During the crisis the stickers on the cars read: ‘Good Old Smithie!’ ‘Up with Smithie!’ ‘And the Same to you, Wilson!’ When they holiday in the Union, Rhodesian cars read: ‘Thanks to our Pals—from Rhodesia!’ ‘Thanks to the Nats!’ And so on. Whitehall—when it has been in a responsible mood—has always made the mistake of treating these children seriously. And in the meantime they control a country half the size of Spain and in a key position for the entire continent.
As for sanctions, they were bound to be ineffective, since white Rhodesia could count on aid, open and hidden, from the Republic and from the Portuguese territories. If sanctions prove uncomfortable enough to force concessions, then we can expect some face-saving formula to be agreed to by Britain which will give the appearance of an agreement by the whites to advance the Africans. The whites will hold their power; the Africans will stay exactly as they are. Meanwhile, in the background, that handful of dedicated heroes, black and white, will continue to work, trying to improve conditions, trying to let in a little agitators. For how long? For a very long time, I believe. What is to change things?
I think that, in politics, people do not consider geography enough. The realities tend to be rooted in geography. Rhodesia is now one with the Republic in everything but name, and the southern part of the African continent is isolated. On either side, thousands of leagues of sea; just below, the Antarctic. Embedded between the two white-dominated countries, Bechuanaland (now Botswana), a bitterly poor country concerned only not to let itself be swallowed up by its very powerful neighbours. Then, north, across the Zambezi, Zambia, with problems enough of her own and certainly in no position, as romantics seem to expect, to fight a liberating war. And Malawi, which has turned out to be a black dictatorship, with all its opposition in exile, is fighting some solitary battle for its own interests. Africa, now that the white men have left most of it, has become like any other continent in the world, a mass of nations, each one of which has its own interests, its own form of nationalism. And every one of these countries is very poor. It is not likely that these nations, even if they were able to agree among themselves to do it, could launch a successful war to ‘liberate their brothers down South’ as some people seem to believe they will. Brotherhood and entrenched national interests, as recent history has abundantly shown, don’t march together. The Republic and Rhodesia—and they would be aided by the Portuguese colonies—have highly equipped modern armies, highly efficient secret police and sections of their black populations corrupted into spies and informers. And besides—look at the map.
And, more importantly, consider world priorities. As I write, there is danger of a war between Egypt and Israel; and the war in Vietnam is at crisis point. The world is so precarious that nasty slums like Southern Africa, slummy explosive continents like South America, must get on with it, they aren’t a danger to world peace, they don’t threaten our very existence. Southern Africa will go on exactly as it is now, as it has been for decades. What is to change it? The much-too-lately aroused moral idealism of small sections of Britain and America? If the big mining interests that own most of the wealth of the subcontinent put pressure on—but big companies don’t behave like this. And if they did—in Going Home I said that the whites would prefer to dwindle into a poor isolation rather than give up their idea of themselves. I think I was right. They would. This particular complex of manias is more powerful than long-term self-interest. It always has been. I can see, unless international influences (a really effective United Nations?), now unlikely to do so, exert pressure, the whole of the Southern continent becoming more cut off, bigoted, ignorant, backward; the whites deliberately closing their minds and forcibly keeping the minds of the Africans dark—with more and more prisons, whips, jailors, hangings, and forcible exiles.
