? But what more is there to say?
Walking out of the hotel I was looking for the lavatory where it used to be. Coming towards me, a middle-aged woman. I used to know her well. ‘Where’s the lavatory these days?’ I asked. ‘Really, dear!’ she said. ‘It’s the powder-room since you left. Third door on the right.’
At the post office, it says Natives and Europeans. I went to my part of the building, and watched the long queues of Africans patiently waiting their turn to be served.
Then I went to get a copy of my driving licence, which I had lost. The office was in makeshift buildings on a waste lot; the growth of administration due to Federation has spread government departments everywhere there is room for them.
There was a long queue of about 150 white people, and another parallel queue of black people. The sun was burning down, and puffs of pinkish dust settled from the shifting, bored feet. Pleasant to see these sunburned skins, the red-brown, glistening, healthy sunburn of the highveld; pleasant to stand in the hot sun, knowing it would not withdraw itself capriciously in ten minutes behind cloud.
In front of me in the queue were two young farmers in for the day. Farm-talk: prices, cost of native labour; the Government favoured the townsfolk. This at least hadn’t changed at all. They wore the farm uniform – short khaki shorts, showing yards of brown leg, bush shirts, short socks.
Time passed, nearly an hour of it; the queue had hardly moved forward.
They were now talking of one Jerry, and here, it seemed, was a matter they approved of, for the fatalistic shrug of the Government-oppressed countryman had given way to the earnest manner of two children swapping confidences.
‘I’m with you. Jerry is a good type. Not like some magistrates. We are lucky to have him in our district.’
‘Fair’s fair with Jerry. He warns you – then he gets you, square and legal.’
‘That’s what I say. He came to my place one sundown – he said, “Now look here, man, that’s the third time I saw you doing seventy through the township. Next time I’ll see there’s a fine.”’
‘Then he will. Because he does what he says. He sent a chit around to me. “Tom,” he said, “it was nearly eighty you were doing today. You only have to slow down to thirty for a mile through the village. Is that so much to ask?” Yes, that’s what he wrote to me.’
‘Yes, that’s Jerry all right. He said to me, “There’s a school, too. The place is full of kids. Use your head,” he said. “Think how you’d feel if you got a couple of those kids. Use your heart.”’
‘Yes, that’s what he said to me when he came to see me. He gave me fair warning. Next day, that was yesterday, I got a summons. I was doing eighty, mind.’ Here he paused and looked with dark solemnity at the other. ‘Eighty. So I was summoned. Fair’s fair.’
‘Yes, you can always trust Jerry to do what’s right.’
‘Yes, he never lets you get away with it. Not more than what’s fair.’
Which conversation may, perhaps, throw light on another: three weeks later, a friend of mine who inspects African schools, in that voice of exasperated affection which is common among liberal members of the administration who have to work constantly against their own beliefs, ‘Damn it, man, they’re mad. Say what you like. Yes, all right, we’re mad, but they’re madder. There are times I could throw the whole thing up. You know what? There’s a teacher. He’s been swotting and struggling for that ruddy Standard IV certificate for years, and then he got it, and he was in a kraal school at last, a big man with all his six years’ schooling behind him and all’s hunkydory. So then I went out to inspect. I found him there in that pitiful, bloody little school, next door to a whacking great church, needless to say, and he had his sixty kids sitting on the mud floor in neat little rows all chanting the ABC in Shona, and there he was drunk as a lord and staggering around like a sick chicken. I said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed, Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savings for fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at Jackson’s farm, and I lay awake all night tortured – man, but tortured! – thinking of that poor silly bugger and his dad’s life savings. Because, my God, if I was stuck out on that Reserve 150 miles from anywhere on £6 a month I’d drink myself to death in a month, man. Next morning I woke up more dead than alive, having decided I was going to clear out of this bloody country – no, really, I can’t stand it, I’m going – when who should I see but Joshua on his bicycle? He had cycled 20 miles since dawn through the bush with a chicken. The chicken was for me. You could have knocked me down with a – I said to him, “Damn it, you poor fool, Joshua, damn it! I’ve given you the sack, I’ve ruined your life, now you’ll have to go off and dig a ditch somewhere, and you bring me a chicken. Have a heart,” I said, “don’t do that to me.” “Sir,” he said. “It came into my heart last night to bring you a chicken. It is for you, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that off he went back to his bicycle. So I brought the chicken home, and here was my wife with psychological troubles, and my kids, damned spoilt brats who are so blasé and full of experience from the pictures they can’t get a thrill out of anything, and the big baas, that’s me. And the happy family, we ate that poor bastard’s chicken, and I don’t know why it didn’t choke us.’
‘Now, now, darling,’ said his wife, ‘you must keep a sense of proportion.’
After two and a half hours I had reached the door of the office. It seems that this was the time of the year for renewing licences, and so the whole countryside moves into town for that purpose, and patiently queues behind the single counter that does duty for the ordinary run of business during the rest of the year. Then I discovered I was in the wrong queue, so I started again. At last, I was told I must go to an inner office; and the official invited me to do so through an inside passage, because otherwise I would have to pass through a crowd of natives, and I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?
Inside there was a nice girl, who in the best tradition of the country, which is to have no respect for institutions, said, ‘Well, I can’t help you, because that silly lot of MPs we’ve got have absent-mindedly passed a law saying that everyone who loses his licence must take another driving test. I expect when they’ve noticed what they’ve done, they’ll change it back again, but in the meantime I think you’ve had it, because there’s queues miles long of people waiting to be tested for new licences and I can only hope there are some MPs among them.’
‘But last time I lost my licence,’ I said, ‘all I did was to go to the office and they looked up a file and gave me a new one.’
‘That was in the good old days. That was before Federation. No, things aren’t what they used to be. And besides, it seems the files have got mislaid.’
So I went back to the house and telephoned the police at Banket where sometime in the ’thirties I was given my licence by a young policeman who was not interested in the quality of my driving. But they said the records were always destroyed after five years, and they couldn’t help me – the place I wanted was that office in town.
I fell into despair; but after reflecting that it was unlikely that the whole character – or, as the Americans would say, the mores – of the country had changed in seven years, I walked back to the licensing office, past the white queue that still waited, through the black queue, into the inner office, and said I had lost my driving licence. Whereupon a young man who had either not heard of the law just passed by Parliament, or who didn’t care, charged me 1s. and gave me a substitute licence. And so the magnificent empty roads of the country were open to me.
Down the empty road to Umtali we drove. It is the road running east to the Portuguese border – a road that drives straight up one rise, down the other side, up again; first through hills tumbled all over with granite boulders like giant pebbles balancing on each other, sometimes so lightly it seems a breath of wind would topple them apart; then through mountains; for nearly 150 miles, and one looks down on Umtali from above, a small, pretty, sleepy town that never changes, in a hollow in the mountains.
It is hot there, very hot and steamy. This is not the high, dry climate of the bushveld; it is tropical, and after a few days there one becomes languid and disinclined to move. I know because I have stayed there for long stretches three times. Because those times were separated by periods of years, I know three Umtalis, and on that day I went back, dropping fast down the mountainside into it, those three towns remained separate from each other and from the town I saw then.
The first time I was eleven and I had never stayed away from home before except for boarding school. It was in a tiny house at the very bottom of Main Street, which is three miles long; the upper end of Main Street was respectable and rich, but the lower end was poor and near the railway. The house was of wood – wooden walls and floor, and lifted high off the earth on a platform, in the old style. It was in a small, fenced garden, crammed with pawpaw trees, avocado pear trees, mangoes, guavas; and around the fence nasturtiums grew as thick and bright and luxuriant as swamp-flowers. That garden quivered with heat and dampness. Under the thick shade of the mangoes the earth was sticky with fallen, decaying fruit and green with moss. The house was crammed, too; it was a large family; but I cannot remember the other children, only Cynthia, who was fourteen and therefore very grown up in my eyes. The others were all boys; and the two women, Cynthia and her mother, despised the men of the family utterly and all the time. Mrs Millar was a big, dark, ruddy-skinned woman with heavy black hair and black, full eyes. She was like a big laying hen. Cynthia was the same, a dark, big girl, full-bosomed, with fierce red cheeks. The father was a little man, wispy and ineffectual and pathetically humorous, making bad jokes against his wife’s bitter scorn of him because he had a small job as a clerk in a hardware shop. They were gentlefolk, so they said all the time; and this job and what he earned made it impossible to keep up the standards they wanted. And certainly they were very poor. I had always imagined our family was; but my mother’s generous scattiness over money was luckily always too strong for my father’s prudence; so that no matter how he laboured over the accounts, emerging on a Sunday morning with incontrovertible proof that we could not afford this or that, she would look at him with the stubborn wistfulness of a deprived small child and say: ‘Why don’t you get some out of the bank?’ ‘But, damn it, you have to put money into a bank before you can get it out.’ ‘Then get a loan from the Land Bank.’ ‘But we’ve already had a loan; we can’t have any more.’ ‘Nonsense!’ she would say at last with determination. ‘Nonsense!’
Not so in the Millar household, where Mamma would tell the guilty family the exact cost of the meal they must be thankful they were about to receive – they were religious. Or rather, she and her daughter were. I had imagined I was persecuted by religion, and had rebelled against it; but religion with us never intruded too uncomfortably into practical life.
But the difference between the Millars and ourselves that made me most uneasy was this insistence on being gentlefolk. It was a word that I had never heard before out of novels.
Once again, it was the fortunate clash of temperaments between my parents that saved us from it, for while my mother was nothing if not conscious of having come down in the world, my father was oblivious to all such things, and had, in fact, emigrated from England to be rid of the whole business of being respectable. And so, when she was in one of her organizing moods, he would merely listen, with irritable patience, until she had finished, and say: ‘O Lord, old girl, do as you like, but leave me alone.’
But the little house near the railway lines, which was shaken day and night by the shunting trains, almost under the great water-tanks which dripped and splashed over the mango trees – that house which would have been a perfect setting for one of Somerset Maugham’s tropical dramas was, in fact, saturated with the atmosphere of coy, brave, decaying gentility that finds its finest expression in Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. Yet there were two women in that house to, I think, five males.
Mother and daughter would sew, knit, patch, darn, sitting together on the verandah, a unit of intense femininity, exchanging confidences in a low voice, while father and sons would hastily slip out of the house, father to the bar, sons to their friends’ houses.
And when the father returned, fuddled and apologetic, mother and daughter would raise their eyes from their sewing, exchange understanding glances, and let out in unison a deep, loud sigh, before dropping them again to their work, while the little man slunk past.
I was appalled and fascinated by the talk of the two females, for such confidences were not possible in our house. I would sit, listening, burning with shame, for I was not yet in a position to contribute anything of my own.
I was there six weeks. At night I used to lie in bed across the tiny room from Cynthia and listen while father and mother argued about money in the room next door. One could hear everything through the wooden wall.
‘Poor, poor, poor mother,’ Cynthia would say in a burning passionate whisper.
I would fall off to sleep, and wake to see her in the light that fell through the window past the moonflowers and the mango trees, leaning up in bed on her elbow, listening, listening. Listening for what? It reminded me of how I used to listen avidly to her talk with her mother. Then a train rumbled in, and stood panting on the rails outside, the water rushed in the tanks, and Cynthia lay down again. ‘Go to sleep,’ she would hiss in a cross, low voice. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Before I slept I would think of my home, the big mud-walled, grass-roofed house on the kopje where the winds came battering and sweeping, and where I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing Chopin and Grieg two rooms off, against the persistent thudding of the tom-tom from the native village down the hill. When I woke the piano would still be sending out its romantic, nostalgic music and the drums still playing. I would imagine how in the compound the people were dancing around the big fire between the little grass-roofed huts while the drummers sat making their interminably repeated and varied rhythms on and on. But the other picture in my mind was not of my mother as she was now, middle-aged and tired, but of an early memory: her long, dark hair knotted low on her neck, bare-shouldered under the light of the candles set at either end of the piano, playing with shut eyes as she, in her turn, remembered something far off and unreachable. And the drums were beating, even then, as long ago as that.
