‘There’s just a chance Central Africa may not go the same way.’
‘Why? How? Has even one of the basic laws been changed since Federation?’
‘The atmosphere is much more pleasant here.’
‘It may be more pleasant for the whites, but not for the Africans. I’m going back to Johannesburg tomorrow, and I know I shan’t get out again. I’m in it for better or for worse.’
‘When the time comes the Africans aren’t going to distinguish between kind-hearted white liberals like us and the others. They’ll simply cut the throats of everyone with a white skin.’
‘Then at least my throat’ll be cut on my own soil, in my own country. I’m not running away.’
‘There’s nothing white progressives can do any more. We aren’t even allowed to do welfare work now. We aren’t allowed any contact with the Africans at all. South Africa will be delivered by the Africans themselves without our help.’
‘It’s my country as well as theirs. I’m third generation. I could run away to England tomorrow if I wanted, but I’m sticking it out. South Africa is my country because I’ve always fought for racial equality. And if they stick an assegai into me on the day by mistake then there’s no hard feelings.’
I met an old school friend in the street. She was one of the big girls when I was new at school. I was very homesick, and she was good to me. Now she is a thin, anxious, greying woman. We exchanged small-talk for a time. Then she said:
‘Good luck. I wish you all the luck there is. A lot of us hate what happens here. We aren’t all bad, you know.’
‘But I haven’t said so,’ I said.
‘But you’re always sorry for the natives. Well, I am, too. It’s all awful. I know it is. But some of us white people have hard lives. Things aren’t easy for some of us. My old man’s failed in farming and he’s got an office job. We don’t do well. A lot of us don’t do well. Some of the natives are earning nearly as much as we are. I know not many. But plenty of us are having bad times. And if you haven’t got money in this country you’re nothing. That’s all that matters, money.’
‘I’m sorry things haven’t gone well for you,’ I said.
‘I’m not complaining, don’t think that. Some people have it lucky and others don’t. That’s life, isn’t it? But sometimes I think we’re worse off than the natives. They don’t seem to worry as much as we do. And they’re such a cheerful lot—I envy them. I do envy them. And they’re so poor. One of them’s a friend of mine. Yes, a real friend. She was my nanny for my little girl. Now I go and see her. She’s in Highfield—you know, the new township. It’s pretty, isn’t it? I told the Superintendent she is still working for me, so I can go and see her. She’s always so cheerful and they live on £10 a month, five of them. It makes me feel ashamed, with my troubles. She says to me: “Now have a good cry, missus, and tell me what’s wrong. We’re both women, aren’t we? We both have the same troubles.” So I do…’
She looked at me anxiously, afraid she had not made me understand something very important to her. ‘You know, years ago, I’d never have believed it if someone had said I could feel about a native woman as if she were my real friend. But I do. So things are changing here. Don’t you think they are changing?’
7
About this time I began to feel a restlessness, the lack of something. What was it? Of course, a car—now in London I use buses and trains, and in moments of urgency a taxi, and never want a car. But in these American suburbs life is built around the motor-car. Without a car one is incomplete.
I therefore borrowed one and drove fast down to Bulawayo, passing Gatooma, Hartley and Gwelo.
In Gwelo I wanted to see the fine new steel-works; apparently there is only one other like it in the world. But they would not give me permission because of my political views. I do not know whether they imagined I would be able to deduce the secret processes of steel-making from a single walk around the works, and afterwards use these secrets for evil ends, or—but I don’t know. I was sorry about this, because people tell me this is one of the most interesting places to see in Southern Rhodesia.
Instead I had a good look at the new secondary school for Africans which will be opened next year. It is built on a beautiful site on high ground outside Gwelo; a fine building, with accommodation for pupils and teachers every bit as good as that considered suitable for white pupils and teachers. I was told that they are now discouraging white visitors, because these go off and complain bitterly about the Government which is spoiling the natives.
Then I had a look at the housing in Gwelo itself.
All these towns, big and small, are on the same pattern, which is the same pattern as in South Africa. Flying over these cities one can see the shape of industrialization emerging: the white town rising tall and shapely in skyscrapers, or spreading itself in gardened villas; and around them the native townships. From the air the townships look like a child’s playing blocks arithmetically arranged; hundreds of identical small huts or houses. The older townships are a confusion of brick lines, shanties and shacks.
An African’s experience of urban life is the same in any city of white Africa—Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Salisbury, Bulawayo, the cities of the Copper Belt, the towns of East Africa. An African enters the white man’s town with an assortment of ‘passes’ in his hand; must submit to the sometimes brutal, sometimes paternal, Location Superintendent, to the welfare officers and the police; he enters industrialization through the only gate there is: the segregated township. The policy for the Reserves differs from country to country, but not for the towns.