The man Vorster is bringing a new sophistication to apartheid. For instance, ‘white’ liquor is now available to Africans until recently forbidden it. Outside the bottle shops, Africans queue for the status-symbol. Alcohol has always been used on the farms—tots of brandy have been part of wages for brutalized farm workers for decades. But now alcohol has moved into the cities, enlisted by the Nationalists. And the hard edge of white supremacy has been taken off for a few privileged Africans, in small limited areas. In some of the big stores a black man or woman may be served with courtesy, called Sir and Madam. Certain Africans are highly paid to spy, inform, infiltrate. In the African townships you keep your mouth shut, no one knows who may be in the pay of the Government. The opposition has been destroyed. You can visit the lush swimming-bathed, lawned and gardened suburbs of the white cities and forget that anything exists outside them. When the journalists are asked why they keep quiet about what they know of the oppression, of the tortures in the prisons, the savagery of the machinery of apartheid they reply they would lose their jobs, and anyway, no one would believe it. They mean: the whites who pay us don’t want to believe it. Where have we heard all this before? Yes, it has become an easy cliché to say that oppressive states are Nazi. But this state is Nazi. Behind Vorster are Nazis from Germany, some who have been there, biding their time for years; some recently arrived; and the techniques now being applied in the Republic were developed under Hitler.
It is just possible that if Rhodesia could develop an efficient African movement, the Republic would benefit by its example. But the Rhodesian movement is divided, and on personal grounds, and is not likely to be of much use. But, detention camps and prisons are great educators, and perhaps now in some bush prison a leadership is developing itself—a Kaunda, a Kapepwe. If this happens, we can expect the usual campaign of denigration from all the whites, some of the bought blacks and most of the British Press.
I went to Zambia for the Independence Celebrations. When I had been there previously, the Nationalist leaders, Kaunda and the rest, were reviled by the whites; and the Africans were rioting, stoning white cars, challenging the colour bar everywhere, going to prison. The atmosphere was very ugly. It went quite without saying no white would be prepared to stay in a country run by these unscrupulous black agitators. But the Celebrations were attended by a great many white people who had forgotten their own attitudes of less than ten years before. They were admirers of Kaunda and his cabinet to a man. It cannot be said that the majority of the whites in Zambia are happy with their position—most are there only because of the money they can earn. But they are there, working and behaving more or less decently. That’s something. The really unpleasant people were the old Colonial Office officials who, having administered for years a policy which must ensure that when the Africans got self-government they would have no more than a couple of dozen educated men to run a country with, sat around, gloating openly or furtively over the inefficiencies of the new regime. They are people unable by nature to connect their own attitudes with the results of them. There were a great many like this, and not all from the old Colonial Office. And a lot of them are still there.
But—nothing succeeds like success. Consider Kenya. What could be more extraordinary than the way that evil, black-magicking demagogue Kenyatta has been transmogrified into the respected Daddy of Kenya? Old-hand whites go around saying: ‘What is going to happen to this country when The Old Man goes, I can’t think.’ They were raving to tar and feather him not so long ago. It is not that one wishes people to have integrity of memory, for the sake of it, but it would be nice if, as this country or that heats up and political temperatures rise, people would remember how often we have been there before.
I remember, thinking of Kenyatta, a man called Montague Slater, now dead, who wrote a book called The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta. Montague was a quiet, doggedly humorous man, a Communist, and the difficulties of writing that book at all in the suspicious violent atmosphere of Britain during and just after the Mau Mau Rebellion he described to his friends—humorously and doggedly. That trial, the farcical brutality of it, is how ‘British Justice’ has been experienced by many Africans, and how they think of it. But we forget nasty lapses
like that trial when we have returned to our senses again. I sometimes wonder how Montague Slater would now regard the metamorphosis of the villain Kenyatta into a trusted statesman. Humorously I suppose. We owe more than we ever admit to these quiet and patient fighters in the background, who change atmospheres and attitudes in small but important ways.
When I wrote Going Home, I was a Communist—that is, I was holding a party card. I am not one now. The trouble is, being an ‘ex-Communist’ is just as much of a false position as being a Communist. But I’ve long since understood that what it was like being a Communist in a certain time and place can be understood by no one who was not. Which is why I am so glad I was one, had the experience. And I’m grateful to the Communists for what they taught me: particularly about power, the realities of political power. It is no accident that the only group of people who knew that Federation was dangerous nonsense, that Partnership was a bad joke, were Socialists of various kinds.