The drums beat through all the nights of my childhood stronger even than the frogs and the crickets, ultimately stronger even than the piano, for when I woke in the morning with the sun standing over the chrome mountain, a single, tired, indefatigable drum was still tapping down the hill. And there came a time when my mother could not trouble to get the piano tuned.
But waking in the house near the railway lines, sweating with heat, half-sick with the sweet smell of the decaying fruit and vegetation outside, it was to see Cynthia and her mother standing together in the corner of the room, hands folded, heads bent in prayer. Then, with a deadly look at her husband Mrs Millar would say in her womanly resigned voice, ‘You can’t have bacon and eggs – not on what you earn.’
I was badly homesick. I hated that house. I longed for my cool, humorous, stoical mother, who might sentimentally play Chopin, but would afterwards slam down the piano lid with a flat: ‘Well, that’s that.’ I wanted, too, to lay certain questions before my father.
When I got home I went in search of him, managed to distract his attention from whatever philosophical problem was engaging him at the time, and remarked that I had had a lovely time at the Millars’.
‘That’s good,’ he said, and gave me a long, sideways look.
‘They have grace before every meal,’ I said.
‘Good Lord,’ he said.
‘Mr Millar goes to the bar every night and comes home drunk, and Mrs Millar prays for his soul.’
‘Does she now?’
There was a pause, for I was very uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘Mrs Millar came on to the verandah one morning, and said in a loud voice to Cynthia …’
‘Cynthia? Who’s she?’
‘Of course you know, she’s been here to stay.’
‘Has she? I suppose so. Lord, you don’t mean that girl – very well, go on.’
‘She said in a loud voice to Cynthia, “I’ve been praying, Cynthia. O Cynthia, our horrible, horrible bodies!”’
I was hot all over. Never had anything made me as uncomfortable and wretched as that moment. But my father had shot me a startled look and gone red. He struggled for a moment, then dropped his head on the chair-back and laughed.
I said: ‘It wasn’t funny. It made me sick.’
‘Lord, lord, lord,’ said my father, lifting his head to give me an apologetic, embarrassed look between roars. ‘Lord, I can see the old hen.’
‘Very well,’ I said, and walked away with dignity.
I was furious with him for laughing; I had known he would laugh. I had come home a week earlier than was arranged to hear that laugh. And so I was able to put that unpleasant household behind me and forget it. My father could always be relied on in these matters.
Living down by the railway line, the upper part of the town was represented by three houses where the Millars, mother and daughter, with the painful writhings of inverted snobbery, permitted themselves to be accepted – as they saw it. The inhabitants of the three houses were certainly innocent of the condescension ascribed to them. Living with the Millars, I knew the lower mile of Main Street and its shops, particularly the Indian shops which had cheap cottons and silks from the East. Mrs Millar would send Cynthia and myself up to Shingadia’s for half a yard of satin and a reel of sewing silk, and Cynthia walked proud and slow up Main Street, and into the Indian shop, her eyes busy for signs of the enemy, those girls who bought at the big stores farther up the street, and would certainly despise her if they saw her in Shingadia’s.
And if one of these envied girls came in sight, as likely as not on her way to Shingadia’s, she would turn to face her, head high, dark eyes burning, waiting to say in the voice of an exiled duchess: ‘I have come to buy mother a yard of crêpe de Chine.’ Then, the encounter over, we would walk back, and I waited for that moment when she would sigh and say: ‘It’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you.’
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Doris Lessing
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a compelling account of her return to the land in which she grew up.In 1956, some seven years after departed for England, Doris Lessing returned home to Southern Rhodesia. It was a journey that was both personal – a revisiting of a land and people she knew – and, inevitably, political: Southern Rhodesia was now part of the Central African Federation, where the tensions between colonialism and self-determination were at their most deeply felt.‘Going Home’ is a book that combines journalism, reportage and memoir, humour, farce and tragedy; a book fired by the love of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers for a country and a continent that she felt compelled to leave.
Copyright (#uc37f56b1-de3b-5440-bb74-278c20415c88)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1957
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1957, 1968
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006545156
Ebook Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN: 9780007499830
Version: 2017-02-06
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ae31001-64f4-51b4-8189-4021605e2b34) Title Page Copyright 1 (#ulink_e2971c45-f569-541c-9007-d385b9f29fb3)2 (#ulink_46a16f0a-7a3e-5557-a24d-f012dde71c59)3 (#ulink_b9d0e080-7342-5e9e-992f-5ef6f9759ee5)4 (#litres_trial_promo)5 (#litres_trial_promo)6 (#litres_trial_promo)7 (#litres_trial_promo)8 (#litres_trial_promo)9 (#litres_trial_promo)10 (#litres_trial_promo)11 (#litres_trial_promo)12 (#litres_trial_promo)13 (#litres_trial_promo)Eleven Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)Twenty-six Years Later (#litres_trial_promo)Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Other Books by Doris Lessing (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher
1 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider’s egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling flocks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.
Here is where the sun regulates living in a twelve-hour cycle. Here the sun is a creature of the same stuff as oneself; powerful and angry, but at least responsive, and no mere dispenser of pale candlepower.
When I was first in England I was disturbed all the time in my deepest sense of probability because the sun went down at four in the middle of an active afternoon, filling a cold, damp, remote sky with false pathos. Or, at eleven in the morning, instead of blazing down direct, a hand’s-span from centre, it would appear on a slant and in the wrong place, at eight o’clock position, a swollen, misshapen, watery ghost of a thing peering behind chimney-pots. The sun in England should be feminine, as it is in Germany.
During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now. Recently I found some pages I wrote then: it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year; endless miles of heavy, damp, dead building on a dead, sour earth, inhabited by pale, misshapen, sunless creatures under a low sky of grey vapour.
Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home. Now London is to me the pleasantest of cities, full of the most friendly and companionable people. But that year of horrible estrangement from everything around me was real enough. It was because, bred in Africa, I needed to be in direct physical touch with what I saw; I needed the cycle of hot, strong light, of full, strong dark.
One does not look at London, but at a pretty house, a glimpse of trees over rooftops, the remains of an old street, a single block of flats. The eye learns to reject the intolerable burden of the repetition of commercialization. It is the variegated light of London which creates it; at night, the mauvish wet illumination of the city sky; or the pattern of black shadow-leaves on a wall; or, when the sun emerges, the instant gaiety of a pavement.
On that morning over Africa I learned that I had turned myself inwards, had become a curtain-drawer, a fire-hugger, the inhabitant of a cocoon. Easy enough to turn outwards again: I felt I had never left at all. This was my air, my landscape, and above all, my sun.
Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But – a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that the love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps.
On this trip home a man with whom I had been arguing bitterly about politics said to me suddenly: Where did I come from? I said Lomagundi. He knew it well, he said. He liked the highveld, he remarked, defensively. For the highveld is reaches of pale, dry grass, studded with small, dry, stunted trees – wide, empty, barren country. I said yes, and the Kalahari, too. Yes, he said; and the Karroo. The Kalahari and the Karroo are stages nearer desert of the highveld, full of bitter shrubs, cacti, lizards and hot stones. They are enormous, with a scarifying, barren beauty. They, too, are almost empty.
For a moment we shared the understanding of people who have been made by the same landscape.
But I am not sure whether this passion for emptiness, for space, only has meaning in relation to Europe. Africa is scattered all over with white men who push out and away from cities and people, to remote farms and outposts, seeking solitude. But perhaps all they need is to leave the seethe and the burden of Europe behind.
I remember an old prospector came to our farm one evening when I was a child. He had spent all his life wandering around Africa. He said he had just gone home to England for a holiday of six months; but left at the end of a week. Too many people, he said; a tame little country, catching trains and keeping to time-tables. He had learned his lesson; he would never leave the highveld again. ‘People,’ he said, shouting at himself – for he was certainly arguing against his own conscience – ‘people are mad, wanting to change Africa. Why don’t they leave it alone? A man can breathe here, he can be himself. And,’ he went on, getting angrier and angrier, ‘when we’ve filled Africa up, what then? The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it – millions of people all crowded together, fighting and struggling, but behind them, somewhere, enormous, empty places. I tell you what I think,’ he said, ‘when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.’
That’s what he said. I remember every word, for he made a great impression on me.
Next morning he went away, and we heard he had gone up over the Zambezi escarpment into the bush with his bearer. On the verge of one of the hills overlooking the river he built a hut and thatched it, and settled to live there, entirely alone. But he got black-water fever, and the news travelled back, as news does in these parts, and at last reached his wife in the city, who – a bush-widow these many years – got herself a lorry and went off after him until she reached the end of the road, and then inquired of some passing Africans who took her to the hill where her husband was. Between one bout of fever and another, he sat on a candle-box under a tree, an old man of fifty or so, looking at the gorges of the river and at the hills. Africans from a neighbouring village had set water and some meat by him, and were waiting at a little distance in the shade of a tree. He was very ill.
‘And now,’ said she, ‘enough of this nonsense: it’s time you came back and let me look after you.’
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I want to die alone.’
‘But there’s no need to die. You’ll get better in hospital.’
A look of revulsion came over his face, which she understood too well. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you myself.’
He turned his face from her, and looked out and down to the river. And so she went to examine the inside of the mud hut which had nothing in it but a case of whisky and a roll of bedding and some quinine and a rifle; and then went over to the young men, who got to their feet as she approached.
‘Now, look after the baas nicely,’ she said.
‘Yes, Nkosikaas,’ they said.
She walked away down along the Kaffir paths several miles to the road, climbed back into the lorry and drove back to town. And when he died, which was several days later, the people of the village buried him and sang their mourning songs over him.
That was the story as we heard it from a group of young men travelling through our farm on their way to find work in the gold mines of the Rand.
It seems to me that this story of the man who preferred to die alone rather than return to the cities of his own people expresses what is best in the older type of white men who have come to Africa. He did not come to take what he could get from the country. This man loved Africa for its own sake, and for what is best in it: its emptiness, its promise. It is still uncreated.
Yet it is only when one flies over Africa that one can see it, as such solitary people do, as the empty continent. The figures are eloquent enough – that is, if one possesses the kind of mind that makes figures live. In Central Africa there are seven million Africans and two hundred thousand white people. It sounds quite a lot of people from one point of view, if one tries to imagine the word million in terms of a crowd of people. And if one has lived in a city there, one remembers the pressure of people. Yet it seems seven million people are nothing, not enough – this enormous area could hold hundreds of millions.
But now, steadily flying south for hour after hour, one sees forest, mountain and lake; river and gorge and swamp; and the great reaches of the flat, tree-belted grassland. The yellow flanks of Africa lie beneath the moving insect-like plane, black-maned with forest, twitching in the heat. A magnificent country, with all its riches in the future. Because it is so empty we can dream. We can dream of cities and a civilization more beautiful than anything that has been seen in the world before.
It was over Kenya that a subtle change of atmosphere announced we were now in white Africa. Two Africans sitting by themselves had a self-contained and watchful look. Perhaps they were reflecting on the implications of the fact that this being a South African plane the covers on the seats they used would have to be specially sterilized before re-use.
