Shikasta
Page 43
This litany, or requiem, or lament, on the subject of war took three days. Meanwhile, the moonlight strengthened. The evening sessions were monitored by a brilliant, almost full, moon that dimmed the torches, and dwarfed the arena and its antagonists.
By the fifth day a routine had been established. And a self-imposed discipline: all could see its necessity.
This mostly concerned alcohol. There had been some unfortunate incidents. Again the suggestion was made that it should not be brought into the camp. Meanwhile, the locals were in throngs around the camp day and night, only too ready to sell or barter alcohol, and even a little food. Already the young people had begun to leave the camp immediately after "breakfast" (as the agents complained, the meals were becoming "invisible") and made their way to the sea, some miles away. There they drank wine, ate what food they could cadge or grab, and began to catch fish and cook it there on the shore - knowing of course full well that fish from that sea was not safe food. They swam, rested, made love - and were back by five o'clock. If this had not happened, the camp would have been even more intolerable. It was already extremely uncomfortable, mostly from shortage of water, smelly, dirty, and besieged more and more by the curious villagers, who never took their eyes off these visitors of theirs, nor stopped trying to squeeze onto the tiers for what they clearly saw as free entertainment.
George Sherban seemed not to sleep. He stayed in the camp, for the most part, always available to whoever wished to talk to him. He was often with the old white. His brother Benjamin was much occupied with looking after his contingent of children, who were becoming wild, undisciplined - and liable to turn at any moment into the children's gang of the type we are unfortunately only too familiar with. The energies of many of the delegates, male and female, were devoted to restraining these children.
On the fifth night, there was a brief but heavy shower of rain. The dust was laid, the air cooled, the seats in the amphitheatre washed, the tension eased. The opportunity was taken to fill in the latrine pits, and to dig others. This improved things a little.
After the sessions spent on war, there succeeded four days on Africa. The "witnesses" came from every part of Africa. The days of their testimony again sharply changed the atmosphere. How may I put it? Variegated in type and aspect as they were, nevertheless, all together, they presented a picture of such liveliness and exuberance, such strength, such uncompromising virility, such warlike self-sufficiency - of course it must be remembered that in some parts of that continent governments have been in power which strike some of us as less than suitable, and which have discouraged those parts of the population they disapprove of to the point where only the more martial seem to survive. However that may be - and of course, I am only putting together a picture as it appears to our agents - these nearly hundred delegates seemed to impress upon everyone their difference from the rest. One point, for instance: with rather more to complain about from the white man even than other continents, they were concerned to express opinions about the intervention of others, not all white.
I will return to particularities:
The first "witness" was a fine young woman comrade from Zimbabwe.
She was received with the closest attention, and in silence - not with the hissing groan that so often is mentioned by our informants. This was the first indication of the change in mood, and because of the current situation in Africa, one of wars, civil wars, economic chaos. What she said sounded like ancient history, which, since her starting point was the conquest of Matabeleland and Mashonaland by Rhodes and his lackeys that took place not much more than a hundred years ago - a fact that she lost no time in reminding them of - was amazing in itself. Our Agent Tsi Kwang, for instance, was moved to remark that it made her think.
Her indictment, obviously considered an exemplary one, perhaps because it could be contained within such a short time span, a century being but a moment compared to the stretches of centuries - not to mention the millennia - which some delegates found it no hardship to encompass, was given from four a.m. on the sixth day until eight a.m. - but she was supported during the last hour by a white witness, a lawyer, whose standing by her, calling at her indication up into the early morning sky all kinds of facts and figures, had a bizarre and even, to some impatient ones, risible effect.
The cutting edge of her indictment was not the expected one: that the white barbarians had conquered by arms a defenceless and hospitable people who did not expect treachery and guile, but on the contrary offered their country freely and willingly to these tricksters - only to find themselves butchered, massacred, and then enslaved. The point that concerned her was this one; and the fact that it would have been better made in more modest surroundings conducive to such moderate reflections, should not prevent us from actually considering it in more modest surroundings.