With the opposition in South Africa defeated, the filth being piled on its memory by very efficient propagandists, I want to pay tribute to the Communists and Socialists there who fought so well and bravely. (No, I am not saying that all the people who fought the Nationalists were Communists and Socialists.) But when the historians come to write the story of the fight against the Nationalists, the Communists will come out very well. They can be faulted on mistaken judgements about the Soviet Union, and on their analysis of the ‘class struggle’ in Africa, but not on common sense about the colour struggle, nor on courage, nor on humanity. When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the colour bar in their lives. Very few other people did—not the Labour Party, except for a few individuals—not the ‘liberals’, the word means something different there than it does here—and not the members of the churches. No one. But when you joined the Communists you met, for the first time, people of other races, and on equal terms. It was for this reason the Communist party had influence: not because of its theories.
There are no Communists now in South Africa. When the fighting lawyer Bram Fischer was sentenced for life he said he was a Communist. That was brave of him, because it made it so much easier for him to be blackened, denigrated, forgotten. He is now in Pretoria jail, the ugliest prison in a country full of them. It is where they keep people who are sentenced to death. He could easily have denied that he was a Communist. He knew quite well what it would mean, not only there, but here, saying ‘Yes, I am a Communist.’ But he said it. It was the end of an epoch, the sentencing and silencing of Bram Fischer. He was, and is, the most extraordinarily brave man. And the time will come when South Africa will be proud to have bred him.
I can write something now that I couldn’t when I wrote Going Home. I was on that trip just after the Twentieth Congress. Water under bridges, it seems, because last week I said to a young man interested in politics, ‘The Twentieth Congress,’ and he said: ‘What’s that?’ Well, it was the Congress of the Russian Communist Party when Khrushchev stood up in the Kremlin and said that Stalin was not all what he had been cracked up to be. Now this may have been a revelation in Russia, but it wasn’t in certain Communist circles here, who had for some time been fighting to get the leadership of the Communist party to tell the truth and divorce itself from Russia. The Twentieth Congress came as a relief for many Western Communists. What sent so many Communists out of the Western Communist parties was not Hungary, but Hungary coming so soon after the Twentieth Congress. To put it over-simply: if the Russian troops had gone into Hungary as they did before the Twentieth Congress, it would have been shocking but no more than could have been expected. That they crushed the Hungarian uprising in the brutal and cynical way they did after the Twentieth Congress, meant that Congress was more of a safety-valve than a promise of change.
I see that I said in Going Home that within a decade the Communist countries would have become more democratic than the Western countries. This has turned out to be untrue. But the Communist countries, save for China, have all become much more democratic, so much so as to make obsolete all the patterns of thinking of ten years ago.
But to return to ’56. I was in the position of someone coming from ‘the centre’—which is the romantic way people living in outposts see people who live in London. I would be in a position to deny the horrid truths of the Twentieth Congress—which were nothing, said the local Communists, but revolting lies and inventions. They were able to feel like this because they were isolated in Rhodesia. Who were the local Communists? They weren’t Communists at all. There has never been a Communist party in Rhodesia. They were a couple of dozen people scattered about the country who were inspired in the long, thankless, draining battle against colour bars and white supremacy by the glories of the Russian revolution. It is always a mistake to discount such people and their influence for good. If you are living in a country which is stifling, backward and provincial, and you are a lively idealistic person, you need something to buoy you up. For many people, in many parts of the world, this idealistic flame was Russia. Your local conditions may be primitive—but somewhere is good, the truth, progress. Your neighbours think you are mad and treacherous Kaffir lovers—but in other parts of the world you have friends, even if you don’t know their names. No one should laugh at this, or think it childish who has not lived in a backwater full of neurotic and bigoted racists.