Until now the men making announcements over the loudspeaker had had the anonymous voices of officialdom. Now there was a new voice, unmistakably South African, stubbornly national. Jaunty and facetious, with the defensiveness of the Colonial who considers an attempt at efficiency as nothing but snobbishness, it began: ‘Well, ladies and gents, here I am; sorry about it, but I’m not a BBC announcer, but I’ll do my best. If you look down on your right now you’ll see the Aberdare Forest. You’ll understand why it took so long to bash the Mau Mau. See that thick bit over there? That’s where we got a whole bunch of them. Starved ’em out. Took six weeks.’ This man was not from Kenya, but he was white; and the problems of white Kenya were his, and – so he took for granted – ours too. He went on, swallowing his words, the ends of his sentences, most of the time inaudible. Once he clearly enunciated a whole series of sentences just to show that he could if he chose. ‘Down there is Masai country. Of course, I don’t know anything about the Masai, but they tell me the Masai are warriors. Or used to be. They like drinking blood and milk. They seem to like it. Or so I’m told. Of course, I don’t know anything about these things.’ Click, as the machine switched off, and we descended at Nairobi.
Nairobi airport is interesting for two things. One is that it is infested with cats of all shapes, colours and sizes. I have not seen so many cats since one year when my mother got into a mood where she could not bear to see a kitten drowned, so that very soon we had forty cats who almost drove us out of the house before we could bring ourselves to lay violent hands on them.
The other is that the lavatories are marked ‘European Type’ and ‘Non-European Type’. The word type, I suppose, is meant to convey to the critical foreign visitor that Non-Europeans prefer their own amenities. It was my first indication of how defensive the colour bar has become. Also, to what irrational extremes it will take itself under pressure. When I left no one thought ill of themselves for defending white civilization in whatever ways were suggested by pure instinct.
The two Africans sat in the restaurant at a table by themselves. The social colour bar is being relaxed here slightly. (The other day I asked an African from Kenya what he thought was the most important result of the war in Kenya; he replied grimly: ‘In some hotels they serve us with food and drink now.’)
It was at this point that I noticed the old attitudes asserting themselves in me again. If one went to sit at the same table, it would be something of a demonstration. Perhaps they would prefer not to be drawn attention to in the electric atmosphere of Kenya? Or perhaps … yes, I was certainly back home.
One of the reasons why I wanted to return was because so many people had asked me how it was I had been brought up in a colour-bar country and yet had no feeling about colour. I had decided that a lucky series of psychological chances must have made me immune. But it was surely impossible that I should be entirely unlike other people brought up in the same way. Therefore I was watching my every attitude and response all the time I was in Africa. For a time, the unconsciousness of a person’s colour one has in England persisted. Then the miserable business began again. Shaking hands becomes an issue. The natural ebb and flow of feeling between two people is checked because what they do is not the expression of whether they like each other or not, but deliberately and consciously considered to express: ‘We are people on different sides of the colour barrier who choose to defy this society.’ And, of course, this will go on until the day comes when self-consciousness can wither away naturally. In the meantime, the eyes of people of a different colour can meet over those formal collective hands, in a sort of sardonic appreciation of the comedies of the situation.
But what I did find was that while I am immune to colour feeling as such, I was sensitive to social pressures. Could it be that many people who imagine they have colour prejudice are merely suffering from fear of the Joneses? I dare say this is not an original thought, but it came as a shock to me.
In the Tropical Diseases Hospital in London, where I was last year for a few weeks, a middle-aged white woman was being treated in the same room. When she found there were dark-skinned doctors and patients, she suffered something not far off a nervous collapse. She got no sympathy at all from either nurses or her fellow patients about her dislike of being treated the same way as black people, so she became stiffly but suspiciously silent: bedclothes pulled up to her chin, like a shield, watching everyone around her as if they were enemies. And every bit of china she used, every fork or knife or spoon, was minutely examined for cracks or scratches. The presence of coloured people meant germs: germs live in cracks. Her worry about these utensils became an obsession. Before a meal, after she had sent back cups, plates, cutlery, several times to be changed, she would then wash each piece in the basin in strong disinfectant. Unable to express her dislike of coloured people through the colour bar, she fell back on the china. This is the real colour prejudice; it is a neurosis, and people who suffer from it should be pitied as one pities the mentally ill. But there is a deep gulf between this and being frightened of what the neighbours will say.
In writing this I am conscious of a feeling of fatigue and sterility, which is what I have to fight against as soon as I set foot in white Africa. For a long time I believed this was the result of being in a minority among one’s own kind, which means one has to guard against being on the defensive, which means one has to test everything one says and does against general standards of right or wrong that are contradicted all the time, in every way, by what goes on around one.
But I no longer believe this to be true. What I feel is a kind of boredom, an irritation, by all these colour attitudes and prejudices. There is no psychological quirk or justification or rationalization that is new or even interesting. What is terrible is the boring and repetitive nature of ‘white civilization’.
As soon as one sets foot in a white settler country, one becomes part of a mass disease; everything is seen through the colour bar.
‘The patient must get worse before he can get better.’ And I know this is a light phrase for human suffering and what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in frustration. I do not have to be told or made to feel what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in humiliation and frustration. I know it all.
But in thinking of the future rather than the bitter present, I believe I am one with the Africans themselves, who show their superiority to colour bars by their joyfulness, their good humour and their delight in living. People who imagine the ghettos of white-dominated countries to be dreary and miserable places know nothing about the nature of the African people.
Worse than the colour bars, which are more dangerous and demoralizing to the white people than to the black, for they live within a slowly narrowing and suffocating cage, like so many little white mice on a treadmill – worse than this is the fact that the Africans are being channelled into industrialization in such a way that what is good in European civilization cannot reach them. They are allowed to know only what is bad and silly. That is why I am so impatient that they should wrench themselves free before they have lost touch with their own rich heritage, before they have become exhausted by exploitation.
I long for the moment when the Africans can free themselves and can express themselves in new forms, new ways of living; they are an original and vital people simply because they have been forced to take the jump from tribalism to industrial living in one generation.
And yet – the stale patterns of white domination still exist. So because I was brought up in it I have a responsibility. And does that mean I must go on writing about it?
I have notebooks full of stories, plots, anecdotes, which at one time or another I was impelled to write. But the impulse died in a yawn. Even if I wrote them well – what then? It is always the colour bar; one cannot write truthfully about Africa without describing it. And if one has been at great pains to choose a theme which is more general, people are so struck by the enormity and ugliness of the colour prejudices which must be shown in it that what one has tried to say gets lost.
When I am asked to recommend novels which will describe white-settler Africa most accurately to those who don’t know it, I always suggest a re-reading of those parts of Anna Karenina about the landowners and the peasants – simply because colour feeling doesn’t arise in it.
For the interminable discussions and soul-searchings about ‘the peasant’ are paralleled by the endless talk about ‘the native’. What was said in pre-revolutionary Russia about the peasant is word for word what is said about the Africans – lazy, irresponsible, shiftless, superstitious, and so on.
And in the person of Levin one finds the decent worried white liberal who is drawn by the reserves of strength, the deep humanity of the African, but yet does not trust him to govern himself. Levin, in Africa, is always dreaming of going native, of escaping from the complexities of modern civilization which he sees as fundamentally evil. He philosophizes; goes on long trips into the bush with his African servant to whom he feels himself closer than to any other human being and to whom he tells everything; half-believes in God; knows that all governments are bad; and plans one day to buy a crater in the Belgian Congo or an uninhabited island in the Pacific where at last he can live the natural life.
All this has nothing to do with colour.
I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described in Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know. An enormous, under-populated, under-developed, unformed country, still agricultural in feeling and resisting industrialization.
For a novelist based in Africa it is discouraging that so much of what develops there is a repetition of the European nineteenth century. Time and again one seizes on a theme, looks at it carefully, discovers that unless the writer is very careful it will merely repeat what has already been said in another context – and then, trying to isolate what is specifically African, what is true of Africa at this time, one comes slap up against that complex of emotions, the colour bar. I believe it to be true that what unifies Africa now, what makes it possible to speak of ‘Africans’ as if they were the members of one nation instead of a hundred nations, is precisely this, that white domination has given them one overriding emotion in common, which makes brothers of them all from Cape to Cairo. Yet behind this, perhaps, there is something else that is more important. Perhaps in a hundred years, looking back, they will not say: ‘It was the century when we turned the white men out of our continent and regained our freedom,’ but … I don’t know. When a people struggles for freedom the struggle itself is always so much greater and more creative than what is being fought.
Perhaps they will say: ‘That is the century when we found we were not simply black men, but a company of peoples infinitely diverse, original, rich and varied. That is the century when we recovered the right to find out what we are.’
But now, for the writer, it is hard, because the infinite complexity and the richness always narrow into a protest against that monstrous thing, the colour bar.
In white Africa I do not think the Africans have yet produced types of people or forms of organization that have not been produced elsewhere. African nationalists speak the same language as congress leaders in any country; political leaders must reflect white domination as long as it remains: Generals China and Russia of the Mau Mau would not have been possible without Colonel Blimp.
As for the British, they either live as if they have never left Britain or proliferate into eccentrics or rogue elephants. Africa is full of colourful characters, adventurers, criminals, petty tyrants or solitaries. But I don’t think it can be said we have not seen them before – or read about them.
I think it is the Afrikaner who is the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. He is a tragic figure. The Africans are not tragic – they have the future before them; they are a suppressed people who will soon free themselves as Colonial people are freeing themselves everywhere in the world. The British are not tragic, they are too flexible. I think most of the British in Africa will be back in Britain inside twenty years. But the Afrikaners are as indigenous as the Africans. And since they insist their survival as a nation depends on white domination what possible future can they have? Yet they are not a corrupted people, as the Germans were corrupted by the Nazis – Afrikaner nationalism is not a falling-off from a high peak of national cultural achievement. The Afrikaners have remained unaltered while the world has changed, and that is their tragedy. Their history as a people has been a long, courageous battle for independence and freedom; yet they do not understand other people’s desire for freedom: that is their paradox.
They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black–white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid. But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the segregation created by Smuts, the Afrikaner who became a spokesman for the British Empire, and his British-dominated United Party. Passes, segregation, farm-prisons, pick-up vans and the industrial colour bar were not introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalists: the system was created by the white people, Afrikaner and British together, and financed by British and American capital. But the Afrikaner has been made the villain of the scene; Smuts was called a great statesman, but Strydom is hissed in the streets when he comes to Britain.
And so the drive towards national isolation and self-sufficiency which is the basis of Afrikaner nationalism is strengthened.
Sooner or later it will be the Afrikaner and the African who will face each other as opponents in the southern tip of the continent. And they are very alike. I have yet to meet an African who does not say that he prefers the Afrikaner as a man to the British. ‘The Afrikaner calls me a Kaffir, he says what he thinks, but he is more humane, he treats me better.’ I have heard that very often.
And inevitably the two people are becoming fast mixed in blood – if one may use that convenient word – in spite of all the laws and the bars and the barriers. There is no sadder or more bizarre sight than to see a group of ‘white South Africans’, each with the marks of mixed descent strong in face and hair and body-build, arguing about the necessity of preserving racial purity.
On an aeroplane in Northern Rhodesia I sat next to a young Afrikaner flying back home. He was immediately recognizable as one, first because of his open, simple face, and next because the marks of mixed parentage were on his hair and his facial structure.
We got into conversation.
