Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

by Doris Lessing

  I was not really upset by being turned out of South Africa, for I had no emotional stake in the place. I was taken to the plane I had come on by two officials, and on the flight back sat by myself while people looked at me, imagining God knows what crimes.

  Back in Salisbury I was postponing all the business of being a journalist, not really my favourite occupation, and sat around on verandahs, gossiping. Then there was a call from the Prime Minister’s office, saying, Don’t you want to interview Garfield Todd? It had not occurred to me. What for? I was after very different sources of information. But off I went to the Prime Minister’s office, and there was Garfield Todd, a tall, handsome man striding about like Abraham Lincoln, for you could see walls and ceilings irked him and he would rather have been out-of-doors. And there I was for about three hours. As usual, I was in a thoroughly false position. Garfield Todd, a noble soul, was in love with the Federation of Central Africa, that noble idea that ignored every reality. He said, ‘I have let you in…’ or, rather, ‘I have stretched my hand out over you, my child’—he was a missionary—and this was because he intended me to write nice things about Southern Rhodesia and the Federation. The foreign journalists always gave it a bad press, he said. He had told his publicity men to give me every facility, because he knew that when I saw ‘with my own eyes’ what was being done, I must be impressed, and I would write nice articles. I said I had been brought up in the country, I knew it inside out and back to front, and there was no way I could write ‘nice articles’ about it. What can be more extraordinary than what one doesn’t hear, doesn’t ‘take in’? Because it was emotionally impossible for me to be excluded from the landscape I had been brought up in, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The fact was that I had been made a Prohibited Immigrant by Lord Malvern (Dr. Huggins, the family doctor) when I left Southern Rhodesia eight years before: ‘I wasn’t going to have you upsetting my natives.’ But I had not been told I was Prohibited. They were embarrassed about it when, weeks later, I went with a lawyer to Rhodesia House in the Strand. They prevaricated, they wriggled, they lied, but in the end they admitted I was Prohibited, saying, ‘Drat it, you’ve forced our hand.’

  Meanwhile, on being told by the Special Branch that my name was on the passenger list, Garfield Todd had intervened to allow me in. I told him he was putting me in an impossible position. He said he had confidence in my fairness of mind. I said it obviously had nothing to do with fairness of mind, since we both had fair minds but disagreed. We went on to debate about the bases of federation. I said that its inflammatory nature was surely shown by the fact that it had given birth to the two African National Congresses, of Northern Rhodesia and of Nyasaland. (It had also given birth to the still invisible National Congress in Southern Rhodesia: I had already met clandestinely two men who lived permanently on the run from the police of all three countries, smuggling into Southern Rhodesia leaflets and information from the two northern countries.) Garfield Todd said he loathed and despised the leaders of the National Congresses. He said they were loud-mouthed agitators. Of course they are, I said. Quite soon he was to become the good friend of all the black leaders.

  I spent the rest of my time in Southern Rhodesia being courteously escorted around by his publicity people but at the same time pursued by the Special Branch, who had a rather more realistic view. They turned up in the most surprising places, such as in the middle of the bush near the Zambesi, where Paul was drawing a Coca-Cola stall; at the next table in the Karoi Hotel, trying to eavesdrop: he had the bad-tempered look characteristic of these people when forced into unwilling proximity to their seditious charges; in the next car at a drive-in cinema—but he went to sleep.

  The painful part of the trip was going to see all my old comrades, the Reds. To hold views about the society you live in not shared by the people you live among, to preserve them coolly and sanely, to remain unparanoid and unbitter…well, it is not possible. In the old Southern Rhodesia, before the advent of Reds and kaffir-lovers, there were one or two such souls, one of them Arthur Shearly Cripps, the poet, who was supported by religion, but on the whole it was impossible. Eight years had passed. The Cold War still gripped, and because of the birth of the National Congresses up north, white attitudes had hardened. I found my old friends had become paranoid, had taken to drink, or had turned into their own opposites, defending White Civilisation in ways they would so recently have found pathetic. Or they were having breakdowns. All these people had been sustained by a vision of that beautiful and true Utopia over there in Russia, but they had just read in the Observer the full text of the Khrushchev speech, and they were angry, disbelieving, bitter. I met little groups or the isolated person in some mining town or in a house in Bulawayo or Salisbury, and they were in despair, and their hearts were broken. There was one thing I could not say: ‘Not only is the Khrushchev speech all true, but the real truth is a hundred times worse.’ ‘Yes, it is true,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am afraid it is true, Khrushchev’s speech is true.’

  I was looking—and I knew it—at what I would have become had I stayed in that first marriage, a civil servant’s wife in that society. I would have been a lush, had a breakdown, at best become bitter and neurotic.

  I saw my brother, for a couple of days, in his house in Marandellas. It was uncomfortable for both of us. He was entertaining this wrong-headed kaffir-lover, who had written these unfair books. I was with a man whom you could not even describe as ‘reactionary’, for his attitudes on any subject at all were always at an extreme, like caricature.

  I saw my mother for an afternoon. She was staying with her old friend Mrs. Colborne, and we met with our usual politeness, and under this surface were worlds of grief.

