But what could the CID be doing here?
Making sure that I did not, after my warning, take this route up into Northern Rhodesia? Making sure that I was not making seditious speeches to the group of black children, the chickens and the mongrel dogs and the salesman at the kiosk and his friends who were now gathering around from a nearby village to watch the process of drawing?
But there was no doubt it was the CID. I think Governments should employ mercenaries for this sort of work; true believers are a bad policy; for there are countries where one can pick out the political police streets away by their look of disgusted and irritated hatred. This man walked up and down the road for half an hour, looking at Paul, looking at me, as if he would like to wring both our necks if only there was a law to permit it. When Paul had showed his drawing to the Africans, who liked it very much, and stacked his drawing things back in the boot of the car, and we had got into our car, the man got into his car. We drove off, but he remained sitting in his car looking after us, and did not follow us again, though we were driving slowly now, on purpose so that he should catch us up. So he must have turned back to whatever post he operated from.
9
Since I might not get up North, and I wanted to write about the trends in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, I made arrangements to meet representatives of the two Congresses. For to know what the Government, or white settlers’ organizations, think about events it is only necessary to read the papers.
These arrangements were made carefully, since Congress representatives are not exactly liked by the Government; and for the same reason I shall not use the names of people or places.*
I wanted to find out two things. What was the attitude of National Congresses to the rapid industrial development going on in the Federation, and which must increase the wealth of this backward and undeveloped area. Secondly, how did they now view Federation?
For, one evening in a pleasant house, a group of white progressives—a word which is rather more elastic in this part of the world than it is in Britain—had worked out an admirably logical thesis which went like this: That since it was unlikely the Africans would be given self-government in the next decade and it seemed they were not in a position to take it forcibly; since the most striking, the most basic fact about the Federal area is its poverty, and schemes like Kariba and other big projects will ultimately raise the standard of living of everybody; would it not be better if the African Congresses supported economic development, at the same time using their great strength to demand a steadily increasing share in control of government? For the phrases and slogans of Partnership offer a verbal basis to fight on: to put the flesh of reality on these words would be to create a real democracy.
In short, to make the architects of Partnership fulfil their promises.
This is a very brief summary of the conclusions come to after an argument that went on for some hours, with great heat, based on a wealth of knowledge and information and experience, between various sorts of Socialist, ranging from classic Marxist, through Fabian, to old-fashioned liberal.
There was nothing wrong with our methods of reasoning, which were, however, only possible because, being white, we had not been subjected every hour of our lives to the humiliations of the colour bar.
For when I met these Congressmen, in small, shabby, out-of-the-way rooms, in an atmosphere of secrecy and oppression, those very sane and sensible arguments seemed silly, or at least irrelevant.
I have known many Nationalists, but never any as bitter as these.
I hate nationalism; but I hate even more that soft-mindedness which deplores the colour bar and ideas of white supremacy, hopes they will soften and diminish, and behaves as if they have vanished already—that hypocrisy which acknowledges the ugliness of white-settler what-I-have-I-hold, and yet will not acknowledge the justice of the black nationalism which is its inevitable consequence.
Political emotion, that emotion which drives masses of people into action, is never reasoned and rational. The leaders of a movement may be thoughtful men; their followers are not.
The emotions of ‘white-civilization’ are not rational; nor are the emotions of nationalism.
Talking to these Nationalists—Nationalists for that matter from any part of ‘white’ Africa—I find that there are two nightmares or fantasies which haunt them.
One I have already mentioned: ‘The whites want to kill us all off, they won’t be happy till we are all dead.’
Yet manifestly a dead African is a bad African—that is, unless he rebels; since a dead African is not able to do the dirty work of the country.
The other is: ‘They are going to bring in hundreds of thousands of white people from Europe and swamp us, and take our land.’
Ever since I can remember, the white settlers have been agitating for mass white immigration, so as to strengthen them against the Africans. This heart-cry is perennial; it is never absent from sundowner talk or newspaper column. But there never has been mass white immigration. Nor can there be. Having reached, since the war, a figure of twenty thousand a year, the Government has had to peg the figure there, because the existing facilities are so over-strained they can’t feed more people: not only the black men’s towns, but the white, are short of schools and hospitals, let alone housing. And that figure of twenty thousand is itself a defeat, for at last the Government has given up the dream of ‘sound Nordic stock’—meaning Britishers, Germans and other Northern Europeans, the arguments in favour of which are the same as those used by Hitler and Goebbels—to import quantities of Italians and Greeks, peoples who, to the average white settler, seem not far removed from the Africans. These people are already undermining ‘white supremacy’ since they are a cheerful and happy-go-lucky lot, who do not take easily to the neurotic rigidities of white settlerdom.