‘I am sad today,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know what to do. I’ve just been up to the Copper Belt, and that’s the place for me, man, you can earn money there, not the Kaffir’s wages you get back home now. But if I go to the Copper Belt, man, my heart will break.’
‘But why?’
‘Because of my pigeons. They’re my little sisters. How can I take my fifty pigeons all the way to the Copper Belt? They will be sad there. I’d have to sell them. I wouldn’t like to do that. I’d feel sad all the time.’
‘Perhaps you’d get over it? And you could buy some more pigeons?’
‘How can you say that? That’s not right. No, man, the way I feel now, I’ll have to stay at home, even if I don’t like it.’
I noticed he had broken his thumb.
‘Yes, and that’s another thing. I got that last year. On the job I’m a policeman. A man was beating up a Kaffir. He had no right to do that. The Kaffir hadn’t done anything. So I broke my thumb on him. People shouldn’t go hitting Kaffirs when they haven’t done anything. Well, the next thing was I broke it again. You know how you have to beat up Kaffirs when you arrest them: they don’t tell the truth if you don’t give them a good hiding. But now I keep thinking about my thumb, and I can’t do my work properly. You can’t do the job without your fists. No, I’ll have to get another job. Besides, the police is no good.’
‘You don’t like the work?’
‘Hell, man, it’s not the work. But things are bad now. I know you’ll think I’m saying this because you’re English and I’m trying to make up to you. But it’s God’s truth, I like the English. There’s an Englishman in the office, and he’s fair, and I like him. He treats everyone the same. But our men there, man, but you can’t trust them! They tell you to do something, and then it goes wrong, and then it’s your fault. They don’t stand by you. And they tell on each other all the time. But the Englishman’s going. He’s going back to England, he says. And so I’ll leave, too. I’m not staying where things aren’t fair. Don’t think I mean anything about South Africa; it’s God’s country. Why don’t you come and see it?’
This being after I was proscribed, I said his Government would not let me in and why.
He looked at me long and earnestly. ‘Never seen a commie before,’ he said.
‘There used to be plenty in South Africa before it was illegal.’
‘Never heard of that. Well, look then, tell me, what is it about?’
‘In South Africa, what is important now is that we are against racial inequality.’
His face fell; he was a small boy. ‘Now look, man, hell! I don’t see that.’
‘Sooner or later you’ll have to.’
‘But they’re nothing but children, man! You must know that. Look how they live! It makes me just about sick to go into one of their locations. Besides, I don’t like their colour, I just don’t like it.’
He paused, very serious, wrestling with himself. ‘You think I’ve just been brought up to be like that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘It’s no good, I don’t see it. Now look here’ – and he turned earnestly towards me – ‘would you let a black man marry your daughter?’
‘If my daughter wanted it.’
He slowly went a dark red. ‘I don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. I just don’t like it.’ A pause. ‘Then I can see why they didn’t let you in, man. Women shouldn’t go around saying things like that. No, you mustn’t talk like that, I don’t like to hear it.’ His face slowly went back to normal. Then he said: ‘But I’ve enjoyed talking. I always want to know about these things. I’ve never been out of South Africa before. If I can leave my little pigeons and get up to the Copper Belt and earn some money, then I want to come to England. They say that Kaffirs are just like everybody else there?’
‘Just like everybody else.’
‘I don’t think I should like to see that. It wouldn’t seem right to me. But hell, man, that means they can go with the women? Sorry, talking like this, but it’s not personal. But you can’t have them going with the women. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t like …’
This is the stock South African conversation; and it goes on just as if nothing had happened. But what is happening is that the poorer of the white people are becoming more and more like the poorer of the Africans.
In the Lusaka airport there was a five-hour wait for the connection south to Salisbury.
Sitting in the little garden were a group of white people, toasting themselves in the sun, carefully accumulating pigment under their precious white skins.
The mystiques of sun-tanning are becoming as complicated and irrational as those of food and sex. What could be odder than to see people whose very existence depends on their paleness of skin deliberately darkening themselves on the preserved ‘white’ beaches of the coasts, or on the banks of ‘white’ swimming baths? But in a country where anyone who works in the open must become dark-skinned, and where it is impossible to distinguish between deep sunburn and the skin of a coloured person, one acquires a mysterious sixth sense that tells one immediately if a person is ‘white’ or not.
Having been in Britain for so long, I had lost this sense; and, sitting in a café in Bulawayo, I was pleased to see a group of people come in who had dark brown skins. The spirit of Partnership, I thought, was really relaxing the colour bar. A few minutes later a man came in who I thought was indistinguishable from those already sitting there. He went to sit at a table by himself. At once the woman behind the counter came over and said: ‘You know you are not allowed to come in here.’ He got up and went out without a word. It seemed that the first group were Italians.
In 1949, on the boat coming to Britain, where most of the passengers were elderly ladies playing bridge and knitting, were two attractive young women. They did not mix with the rest at all, were spoken of as ‘Durban society girls’. One was a tall, slim, pale creature with smooth, dark hair and intelligent, dark eyes kept deliberately languid. The other was a plump little yellow-head, not pretty, but as it were professionally vivacious. They were American in style, as most South African girls are: very well-kept, self-possessed, independent.
I got to know the cheerful little one, who told me that her friend was called Camellia. ‘She’s done well for herself if you like. She was just an ordinary secretary, working in the office, but the boss’s son married her. Then he got killed in an air crash. She’s married into one of the oldest families in Durban. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a damn for anybody.’ It seemed that this quality of not giving a damn was the bond between the girls; for Camellia had taken her typist friend Janet with her into society. Janet had consequently also done well for herself: she was engaged to a cousin in the same family. It seemed that the young widow had gone to Uncle Piet, executor of the estate, and said: ‘I’m fed up with life. I want a holiday in Europe.’
Janet said: ‘That silly old bugger Uncle Piet said she had a duty to her position in society, and she should set an example, and she wasn’t to go for more than four months. But he gave her a thousand. So that’s how I came too. She’s generous, Camellia is. And it’s not that she’s got all the money she wants. Actually she hasn’t got any money. Her husband didn’t know he was going to be killed, and anyway he was under age. They both were. When they got married the papers called it “the wedding of the beautiful children”. Because he was good-looking. So Camellia doesn’t get any money except what Uncle Piet lets her have, because she hasn’t any money by will. But when Camellia said I must come with her, Uncle Piet didn’t like it. He said it was my duty to stay with my fi-ance. But see the world before you get tied down with kids, that’s what I say.’
The two girls spent all day lying side by side in two deck chairs in the shade, refused to take part in the deck-sports, and at night did the few young men there were a favour by dancing with them. At least, this was Camellia’s attitude; though I think the little one would have liked to be less aloof.
Two years later I saw them in Trafalgar Square, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Camellia was with a man who was probably a West Indian; and Janet was tagging along. This set-up intrigued me for some days. Had they gone home to collect more money from Uncle Piet and then come back to Britain again? What had happened to Janet’s eligible fi-ance? And above all, how could a Durban society girl, even if she didn’t give a damn, get herself involved with a Negro? As I was on a bus when I saw the group, unfortunately there was no chance of finding out.
That was in 1951. In 1953 I was walking along the edge of the sea in the south of France, and there was the young man I had seen in Trafalgar Square with an extremely beautiful black girl. They were sitting side by side on a rock, arms and legs inextricably mixed, and on the sand watching them was Janet, who was her normal colour. Then I saw that the beautiful Negress was in fact Camellia. All that was visible of her – and she was wearing a minute red bikini – was burned a very dark bronze.
I went up to Janet and asked her how she did.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing well for yourself since I saw you last.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And how goes it with you?’
She looked at the couple on the rock. No doubt but that she was very upset. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘my mind is much broader since I came to Europe, but what am I to do? Tell me that?’
‘I can see your problem,’ I said. ‘But what happened to your fiancé?’
‘Which fiancé?’ she said, and giggled. ‘No, it’s not that. I can look after myself, but it’s Camellia. After we were here that time, we got a letter from Uncle Piet, asking when we were coming back. Camellia wrote and said she was still getting over her sad loss, so he sent her some more money. Actually, we were getting some culture. After all, you come to Europe to get some culture. South Africa has got everything, but it isn’t very cultured. So we got mixed up in artistic circles. I made Camellia do it, because at first she didn’t want to. There were coloured people, and she didn’t like that. But then she met Max and he and she quarrelled all the time. Besides, it intrigued her, you know how it is, you come here from South Africa and they just laugh at you. Max was always laughing at Camellia. The next thing was, my fi-ance came over, and said it was time I came home. But my ideas had changed. I said to him: “Now that I have been around a bit I am not sure that you and I are suited. My mind is much broader than it was.” So we broke it off and he went home.
‘Then Camellia and Max came here for a holiday. She said she couldn’t stick it without any sun any longer. She started lying about in the sun. And at home she never goes out without a big hat, and even gloves if the sun is hot, because she is so proud of her skin. I told her: “You are crazy to ruin your skin.” And Max said to her that the way everybody in Europe goes south to get sunburned every summer is an unconscious tribute to the superiority of the dark people over the white people. He said that a hundred years ago no one in Europe got sunburned. Max is very well educated and all that. But Camellia got mad, and they quarrelled badly, and so she and I went home. Camellia tried to settle down. Piet wanted her to marry cousin Tom to keep everything in the family. But Camellia said she wanted to go away to make up her mind about marrying Tom. So we both of us came back to England. Camellia met Max straight away. He is the son of a rich family from the Gold Coast. Did you know there were rich families among the natives in the Gold Coast? There are. He is a lawyer. Then they made it up and came here again for a holiday and when she came to England she might just as well have been born in the location. Just look at her.’
‘Luckily,’ I said, ‘there aren’t any locations here, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, but now Uncle Piet has written saying that if she doesn’t go home before Christmas he will no longer consider her one of the family. No money, that means. And so she is going back. I’m taking her. I promised Uncle Piet I would take her. Next month. She and Max have decided that she would not be happy in the Gold Coast. For about one week they decided to get married, believe it or not. Then Max said she has not got the sense of social responsibility he wants in a wife – can you beat it? And she said that as far as she was concerned, he was primitive. They quarrelled, I can tell you!’
‘So it has all turned out well in the end,’ I said.
‘Yes, but how can I take her back like that? The boat goes in a month. She says she is going to stay here until it goes. Everyone will think she’s a Kaffir, looking like that. I can’t understand her. The magazines used to call her the girl with the skin like petals. Actually Camellia was her christened name, believe it or not, but she was proud of them calling her that, even though she pretended she didn’t give a damn.’
‘There are bleaching creams,’ I said.
Janet began laughing. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said, and admittedly she sounded not far off tears. ‘But if I take her back like that, Uncle Piet will blame me. And I’m going to marry a nice boy who is one of the family. I said to Camellia, “If you had fair hair,” I said to her, “then it wouldn’t matter. But you’re crazy with your dark hair to have such dark skin.”’
‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.
‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’
And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.
On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.
In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.
Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’
This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.
But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.
‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’
‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’
She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’
‘Jolly good,’ I said.
‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.
‘And Caroline?’ I asked.
‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’
‘And Janet?’
‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’
Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.
‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’
‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.
‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’
2 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing – not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.
I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting – all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other – confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.
The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.
To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.
But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.
The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.
I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls – even parks and gardens – are an urban shell.
But in Africa the wildness of the country is still much stronger than the towns.
