NF (1957) Going Home

by Doris Lessing

  In a corner of the grading-shed was the class. About twenty children sat on the floor among piled bales of tobacco. They were of all ages, girls and boys, in their ragged pants and shirts, their ragged dresses—barefoot, of course. They were the children we had already seen working. The teacher, a cheerful and enthusiastic pedagogue, was repeating the syllables of the Shona language again and again, while the children chanted them after him. He wrote the syllables on the blackboard, which was the top of a packing-case, with a bit of chalk. The children had pebbles for the purposes of counting, and bits of torn schoolbooks lay about. They had to pay for their own books.

  There was a single yellowish electric-light bulb glowing down from the rafters of the shed.

  It was a very cheerful class; both teacher and scholars were proud to have visitors, and the little hands were shooting up in answer to every question: ‘Yes, teacher,’ ‘Me, teacher,’ ‘Please, teacher.’

  It seems that these children go to class every afternoon at four or five o’clock after their day’s work for a couple of hours’ education; but my host said it was a pity I could not see them at week-ends, when they are at their best, for they do marching and games under the teacher.

  ‘And so,’ he said, ‘you must not say that nothing is being done for the children, because all the tobacco farmers have schools on their farms now.’

  I tried to get the figures later from one of the publicity men for child labour, but was unable to do so. It appears there are no figures. Child labour is extensively used on the farms; and in the towns children work as house servants. But it is expected that within five years all the children in the towns will get some sort of education.

  I also asked the publicity man if there was any sort of control of these private compounds; he said there was regular inspection, and the conditions were ‘pretty good’ these days.

  When I paid a visit to my own district, Lomagundi, some weeks after this, I was on another tobacco farm, and asked how many children were employed. My hostess did not know; she thought sixty or seventy children. ‘But these days all the tobacco farmers provide schools. You can’t get the children to come and work at all unless you pay a teacher for them. And you have to pay at least £6 a month for a teacher. On some farms the children don’t work in the afternoons at all. They work in the mornings and go to school in the afternoons.’

  We were driving through the compound as we talked; it was of brick huts, but a squalid, broken-down place, and everywhere were ragged, barefoot children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘They look happy enough, don’t they?’

  My host of the grading-shed was also convinced of the happiness of his natives; but he did say that they were an unsatisfactory lot, very unstable, because they went off at the end of the season back to their kraals, and they never came back, although he offered a £2 bonus to any who would. He always had to recruit his natives afresh every season.

  After the visit to the class, we went off to have supper in the farm manager’s house. It all made me feel as if nothing had changed and nothing ever could: the big, bare brick room, with the stars shining more brilliantly through the window than the light inside the room; the soft, hot air coming in; and the talk, which was, of course, about the colour problem.

  But we had to hurry the meal, because there was to be a film show for the natives, and they didn’t like it to be late, since they had to get up at five in the morning.

  At eight o’clock, then, we were back in the big grading-shed. We, the white people, sat on chairs beside the projector, and the women and the children sat forward, on the floor under the screen which had been erected; and the men stood on either side, leaning on tobacco bales or against the tobacco racks.

  The farm managers were whooping up an atmosphere, shouting ‘Su-pair!’ For we were to show films of Superman, which it seems are popular with the Africans.

  The lights went down; and the film began. It was about some wicked men in a skyscraper office in America somewhere, plotting against Superman. The villain appeared to be some sort of Beetle; but as Superman himself was, in his human guise, an undercover man inside the Beetle gang, the whole thing was very confusing to me; and the only person whose role was quite unambiguous was the beautiful blonde’s. There was a big fight at the top of the skyscraper, where Superman was throttling people and banging them like limp sacks against the walls; and at this point the audience was growling and roaring with excitement. The only points in the film where this audience showed unmistakable appreciation were when Superman was beating up someone.