Gwelo is a miniature of the bigger towns. There is a new township for the better-off Africans some miles out of town, consisting of hundreds of tiny, mass-produced houses. In the locations of the town itself I saw the worst conditions I have seen anywhere. In the brick lines, that is, small windowless brick rooms built side by side under a single roof, the doors open on to the dust between the rows. Inside, you see chairs and tables drawn up to the ceiling on ropes, to be let down as needed. On the walls, pictures of the Queen torn out of the magazines. These rooms are very clean and tidy, although a dozen or more people may be living in them.
In a courtyard in another part of the location, consisting of ten single rooms built around an unroofed, unfloored space, where the cooking and washing were done, about fifty people, men, women and children, were living. From the entrance to this court one could see, a hundred yards off across the dust, a straggling group of iron-dome shapes stuck here and there on the ground. That was where some of the municipal employees lived. A woman from the court said primly to me: ‘Do not go there, madam. Those are very poor, rough people. They are no good.’
I began to walk off towards this camp, but was stopped quickly by my guide—for I had not got official permission to enter the location on this occasion. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘are you crazy? You can’t just wander about here looking at things like that. If you stay in the car with me, it’ll be all right: if any of the superintendents see you, they’ll think you’ve got permission. But they don’t let people in to see these conditions as a rule.’
So I did not see inside the iron kettles where the poor, rough, no-good people lived.
Then I drove on down to Bulawayo. There was nothing I enjoyed more, during the whole trip, than the driving very fast over those good, empty roads, between one little town and the next. Sometimes a ploughed field, sometimes the sharp green shimmer of late mealies, but mostly empty, rolling bush, with nothing, not a single human being, in sight. Sometimes I stopped the car and left it and went off into the bush and sat in the grass under a tree for the pleasure of being alone. I had not been alone in seven years. In London one can never be alone, not even with the doors locked and the telephone off the hook. Always there is the pressure of people. But here, it seemed, I was breathing free for the first time since I left home. No one knew where I was. All around me, acres and acres of empty country. It was like being a child agai
n, when I spent all day alone by myself in the bush.
But, alas, I was being a journalist, and had responsibilities, so I had to move on again, down towards Bulawayo.
Bulawayo is not a pretty town, like Salisbury with its gardens and trees. Salisbury is the civil service town, rather smug and dull. Bulawayo is commercial and ugly, and much more lively and enterprising. It is typical of Bulawayo that the cooling towers of the power-station rise from the middle of the town, are not pushed off to one side as they are in Salisbury. One approaches Bulawayo through factories, watching how the cooling towers lift above the town; they are pale, squat, beautiful curved shapes, lightening and darkening as the heavy smoke sifts the sunlight over them.
In Bulawayo I interviewed a great many people, but they said nothing that had not already been said in Salisbury.
A visit to the Hope Fountain Mission, a few miles outside of Bulawayo. It is a London Missionary Society place, the oldest in the country, dating from Lobengula’s time; and a house there is built on the site of one where the Rudd concession was signed.
It is run by a pleasant and humorous couple, Mr and Mrs Partridge. In their house I met some of the African teachers. We discussed Partnership, and how Mr Todd was helping the missions with generous grants of money.
The teachers told stories about the colour bar with a gentle humour entirely unbitter.
The girls said that when they went into the shops to buy, the white assistant called them ‘nanny’. ‘Here, nanny!’ or: ‘Not that counter, nanny!’ And the men said they were called ‘boy’. ‘Well, boy, what do you want?’
They are very poor. A matriculated teacher is paid £20 a month; a teacher with the Cambridge School Certificate, plus teacher training, gets £14 a month.
Many male teachers leave their work because they can earn more money in other jobs.
But for the women there is no alternative, unless they want to look after children at a few shillings a month, or to be trained again as nurses. A woman teacher, with a teacher-training certificate gets about £8 a month.
Many of these teachers pay out of their small wages for the education of a younger brother and sister. For instance, a girl on the staff here pays £20 a year for her sister to be trained as a teacher.
Two things were particularly discussed. One, the uses and abuses of correspondence courses, which are immensely popular. It costs £12 cash, or 14 guineas in instalments, to take the junior certificate and £25 for matriculation. This is a great deal of money to find out of ordinary wages of £4, £5, £6 a month. Many begin the courses and find they cannot keep up the instalments. But in spite of these difficulties a great number of people manage to pass the examinations. Three Africans in Southern Rhodesia have got university degrees by correspondence course.
But while these courses help a number to get an education who could not otherwise do so, there are some unscrupulous firms, operating particularly from the Union, which batten on the ignorance of Africans about legal matters. For instance, there are many cases where people who had only filled in the form asking for a propaganda booklet have been sued by the firms for the full costs of the course. Some, terrified, paid the money; others were rescued by wordly-wise friends.
The other thing discussed—and I was to hear it talked of many times—was the problem of the African who wants to take secondary education and can find no place in the schools. At immense cost and sacrifice an African will get his Standard VI certificate and then find there is nothing he can do but become an unskilled labourer.
‘The argument is,’ said Mr Partridge, ‘that a white child must have at least primary education even if he ends up by being a farm assistant or a ganger, and what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But the Africans do not see it in this way. For them, education is the path to a better life, or otherwise it is wasted.’