But even so, this house was wrong; it was not this that I had come home to find. For me all houses will always be wrong; all bungalows, cottages, mansions and villas will be uncomfortable and incongruous and confining. I only like blocks of flats, the most direct expression of crammed town-living. I did not understand why this should be so for a long time, until I took to dreaming nightly of the house I was brought up in; and then at last I submitted myself to the knowledge that I am the victim of a private mania that I must humour. I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. In order to find a place I live in tolerable, I have not to see it. Or rather, I work on it until it takes on the colouring suggested by its shape, and then forget it. If, in an unguarded moment, I actually see it, all of it, what it is, then a terrible feeling of insecurity and improbability comes over me. The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. I suspect more people are in this predicament than they know.
But that first house crumbled long ago, returned to the soil, was swallowed by the bush; and so I was glad after we had had dinner to go out again in the car, ostensibly to look for someone whose address we did not know, but hoped we might find by chance – in fact to get out of the town into the bush.
In five minutes we were there.
And now for the first time I was really home. The night was magnificent; the Southern Cross on a slant overhead; the moon a clear, small pewter; the stars all recognizable and close. The long grass stood all around, tall and giving off its dry, sweetish smell, and full of talking crickets. The flattened trees of the highveld were low above the grass, low and a dull silver-green.
It was the small intimate talking of the crickets which received me and made me part of that nightscape.
Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady, solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.
It was only so the first night; for at once habit took over and erected its barriers; and if I had had to fly back to England the next day, I would have been given what I had gone home for.
For to stand there with the soft dust of the track under my shoes, the crickets talking in my ear, the moon cold over the bush, meant I was able to return to that other house.
There are two sorts of habitation in Africa. One is of brick, cement, plaster, tile and tin – the substance of the country processed and shaped; the other sort is made direct of the stuff of soil and grass and tree. This second kind is what most of the natives of the country live in; and what I, as a child, lived in. The house was not a hut, but a long, cigar-shaped dwelling sliced several times across with walls to make rooms.
To make such a house you choose a flat place, clear it of long grass and trees, and dig a trench two feet deep in the shape you want the house to be. You cut trees from the bush and lop them to a size and insert them side by side in the trench, as close as they will go. From the trunks of living trees in the bush, fibre is torn; for under the thick rough bark of a certain variety of tree is a thick layer of smooth flesh. It is coloured yellow and pink; and when it is still alive, newly torn from the tree, it is wet and slippery to the touch. It dries quickly; so it is necessary to have several labourers stripping the fibre, with others ready immediately to use it for tying the trees of the walls into place. At this stage the house will look like a small space enclosed by a palisade – tall, uneven logs of wood, greyish-brown in colour, laced tightly with yellow and rose-coloured strips. The palisade will have spaces in it for doors and windows.
On this frame is set the skeleton of the roof. More trees have been cut, slimmer ones, and laid slantwise from the tops of the wall-poles to a ridge in the centre. They are tied with strips of the fibre to this centre pole, which is an immensely long gum tree or thorn tree made smooth and slim, lying parallel to the ground.
Now the house will look like an immense birdcage, set in the middle of the bush. For the trees have not been cut back around it yet; and the grass is still standing high all around, long swatches of grass, a browny-gold in colour. One cannot build this sort of a house save when the grass is dry, at the season for thatching.
Standing inside the cage of rough poles, the sun comes through in heavy bars of yellow. Strips of fading fibre lie everywhere in tangles; chips of wood send off a warm, spicy smell.
Now it is time to make the walls.
From an ant-heap nearby earth is cut in spadefuls and laid in a heap. Ant-heap earth is best, because it has already been blended by the jaws of a myriad workers.
It is not always easy to find the right ant-heap, even in ant-heap country; for even ants cannot make suitable wall-earth where the ingredients are not right at the start. And, having found a properly composed heap, there may be snags. For instance, when we were building our house, the ant-heap we were working had three skeletons laid side by side, in such a way that showed these were the bones of chiefs of a tribe. Earthen cooking-pots buried beside the skeletons still showed traces of white meal mingled with the earth.
Our labourers would not go near this ant-heap again, for they feared the spirits of their ancestors. So we had to choose another. But meanwhile, some of the earth had already been pounded into mud for the walls; and so the walls of our house had in them the flesh and the blood of the people of the country.
To make mud for walls, a great heap of ant-worked earth is built up and wetted. Then the feet of the builders squelch it into the right consistency. Also, in this case, the feet of my brother and myself, who were small children.
To lay the mud on the poles it is carried in petrol tins from the men who are softening it to the men who are plastering; great handfuls are taken up quickly from the tins, before it can dry out, and slapped on to the poles. Sometimes there are gaps between the poles too wide to hold the mud; and then handfuls of grass are caught up and inserted and worked in with the mud. The smell of this mud is fresh and sweet, if the water used is good, clean water.
Soon all the walls are covered with a thick, dark mud-skin; and this is quickly smoothed over with trowels or flat bits of tin. Now the house is a house and not a frame of tree-poles; for the walls cannot be seen through.
Next, the long, pale grass is cut from those parts of the farm where it grows best and tallest, and is laid in piles ready for the thatchers. It is laid swathe over swathe beginning from ridgepole and working downwards, and each swathe is tied into place with the bush-fibre. The grass is laid thick, 18 inches deep; and finally the loose, long tips that draggle almost to the ground are cut off straight and clean with long, sharpened bits of metal.
And now the roof of the house is a gleaming golden colour, laced with rose-pink and yellow; and so it stays until the rains of the first wet season dim the colours.
Meanwhile, the doors have been hung and the windows fitted; and this is not easy when the poles of the walls are likely to be uneven. Nor are those doors and windows ever likely truly to fit; for the wood of lintels and frames swells and contracts with the wetness and the dryness of the time of the year.
The floor is done last. More ant-heap earth is piled, and on it fresh cowdung; and it is wetted with the fresh blood of an ox and with water, and is stamped free of lumps. This mixture is laid all over the earth inside the house and smoothed down. It has a good, warm, sweet smell, even when it dries, which takes about a week.
Now the house is finished and can be lived in. The mud-skin of the walls has dried a pleasant light-grey, or a yellowish-grey. Or it can be colour-washed. The mud of the floor is dark and smooth and glossy. It can be left bare, or protected with linoleum, for after a time this kind of floor tends to scuff into holes and turns dusty, so linoleum is useful, though not as pleasant to look at as the bare, hard, shining earth-floor.
A pole-and-dagga house is built to stand for two, three, four years at most; but the circumstances and character of our family kept ours standing for nearly two decades. It did very well, for it had been built with affection. But under the storms and the beating rains of the wet seasons, the grass of the roof flattened like old flesh into the hollows and bumps of the poles under it; and sometimes the mud-skin fell off in patches and had to be replaced; and sometimes parts of the roof received a new layer of grass. A house like this is a living thing, responsive to every mood of the weather; and during the time I was growing up it had already begun to sink back into the forms of the bush. I remember it as a rather old, shaggy animal standing still among the trees, lifting its head to look out over the vleis and valleys to the mountains.
I wrote a poem once about a group of suburban town houses; which I could not have written had I not been brought up in such a house as I have described:
THE HOUSE AT NIGHT
That house grew there, self-compact;
And with what long hopeless love
I walked about, about –
To make the creature out.
First with fingers: grainy brick
That took its texture from the earth;
The roof, membranous sheath
On rafters stretched beneath.
Yet, though I held the thing as close
As child’s toy gathered in my hand –
Could shatter it or not;
No nearer truth I got.
Eluded by so frail a thing?
But if touch fails then sight succeeds.
But windows shadowed in
My face that peered within.
And through my shadowing face I saw
A room where someone lived, and there
The glow of hidden fire;
A secret, guarded fire.
Should I fail by closeness? Then
Move back and see the house from far,
Gathered among its kind,
No unit hard-defined.
And there a herd of houses! Each
Brooding darkly on its own,
Settled in the shade
That each small shape had made.
Till suddenly a mocking light
Flashed on from that one house I’d searched,
As if a beast had raised
His head from where he grazed.
And brilliant to my blinded face
As if with laughter openly,
These dazzling panes comprise
All dazzling gold eyes.
The house was built high, on a kopje that rose from a lower system of vleis and ridges. Looking from the windows you seemed on a level with the circling mountains, on a level with the hawks which wheeled over the fields.
My room was the third down from the top or end of the house; and it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window, and a door which I kept propped open with a stone. The stones on the kopje were not of the quartz which cropped up all over the farm, but tended to be flattened and layered, and were brown, a light, bright brown, and when they were wet with rain, yellowish. To the touch they were smooth and velvety, because of the dust surface. Such a stone I used to prop my door open, so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields, and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air with their stretched wings motionless. The great mountain ten miles off was the chrome mountain, scarred all over with workings; and it was part of the chain of hills and peaks over which the sun rose. The big field below the house was a mealie field. Newly ploughed it was rich reddish-brown, a sea of great, tumbling clods. From the path which ran along its edge, the field showed a pattern of clods that had fallen over from the plough-shares one after another, so that walking slowly beside it avenues opened and shut, lanes of sunlight and shadow. And each clod was like a rock, for the interest of its shape and colour: the plough-share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean, shining surface, iridescent, as if it had been oiled with dark oil.
And sometimes, from the height of the house, looking down, these clean, shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment so that a hundred acres of clods glittered darkly together, flashing off a sullen light; and at such times the hawks swerved off, high and away, frightened.
Then the harrows drove over the field, side by side, the heavy, shining oxen plunging and scrambling over the great earth-boulders; they drove over it again and again, till the beasts walked easily, setting their feet down in soft tilthed soil; and the field was flat, without shadows, an even reddish-brown. And so it stood a while, waiting for the rains. During this time the air was full of dust, for the wind-devils danced and played continuously over the field; and sometimes columns of whirling, fiery red dust mingled with fragments of last year’s mealie-stalks that glittered gold and silver, stood in the air higher than eye-level from the house; and the hawks were gone out of the dusty air into the clean air-currents over the far bush. Through the dust that shone a soft red at sunset and sunrise, the great soft-stepping oxen moved, two by two, in front of the planters; Afrikander oxen with their long, snaky horns; and behind the planting machines the small, white, flat seeds popped into the earth and were covered. The flocks of guinea-fowl moved down out of the bush at dawn and at sunset after those precious mealie-grains, flocks of sometimes fifty, a hundred, two hundred birds; and my brother and I, waiting in the bush with our rifles, saw them as industrious as farmyard birds over the hidden mealie-seeds.
Now the long tension of the dry season had built up into a crescendo of bad temper and irritability and anxiety that means the rains will come soon; and at night, lying in bed, I saw the lightning dance and quiver over the mountains while the thunder growled. The long stretches of bush and field were dark; this was the only time of the year the fields were dark, for all the light had gone into the electricity that darted along the edges of the cloud-masses.
And then, one night, I would wake and hear a rushing and a pouring and a rustling all around; the rains had come. Over my head the old thatch was soaking and swelling, and in the weak places the wet seeped through, so that from half a dozen patches of roof over my room came a soft dulcet pattering. I crept out from under the mosquito net to set basins and jugs to catch the drops; and looking out from the door into the wet darkness a battering of rain ricocheting up from the earth came as high as my waist so that I had to step back fast into dryness. But until the lightning drove down through the wet and broken cloud-masses it was dark; when the light came, it drove down the shining rods of white rain, and showed the trees crouching under the downpour and a thick dance of white raindrops like hailstones a foot deep all over the earth.
