NF (1957) Going Home

by Doris Lessing

  And then the big red sun dipped under, and there was an exquisite afterglow, warm and nostalgic and clear; and the air was sweet with hot dust and hot leaves and warm grasses.

  Soon it was dark; the lights of cars showed miles away, dipping through the bush, or shining up in a wide, white dazzle over the farther side of ridges. And the road was very bad; and we hoped that soon an ugly little roadside bar-hotel would show itself; or at least, I did; for I wanted to sleep again beneath a corrugated-iron roof, and hear it sing and crackle as the night-chills fought in the metal with the day heat.

  Then, where the map said we could expect Karoi, a big white hotel rose three-cornered on the road, shining with car lights and strung with little coloured bulbs.

  So the car was left in a rank parked solid with cars and we went into a fine modern hotel, full of farmers in for an evening’s relaxation, and travellers going north and south. The verandah was pleasant to sit and drink on, looking as it does on to a little court edged with flowers and decked with more coloured lights strung over white walls, reminding me of a hotel I once stayed in in Spain, which had exactly this air of warm moon-lit laziness, and even more because of the women wearing bare-armed linen and cotton dresses, and moving with the indolence of hot weather.

  The dinner was disagreeable because there was a middle-aged lady at the table from Kenya. She said she was leaving Kenya, where she had lived most of her life, because things were so bad there. Mau Mau? But no; the natives were under control again; it was the Indians, she said; the Indians all over the place; and Indians and natives coming into the bars now, and even to eat in some of the hotels. They had a bad type of Indian, she said, they were traders, and always speaking up for themselves. And now they were even asking for land; they were getting uppity. Who ever heard of Indians being farmers?

  Perhaps in India, it was suggested, it could be said they were farmers. ‘Then why don’t they go back there? We don’t want them.’ But the Government was soft. It was soft with the Kaffirs and it was soft with the Indians. Look what it did with Mau Mau. Giving in to Britain as usual—our men knew how to deal with the natives, but the British troops had different ideas, and look at the fuss in Britain over nothing, the Kaffir never did understand anything but a good hiding. And she was going to live in Southern Rhodesia, which was the only civilized country left. South Africa was no good because of the Nationalists, and Northern Rhodesia was a Kaffir country, but Southern Rhodesia was still a British country, thank heavens for that at least.

  After this, we followed the advice of the management, and decided to spend the evening in the drive-in cinema at the back of the hotel. Drive-in cinemas are now rapidly becoming a major feature of life in the southern half of the continent-naturally, since it saves one from being parted from one’s car too early in the evening.

  But I admit it seemed odd to find one in Karoi, which must be (if I remember it right) about 170 miles from Salisbury, and another 150 from the Zambezi; it is a little station stuck in the bush.

  We took the car round to the back of the hotel, and there drove it up the ramp, anchoring the front wheels in a groove for the purpose, had the loudspeaker fixed on to the window, and looked at the big, white screen that glimmered soft in the moonlight against a blaze of enormous African stars. Then there was a newsreel, and then a British film whose name I forget, but the script was by Mr Priestley, and the main part was played by Alec Guinness. The story was about a young clerk told he was soon to die; so he drew out all his savings and set himself to have a good time in a luxury hotel. I think I might have considered this a good film had I seen it in Leicester Square, but nothing could have seemed more incongruous and pitiful than this cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of ranks of tobacco farmers in their big cars, with the African waiters hanging about in the shadows, watching the screen with one ear open for a summons from the verandah whence came the chink of ice in glasses; while behind the screen the Southern Cross moved sideways to make room for Orion, and the crickets chirped incessantly just off in the bush.

  We were off along the road next morning while the moon still whitened it. The light changed fast and warmed; and the bush darkened and sprang up on either side of the road as the sun burst over the hills.

  The turn-off to Kariba has a big notice that there is no accommodation for sightseers. After the pitted, rutted main road, the new dirt-surfaced road to Kariba was restful to drive on. It winds along through increasingly wild country down towards the Zambezi, for 60 miles or so; and the kloofs and hills and turning points along it have names like Puff-Adder Rise and Buffalo Nek.

  From time to time the car was stopped by a tsetse fly post, and the wheels and body of the car were sprayed. When the car stopped for a couple of minutes, it was at once invaded by half a dozen innocent-looking flies, which we swatted at once, reminding ourselves that very few people die of sleeping sickness.

  We reached the site at about nine in the morning, a turn off the road into a flat place between hills, which were covered all over with camps, tents and breeze-block huts shining white through thick trees, while land-rovers and bulldozers manoeuvred everywhere, over sun-dried mud-ruts. White men supervised groups of Africans doing this or that sort of work.

  It all looked like a gold-rush film; another world from the comfortable conformities of little Salisbury; and I liked it very much. This was the atmosphere of the old days, the good old days that people remember so sentimentally; and I cannot help remembering them sentimentally too.

  It took some time to track down the official who would be responsible for us—a young Frenchman from Mauritius who, after a few years here, was already completely Rhodesian and who went out of his way all day to be as helpful and as hospitable as he could be, in the Rhodesian tradition of fine hospitality.