In this vast territory, the whites had been given "self-government" by the home country Britain in 1924, except, that is, for two aspects. One was Defence - which did not concern her. But the other was "Native Affairs," and this was reserved by the British government on the specific and expressed ground that they, the British nation, had the responsibility to protect the conquered native populations, to see that their rights were not infringed, that they were not to suffer hardship as a result of their "tutelage" by the whites. For it goes without saying that the whites saw their rule as educational and benevolent. (I inscribe this second word with reluctance, with the reliance on your understanding, and the reflection that one word may have to stand for a variety of shades of circumstance.) From the very moment the white conquerors were given "self-government" they took away the black people's lands, rights, freedoms and made slaves and servants of them in every way, using every device of force and intimidation, contempt, trickery. But never did Britain protest. Never, not once. She did not raise her voice, even though throughout this entire period of ill-treatment by the white minority, the black peoples were expecting to be rescued by their "protecting" government overseas, and believed that this rescue did not occur only because their white friends overseas could not really know of their situation. Not that they desisted from sending every kind of representation to the Queen and to Parliament as well, and through every sort of intermediary. But why did not one British governor ever notice what was happening and protest and report to his home government that the main clause in this famous agreement giving self-government to the whites was not being honoured? Why did not help ever arrive to the enslaved and betrayed people of the then Southern Rhodesia? It was because of a very simple fact. Because the government in Britain, the people of Britain, did not remember, had not thought it important enough to take in, the key fact that self-government had been given to the white minority on condition the blacks were not ill-treated, and that they had the obligation to step in. And they had been able to forget, simply not to take notice, because of their inherent and inbred contempt for peoples other than themselves. Worse was to come. When Africa began stirring in her chains (a phrase which gave particular pleasure to Agent Tsi Kwang), when a small section of "liberal" whites began to protest in Britain about the treatment of the betrayed blacks, even they did not seem to know that all this time the government of Britain had the legal right to step in at any time in pursuance of duty. They did not seem to have absorbed the fact that during a period of several decades when the blacks had everything taken from them, Britain had had the legal and moral responsibility to step in and forcibly stop the whites from doing as they liked. And more, when the blacks began fighting back under the rule of the infamous Smith and his cohorts, and the British government was at last forced into some attitudes of responsibility, even then no one seemed able to remember that the culpable one was not Smith, nor even his predecessors, but Britain herself, who had betrayed the blacks for whom she was supposed to act as guardian against the whites. For Britain it was who had connived at, allowed, and by passive indifference, encouraged the whites to do exactly as they wished. And when the last stages of that tragic struggl
e were going on, the British government, throughout, talked, acted, and seemed even to believe, that the whites of Rhodesia were responsible for the situation and not itself, as if something quite odd and unknown were happening, a great surprise, the grabbing of rights and land from the blacks - something that had had nothing to do with the British government. And all this led to one of the most absurd, contemptible sequences in late British colonial history - that Rhodesia could have been in the forefront of the news, day and night for years, the cause of the blacks so belatedly espoused by a thousand kind hearts, commented on ceaselessly by a thousand professionals, but not once during this time was the point made that Britain had been responsible for the situation in the first place.
"And how was this possible, this extraordinary state of affairs?"
"I will tell you," called up this young soldier into the morning sunshine above the amphitheatre. "It was because the British people and their government could not see us, they always had a blind spot for us, we blacks did not count. If we were dogs and cats they would have seen us but we were black people. In the War of Liberation these philanthropists cried out when a white person got killed, but if fifty black people got killed, and even if they were children, they did not notice it. We were always nonpeople to them. Why should they care about broken promises?"
I describe this in more detail than perhaps is necessary for you who have always taken such an interest in Africa and who indeed as a young man spent two years in Mozambique with the Resistance Forces. I describe it because it has caused me to reflect on the extraordinary persistence of certain phenomena in a given geographical area. (I rely on our old friendship, hoping you will excuse a slackness of thought or of phraseology or perhaps even an apparent irrelevance to the true and real issues of the Liberation of the People, but it is nearly four in the morning, and outside H.Q. I can hear the sounds of our patrolling soldiers, our own, as it happens - but who can rely on the permanence of anything in these stirring times.) There is no end to the indictments against the white man. I say this and need say no more: one has only to mention any country and the stark facts and figures spring to mind. We did not need a "Trial"!
But this young woman was making a point others had not. "Stupidity," "ignorance," "arrogance," the crude self-satisfaction we have so often discussed - these are one thing, and these words or similar ones ended every one of the "indictments." But she was saying something more. How was it possible for a tract of country the size of Honan Province to be conquered by a handful of adventurers, and thereafter to be forgotten by the empire? Because that is what happened here. Brutality, yes. Ignorance, yes. Yes, yes, yes. But these have not been exactly unknown in history. But it was possible, in the British Empire, for a vast part of Africa to be physically conquered, put in the care of one hundred thousand whites - and the number of these never rose above half a million - and thereafter forgotten. Oh, governors were sent out - the type we know so well. I don't doubt that from time to time the British government was reminded by its financiers that there were interests there that needed guarding, but that was all. Serious undertakings, promises, obligations, were not reneged on so much as overlooked. To the extent that the Rhodesian crisis when it finally matured could be discussed for years and years, and the key fact never mentioned.
And now to my point about a continuation of a trend, a strand, a factor in a place, or among a people.