So I would go back to sleep, lulled by the roar of the rain outside and the splash of the roof-leaks into the basins. In the morning I was woken not by the warmth of the sun on my bed but by a new intenser glare of light on my eyelids: the air had been washed clean of smoke from the veld fires and of dust, and the skies had lifted high and bright, and the trees were green and clean. The sun had come close again, shining free and yellow direct on to the big field, which was now a dark, rich, sodden red, a clear, red space among rich, sodden foliage. The thatch was still dropping long stalactites of shining water, and it was as if the house was enclosed by a light waterfall.
By midday the wetness had been whirled up into the air in clouds of steam; the big field steamed and smoked; and it was as if one could feel the growth being sucked up out of the mealie-grains by the heat and the wet.
During the first days of the wet season the storms and the showers advanced and retreated, and we watched the drama from the kopje-top; the now rich green bush stretching all around for miles would be blotted out suddenly in one place by a grey curtain, or the clouds would open violently overhead, enclosing us in a grey, steaming downpour. Below, the field was already showing a sheen of green. From the path beside the field, walking, the field was again opening and shutting, but now in avenues of green. Each plant was an inch high, a minute, green, divided spear, as crisp as fresh lettuce, and in the heart of each a big, round, shining globule of water.
Now the farmer would be pleased if the rain stopped for a week or ten days, so as to drive the roots down into the earth and strengthen the plants. Sometimes he was obliged; and the field of mealies stood faintly wilting, limp with thirst. But however the rain fell, the green film over the dark earth thickened, so that soon there were a hundred acres of smooth, clear apple-green that shimmered and rippled under the hot sun.
In the moonlight, looking down, it was a dim green sea, moving with light.
Soon the plants put out their frothy white crests; in the moonlight there was foam on the sea; and in the daytime, when the winds were strong, the whole field swayed and moved like a tide coming in. At this time the hawks hung low over the field with bunched, ready claws, working hard, so that from the house you looked down on their wide, stiff wings.
The rainy season passed; and the brilliant green of the field dimmed, and the sound of the wind in it was no longer a wet, thick rustle, but more like the sound of an army of tiny spears. Soon all the field was a tarnished silvery-gold, and each mealie-plant was like a ragged, skeleton scarecrow, and the noise of the wind was an incessant metallic whispering.
From the house now the field could be seen populated with black, small figures, moving between the rows and laying them flat. Soon the dark, dry earth was bared again, patterned with mealie-stooks, each a small, shining pyramid; and all over the soil a scattered litter of soft, glinting, dead leaf and stalk. Then came the heavy wagons behind sixteen oxen led by the little black boy who pulled six inches in front of the tossing, curving, wicked horns, with the driver walking behind, yelling and flickering his long whiplash in the air over their backs.
The field was bare completely, the stooks stripped of maize-cobs, the stooks themselves carried off to make manure in the cattle-kraals. It was all rough, dark-red earth, softly glinting with mealie-trash. In came the ploughs, and again the earth fell apart into the great shining clods.
This cycle I watched from my bedroom door, when I was not absorbed by what went on in the room itself. For after a decade or so of weathering, the house had become the home of a dozen kinds of creature not human, who lived for the most part in the thatch of the roof.
Rats, mice, lizards, spiders and beetles, and once or twice snakes, moved through the thatch and behind the walls; and sometimes, when the oil-lamp was flickering low, which it did in a steady, leaping rhythm till it flared up and out – in a way which I am reminded of by the pedestrian-crossing lights in the street outside my window, flicking all night on my wall in London – sometimes, as the yellow glow sank, a pair of red eyes could be seen moving along the top of the wall under the thatch. A mouse? A snake perhaps? For some reason they seldom came down to the floor. Once I saw a pair of eyes shining in the light coming through the window from the moon, and called for my parents to kill what I was convinced was a snake, but it was a frog. In the wet season, the frogs from the vlei two miles away were so loud they drowned the perpetual singing of the night-crickets; and the irregular pattering of frogs on the floor of my room was something I learned to take no more notice of than the pattering of rain from leaks in the roof. It must not be imagined that I am a lover of wild life. I am frightened of all these creatures – or rather, of touching them by accident in the dark, or putting my foot on one; but if you live in a house which is full of them, then your area of safety contracts within it to the bed. I never went to bed without taking it completely apart to make sure nothing had got into the bedclothes; and once safely in, with the mosquito net tucked down, I knew that nothing could fall on me from the roof or crawl over me in the dark.
The family attitude towards the role of mosquito nets is illustrated by a dialogue I overheard between my parents in the next room.
It was the first rains of the season, and the roof had begun to leak in a dozen places. I had already lit my candle and set out the pails and basins; and I knew that my father was awake because I could see the fluctuating glow of his cigarette on the wall through the crack of the door which did not close properly.
I knew that he was waiting for my mother to wake up. At last I heard him say in a sort of hushed shout: ‘Maud, Maud, wake up!’ Nothing happened and the rain roared on.
‘Maud!’
She woke with a crash of the bedsprings. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I can hear that it’s raining.’
‘The roof’s really bad this year,’ he said. ‘Like a sieve.’
‘When the grass swells, it won’t be so bad.’
‘It’s worse than it was last year.’
‘We’ll get the thatching boy up in the morning,’ she said sleepily, and turned over.
‘But it’s raining,’ he said desperately.
‘Go to sleep.’
‘But it’s raining on me.’
‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just …’
‘Well then, go to sleep.’
‘But I’m only just …’
‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
‘Almost anything, I should think.’
‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
A stir in my mother’s bed.
‘Shhhhh,’ my father would say hastily. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Or: ‘Are you asleep?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘You know the centre of the earth is all molten, so they say?’
‘Well?’
‘Suppose they sank down a borehole and tapped it. Power. Much more effective than all these dams and things. Do you think they have thought of that yet?’
‘Bound to.’
‘You’re not much good, are you? No imagination. Not a scrap of imagination between the lot of you, that’s your trouble.’
Walls are by nature and definition flat; and having lived for so long in London, when I hear the word wall I see a flat surface, patterned or coloured smooth.
But the wall that faced my bed was not flat.
When the workmen had flung on the mud, naturally it was a little bumpy because no matter how you smooth on mud over poles, if there is a knot on the pole where a branch was chopped off, or if the pole had a bit of a bend in it, then the mud settled into the shape of bump and hollow. Sometimes, because of the age of the wall, a bit of mud had fallen out altogether and had had to be replaced, much to my regret, for the exposed poles showed themselves riddled with borer holes and other interesting matters. Once there was a mouse-nest in the space between two poles. There were five tiny pink mice which fitted easily into about an inch of my palm. The mother mouse ran away, and I diluted cow’s milk and tried to drop it off the end of a bit of cotton into the minute mouths. But a drop is always a drop; and for a baby mouse as if someone had flung a bucket of milk into its face. I nearly drowned those mice, trying to work out a way to make a drop of milk mouse-size. But it was no use, they died; and the jagged space in the wall was filled in with new mud.
The wall had been colour-washed a yellowish-white; but for some reason I have forgotten, after the brown mud had been filled in, it was not painted over, so that there was a brown patch on my wall.
I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red. The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.
High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to fragments of mud from the wall flopping down on to the floor.
And if the wall was in a continual state of disintegration and repair, an irregular variegated surface of infinite interest, then the floor was not at all the flat and even surface of convention.
Long ago, the good, hard surface of dung, mud and blood had been protected by linoleum; and this in its turn had hollowed and worn as the earth beneath had hollowed or heaved because of the working of roots or the decay of old roots. A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season. There was a crack in the mud there; the linoleum began to bulge upwards, and then split; and out came a pale, sickly, whitey-yellowish shoot which immediately turned a healthy green. We cut it off; but it sprouted up once or twice every wet season. As soon as the rains stopped, the shoot sank back, sullen and discouraged until next year, biding its time. One year I decided not to cut it. The first thing every morning I put my head out from under the mosquito net, over the edge of the bed, to see how the shoot was getting along. Very soon it was a small, green bush, pushing up against the wire of the mattress. The next thing, it would have split the mattress as it had split the linoleum. I moved the bed, thinking it would be attractive to have a tree growing in the middle of my bedroom, but my mother would have none of it. She had it chopped down, and a lot of fresh mud laid and stamped hard and flat. Next season the shoot came up at the side between the fresh bit of floor and the old, near the wall. It came pushing up with a watch clutched in its leaves. This was because my father, who had many theories about life, had a theory about watches. Foolish, he said, to buy watches costing 5 or 10 guineas which, being delicate and expensive, were bound to break soon. Better to buy a dozen turnip watches at a time, at 5s. each, from the Army and Navy Stores; and then when they broke it would not matter. He ordered a dozen watches, but they never broke: they were indestructible. As a result we had watches propped all over the house; and I had one by my bed. When it fell into a crack in the mud, I did not bother, because there were plenty more. But it reappeared in the first rains of that year, from the mud of the floor, held in the green arms of the little tree, like a Dali picture.
The only creatures that were really a threat to this house were the white ants. All that part of the country was full of ant-heaps. They can be 10, 20 feet high. After the rains, a grass-covered peak of earth which has looked dead will suddenly sprout up an extra foot or so overnight of new red granulated earth, like the turrets and pinnacles of a child’s fairy castle.
A good, hard kick will send the new earth flying and expose a mass of tunnels and galleries leading down far, far into the earth. There is always water under ant-heaps. People digging wells look for a good, old, well-established ant-heap. They follow down the tunnels. Sixty feet, a hundred feet, sometimes deeper, they are bound to come on water.
There was an ant-heap in front of the house, and another to one side; most of the time the ants remained there, but occasionally they sent outriders into the house.
On my white bedroom wall, for instance, would appear a red winding gallery, like an artery, irregularly branching. These galleries were wet at first, and granular, because each particle of earth is brought in the mouth of an ant. It is a mistake to wipe these galleries off while they are still wet, for all you achieve is a smear of red earth and crushed ants on the wall. Once dry, they can be easily brushed off, leaving only a faint, pinkish mark on the white. It is exciting to see a new gallery where none existed three hours before, and to shrink yourself ant-size and imagine yourself scurrying along under fragrant tunnels of fresh, wet earth.
It was the ants, of course, who finally conquered, for when we left that house empty in the bush, it was only a season before the ant-hills sprouted in the rooms themselves, among the quickly sprouting trees, and the red galleries must have covered all the walls and the floor. The rains were heavy that year, beating the house to its knees. And we heard that on the kopje there was no house, just a mound of greyish, rotting thatch, covered all over with red ant-galleries. And then in the next dry season a big fire swept up from the bush at the back, where the kopje fell sharp and precipitous over rocks into the big vlei, and there was nothing left of the house. Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.
One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.
Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush – supposing then that the house was still there after all?
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live.
Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.
It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls – I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.
One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.
On the left stretched some lower hills. There appeared a small white vapour glistening in the moonlight in a gap between the peaks. Over the edge of the gap came a wisp of white cloud, a small tendril, curling down. Then the sky on that side was a whirl of moonlit mist, and instead of one curling finger, cloud came pouring down and through the gap like a flood of celestial milk. It sank as it came, covering first the flank of the mountain, then blotting out the lights of the houses on that side. The lights went out swiftly, and the mist came pouring steadily in, and soon half of the city had gone, and the sky on that side was a high bank of white and shining cloud. Then all the city was gone and the ships and the sea, and below a great white floor of moonlit cloud heaved and rose, and over on the right side the stars were dimming. Then there was cloud overhead, and cloud at my feet, rising. The fir trees just below sank in mist till only their black tops showed. As the cold dampness came up, the trees went.
It took only ten minutes, from the time that the city lay open and glittering to the time when it had gone, gone completely.
