On these evenings in my home, a great deal of sombre joking went on. They dreamed of how things would be when they were governing their countries. One evening I heard the Northern Rhodesians, Kenneth Kaunda included, saying it would be impossible to run their country, achieve real independence, because the Copper Belt was owned by international capital. Copper is Zambia’s only asset, apart from abundant wild life. They would never be allowed to close down the copper mines. It would be best simply to blow up all the mines, and then they would have independence. This idea was a serious, if wistful part of their programme, developed over more than one evening.
Kenneth Kaunda, Mainza Chona, Harry Nkumbula, returned to Zambia, where they were in prison for a time, but then the first two became Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs respectively, while Harry faded from view. Babu went off to Zanzibar and the British prison. Orton Chirwa went to Nyasaland, Malawi, and his terrible end.
I heard no more from the Northern Rhodesians. I was told that Mainza Chona was going about telling people to keep clear of me because I was a dangerous communist.
I did not mind this. For one thing, my evenings were my own again. Did I then feel—or do I now feel—resentment that men I befriended, gave money to, fed (though of course I was not the only hostess in London to help them), then became someone to be avoided? No. In politics virtue has to be its own reward, and anyone who expects justice and even gratitude is as stupid as a soldier risking his life in war who expects his government to do right by him—crippled soldiers were selling matches and bootlaces on the streets of London to survive before the war in The Trenches had even ended—or women who stand by struggling young artists and poets.
There was, in fact, very little communism, theory or practice, during those evenings. For one thing, the dogma, or Party Line, still was that black nationalism was an aberration, reactionary, and so forth. A black proletariat was still the only key to the glorious dawn in Africa. None of these men was interested in communism. Their talk was all of the repressiveness of the Colonial Office, of how they had been betrayed by Federation. Queen Victoria had promised their chiefs that their (black) interests would always be paramount, yet the Colonial Office had agreed to Federation, which would put them at the mercy of Southern Rhodesia. The bitterness of betrayal was the keynote of their talk.
A little event, which I still find touching. Someone in Whitehall decided it would be a good thing if a Royal could have these agitators to tea, because one never knew: after all, look at Kenyatta, look at Nkrumah, dangerous agitators and then noble leaders. In the Palace they probably said, ‘Oh Lord, no, someone’s got to ask a parcel of blacks out to tea. How about you?’
‘No fear, can’t stand the buggers.’
‘How about you, then?’
‘Not me.’
‘I know, we’ll tell Alice she’s got to do it.’
So Princess Alice asked the future government of Zambia to tea in a palace, I don’t know which, and these lonely and ignored men were so grateful for the attention and, too, for what they saw as a delicate reference to Queen Victoria’s promise to their forebears, that half a decade later, when Zambia got self-government, President Kenneth Kaunda most especially asked if Princess Alice could be his official guest and open the big official ball with him at the Celebrations. And so there at the ball was this old frail lady, dressed in her jewels, with her pretty tiara, waltzing gently around and around with President Kaunda…. About politics there is nothing to be done, finally, but laugh.
By then I had become impatient with what I had decided were romantic and paranoid souls in the Party who were convinced that their telephones were tapped and their letters opened, but then something happened that convinced me my letters were opened. After Babu had returned to Zanzibar, he sent me a letter recommending a certain cousin, who would come to see me on such and such a date and would much benefit by attending the evenings—but by then they had ended. He wasn’t interested in politics, said Babu, he was a good-time boy, and he needed instruction. When this cousin turned up, without having telephoned or sent a message, he was fearful, said he had come only because Babu had told him he must. He had been summoned by an official in Whitehall, and warned that he must keep clear of a certain Mrs. Lessing, who was involved in dangerous conspiracies with the Arabs. He must be careful to avoid this woman, or his time in London would be short. They knew he planned to visit me on such and such a date. So they must have opened Babu’s letter. This cousin wanted to know who were these Arabs? I wanted to know too. The Arabs (which?) were not then noisy figures on the world stage; we hardly thought of them. I had not met any Arabs in London. The only time I had met an Arab was back in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, when our group conceived the brilliant idea of asking all our Jewish friends to meet the Arabs just let out of the internment camps, where they had been for the years of the war because they were pro-German. They were bitter and angry men, the Jews were bitter and angry. We had actually imagined that civilised discussion might clear the air. So hostile were the few first moments of their confrontation that we—the noninvolved—simply left them to it and went off to drink in the Grand Hotel, sending emissaries from time to time to see how things were going. Very badly, and they ended in violence. And that had been my sole encounter with Arabs of any kind. I was mystified, and so was the cousin, who said he couldn’t afford to follow Babu’s instructions and come to my parties, because he wanted to have a nice time in London and didn’t want to be ejected from Britain. These mysterious conspiratorial Arabs were to reappear later. As for me, I shrugged my shoulders and thought, Well, what can you expect? Any encounter I’ve ever had with the famous British secret services—and they have always been slight—has had this flavour of the farcical, the surreal.