  First, he explained that all this scene of chaotic activity was temporary; for affairs were still in the stage of building access roads and permanent housing; and groups of people were being flown in daily from Greece and Italy; and the African labourers were being garnered in from wherever they could be found.

  He took us in his land-rover over roads such as I have never even imagined; but they were not roads, merely those parts of a rough terrain that offered the least resistance to locomotion. I was filled with respect for land-rovers; this one climbed up tracks as steep as house-sides without any effort, and finally up a high mountain, so that Paul Hogarth could make drawings of the landscape.

  On the top of this mountain we sat, therefore, for an hour or so, while baboons and monkeys swung through the trees and gibbered at us from the bushes; and we threw pebbles down a steep, narrow gully full of boulders, watching them bound off at angles or up into the trees, and we looked at a great expanse of landscape. It was an aeroplane view of the systems of the Zambezi and the Sanyati rivers, winding flat and brown through thick, green forest—a landscape that stretched off and away and around for nearly 100 miles, mountain and hill and plain, river and marsh and forest, with cloud-shadows moving over it like the stains on the bed of an ocean. At the side of the mountain we sat on was the Kariba Gorge, where the wide Zambezi narrows and runs fast and deep and browny-green, edged with white sandbanks.

  All this wild and noble country will be under water in a few wet seasons. This will be the biggest man-made lake in the world, 200 miles long, with a shore line of over 800 miles.

  I said it was sad to think of that wonderful country vanishing under water; but my guide said if it is cruel to break an egg, it is nice to eat the omelette. He was not thinking about the Africans who live in that valley; but I asked him if he had heard that there was any trouble about moving the Africans; and he said the Native Commissioners were handling it.

  Later that day another engineer said with a sort of good-humoured amusement: ‘They say that the natives of the valley don’t believe that the waters will come over their villages. They think it’s a trick to steal their land from them. It’s the Congressmen
who work them up. But they’ll believe it soon enough when the water does start to rise.’

  Our Frenchman was more interested in the immediate problems: very proud of the radio station on this mountain. No telephone lines were laid yet, so the radio linked with Chirundu, and through Chirundu to the big centres north and south. And all the supplies came through by lorry from Karoi, 125 miles away, or by aeroplane. As we sat on the mountain the planes were climbing and descending over the new air-strip, which in a couple of years will have gone under the lake. People were flown in and out for holiday week-ends; and all the officials and experts came in by air.

  Paul Hogarth having finished his drawings, we descended the mountain and went up to the mess on a hill for lunch. The mess was an attractive little building, mosquito-gauzed, full of refrigerators and amenities. The lunch was the best sort of meal one can have in these parts, quantities of admirable cold meats and salads: this is a meat-eating country and rapid adjustment is needed after life in England, on finding the table loaded with pounds of meat at every meal, a steak covering a big plate, chops coming in half-dozens, refrigerators crammed with sirloins the size of boot-racks.

  The people having lunch were mostly women and children, who had already moved in after their men. The children would have to be taught by correspondence course for some months yet; and the women would have to rely on each other for entertainment, with the men working so hard; for it was made clear that the people who came to work on Kariba were not clock-watchers and chair-sitters. They were there because they wanted something worth while to do, and to get out of the city and to be free and unconfined by civilization. Some of the men who had come first to the site, when there were only a handful working on it, had already left: with all these people being flown in, all these civilized amenities, and the women and the children, it was getting too tame for them.

  Soon, everything would be tidied up and in order. There were two townships, one European and one African, being built up on twin hills, out of the reach of tsetse fly and mosquitoes; the roads would be good; schools would be built, and a fine hospital. It would be a centre, almost a city and was expected to stand for ten years, until the scheme was completed.

  And at the end of ten years, what would happen to the two model townships on the twin hills? Why, then, if the industrialists had any sense, they would move their businesses up here, near to the source of power. Why shouldn’t Kariba become a real city, like a Copper Belt town?

  But later, when I recounted this conversation to a businessman from Johannesburg, he said, not without malice: ‘Malvern and Welensky are mad—clean off their heads. They’re spending every penny of the credit of the country on Kariba, and when it’s finished they’re going to have enough power to run a continent on, and no industries to run—or hardly any industries. Kariba’s a project for a heavily industrialized country, and they aren’t going to get the investment in industry because everyone knows the whole show might explode in race-war at any minute.’

  And, from a politician in Northern Rhodesia: ‘The reason why Lord Malvern’s stuck out for his Kariba is because his fancy has been tickled by the fact that the lake will be the biggest man-made lake in the world. At last it’s a monument big enough to retire on—like Rhodes and Rhodesia.’

  But such carping remarks would not go down well at Kariba itself, which is infected, if any place is, by a pioneering, obstacle-crashing, rip-roaring atmosphere of achievement.

  After lunch we descended to the verge of the Zambezi, where a hippopotamus stood shoulder-deep in the shallows, very enviably, for it was steamy and hot, 86 degrees in the shade. But apparently this is considered cool in these parts, for the temperature only a few weeks back was in the hundreds.