This "Trial" took place - as far as the participants were concerned - for only one reason: to air grievances and complaints against the erstwhile colonial oppressors. The Imperialists. That was its function. This girl made her case for four hours, calling in the aid of her white lawyer, and she was listened to with great attention. And yet her case got lost. It was because of the general atmosphere - that there was so much to listen to, to work through, in conditions of such discomfort. Her point, that a great empire was able to conquer and then to forget, or overlook, a territory the size of Honan was not taken in. Is not that extraordinary? In fact, what happened was what had always happened to that particular territory. Yet a few hundred miles to the north, in Northern Rhodesia, shortly to be Zambia, uprisings, and successful ones, took place among the black peoples against the whites, and the key emotional factor was precisely that the British people, in the person of Queen Victoria, had made promises which had not been kept. There, effective. In Rhodesia, not.
Well, I at least find myself reflecting on this point. A geographical area keeps a certain flavour, which manifests in all its happenings, its events, its history. I cite for instance the lamented Soviet Union, or Russia, where events occur and continue to repeat themselves, over and over, regardless of whether that vast land is called Russia or the Soviet Union, or its dominant ways of thought are this or that or the other. And of course there are other examples we may easily think of.
I sometimes wonder if this thought may not be usefully taught to children at the start of their "geography lessons." Or would one call it history? If I seem to ramble, put it down to the long night of anxious wakefulness. The" dawn is here and I shall not rest yet, for I wish to finish this long letter to you; the courier will leave this evening.
I return to the amphitheatre: Africa was the agenda for several days.
Meanwhile, in the camp itself, it is clear that the organisation was suffering.
Everyone was really hungry, lacking sleep, hot, dusty. By now nearly all of them flocked to the coast for the midday hours, and of course this made them even more tired.
There was by now a feeling of urgency. With the full moon blazing down, so that the thousands on the tiers were fully visible to each other, and the torches almost unnecessary, the contenders dealt fast with: the ruining of the Pacific, the imposition there of alien ways on ancient and peaceful societies, the forcible imposition of Christianity, the destruction of islands in the interests of western industry and agriculture, the use of the Pacific for nuclear weapons tests as if this ocean belonged to Europe. They dealt with: European rule over subjugated peoples in the Middle East, the irreconcilable promises made to Arabs and Jews, the arrogance displayed... "contempt, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance."
I interpose at this point that those so recent enemies the Arabs and Jews were inseparable, and took every opportunity of reminding us of their common origin, their similar religions, the compatibility of their cultures, and - so they intend - their common and harmonious future.
The "Trial" then dealt with: the white man in Australia, the white man in New Zealand, the white man in Canada, the white man in the Antarctic.
You will note that I have scarcely mentioned the Russians. One reason is that there were no Russian delegates, though there were from the Russian colonies Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, Cuba, Afghanistan, parts of the Middle East.
By then, delegates were following each other every ten minutes, and they were in lines stretching up the aisles and waiting to recite, or to shout, their indictments, and to return to their places.
We have now reached halfway through the "Trial" - the fifteenth day. Rereading the agents' reports, what is striking is the note of frustration - annoyance. You will bear in mind that our agents are all active members of their representative organisations, not dissidents or oddballs. They act for us mostly without payment, and as a token of appreciation for our Beneficent Rule. They are emotionally part of the Youth Armies, and their value is that they share with, and cannot help but register, the prevailing common mood or moods.
I again have to ask, What was it that all these young people were expecting and that they were not given? For on the face of it, they were getting exactly what they had come for.
I quote Tsi Kwang: "There is an incorrect spirit. The cadres are not overcoming the difficulties of the situation. There is vacillation and also many mistakes. There is an insufficient readiness to boldly grasp the bourgeois distortions that cannot help but negate the true experience of the sincere Youth." And so on for several pages.
All our age
nts, during those days, turned in similar reports.
The egregious Benjamin Sherban: "The centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." I am told that these are lines from an ancient folk ballad. (I would like to hear the rest of it, for there may be guidance there in present difficulties.)
It is clear that the delegates were at breaking point and it was only because of the flexibility and tolerance of the organisers that the "Trial" could continue at all. For one thing, alcohol was now entering the camp and affecting discipline. For another, sex, previously discreet and within the limits of good sense, was now blatant, not only between delegates, but between them and the locals.
The prevailing mood was one of restlessness, dissatisfaction, a continual movement around the camp, from tent to improvised shelter to mess tents, where debates and "seminars" seemed continuously in progress, and from the camp to the shores - and by now some donkeys had been pressed into service, and derelict army trucks had been located and put into use (petrol being commandeered of course) and parties of delegates moved up and down the coasts entering towns and villages to try and organise food, and individuals wandered about as well, for as usual on these highly pressured occasions, there are always those who seem to spin off, as if from a centrifuge. These broke down, or threatened to, wept, complained of being underrated, discussed the possibilities of suicide, and fell hopelessly in love with delegates whom they certainly will never see again.