And so, when this dream began to recur, together with the dream of the heap of red, sinking earth and dead grass with the trees growing through it, I first restored the house, and then forced the mist back, rolled it back off the city and the sea and the lighted ships and back through the gap in the mountains. It took a long time, but at last the city was free and illuminated again.
3 (#ulink_8ca2bc1f-8f96-5d5d-9d30-c516e358d53f)
On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.
I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.
‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can – if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’
Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.
I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.
At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.
I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.
And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.
The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.
‘In short,’ we concluded, ‘we are seeing a process whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’
But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.
After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.
My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.
But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.
Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.
That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.
Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen – driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.
Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.
That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.
What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man for all that, because in this country there is no class feeling, only money feeling.’
Again, just as America is permeated with the values and attributes of the two groups of people supposedly non-assimilable – the Negroes and the Jews – so the white people here who think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, but the qualities they ascribe to the Africans are inevitably absorbing those qualities.
It is a society without roots – is that why it has no resistance to Americanism? Or is being rootless in itself American?
The myths of this society are not European. They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman homemaking in lonely and primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents; the simple and brave savage defeated after gallant fighting on both sides; the childlike and lovable servant; the devoted welfare-worker spending his or her life uplifting backward peoples.
Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa.
On that first morning I went shopping to try to get the feel and atmosphere of the place.
First into a vegetable shop. Shopping has certainly changed: now the counters are refrigerated, self-service shops everywhere, and above all Coca-Cola has moved in. The Coca-Cola sign is on every second building, from the high new blocks of offices and flats to the scruffy little store in the Native Reserve.
In the vegetable shop were three white people and two Africans. Two of the white people were serving behind the counter; then two African men, with shopping baskets. Then me. I waited my turn behind the two Africans to see what would happen. The woman behind the counter eyed the Africans coldly, and then in the cool, curt voice I know so well said: ‘Can’t you see the white missus, boy? Get to the back.’ They moved back, I moved in and was served. Another white woman came in; she was being served as I went out. The Africans patiently waited.
And for the thousandth time I tried to put myself in the place of people who are subjected to this treatment every day of their lives. But I can’t imagine it: the isolated incident, yes; but not the cumulative effect, year after year, every time an African meets a white person, the special tone of voice, the gesture of impatience, the contempt.
In the next shop, which was a bakery, a young girl in jeans, striped sweat-shirt and sandals, was greeted by a boy in sweat-shirt and jeans. ‘Hiya, Babe!’ ‘Hiya, Johnny.’ ‘See you tonight?’ ‘Ya, see you at the flicks.’ ‘Bye.’ ‘Bye.’
The main street is crammed with cars, with white women drifting along, talking, or standing in groups, talking. They wear cool, light dresses, showing brown bare arms and legs. The dresses are mostly home-made, and have that look of careful individual fit that one sees in the clothes of women in Italy and Spain.
These are the women of leisure; and, having been one of them for so long – or at least expected to play the role of one – I know that their preoccupations are in this order: the dress they are making for themselves or their daughter, the laziness of their servants, and an infinite number of personal problems. Or, as the Americans would say, Problems.
Their husbands are now busily engaged in getting on and doing well for themselves in the offices; and their children are at school. The cookboy is cooking the lunch. They will take back the car laden with groceries and liquor, dress-lengths, bargains. Then there will be a morning tea-party. Then lunch with husband and family. Then a nap. Then afternoon tea, and soon, sundowners. Then the pictures. And then, bed. And, in the words of a personal servant of a friend of mine: ‘The white man goes to bed, he makes love, twice-a-week, bump, bump, go-to-sleep.’
Though this did not occur to me until later, at the end of my trip, when my mind had cleared of the fogs induced by the word Partnership, is it possible that the white men of Central Africa are so anxious to create a class of African in their own image, equally preoccupied with getting on and doing well for themselves – is it possible that one of the reasons for it is that other anxious white myth, the potent and sexually heroic black man? Is it possible that (of course in a very dark place in their minds) they are thinking: ‘Yah, you black bastard! You start worrying about money, too! That’ll fix you!’
A group of these slow-moving, heavy-bodied women turned: one advanced towards me. Another school-friend. ‘My old man heard it from his boss, and he heard it from a friend at the airport, so I knew you were back. Things have changed here, don’t you think so? I hope you are going back to write something nice about us for a change. Hell, man, what have we done to you? You were always doing well for yourself before you left, weren’t you, so what are you getting excited about? Hell, man, what have we done? I’ve had my cookboy for fifteen years, since I got married, and I’ve always treated him right. And what do you think of the lights of London? I was there last spring, did you know? But we went to Paris. Man, I don’t know what they see in Paris. It cost ten pounds for a cabaret and a bottle of some champagne and some night-life.’
‘They were cheating you,’ I said.
‘Is that so? Well, next time we are going to Johannesburg. We’ve got just as good night-life there. And the Belgian Congo, too. They’ve got some night-life just as good as Paris. And if my old man wants to go and see some nudes, then he can go and see them there, because those nudes in Paris haven’t got anything we haven’t got. And it only costs half. Seen our new nightclub? Seen our new restaurant? Jesus, we’ve got as good here as you’ve got in London, I’m telling you. Things have really changed since you’ve left, they have. It’s a fact.’
After this conversation, I walked down First Street. On the pavement, sitting with their feet comfortably in the gutter, five African women, knitting, watching life pass by. They looked relaxed and happy. They wore good print dresses, crocheted white caps, sandals. Clothes have changed much for the better in a decade. Gone are the old blue-printed cottons, which were almost a uniform for African women. A man I know who imports for the African trade said: ‘The days of “Kaffir-truck” are over. Now we import quantities of cheap, bright stuff for the native trade. But already some Africans buy as good quality as the Europeans. In five or six years they won’t be manufacturing special goods for the African trade.’
In Meikle’s lounge, a place where I spent a good part of my adolescence, I drank beer and watched what went on. Women having morning tea, farmers in for the tobacco auctions, everything the same.
At the next table, two women, an American and an Englishwoman. It appeared they were both making trips through Africa, had met in Durban, were travelling back to England together for company. They knew each other previously. Now they were discussing some mutual friend who, it seemed, had come to no good.
AMERICAN: So now I don’t know what he’ll do. You can’t start all over at fifty.
ENGLISH: It seems such a shame. And what can it have been? Yes, of course he always drank too much, but why suddenly … I mean, he never drank too much.
AMERICAN: Well, dear, he had problems.
ENGLISH: But no worse than usual? And there was that nice wife of his. She always pulled him together when – I mean, I remember once, when they were visiting us in London, he was rather depressed, and she pulled him together. It was not that they needed to worry about money.
AMERICAN: He was basically unstable, that’s all.
ENGLISH: But suddenly? There must have been something definite, something must have happened. Of course, people don’t drink too much for nothing. But everything must have suddenly piled up? Perhaps he was working too hard. He always did, didn’t he?
AMERICAN: Now Betty, there’s no point in going on. He had a character defect.
ENGLISH (slightly irritated, but persistent): I dare say, but his character couldn’t suddenly have got all that much more defective? There must have been some reason?
AMERICAN: I keep telling you, he was psychologically maladjusted.
ENGLISH (after a pause, drily): You always put your finger straight on to a thing, dear.
AMERICAN (very faintly suspicious): What? But what more is there to say?
Walking out of the hotel I was looking for the lavatory where it used to be. Coming towards me, a middle-aged woman. I used to know her well. ‘Where’s the lavatory these days?’ I asked. ‘Really, dear!’ she said. ‘It’s the powder-room since you left. Third door on the right.’
At the post office, it says Natives and Europeans. I went to my part of the building, and watched the long queues of Africans patiently waiting their turn to be served.
Then I went to get a copy of my driving licence, which I had lost. The office was in makeshift buildings on a waste lot; the growth of administration due to Federation has spread government departments everywhere there is room for them.
There was a long queue of about 150 white people, and another parallel queue of black people. The sun was burning down, and puffs of pinkish dust settled from the shifting, bored feet. Pleasant to see these sunburned skins, the red-brown, glistening, healthy sunburn of the highveld; pleasant to stand in the hot sun, knowing it would not withdraw itself capriciously in ten minutes behind cloud.
In front of me in the queue were two young farmers in for the day. Farm-talk: prices, cost of native labour; the Government favoured the townsfolk. This at least hadn’t changed at all. They wore the farm uniform – short khaki shorts, showing yards of brown leg, bush shirts, short socks.
Time passed, nearly an hour of it; the queue had hardly moved forward.
They were now talking of one Jerry, and here, it seemed, was a matter they approved of, for the fatalistic shrug of the Government-oppressed countryman had given way to the earnest manner of two children swapping confidences.
‘I’m with you. Jerry is a good type. Not like some magistrates. We are lucky to have him in our district.’
‘Fair’s fair with Jerry. He warns you – then he gets you, square and legal.’
‘That’s what I say. He came to my place one sundown – he said, “Now look here, man, that’s the third time I saw you doing seventy through the township. Next time I’ll see there’s a fine.”’
‘Then he will. Because he does what he says. He sent a chit around to me. “Tom,” he said, “it was nearly eighty you were doing today. You only have to slow down to thirty for a mile through the village. Is that so much to ask?” Yes, that’s what he wrote to me.’
‘Yes, that’s Jerry all right. He said to me, “There’s a school, too. The place is full of kids. Use your head,” he said. “Think how you’d feel if you got a couple of those kids. Use your heart.”’
‘Yes, that’s what he said to me when he came to see me. He gave me fair warning. Next day, that was yesterday, I got a summons. I was doing eighty, mind.’ Here he paused and looked with dark solemnity at the other. ‘Eighty. So I was summoned. Fair’s fair.’
‘Yes, you can always trust Jerry to do what’s right.’
‘Yes, he never lets you get away with it. Not more than what’s fair.’
Which conversation may, perhaps, throw light on another: three weeks later, a friend of mine who inspects African schools, in that voice of exasperated affection which is common among liberal members of the administration who have to work constantly against their own beliefs, ‘Damn it, man, they’re mad. Say what you like. Yes, all right, we’re mad, but they’re madder. There are times I could throw the whole thing up. You know what? There’s a teacher. He’s been swotting and struggling for that ruddy Standard IV certificate for years, and then he got it, and he was in a kraal school at last, a big man with all his six years’ schooling behind him and all’s hunkydory. So then I went out to inspect. I found him there in that pitiful, bloody little school, next door to a whacking great church, needless to say, and he had his sixty kids sitting on the mud floor in neat little rows all chanting the ABC in Shona, and there he was drunk as a lord and staggering around like a sick chicken. I said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed, Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savings for fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at Jackson’s farm, and I lay awake all night tortured – man, but tortured! – thinking of that poor silly bugger and his dad’s life savings. Because, my God, if I was stuck out on that Reserve 150 miles from anywhere on £6 a month I’d drink myself to death in a month, man. Next morning I woke up more dead than alive, having decided I was going to clear out of this bloody country – no, really, I can’t stand it, I’m going – when who should I see but Joshua on his bicycle? He had cycled 20 miles since dawn through the bush with a chicken. The chicken was for me. You could have knocked me down with a – I said to him, “Damn it, you poor fool, Joshua, damn it! I’ve given you the sack, I’ve ruined your life, now you’ll have to go off and dig a ditch somewhere, and you bring me a chicken. Have a heart,” I said, “don’t do that to me.” “Sir,” he said. “It came into my heart last night to bring you a chicken. It is for you, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that off he went back to his bicycle. So I brought the chicken home, and here was my wife with psychological troubles, and my kids, damned spoilt brats who are so blasé and full of experience from the pictures they can’t get a thrill out of anything, and the big baas, that’s me. And the happy family, we ate that poor bastard’s chicken, and I don’t know why it didn’t choke us.’