  And then I returned to my proper business of looking at housing and collecting figures. I had read speeches by African politicians that the labourers at Kariba had been dying like flies and working in very bad conditions. I was shown the site where an African hut-camp had been, and was told things had been so bad there that the welfare people had insisted the whole place must be bulldozed down. So they must have been bad. But I do not believe that the Africans were dying like flies. Time and again, speaking to Africans, I hear the terrible: ‘The Europeans want to kill us all off, they won’t feel happy and safe until we are all dead.’ But my personal belief is that no one African will be allowed unnecessarily to die as long as there is such a shortage of labour; they will be treated in such a way as to preserve health and working efficiency—no worse, and no better.

  The temporary housing for Africans looked like that I have already described—adequate, inhuman, barrack-like. Showers one for fifty men, latrines one for twenty, three single men to a hut, twenty to a dormitory. The new township on the hill, which will hold eight thousand Africans, will be on the same lines.

  I interviewed at random one worker, of whom Paul had made a drawing. His name was Jeremiah; and he came from Portuguese East Africa, near Beira. He was a Shangaan, and had been three months working in Southern Rhodesia at £3 a month. In Portuguese territory he had been earning £5 a month. Why, then, had he come to Southern Rhodesia? He wanted to travel, he said. He had never been to school, was illiterate, did not know how old he was. He had a wife in his village at home, but no children.

  My guide asked him: ‘Which white men are kinder, those in Portuguese East Africa, or those in Southern Rhodesia?’—which was how my query, which nation he preferred working for, translated into kitchen Kaffir. To which he replied: ‘All white men are nice.’

  But he hated being questioned and wanted to get away.

  I said, ‘Well, we’ve got the facts, but we don’t know what he feels.’

  At which the official said: ‘These types don’t know what they feel. Only the educated ones do, and they’re embittered.’

  This official, when asked what he thought of Partnership, said: ‘Huggins is a Kaffir-lover. He doesn’t care about the white people, only the natives. I prefer the South African system.’

  Again, much complaint about prostitutes. Most women here are not wives, but camp-followers: the welfare man’s term for them. There are about three dozen; and they earn as much as £60 to £90 a month.

  ‘We allow the prostitutes because if you have wives around there’s so much trouble with the single men always fighting with the husbands. We see that the prostitutes don’t live here; they live in neighbouring villages.’

  The compound manager said: ‘Everyone applying for married quarters here is going to have to produce a marriage certificate; we’re not going to have these temporary wives here. And there isn’t a Native Commissioner here to marry people quickly—the nearest Native Commissioner is in Miami. No, we aren’t going to forbid wives, but we aren’t going to encourage them either.’

  I asked if convict labour was being used; he said he had never heard of convict labour—in the tones of a man well-used to unjust accusations. I pointed out that the new aerodrome near Salisbury is being built almost entirely by convict labour and that I had repeatedly heard rumours of convict labour being used on Kariba. But he heatedly denied it.

  He was proud of the social amenities for his Africans—football and hockey, a cowboy film once a week, and regular lectures on hygiene. There is a choir which is popular, tribal dancing (which is not—‘perhaps because there are so many different tribes here’), and a jazz-band. There would be primary schooling for all the African children, but no secondary schooling. All Africans are vaccinated on arrival and made to take quinine regularly. Domestic servants are examined regularly for venereal disease, but not the ordinary labourers.

  The Africans working here, like those everywhere else, will be virtually the property of the company which employs them, housed, fed and regulated by the employers, under Government inspection.

  Lastly we went to the site itself, where the dam is being built. As we approached, a crocodile drove straight up-stream in the middle of the river, like a speedboat, away from the noise of the construction.
Between high wooded banks, cables were slung over the water; a suspension bridge, half-finished, jutted across the stream; piles stood in the river-bed; and on the bank we stood on, a road was being built: gangs of Africans under European supervision.

  I went down the deep tunnel which drove to water-level where the tunnel was under construction to take the main flow of the water when the dam itself was building; it was like going down a mine, damp and hot, with the electric lights shining dimly along earth roof, and the great cables unrolling downwards.

  Then it was time to leave, for we wanted to get back to Salisbury that night.

  Just past the turn-off on the main road, there is a little grass kiosk in the bush at the roadside, with a sign on it: ‘Drink Coca-Cola.’ Paul wanted to make a drawing of this evidence of the Coca-Cola revolution; so we stopped the car. He went off to draw, while a crowd of fascinated African children collected, and the Kaffir-fowls scratched about; and I sat in the car and drank Coca-Cola. Suddenly a big car came up along the road the way we had come very fast and stopped with a screaming of brakes, just behind our car. The man in it immediately got out; but he did not buy Coca-Cola. He stood for a moment, looking at the number-plate on our car; then remained standing on the road, looking suspiciously at Paul, who was sitting on his stool drawing, and suspiciously at me.

  This went on for some minutes. I took another look at him and thought I knew his face. Then I understood it was not the face I recognized, but the expression on it. What was it? Of course! This was the look of those Afrikaner special branch police in the Jan Smuts airport, while they were shepherding me on to the plane like a pack of dogs herding one sheep.