  There was a ramp from the top of the skyscraper to the street; and the blonde, who had passed out from stress and strain at the wheel of an immense car, was whizzing around and down this ramp, while Superman fled down the sky after her. He caught her at the bottom just before the car crashed into a wall, and then the lights went up.

  The two white managers got up from their chairs and began clowning and throwing themselves around, shouting ‘Su-pair! Su-pair!’ while a few of the Africans laughed and played up, shouting back ‘Su-pair!’ Most looked embarrassed and sullen, however. All the time the reel was being wound back, the two white men were diving head first over bales, staggering around shaking their hands together over their heads, or, pointing their joined hands upwards, made as if to fly off upwards, like Superman.

  To cries of ‘Su-pair!’ the lights went out; and we were now in the bowels of a mountain, where Superman was plotting against the Beetle for some good and noble end, but what this end would be was never made clear. At the end of this reel, the Beetle had thrown a switch which dissolved the mountain into lava; and Superman was wading waist-deep through red-hot lava thousands of feet under the mountain.

  For five minutes or so the white managers clowned and postured, shouting ‘Su-pair!’ while my host explained he had these film shows every fortnight; it was expensive, of course, but he liked to do something for his workers.

  The next instalment began without explaining how Superman had got out of the red-hot lava; but he was now rushing around some place like Texas with the blonde on a horse, while the two managers now in a perfect frenzy, were shouting ‘Su-pair!’ at every bound of the horse, and capered and pranced over the bales in the dim light, while about three hundred Africans watched the screen in silence.

  After Superman, a film was shown about skiing in Switzerland. Skiers whizzed down the snowy slopes one after another, and I heard an African mutter just behind me, half in admiration, half in disgust: ‘Those Mlungu! Look at them!’ (‘Those white men! Look at them!’)

  Now the film show was over, and time for the people to go back to their damp and filthy huts for the night.

  They piled in silence out of the doors of the grading-shed, while the indefatigable managers yelled ‘Su-pair!’ and made a few last dives and capers among the bales.

  My host asked the boss-boy if he had understood what the last film was about, for snow never falls in this part of Africa; and he replied with extreme politeness: ‘It shows how the white men slide on sticks over ice.’

  We then drove back the thirty miles to Salisbury, extremely fast. Twice something dark swooped from the stars down towards the windscreen, there was a soft squashy bump, and an owl fell in a struggling mass of feathers on the roadside.

  6

  About this time, three weeks out, I found myself succumbing to my own private form of the colour mania.

  After those endless morning tea parties, those sundowner parties where, if the talk does manage to leave ‘the native problem’ for five minutes, it languishes, the intolerable boredom of this narrow, provincial place settled on me like an illness, and I found myself back at my old post, at a back window, watching the lively social life that goes on around the native quarters and in the sanitary lanes. I went around Harari, the African township which, if squalid, is gay and noisy and vital—and I went there as a white person whose very appearance freezes the spontaneity and the gaiety. />
  Supposing I were given permission to live in one of the townships? I would still be a white person and very properly resented by the Africans themselves. I could never live among black people without any notice being taken of me. And besides, it is against the law. Supposing I were given permission to live on one of the Native Reserves, then…

  All this is madness. Not only is it inconceivable that I should be allowed to do anything of the kind, basically it has nothing to do with colour. If I were in a white country where the people had not yet been exhausted and confined by industrialism I would still be looking out of the window and envying them. Since I seem to have ‘chosen this damned profession where you have to use your brains all the time’, naturally I feel sentimental about those who do not.

  Late-night fantasies: When I was a child I used to think ‘Supposing I blacked my face, and then…’ Half-asleep I think of the German General Lettow-Vorbeck who, during the First World War in Tanganyika, blacked his face and reconnoitred as an African in the enemy lines. So it is possible. But not without its difficulties, for a woman. When I am middle-aged, then all these problems will vanish, and then…

  This fantasy of blacking one’s face is not confined to white people. A novel sent to me to read by an African had an episode in it where a kindly white man, wishing to share with his black friend the experiences of nightlife in Salisbury, blacked his face and went the round of the she beens and dance-halls. He was not discovered.