  I went to see Lord Malvern, head of the famous Federation, and said I wanted to go to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, for Garfield Todd had warned me I would have to get permission. He said, ‘How long do you want to go for?’ and, when I said a week or so, ‘I suppose you can’t do much harm in that time.’ I still didn’t know he had Prohibited me.

  There is a certain charm about all this, an amateurishness: it is because I was white. Had I been black, the South African Special Branch would not have had one second’s embarrassment about deporting me. Had I been black, with my views, I would have been on the run, hiding, like the National Congress men, or pretending to be a house servant.

  The best part of the trip was being alone, in the bush, driving for hours absolutely by myself, the only person on the road, stopping from time to time simply to sit on the edge of space and stare into the great skies. Once, on the road north to the still building Kariba Dam, I saw in front of me on the side of the road an apparently broken-down car. In it were two American anthropologists, whom I had met the night before in Salisbury. Could I help? I asked. They were pale, they were trembling, they were in a funk. What could be the matter? It was all this space, they said. They couldn’t stand it. They couldn’t bear to look at it. I stood by them, as they sat huddled in the front seats, and I looked at all the magnificent emptiness and at the blue distances above, and I asked what it was they were afraid of. But for them, that landscape was full of menace. They begged to be allowed to follow my car, so as not to be the only car on that road. Which they did, until the turnoff to Kariba, where they sent me pathetic smiles and waves, as they drove slowly onwards by themselves.

  On that trip I drove through a forest more wonderful than any I have seen anywhere—tall, noble trees and clean yellow grass, animals and birds everywhere, even elephants, for I saw them quite close, on a little hill. Thirty years on, it had gone, the forest had gone, there were only wrecked trees and erosion.

  Going to Northern Rhodesia was exciting in ways not due entirely to present ‘unrest’. In those days no one went there unless they had to—mining engineers, civil servants, miners in search of work. Northern Rhodesia was the Copper Belt, Lusaka unimportant. Then, as now, most of the black people were in the towns, not in villages in the bush, unlike Southern Rhodesia and—now—
Zimbabwe, where most people are still village people. It was a hard-drinking, rough place, like an urban Wild West. The hour’s flight to Lusaka was from a modern and developed country to a backward one. All of Northern Rhodesia was aflame, with people rioting, throwing stones at white people in cars, setting minor buildings alight—the pathetic weapons of people without power. In the old days—the thirties and forties—the public figure in the news was Roy Welensky, the miners’ trade-union leader: white miners. He was noisy, effective, and crudely anti-black. ‘A rough diamond,’ opined the whites of Southern Rhodesia. Recently he had toned down his racism, to match the times, but the blacks distrusted and hated him. He had been made prime minister of Northern Rhodesia, one of the pillars of Federation. This was a stroke of such brilliant stupidity that even now one has to marvel. It was as if the authorities were deliberately saying to the blacks: You are absolutely right; federation means you will be put into the hands of black-haters, not only Southern Rhodesians but your best-known local one, Welensky.

  I went around and about a good bit, but all that is in Going Home. Three events stay in my mind. One was visiting the headquarters of the African National Congress, a little brick house in a suburb. In the front room, Kenneth Kaunda, a clerkly man, every inch an intellectual, sat reading the New Statesman. In the back yard, a small crowd gathered to greet Harry Nkumbula, the then leader of the Congress. He had been on a trip to see the River Tonga, who were being thrown forcibly off their land to make way for the great Kariba Dam. The Tonga were a major political issue then, used by the National Congresses to accuse the whites. But once in power, none of them gave a damn about the suffering Tonga. I was a sentimental soul in those days and was moved by this outcry. Harry Nkumbula, who had spent some days in the bush, dodging the police, and had hardly slept, returned, found the crowd in the yard, stood on a box, and harangued them. He was a magnificent orator. His lieutenant, Kenneth Kaunda, continued to sit in his shirtsleeves, reading.

  In Ndola, a Copper Belt town, they gave a party for me. I was the main course. This could hardly have been an unambiguous pleasure for them. On the one hand I was a writer and a celeb, and they were short of excitements of that kind, but on the other I was a known sympathiser of the blacks, and a Red, and an enemy. All through the evening I was the target for sickening racial remarks. These people were feeling threatened, because of their no longer obedient blacks, who were throwing stones at their cars and shouting insults, and they defended themselves that evening with spite, malice, and vindictiveness. If they could have killed me slowly, and with maximum unpleasantness, they would. Meanwhile, and all evening, they listened to Eartha Kitt records and sentimentally sang along. They loved Eartha Kitt, brown sugar, little black rabbit; they simply couldn’t get enough of her. Oh, my compatriots, my white compatriots, how I did dislike you, what a nasty lot of people you were. That is to say, whenever the racial nerve was touched, because at other times you were charming, just like anybody else. Who were they all that evening? Managers and senior technicians from the mine and representatives of the big mining companies, Anglo-American and the Rhodesian Selection Trust. More men than women, for women were always in short supply on the Copper Belt. During my time there I was a fizz of angry energy. The Copper Belt had a raw violent energy, and hating something fills you with energy too.