The creed most often discussed in that flat was not communism but anarchy—classic anarchy. Before Babu went off home to do his obligatory stint in prison, he was an anarchist, a friend of Murray Sayle, who was an anarchist because the labour movement of Australia was influenced by this most attractive philosophy—which has none of the disagreeable obligations of power. I remember saying to Babu, And when you have got into power, what will you do with the organisation that got you there? ‘Easy,’ he said airily. ‘We will simply disband it and let natural forces operate.’ It is only fair to record that when I reminded Babu later of his anarchist period he was shocked and said he was glad he couldn’t remember that youthful irresponsibility. Meanwhile, irresponsible or not, it was all very entertaining. Babu came rushing into my flat one afternoon to say that he had a wonderful plan for changing the whole future of Africa. He had a cousin—another one—working on a boat that plied to and fro from London to Egypt. Cairo was then using a very powerful transmitter to saturate ‘the whole of Africa’ with propaganda. I have forgotten what. Babu said we should supply this radio station, where he had a friend, with material of a suitable sort, factual and sober, not the rhetoric employed by Cairo. How would we do this? Easy! We would give it to the cousin on the boat, who would give it to a contact in Alexandria, who would send it to Cairo. But, I said, by the time this valuable material got to Cairo it would be weeks out of date. And besides, surely the people running the radio programmes in Cairo would notice? My role, alas, was to dampen youthful exuberance. For how could I help responding to these attractive lunacies, even while I poured cold water?
Round about that time, I went to some meetings of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, Fenner Brockway’s creation. They were always held in a big room in the nether regions of the House of Commons. The twenty or so people might include future prime ministers and presidents who either had just emerged from British prisons in their respective countries or were about to disappear into prison. I did indeed find democracy in practice likeable. These meetings, which hastened, or marked, the disintegration of the British Empire, went like this. There was a long agenda, a list of the names of the British colonies or protectorates in various stages of unrest: Cyprus, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasal
and, British Guyana…and so on. Barbara Castle came down from above for these meetings: a most efficient and impressive woman she was. The names of the various countries were read out, and a report was given by someone on what was going on. Northern Rhodesia? Unrest. Riots. Stone throwing. Strikes on the Copper Belt. Harry Nkumbula and Kenneth Kaunda imprisoned. Nyasaland? Unrest, strikes, stone throwing, riots…and so on. But when it came to Southern Rhodesia, it was simply passed over. Nothing to be said about it. I asked why and was told that as Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing colony, Britain had no say in what went on. I really could hardly believe my ears. I said that Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1924, but with two reserved clauses. One was Defence. The other was Native Policy. At any time since 1924, Britain had had the right to step in and protect the black population, forbid the passing of legislation, always copied from South Africa. Britain had never done this, not once. It was not too late. The blacks of Southern Rhodesia loathed the idea of Federation, and Britain had the right to intervene.
Nothing came of my remarks. I was looking at the polite, armoured faces of people who ‘didn’t want to know’. Britain had never said no to the whites of Southern Rhodesia, and clearly it was being judged, in that room, as too late to start now.
This was a traumatic experience, painful. I had come to terms with the fact that when the colonies were being discussed, the House of Commons was always empty. No one was interested except the people in this room, who were known everywhere as defenders of freedom for the colonies and freedom inside colonies. These were the people who surely should have known that Britain had a responsibility to the Southern Rhodesian blacks. And now, reminded, they did not care. To them it was irrelevant. I was remembering how often I had been with Charles Mzingele and his friends, hearing them say, ‘And when our brothers in England know how we are being treated, then they will support us.’ The ‘brothers’ here…but this was a complicated concept. The ‘brothers’ did include the trade-union idea of brotherhood and, too, the brotherhood of the labour movement; there was all kinds of morally uplifting talk at trade-union congresses, and Labour Party congresses, about freedom for the colonies. But stronger was some old idea of Britain, or perhaps I should say England, embodying decency and fair play and—forgive the old-fashioned word—honour. Honour is not—or was not—an outdated concept to the Africans. When the blacks of Northern Rhodesia rioted and threw stones, when the blacks of Nyasaland took to violence, it was because they felt betrayed: Queen Victoria had made promises to their chiefs, and these promises had been broken. Similarly, Charles Mzingele and his mates could not believe that Britain would not ever honour the promise made in the entrenched clause: that no legislation damaging to the blacks should be passed in Southern Rhodesia. And somewhere or other I must still have believed in this old-fashioned concept of honour too, for something died in me at the moment when I realised that these people, members of the one organisation in Britain which cared about the colonies, were not interested in Southern Rhodesia and Britain’s responsibility. How very careless, how lazy, how indifferent, the British Empire was, how lightly it took on vast countries and millions of people, not even bothering to inform itself about them. Yes, of course I had known that; yes, I had been working, in a very small way, against that indifference. But now I was in the basement of the House of Commons, and I learned, coldly and sharply and finally, just how careless and irresponsible Britain could be. And—I switched off. It was the enormity of it, the impossibility—matching Charles Mzingele’s perennial ‘When our brothers in England know…’ with the indifference of the people in that room. I went home so angry that—no, I was beyond anger. I could have wept for Charles Mzingele and his misplaced hopes, his betrayed faith in his ‘brothers’—but I was beyond tears. That was probably when I finally stopped believing in the possibility of anything decent in politics. And so I did not go to any more meetings. That was that. It was the moment when people who have been buoyed up by some kind of idealism or belief see it end and then take to violence or ‘direct action’. Well, for me ‘direct action’ had been soured, as for so many others. But when the black people of Southern Rhodesia, shortly afterwards, allowed ‘unrest’ to turn into war, it was because that moment had been reached, the turning of the switch: That’s that.