‘Now, now, darling,’ said his wife, ‘you must keep a sense of proportion.’
After two and a half hours I had reached the door of the office. It seems that this was the time of the year for renewing licences, and so the whole countryside moves into town for that purpose, and patiently queues behind the single counter that does duty for the ordinary run of business during the rest of the year. Then I discovered I was in the wrong queue, so I started again. At last, I was told I must go to an inner office; and the official invited me to do so through an inside passage, because otherwise I would have to pass through a crowd of natives, and I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?
Inside there was a nice girl, who in the best tradition of the country, which is to have no respect for institutions, said, ‘Well, I can’t help you, because that silly lot of MPs we’ve got have absent-mindedly passed a law saying that everyone who loses his licence must take another driving test. I expect when they’ve noticed what they’ve done, they’ll change it back again, but in the meantime I think you’ve had it, because there’s queues miles long of people waiting to be tested for new licences and I can only hope there are some MPs among them.’
‘But last time I lost my licence,’ I said, ‘all I did was to go to the office and they looked up a file and gave me a new one.’
‘That was in the good old days. That was before Federation. No, things aren’t what they used to be. And besides, it seems the files have got mislaid.’
So I went back to the house and telephoned the police at Banket where sometime in the ’thirties I was given my licence by a young policeman who was not interested in the quality of my driving. But they said the records were always destroyed after five years, and they couldn’t help me – the place I wanted was that office in town.
I fell into despair; but after reflecting that it was unlikely that the whole character – or, as the Americans would say, the mores – of the country had changed in seven years, I walked back to the licensing office, past the white queue that still waited, through the black queue, into the inner office, and said I had lost my driving licence. Whereupon a young man who had either not heard of the law just passed by Parliament, or who didn’t care, charged me 1s. and gave me a substitute licence. And so the magnificent empty roads of the country were open to me.
Down the empty road to Umtali we drove. It is the road running east to the Portuguese border – a road that drives straight up one rise, down the other side, up again; first through hills tumbled all over with granite boulders like giant pebbles balancing on each other, sometimes so lightly it seems a breath of wind would topple them apart; then through mountains; for nearly 150 miles, and one looks down on Umtali from above, a small, pretty, sleepy town that never changes, in a hollow in the mountains.
It is hot there, very hot and steamy. This is not the high, dry climate of the bushveld; it is tropical, and after a few days there one becomes languid and disinclined to move. I know because I have stayed there for long stretches three times. Because those times were separated by periods of years, I know three Umtalis, and on that day I went back, dropping fast down the mountainside into it, those three towns remained separate from each other and from the town I saw then.
The first time I was eleven and I had never stayed away from home before except for boarding school. It was in a tiny house at the very bottom of Main Street, which is three miles long; the upper end of Main Street was respectable and rich, but the lower end was poor and near the railway. The house was of wood – wooden walls and floor, and lifted high off the earth on a platform, in the old style. It was in a small, fenced garden, crammed with pawpaw trees, avocado pear trees, mangoes, guavas; and around the fence nasturtiums grew as thick and bright and luxuriant as swamp-flowers. That garden quivered with heat and dampness. Under the thick shade of the mangoes the earth was sticky with fallen, decaying fruit and green with moss. The house was crammed, too; it was a large family; but I cannot remember the other children, only Cynthia, who was fourteen and therefore very grown up in my eyes. The others were all boys; and the two women, Cynthia and her mother, despised the men of the family utterly and all the time. Mrs Millar was a big, dark, ruddy-skinned woman with heavy black hair and black, full eyes. She was like a big laying hen. Cynthia was the same, a dark, big girl, full-bosomed, with fierce red cheeks. The father was a little man, wispy and ineffectual and pathetically humorous, making bad jokes against his wife’s bitter scorn of him because he had a small job as a clerk in a hardware shop. They were gentlefolk, so they said all the time; and this job and what he earned made it impossible to keep up the standards they wanted. And certainly they were very poor. I had always imagined our family was; but my mother’s generous scattiness over money was luckily always too strong for my father’s prudence; so that no matter how he laboured over the accounts, emerging on a Sunday morning with incontrovertible proof that we could not afford this or that, she would look at him with the stubborn wistfulness of a deprived small child and say: ‘Why don’t you get some out of the bank?’ ‘But, damn it, you have to put money into a bank before you can get it out.’ ‘Then get a loan from the Land Bank.’ ‘But we’ve already had a loan; we can’t have any more.’ ‘Nonsense!’ she would say at last with determination. ‘Nonsense!’
Not so in the Millar household, where Mamma would tell the guilty family the exact cost of the meal they must be thankful they were about to receive – they were religious. Or rather, she and her daughter were. I had imagined I was persecuted by religion, and had rebelled against it; but religion with us never intruded too uncomfortably into practical life.
But the difference between the Millars and ourselves that made me most uneasy was this insistence on being gentlefolk. It was a word that I had never heard before out of novels.
Once again, it was the fortunate clash of temperaments between my parents that saved us from it, for while my mother was nothing if not conscious of having come down in the world, my father was oblivious to all such things, and had, in fact, emigrated from England to be rid of the whole business of being respectable. And so, when she was in one of her organizing moods, he would merely listen, with irritable patience, until she had finished, and say: ‘O Lord, old girl, do as you like, but leave me alone.’
But the little house near the railway lines, which was shaken day and night by the shunting trains, almost under the great water-tanks which dripped and splashed over the mango trees – that house which would have been a perfect setting for one of Somerset Maugham’s tropical dramas was, in fact, saturated with the atmosphere of coy, brave, decaying gentility that finds its finest expression in Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. Yet there were two women in that house to, I think, five males.
Mother and daughter would sew, knit, patch, darn, sitting together on the verandah, a unit of intense femininity, exchanging confidences in a low voice, while father and sons would hastily slip out of the house, father to the bar, sons to their friends’ houses.
And when the father returned, fuddled and apologetic, mother and daughter would raise their eyes from their sewing, exchange understanding glances, and let out in unison a deep, loud sigh, before dropping them again to their work, while the little man slunk past.
I was appalled and fascinated by the talk of the two females, for such confidences were not possible in our house. I would sit, listening, burning with shame, for I was not yet in a position to contribute anything of my own.
I was there six weeks. At night I used to lie in bed across the tiny room from Cynthia and listen while father and mother argued about money in the room next door. One could hear everything through the wooden wall.
‘Poor, poor, poor mother,’ Cynthia would say in a burning passionate whisper.
I would fall off to sleep, and wake to see her in the light that fell through the window past the moonflowers and the mango trees, leaning up in bed on her elbow, listening, listening. Listening for what? It reminded me of how I used to listen avidly to her talk with her mother. Then a train rumbled in, and stood panting on the rails outside, the water rushed in the tanks, and Cynthia lay down again. ‘Go to sleep,’ she would hiss in a cross, low voice. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Before I slept I would think of my home, the big mud-walled, grass-roofed house on the kopje where the winds came battering and sweeping, and where I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing Chopin and Grieg two rooms off, against the persistent thudding of the tom-tom from the native village down the hill. When I woke the piano would still be sending out its romantic, nostalgic music and the drums still playing. I would imagine how in the compound the people were dancing around the big fire between the little grass-roofed huts while the drummers sat making their interminably repeated and varied rhythms on and on. But the other picture in my mind was not of my mother as she was now, middle-aged and tired, but of an early memory: her long, dark hair knotted low on her neck, bare-shouldered under the light of the candles set at either end of the piano, playing with shut eyes as she, in her turn, remembered something far off and unreachable. And the drums were beating, even then, as long ago as that.
The drums beat through all the nights of my childhood stronger even than the frogs and the crickets, ultimately stronger even than the piano, for when I woke in the morning with the sun standing over the chrome mountain, a single, tired, indefatigable drum was still tapping down the hill. And there came a time when my mother could not trouble to get the piano tuned.
But waking in the house near the railway lines, sweating with heat, half-sick with the sweet smell of the decaying fruit and vegetation outside, it was to see Cynthia and her mother standing together in the corner of the room, hands folded, heads bent in prayer. Then, with a deadly look at her husband Mrs Millar would say in her womanly resigned voice, ‘You can’t have bacon and eggs – not on what you earn.’
I was badly homesick. I hated that house. I longed for my cool, humorous, stoical mother, who might sentimentally play Chopin, but would afterwards slam down the piano lid with a flat: ‘Well, that’s that.’ I wanted, too, to lay certain questions before my father.
When I got home I went in search of him, managed to distract his attention from whatever philosophical problem was engaging him at the time, and remarked that I had had a lovely time at the Millars’.
‘That’s good,’ he said, and gave me a long, sideways look.
‘They have grace before every meal,’ I said.
‘Good Lord,’ he said.
‘Mr Millar goes to the bar every night and comes home drunk, and Mrs Millar prays for his soul.’
‘Does she now?’
There was a pause, for I was very uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘Mrs Millar came on to the verandah one morning, and said in a loud voice to Cynthia …’
‘Cynthia? Who’s she?’
‘Of course you know, she’s been here to stay.’
‘Has she? I suppose so. Lord, you don’t mean that girl – very well, go on.’
‘She said in a loud voice to Cynthia, “I’ve been praying, Cynthia. O Cynthia, our horrible, horrible bodies!”’
I was hot all over. Never had anything made me as uncomfortable and wretched as that moment. But my father had shot me a startled look and gone red. He struggled for a moment, then dropped his head on the chair-back and laughed.
I said: ‘It wasn’t funny. It made me sick.’
‘Lord, lord, lord,’ said my father, lifting his head to give me an apologetic, embarrassed look between roars. ‘Lord, I can see the old hen.’
‘Very well,’ I said, and walked away with dignity.
I was furious with him for laughing; I had known he would laugh. I had come home a week earlier than was arranged to hear that laugh. And so I was able to put that unpleasant household behind me and forget it. My father could always be relied on in these matters.
Living down by the railway line, the upper part of the town was represented by three houses where the Millars, mother and daughter, with the painful writhings of inverted snobbery, permitted themselves to be accepted – as they saw it. The inhabitants of the three houses were certainly innocent of the condescension ascribed to them. Living with the Millars, I knew the lower mile of Main Street and its shops, particularly the Indian shops which had cheap cottons and silks from the East. Mrs Millar would send Cynthia and myself up to Shingadia’s for half a yard of satin and a reel of sewing silk, and Cynthia walked proud and slow up Main Street, and into the Indian shop, her eyes busy for signs of the enemy, those girls who bought at the big stores farther up the street, and would certainly despise her if they saw her in Shingadia’s.
And if one of these envied girls came in sight, as likely as not on her way to Shingadia’s, she would turn to face her, head high, dark eyes burning, waiting to say in the voice of an exiled duchess: ‘I have come to buy mother a yard of crêpe de Chine.’ Then, the encounter over, we would walk back, and I waited for that moment when she would sigh and say: ‘It’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you.’
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Дорис Лессинг
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a compelling account of her return to the land in which she grew up.In 1956, some seven years after departed for England, Doris Lessing returned home to Southern Rhodesia. It was a journey that was both personal – a revisiting of a land and people she knew – and, inevitably, political: Southern Rhodesia was now part of the Central African Federation, where the tensions between colonialism and self-determination were at their most deeply felt.‘Going Home’ is a book that combines journalism, reportage and memoir, humour, farce and tragedy; a book fired by the love of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers for a country and a continent that she felt compelled to leave.