NF (1957) Going Home Read online

  One man told me he was buying his house: £15 down, and the rest over thirty years. But the lease is only for forty years, so he is bitter because he will own his home for only ten years. ‘It is because they are afraid the white people will want to spread over where our townships are, so they won’t give us freehold unless we live miles away, and then we can’t afford the transport.’

  And: ‘Here in Bulawayo the pass laws are administered leniently. It makes a great difference to us, not always worrying if we have forgotten one of our passes.’

  This conversation concluded with: ‘Our wages are geared to the old idea of us Africans—mealie-meal porridge and a loincloth. But we are trying to live decently. It is impossible on our wages to live on the European pattern, so we do as best we can, half-way between the two.’

  An evening at an adult night-school.

  All classes are catered for up to Standard VI, with provision for leather-work and carpentry. The demand is such that the higher classes are all doubled—people have to be turned away.

  Standing in the hall of this school, three young men were waiting to speak to the Superintendent, asking for a place in class. They went disconsolately away—no room until next term, possibly not till next year.

  The Superintendent said: ‘No class is in demand that does not show immediate results in the form of a certificate that might lead to higher wages; there is no interest in books that are not required for the syllabus or are related to an examination.’

  In the first classroom we entered, the teacher was writing on the board: ‘Increased poll-tax is good for Africans.’

  Most of these young men—there are very few women—work all day in the town and come here for two or three hours a night.

  ‘But the terrible thing is,’ said the Superintendent, ‘that when they do get their certificates, after such a battle, what then? They seem to think the certificate will be a passport to a white-collar job or higher education. I don’t know which is more heart-breaking—to have to turn them away when they come asking for a place in class or afterwards, when I have to say I can’t find better work for them or a place in secondary school.’

  After the night-school, a session in the milk-bar. Juke-box, Coca-Cola, the white boys and girls in jeans and crew-cuts, shouting and yelling and playing the fool. Our friend the teacher looks at them for some time and remarks: ‘I loathe Americanization. This place is getting more American by the day. And as for these white kids, they give me the creeps. Morons, most of them. And then I think of my poor Africans eating their hearts out for an education and they can’t get it.’

  This man says at length, and passionately, how he can’t stand white-settler civilization another minute. He is going to Britain. Yes, definitely, he is leaving, he can’t stand it. What’s the use of fighting this set-up? Ten years he’s been in it now, first South Africa, but he left there thinking the Federation would be better, and now Partnership is the last straw—most of the whites think Partnership is just a bad joke, and so it is. All his energy is spent fighting over details, a few extra shillings here, a slight relaxation of a law there—never anything fundamental.

  Then he tells how one of his African staff, a teacher, knows Shakespeare by heart, is a natural actor. ‘What hope is there for him? Unless he leaves his own people and goes to Britain, he can’t even see a play, let alone act in one. When the Reps, put on their last show, I begged them, I pleaded, to let some of my Africans come—they said they didn’t mind, it was the audience they had to soft-soap. You’ll never find anyone who minds—it’s always the other fellow who’s the villain. No, I’m getting out.’

  Five minutes later he was back on his passion—African education.

  I said, ‘You know quite well you’re not leaving, and if you did, you’d be back again in six months. You’d pine for Africa.’

  ‘I’d pine for the Africans,’ he said. ‘They’re a wonderful lot. But of course I wouldn’t come back. What for? What good can a handful of us do?’ And then he grinned and said: ‘Of course you are quite right. I did leave once, and I came back again.’

  Next evening, another night-school—this one a voluntary effort, the teachers giving one night a week of their time for the love of it.

  In the Standard VI class I asked the first half-dozen pupils how they managed:

  Up at five, with some bread to eat before leaving to walk five miles to the textile factory. They earned £1 2s. 6d. a week. Working hours, seven to five, with a half-hour break when they ate bread and drank tea. They went straight to evening classes from work, three hours every night. They lived in the brick lines, half a dozen to a room. It would take them three or four years to get the junior certificate.

  I asked one what he would do then. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to be a teacher?’

  ‘No, teachers don’t get enough money.’

  This class asked me to address them. I was in a dilemma. I could not speak my mind about the set-up without getting the people who ran the night-school into trouble.

  But remembering how the Africans have to live under a continual pressure of contempt and insult from the white people, how they are always being called backward and ignorant and stupid, I said that the most exciting thing I had seen on my visit was how the Africans are fighting for an education; and how wonderful it was to see people who had to do hard physical labour all day working for hours every night, for the sake of knowledge. I said they were a richly endowed and talented people; and that, just as Africa is a wealthy continent with its wealth scarcely tapped, so, too, the African people are like a giant who does not yet know he is a giant.