I would not have believed that I had cherished these sentimental expectations for my country.
But to finish with that climactic year 1956. The year of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The year of Suez. I was involved with the ‘unrest’ over that to the extent I was at a Trafalgar Square demonstration, but only as an onlooker. My dislike of crowds, which are always on the verge of becoming mobs, was growing with every ‘demo’ I attended. Nor did I have anything to do with the year’s other big event, the Soviet invasion of Hungary.* I was noting, surprised, how many of our young activists went rushing off to Budapest to enjoy the thrill of the thing…I was quite ashamed of my sour view, but really this was the beginning of a very different assessment of the excitements of revolution. Resignations from the Party became a flood. Soon certain ‘revisionist intellectuals’, as the Soviet Union put it, split away and started a rather attractive magazine called The New Reasoner. Edward Thompson—E. P. Thompson the historian—and John Saville were the moving spirits of this little rearguard action: for in retrospect it is easy to see it was not a new beginning, as we all thought then, but only one of the death throes of the Communist Party.
While writing this, I got a letter from Dorothy Thompson: would I like to have copies of the letters I wrote to Edward at that time? I had forgotten I ever wrote any. I read them with interest, to find out what I had been like then, for the mature and reasonable reflections, all passion spent, of my remarks about the Party are not untrue, but none of the emotions of that time are there.
First, the contradictoriness of it all.
Now it seems to me that what is most interesting about monolithic political movements, or countries with a state religion or creed, is not their uniformity, which is only apparent. When I was young, there was Nazi Germany, strutting and Sieg Heiling, as if a single mind governed it, but that is not what history sees now, which is something like a thirteen-year-long explosion. And that Nazi Party which so terrified us all, as if we were watching people hypnotised into a single mind, was nothing of the kind, rather a mass of disagreements, intrigues, plots. Then there was the Soviet Union, easy to see as a mass mind, a fortress mind, which a tiny handful of ‘dissidents’ hardly touched, but again, it was in fact all intrigues, plots, little futile rebellions, the mass murders of opponents. To go from the monstrous to the minuscule: inside the British CP, it was an only seeming homogeneity.
I am not talking about the fact that the Party was shedding members from its inception; the turnover of members was such that until recently there was a joke: ‘Everyone has been in the CP, but no one is in it.’ Inside, it was always a steady evolution of disagreements and adjustments. The Party Line was like that jagged line on a seismograph in a time of earthquake.
In 1956, when I did not regard myself as ‘really’ being a Party member, because of what I disagreed with, I still was thinking of how to save ‘King Street’ from itself, still seeing the CP as something that could be reformed and rescued from the baleful influences of the Soviet Union. If a map were made of my opinions, I would have to be described more as a Trotskyist—and in any communist country I would have been shot for saying a hundredth of what I thought.
Now I look at the great ‘monolithic’ fanatic movements, and what I am thinking is, So what is really going on inside there?
58 Warwick Road
London SW5
19 October
The reaction to the Twentieth Congress has been expressed in party circles throughout the world in the phrase ‘the cult of the individual’. That these words should have been chosen as the banner under which we should fight what is wrong with the party seems to me a sign of the corruption
in our thinking. For they suggest that what caused the breakdown of inner-party democracy was an excess of individualism. But the opposite is the truth. What was bad is not that one man was a tyrant, but that hundreds and thousands of party members, inside and outside the Soviet Union, let go their individual consciences and allowed him to become a tyrant.
Now we are discussing what sort of rules we should have in the party to prevent the emergence of bureaucracy and dictatorship. A lot of worried and uneasy people are pinning their faith in some kind of constitution which will ensure against tyranny. But rules and constitutions are what people make them. The publication of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, an admirable document, coincided with the worst period of the terror. The party rules in the various communist parties are (I believe) more or less the same; but the development of the different communist parties have been very dissimilar.
I think that this talk about changing the rules is a symptom of the desire in all of us to let go individual responsibility on to something outside ourselves, something on to which we can put the blame if things go wrong. It is pleasant to have implicit trust in a beloved leader. It is pleasant and comfortable to believe that the communist party must be right simply because ‘it is the vanguard of the working class’. It is pleasant to pass resolutions at a conference and think that now everything will be all right.
But there is no simple decision we can make, once and for all, that will ensure that we are doing right. There is no set of rules that can set us free from the necessity of making fresh decisions, every day, of just how much of our individual responsibility we are prepared to delegate to a central body—whether it is the communist party, or the government of the country we live in, be it a communist or a capitalist government.
It seems to me that what the last thirty years have shown us is that unless a communist party is a body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement, it must degenerate into a body of yes-men.
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 Page 24