And a great many of the recent immigrants promptly left again. According to figures recently published, fifty thousand white people have left the Federation in the last five years. Why? Because accommodation is hard to find; because everything is overcrowded; because it is a boring and provincial life; because if you are not prepared to talk about the colour bar there is nothing else to talk about; and because the place is as insecure and explosive as South Africa, which is also losing its white citizens in large numbers.
In short, these two powerful fantasies, of being killed off by the whites, and of mass white immigration, are absolute nonsense, economic and political nonsense. Yet they are all-powerful and likely to remain so.
The arguments of the Congress people are very simple, the same whether one listens to a Nyasaland man or a Northern Rhodesian. We were free men, we Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. We made voluntary treaties with your Queen Victoria, and became British-protected persons. We opposed Federation with Southern Rhodesia; yet your Government forced it on us. We have been tricked and betrayed by the British Government; and now we are in the same position as our brothers in Southern Rhodesia, who were physically conquered by force of arms. Yes, now we know that the whites of the Federation will force on us apartheid, the South African system. Why, we already have apartheid, although they call it Partnership. It creeps north from Southern Rhodesia already; already they begin to enforce pass laws here, and to take away more and more of our land. No, we shall have nothing to do with any Federal Government project. No, we do not understand this argument you use, that economic development will benefit the Africans—when has development benefited us? On the contrary, it is the whites who gain, who always gain, and everything that is good is taken away from us. No; when you speak like that, you speak as a white person; you are against us. The simplest child in the village knows that Federation made a dupe of him. But he will not understand what you call tactics. Tactics are immoral. For an African, a thing is good or it is bad. Federation is bad, and we will have nothing to do with it. We will fight to get Nyasaland out of the Federation if we can. And besides, even if it were true that we would earn more money if factories and industri
es came to the Federation, we would have lost our freedom, we would be slaves. No. We know only one thing, that the white people want our land. They will take our land, as they have in Southern Rhodesia. How can we support Kariba when thousands of our people are being moved off their good, rich, fertile land, where they have lived for generations, to bad distant soil, which has never been theirs and which does not know them and their ancestors? No, no. We will not listen. Now we know only one thing—we are black men. You are white. Therefore you are our enemy. No, no, no.
This is the voice of the Congresses.
The men who lead the Congresses are intelligent politicians who understand the modern world. The whites see them as raving seditionaries. Behind these men are a massed, embittered population. This is the same situation as in Kenya before the outbreak: the national movement was suppressed, because it demanded a share in government. Behind it was Mau Mau.
Behind the Congresses in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is Mau Mau, perhaps half a step behind.
The motion behind Mau Mau was a very natural desire for revenge for humiliation, for being made slaves in their own country.
In arguing with Africans who support Mau Mau—for at the bottom of every African heart is a profound natural sympathy with Mau Mau—I have been saying: ‘I have every sympathy with Mau Mau; it is the fault of the white idiots in Kenya that this bitter war began. But I think it was a mistake to fight knowing that you could not win, that you were bound to be destroyed, your people made captive, your leaders hanged, everyone humiliated and discouraged.’
To which the reply is: ‘You destroyed our national organization, you took from us every hope of sharing in the government of our country—so what did you expect us to do? We fought with what means we could. We showed at least that we were not cowards and slaves. And the fact that we could fight at all put heart into Africans all over Africa.’
That we comes from Africans who are not Kenyans, as well as those who are, from Africans who identify themselves as completely with the black side in Kenya as that white South African announcer identified himself instinctively and completely with the Kenyan white settlers.
The voice of the national Congresses is the most powerful factor in Central Africa now: it will determine what happens there; it is the bitter, desperate, proud, angry voice of a people betrayed to the gods of money and expediency.
I re-read the preface to John Bull’s Other Island. Here is Bernard Shaw on the ‘Curse of Nationalism’:
It is hardly possible for an Englishman to understand all that this implies. A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else, and is forced to place himself, to the exclusion of all better company, in the hands of quacks who profess to treat or cure cancer…English rule is such an intolerable abomination that no other subject can reach the people. Nationalism stands between Ireland and the rest of the world…a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation…There is indeed no greater curse to a nation than a nationalist movement which is only the agonizing symptom of a suppressed natural function. Conquered nations lose their place in the world’s march because they can do nothing to strive to get rid of their nationalist movements by recovering their national liberty…
I intended to try to get up north, even though I was told I would be forbidden. So I waited a week, delaying my plans, to see that statesman who, I had been told, intended to prevent me. I interviewed him as a journalist and did not ask his permission to go north, which I could not do, in any case, since I had promised my informant not to say a word of what he had told me. But I said that I was going, to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and waited for him to forbid me. He said nothing, rather grimly, admittedly, but he said not a word. So I made plans to go to Northern Rhodesia.