I heard this point put in various ways: for instance, about the kind of books that are popular in libraries. On the Copper Belt there is an attractive library attached to one of the mines. The official who showed me over it said that novels, plays or poetry were never taken off the shelves, while biographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and do-it-yourself books could not be supplied in big enough quantities.
‘The African,’ said this man with disapproval, ‘is not interested in knowledge for its own sake, but only in knowledge that will pass an examination or get him a bigger wage.’
The novels in this library were mostly forgotten Victorian fiction; not a sign of that now considerable body of novels written in the last decade about modern Africa. I suppose it is not realistic to expect it, since all these novels are without exception a protest against the system. But while the authorities do not provide these novels in libraries—one official said he would not ‘waste money in future on novels’—I noticed that all the Africans I met had read at least Cry the Beloved Country. So when what few African libraries there are cease to provide a home for rejects from the white libraries, fiction might become more popular.
The plays in this particular library were the complete works of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and J. M. Barrie. They had, said my guide, in the voice of one who says ‘I told you so!’ never been taken out.
Mr Partridge, however, an intelligent and practical man, does not talk this sort of nonsense; and his mission is a friendly and hopeful place where white people and black people like each other.
And the country around it is beautiful; a tough, dry thorn-country, every tree full of doves cooing. It had rained, and the pale earth gleamed with silky brown puddles.
It reminded me of the big vlei on our farm, where I used to lie on an ant-heap with my rifle and pick off the doves as they settled on surrounding trees, and take them back to the house for pigeon pie.
That vlei was unlike the other big vlei at the back of our house, where my brother and I went shooting for guinea-fowl and for buck, because the road ran through it that went out to the gold mine in the Ayrshire hills, where big lorries were always passing; and because one of the main paths crossing it led from one Native Reserve to another; so it was too noisy a place for buck and guinea-fowl. But the doves and the pigeons did not seem to mind. There was a brief moment in every year when that dry, brown vlei blossomed with colour, for a variety of big white-and-pink striped lilies grew there at the moment of the first heavy rains.
The third vlei was the biggest of them all, three miles long, half a mile wide, full of thorn trees and grey rocks and heavy, long, grass. I have never met anyone there, white or black; it was always empty, drugged with heat and loneliness.
The lilies grew there, too, for about a week in every wet season.
THE LILIES
This morning it was, on the pavement,
When that smell hit me again
And set the houses reeling.
People passed like rain:
(The way rain moves and advances over the hills)
And it was hot, hot and dank,
The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too.
What was it?
Something I had forgotten.
I tried to remember, standing there,
Sniffing the air on the pavement.
Somehow I thought of flowers.
Flowers! That bad smell!
I looked: down lanes, past houses—
There, behind a hoarding,
A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten.
Then I remembered:
After the rain, on the farm,
The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone
Suddenly turned wet and green and warm.
The green was a clash of music.
Dry Africa became a swamp
And swamp-birds with long beaks
Went humming and flashing over the reeds
And cicadas shrilling like a train.
I took off my clothes and waded into the water.
Under my feet first grass, then mud,
Then all squelch and water to my waist.
A faint iridescence of decay,
The heat swimming over the creeks
Where the lilies grew that I wanted:
Great lilies, white, with pink streaks
That stood to their necks in the water.
Armfuls I gathered, working there all day.
With the green scum closing round my waist,
The little frogs about my legs,
And jelly-trails of frog-spawn round the stems.
Once I saw a snake, drowsing on a stone,
Letting his coils trail into the water.
I expect he was glad of rain too
After nine months of being dry as bark.
I don’t know why I picked those lilies,
Piling them on the grass in heaps,
For after an hour they blackened, stank.
When I left at dark,
Red and sore and stupid from the heat,
Happy as if I’d built a town,
All over the grass were rank
Soft, decaying heaps of lilies
And the flies over them like black flies on meat…
A telephone call from someone I didn’t know. A South African voice. I met him in a café, a big man with the open, direct face and the blue, aggressive stare of a certain type of blond South African.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you want to see me for?’—he had insisted it was very important, he could not tell me over the telephone.
He sat opposite me, sideways, poking his head around to look at me with an insistent pressure of his full eyes. I had the impression that he might easily get up and walk off.
He was silent a moment, then he took a small pill-box out of his pocket, opened it, and picked out of it a white, fluffy chicken-feather smudged with tar. He pushed the feather at me over the table, and seemed to be waiting to see what I would do.
‘What are you?’ I asked. ‘The Ku Klux Klan?’
Suddenly he got angry. He got angry as if he had been wanting an excuse to get angry. ‘I don’t like that kind of talk,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it.’ Chin sticking out at me, eyes blazing. All the same, he looked ill at ease, and as if the anger were mechanically regulated. The whole scene had something mechanically dramatic about it.
NF (1957) Going Home Page 16