  This novel was very interesting to me. It had two heroes, a good white man who defied the colour bar and adopted the other hero, a black youth, as a servant or friend. When he went out in the evenings he would say to this youth: ‘And now, when you have swept the room and washed up, if you are tired you may lie down on my bed and sleep.’

  The white man suffered no ill-effects among his own kind for this behaviour: he seemed to have been a forerunner of the members of the interracial society. Later he said to his servant: ‘You are a good and clever boy, I will send you to university.’ But at the end of the book the youth gets killed in an accident where a white man half-deliberately and half-accidentally runs him over, being drunk and wishing to show off to his friends.

  This was the only touch of realism in the book.

  The book was particularly a lesson to me because its author, once a violent and uncompromising Nationalist, is now a supporter of Capricorn and of Moral Rearmament.

  These fantasies of mine, if unchecked, will lead me straight into the role of the Useful Rebel.

  But it is intolerable never to be able to know, from the inside, the life of the people of one’s own country…It is three in the morning; everything silent, everyone asleep: the only people allowed by the Government to live in such a way that there is no unpleasant strain between white and black are the missionaries. But unfortunately I have not the benefits of religion. Supposing I became a missionary, would I then be permitted…

  Enough now, it is time you went back to England and sanity! Four in the morning: what a pity I have had my sound political education. If I didn’t understand these matters, I wouldn’t know how the patient gets worse before he gets better; I wouldn’t always be croaking like Cassandra and finding my most unpleasant prophecies coming true; I could be a happy member of the interracial society, or a pleasant Capricornite.

  Once a painter said to me that when his picture went wrong and he didn’t know what was wrong with it, he used to creep out of bed in the middle of the night, go to his studio, and very quickly and suddenly throw on the lights—so that he could catch sight of his picture before it could see him.

  Well, I wish I could switch on a new light so that I could see me before I saw myself.

  I am bored with my own contradictions. If, as a Marxist, I say certain kinds of people are bound to behave in a certain kind of way, according to the type of society they live in, or what part of that society they are, then there should be nothing emotional about this; it is certainly no theme for moral indignation. One can and should be morally indignant about the form of society, but not about the behaviour of the people in it. Yet these comfort-loving, pleasure-satiated white settlers make me angry and disgusted. And the way the Africans are forced to live makes me angry and miserable because of the waste and the stupidity of it.

  But I don’t approve of any of these emotions.

  If only, just for half an hour, I could be fitted into a black skin, to see what the world looked like from there. Quite different. Everything different? Lord, how many centuries before all this colour nonsense dies away…Five in the morning. I get to sleep, and immediately dream of the Garden of Eden like a Blake engraving with the Undying Worm, looking sly and mean and satirical, offering me a large apple marked: Communism, or the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

  I have now been sent six novels by Africans. None of them was good enough to be published. But they all had the vitality and freshness of language of people who still use natural imagery in ordinary speech, and translate these images direct into English.

  It was not the writing which was poor; at best it had a Shakespearean vigour and country directness. But the construction was bad.

  In each of these novels the action ceased for several pages at a time, while this kind of talk went on:

  [Two men are sitting at the hut-door at evening.]

  ‘How, then, can we Africans advance while the Land Apportionment Act still applies? Consider, my friend, the Land Apportionment Act as just amended by our Legislative Assembly. It is a wicked blow to African hopes and aspirations.’

  ‘And consider, too, the Native Pass Laws. Until they are revoked, there will never be freedom of movement in our country.’

  ‘And do not let us forget the Destocking Act, which makes the hearts of our rural Africans heavy indeed.’

  ‘And then, my good friend, there is the Sedition Act, an Act which is not easy to understand.’

  ‘No, I would say it is easy to understand. But should we not consider, too, that Act which is called the Subversive Activities Act, and that Act which is cited as the Public Order Act? For these Acts are indeed a yoke around our necks.’