An interview with Lord Malvern, Prime Minister of the Federation. He used to be my mother’s doctor, when he still practised as one; and I had often heard him speak at meetings when I was a child. He is an old man now, sitting behind a big desk under a portrait of Cecil John Rhodes in a long room where you walk towards him, seeing him black and rather hunched against the strong light from the windows behind.
Most of this interview, like all the other interviews, was off the record; for he complained that people were such fools they always misunderstood him. It is no secret, I think, that Lord Malvern or Dr Huggins has never had much respect for other people’s intelligence; and this tendency has been strengthened because he has always been the most quick-minded, lively, sharp-tongued of the politicians in a country that is naturally short of able politicians. Now he gives the impression of being tired, no less asperous and impatient, a brooding and rather lonely figure.
He said he thought Federation was successful, though suffering from growing pains. When I suggested that perhaps the opposition and political feeling it had created among the Africans might ultimately wreck it, he said impatiently that I must not get the impression that the Congresses had any influence; they were just a few noisy agitators.
He said he understood I had Left Wing views. I said yes, strong Left Wing views, to which he replied that he believed in making haste slowly and the middle way.
He understood I wrote; what did I write about? This is a question which always annoys a writer; but I said that for the purposes of this discussion I wrote against the colour bar. To which he said: ‘Well, that’s all right. Of course you know there’s hardly any colour bar left in Southern Rhodesia.’
I asked him if he did not think, since he had got the public to swallow an interracial university, something that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, he could have pushed it through another stage and made it truly interracial and non-segregated. He said, no; it was touch and go as it was; and if those fools in England didn’t shut up, they’d defeat his purpose, scare off the whites and make a black university. ‘As it is they won’t send their daughters—not at the beginning.’
I said I knew one or two families who were sending their daughters, but he said impatiently: ‘I know these people. It’s no good rushing them. All this business of principle, of right and wrong—how can there be right and wrong in politics? You do what you can as you can.’
I said: ‘All you people seem much more scared of white public opinion than you are of African opinion.’
He said, very quickly: ‘No.’
‘You’re the first who hasn’t put it like that, just as plainly.’
‘There is no such thing as African public opinion. They’re not educated enough to have an opinion. We have to steer a middle road and hope the two extremes won’t start shouting. The thing is to make a beginning. After all, nothing’s static. In ten years’ time, when people have got used to the idea of a multi-racial university, we can go a step farther. I have no colour feeling myself—I wasn’t brought up in this country. But you have to recognize it exists.’
And then we got on to the Colonial Office, and kindred matters, and I agreed not to quote him.
10
As I might not be allowed to return to Salisbury, I spent a sentimental morning driving around it, looking at the innumerable places I have lived in. Most, so fast are things changing, no longer exist. Most are not to be regretted. The house I would have been pleased to see go was still there. In it, for over a year, I was very unhappy. I have since learned to distinguish between unhappiness which is simply temperamental, and has to be suffered through, like an attack of flu; and the unhappiness caused by circumstances. At that time I could not distinguish between them. I was dumbly, hopelessly unhappy; I could not believe I would ever have a hopeful thought or feeling again. It was therefore salutary to go and look at the small brick house, in its garden, warm in the sunlight, with c
hildren playing on the verandah. It was hard to identify it as the same place, indeed. A year is a long time to waste in being unhappy; a year is a good part of one’s life.
IN TIME OF DRYNESS
There is no dryness like this drought.
Thin flesh burns, skin cracks, lips strain.
A dull drum tom-toms in the brain,
Low thudding rising to a shout:
There have been years that no rain knew,
And skulls lay bleaching in the dust
That rose and clung like thickening rust
On everything that lived and grew.
Small skulls that are so pitiful,
I flesh your bones with anger, and
Inhabited you walk the sand
And watch the skies to see them fill.
Seven long years a drought can wait.
I think how with each year you cried—
You knew that hell before you died—
That rescue now would be too late.
The thick grey rocks compress you round.
The thick sky presses down like steel.
You have forgotten how to feel
Except as parched plants in parched ground.
Day after numbing day you grieve
For auguries of rain, and yet
You know that grieving you forget
How truly living people live.
Despair has taught you to rely
On memories of waterfalls
That broke from barren rocky walls,
Of bright drops squeezed from leaves half-dry.
Outside that house I walked up and down a few minutes, doing penance on behalf of the selective memory: after all, just because I don’t like to remember that year, and disapprove entirely of my state of mind at that time, it doesn’t mean to say it didn’t exist…
NF (1957) Going Home Page 20