Well, the Twentieth Congress was a blow to such people, and the tragedy was that in any place I went, they were the core of sensible opposition to Partnership and associated foolishness. I spent my days during that extraordinary trip being escorted around manifestations of Partnership by Garfield Todd’s publicity men and shadowed by the CID, as described, and my nights talking to groups of people whose hearts had been broken and who wanted to believe that I was a corrupted person for believing one word that Khrushchev said. They could not bear to believe him—yet. It was all very painful.
There were a good many other interesting aspects of this trip I still can’t write about, because people would get into trouble. That is why I shan’t lightly again go on a trip as a political journalist. Most of the really interesting things you discover you have to keep quiet about. Some journalists enjoy precisely this aspect of their work—being in the know. I find it more frustrating than enjoyable. And besides, it’s a responsibility, remembering to keep your mouth shut, because people’s jobs, lives, are at stake.
The financing of this trip was tricky. I had to go home, for emotional reasons. I needed to see how Rhodesia struck me after living in a civilized country. I needed to feel and smell the place. But I had no money. I was very hard up. I did not have the money for the fare—£250. The News Chronicle said they would send me, but they changed their minds. Meanwhile I had made arrangements to leave. But I was determined to go somehow. What to do? I had no idea. The way I saw it was one of the newspapers ought to send me, because I was equipped to write sense about Federation and Partnership, while the professional journalists were all writing such nonsense. They did not see it my way. With my departure date a month off, on an impulse, I got onto a bus to Fleet Street, walked into Tass and proposed to a charming but surprised young man behind a desk that Tass should pay for my fare home. Every civilized country in the world, said I, paid journalists to visit countries and report on what they found there, and why should not Russia do the same? This, of course, sounds very naïve. But I do not feel this is the place to discuss the usefulness of naïveté. Besides, a good many Communists at that time conceived it to be their duty to influence the Soviet Union towards modern ways. Journalism, then as now, in Russia was old-fashioned, and one of the thoughts in my mind was that I might be adding my mite towards dragging Russia kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
Tass was noncommittal, but he put me into his car and drove me to the Soviet Embassy, where we saw the cultural attaché, a very urbane man, to whom I put my proposition. I was not even asking for expenses, I said, I wanted my fare paid, i
n return for which I would write articles for any newspaper in the Soviet Union he cared to name. The point was, I said, hammering at it, the Russians were not to behave in their usual indolent fashion: it was not the slightest use the money for the fare arriving in six months’ or a year’s time: the Russian time sense was not to operate in my case, because I needed the money to board the plane. Would they let me know, inside a fortnight, if they would pay the fare and what newspaper I would write for? We parted on this basis. The weeks went by. Suddenly, just before departure date, rather less than the fare arrived from the Narodny Bank, but no word about what newspaper I was hired by. Later, after returning from the trip, I found out that the money represented payment for some short story of mine published in the Soviet Union, which I had not been told about. They seldom do tell you. What happens is that a friend who has been on a jaunt to Moscow rings up and says, ‘Did you know that your work X is on sale on the bookstall in Moscow?’ No, you hadn’t known. The Russians behave inexcusably, pirating what they fancy. They pay money into an account in Moscow and if you go there you can spend it. But one isn’t always able to go to Russia—hasn’t the time or the inclination. If you nag, are unpleasant, make a fuss, you can get money paid here. I once got a large sum after a long, nagging campaign for payment for some stories. But the point is, it is a favour, a kindness, not a right. This isn’t excusable. It is not excusable for a large, rich, modern country to behave in such a way. The Russians, like most countries, often behave out of emotions appropriate to a previous epoch. For decades they traded on: ‘We are a poor, struggling, Socialist country surrounded by capitalist enemies. You are a friend, therefore don’t criticize us.’ This was legitimate once, but isn’t now. And—I think unconsciously—they trade on their charm. Few people visit Russia without being slaves ever after to the Russians, if not to their regime. Their warmth of heart, their kindness, their sympathy, their generosity are impossible to forget.
NF (1957) Going Home Page 27