  And now the third event. On the plane from Ndola to Lusaka, I was sitting next to a likeable young man who was—improbably—a policeman. He had been on some stint of duty on the Copper Belt, and he was returning to his mother and his sister, with whom he lived. He talked about his little pigeons and his rabbits. He said I should go with him and meet his mom and his sister. He said we should get married, we would get along fine. Now, that plane trip lasted less than an hour. I was shocked. I was shaken. Attractive young women are used to inconsequential proposals of marriage. Love—that’s a different thing; nothing surprising about invitations to love, at a moment’s notice. But marriage? More than once, when young—but it was during the war—I had sat with other women and we had marvelled—uneasy—at the casual way men will propose. But this young man was rather sensible, I thought. He was not drunk. He was not high on anything—except, probably, dreams. He had never left Northern Rhodesia. Here, sitting beside him high above the earth, was this woman; a journalist, she said. She lived in London. This sweet young man—he was younger than I was by a good ten years—was in a dream of some kind. A figure from the girls’ magazines his sister bought had come and sat beside him on the aeroplane, and when she went off at the airport, waving goodbye, he was full of loss, as we are when we wake from a dream of our heart’s desire and find our arms empty after all.

  But it was such an odd little event, or happening, so bizarre, I could not forget it. I brooded about it, then let it go, but came back to it and fitted it together with events of the same kind. It comes hard for any young woman with even minimal attractions to dismiss them as irrelevant, but at last I had to conclude that some women are like blank screens where people—not only men—project images. These women are not necessarily beautiful or even pretty. They may be plain. They attract proposals and offers of every kind all their lives and make a mistake if they think this is a tribute to their personal charms. I used to think, Well, we’re good listeners, perhaps that’s it. I conducted a quiet private survey among women of my age. Some would look at me, ready to be derisive: What are you talking about? But others knew at once what I was talking about.

  Shortly after my return to London, there was a telephone call, that so frequent telephone call: You are not pulling your weight. The leadership of the Northern Rhodesian National Congress were in London. If they had stayed, they would have been put in prison. They had very little money, they were living poorly, please would I ask them around and see that at least they sometimes got a decent meal. So that is why, for some months, two or three times a week, I had an assortment of black exiles in my flat, in my big room. The most important one was Harry Nkumbula, the movement’s leader. This then so well-known politician has long ago disappeared from view. Like many other Africans in exile then, he drank too much. Later he backed a line too moderate for the uncompromising mood of the blacks in soon-to-be Zambia and fell from grace; Kenneth Kaunda took his place. Harry went on drinking and did himself in with it. Sad; he was an extraordinarily nice man. The people who came to these evenings were not all from Northern Rhodesia. One was Orton Chirwa, from Nyasaland. He worked in London as a teacher. His classes were all white children. Every morning he lined them up, and sat in a chair, and allowed them to file past, each child feeling his hair and exclaiming over it. This ceremony had to take place, as otherwise his classes were continually interrupted: Please, sir, can I feel your hair? Orton was a kind and witty man, but that did not save him from a horrible fate. Another habitué was Babu Mohammed, from Zanzibar. He used to come early and cook with me, his contribution being great pots of curry, Zanzibar style. Others dropped in, but I’ve forgotten names. These men did not know they would soon be in positions of power. They were uncertain, low in spirits, and lonely in London. Later I looked back and thought uneasily about their so different fates. Orton Chirwa was to confront the tyrant Hastings Banda, and he was for many years in prison, where he was chained, tortured, then murdered. Kenneth Kaunda was the first black president of Zambia. Mainza Chona, the promising young poet of the assembly, full of charming idealisms, became minister for home affairs and presided over some very nasty prisons. He had eight children, as an example to his nation, because the idea that having too many children is a bad thing was merely another little plot by the whites. Babu, having worked in the post office, a refuge for many exiles, went back to Zanzibar, where he was imprisoned as an agitator by the British. In prison he said he had the disconcerting experience of reading The Golden Notebook—not the most likely prison fare. Later he became a minister in Julius Nyerere’s government. He was one of the people responsible for the socialist villages—Ujamaa—in Tanzania, which wrecked that country’
s agriculture. Zanzibar had a tyrant, Karume, loathed by everyone except his immediate henchmen, and opposed by—among others—Babu. Someone assassinated him. Babu—among many others—was accused of it. He told me that he could not have possibly done this, because he was in a boat on a pleasure trip with some girls at the time. President Nyerere, about whom Babu had never had much good to say, put Babu in prison to keep him safe from the assassins of Zanzibar and refused to extradite him to certain death: they were torturing and hanging and imprisoning people by the hundreds in Zanzibar. Babu, one of the most gregarious men I have ever known, was for seven years in solitary, where he wrote his memoirs on lavatory paper, as is prescribed. He was fed and kept alive because the men who were his jailors admired and helped him. He said that being in prison under the British was a holiday camp compared to conditions in African jails. Babu was quite often described in the newspapers as ‘the most dangerous man in Africa’. How they do love this kind of idiotic label. Dangerous to whom?*