  ‘Ah, truly, it is time the hearts of the Europeans changed towards us.’

  ‘It is time they turned their hearts towards good will and understanding between the races, yes, my friend, I agree with you.’

  These novels all had the same plot; it is the story of an African who comes from his village in the Reserve into the white man’s town, and—I make a point of this for the benefit of reviewers, one of whom complained of a novel that ‘it had the South African plot’—this is the story of the African in modern Africa. If art, then, is to have any relation to life, stories about contemporary Africa are likely to be based somehow on this plot. And is it not, after all, one of the world’s ten—or is it twelve?—basic plots?

  Another thing I was taught by these novels. It was to be suspicious of that warning which all white writers from colourbar countries get from their white progressive friends. ‘Do not attempt,’ this admonition goes, ‘to write about Africans, for no white person can understand the African soul.’

  For a long time I paid heed to this, until it occurred to me that it might well be another type of Displacement; another way of shifting colour-bar emotions on to an apparently harmless point.

  For when I read these novels, I saw that there was nothing of the mysterious African soul in them at all. They could all have been written of Britain in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It was all there, the warmth, and the space, and the humour; the religious and moral earnestness, with many warnings against that solace of the oppressed and poverty-stricken, the Demon Drink.

  But the most extraordinary thing about these novels was that I saw, suddenly, my home town Salisbury, that peaceful, cushioned, pretty, boring little town, from the underside. Here it was, a wild, police-ridden, precarious, dangerous place, lit most luridly by fires of crimes and alcohol and drugs, beguiled by wicked women and evil men, amon
g whom the good people of the town lived from one moment of hard-won security to the next. These novels were all picaresque. Tom Jones might have been the hero of any one of them; Joseph Andrews might be met round any corner. Moll Flanders would have found herself perfectly at home; and Fagin’s gang of bad lots could swap one set of narrow streets for another with nothing to astonish them but the sunlight.

  In the African Weekly there is a serial story about two young men called Hatichke and Munhira. Hatichke is a rogue, and Munhira tries to keep him out of trouble and prison. The author, someone called ‘Nhaudzimere’, is in the great tradition of English moral writing; that is, he writes of wickedness so entertainingly that it sounds much more interesting than virtue.

  Here, by permission of the editor of the African Weekly, are two instalments of this tale (not continuous)—one where Hatichke goes to prison; and one where Munhira goes home to his village, where he tells Hatichke’s parents of their son’s misfortunes:

  Hatichke, Billy and Mubaiwa found life in the Prison Reserve unbearable. They were used to white-collar jobs, good food and suitable sleeping accommodation. Here the position was just the opposite and contrary to their expectation. Above all, after the first two days of admission they had gone through solitary confinement and had spare diet for three days. On Saturday they received three strokes with the cane each.

  Munhira was anxious, in fact very anxious, to meet Hatichke. After obtaining the necessary documents to visit the Prison Reserve, Munhira met Hatichke there on Sunday afternoon. ‘Now, Hatichke! how much money did you make by your grand scheme?’ Munhira asked. ‘It was not my idea, Munhira. It was Billy’s idea and I must say life in jail is intolerably bad,’ Hatichke said. ‘But what did you say when I condemned the scheme, Hatichke?’ Munhira went on. ‘I must admit that I was too foolish to see your point of view when you advised me,’ Munhira blushed. ‘Let me tell you that solitary confinement and spare diet is really hell on earth,’ Munhira said. ‘And the treatment of prisoners is simply horrible, my friend,’ Billy joined in, but Munhira ignored him. ‘It is you who devised this notorious scheme which landed us in a mess, Billy.’ Hatichke turned red. ‘But you were not forced to follow him in brewing the concoction, especially after my repeated warnings,’ Munhira pointed out. ‘You were free as anybody to say no. But because you are stupid you just follow any move without questioning and unreasonably,’ Munhira reprimanded his friend.