  Then they asked questions.

  ‘In Britain, where there must also be many different tribes, do the tribes quarrel among themselves; or have they learned to get on well together; and is there a colour bar?’

  I said that in Britain there was colour-prejudice among the ignorant and poorly-educated people, but there was no colour bar as it is known in Central Africa.

  Whereupon I was asked how it was possible that the great white man could be poorly educated and ignorant?

  I said that in Britain there were large numbers of poor and ignorant people, though not nearly as poor as the people in Africa, and these did all the hard work of the country, just as the Africans did here.

  What did I think of Partnership?

  I said I thought Prime Minister Todd and his men were quite sincere about Partnership. This was received in non-committal silence.

  Why was it that when white people came out from Britain, first they were indignant about the colour bar and the treatment of the Africans, and then they very fast became just as rude and cruel as the old Rhodesians?

  I said there were two reasons. One was that any white person who really fought against the colour bar was not popular among his own kind; and someone who had just emigrated from his own country to a new life here had great pressure put on him to conform. And besides, among any people, and no doubt that went for the Africans, too, there was never more than a minority who rebelled against a Government or a system.

  This was received in silence; I think a dissenting one.

  I said that the most important reason was that a number of the people who came out from Britain were not necessarily the best; and when they suddenly found themselves in the position of baases, able to push other people around, it went to their heads—I had been going to say that no doubt a certain number of Africans, if given the chance, would like to push other Africans around, a trend which was already very evident; but I was not allowed to get so far, for a stamping roar of approval went up, and what I was saying got drowned in the noise.

  Then one of the teachers recited a piece from the American Declaration of Independence, and another came out and acted for us the old father in Cry the Beloved Country, mourning for his son:

  ‘And now for all the people of Africa, the beloved country. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God save Africa. But he would not see that sa
lvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him and his wife and Msimangu and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That men should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love.

  ‘It was Msimangu who had said, Msimangu who had no hate for any man, I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they turn to loving they will find we are turned to hating.

  ‘Oh, the grave and the sombre words.’

  We all listened in complete silence; and it was like being in church, too grave an occasion for applause.

  And afterwards we, the white people, went to another juke-boxed, Coca-Cola’d milk bar, full of white youth who had just come out of the cinema, and the Africans went back to their brick rabbit-holes.

  Standing in the dust outside a long row of brick rooms, looking in: table and chairs raised to the ceiling on ropes, two narrow iron bedsteads crammed in, covering all the floor-space, and about a dozen people sitting on the beds. Four young men, who were legally living in the room; four young women, their ‘spares’ a visiting preacher; four old wives, jolly and fat; and a sampling of small children. They were singing a syncopated hymn-tune to mouth-organs and banjoes.

  The supper of maize porridge was cooking on the fire outside—a handful of sticks in the dust, small flames, pale in the last sunshine around the big iron cooking pot.

  The official said: ‘These conditions are as bad as anything in Britain during the industrial revolution. But thank God we’ve got the sun; we’ve got this magnificent climate. Imagine this squalor under an English sky.’

  And, from another official, who asked me to make a point of writing about tuberculosis—how it is on the rampage, a particularly virulent form of it; and how one of the reasons why it is spreading fast from the crammed cities to the Reserves is because there aren’t enough hospital beds, so that the Africans when they are too ill to work are sent back to the villages: ‘Do you know what’s the mainstay of white supremacy? No, not the police. The sun. The only reason they get away with these dreadful conditions they make the natives live in is that the sunlight makes life tolerable.’

  After I had left Bulawayo, I got a message telling me that the CID had been around interviewing the people I had seen, telling them I was a wicked and unscrupulous person, and they would get themselves into trouble if they consorted with such as me.

  I know how these matters are conducted, because an African once described to me how, after he had been talking to a certain progressive churchman, the CID came around to his house.

  ‘So you’ve been complaining to Father X?’

  ‘Not complaining, no.’

  ‘You’ve been telling a pack of lies about your conditions?’

  ‘No, I would not say I have been telling lies.’

  ‘But you’ve been talking to Father X?’

  ‘There is no law against it, so far as I know.’

  ‘You’d better watch out. We’ve got our eyes on you. You needn’t think we don’t know what’s going on.’

  8

  Everybody talks about Kariba, with an odd mixture of resentment and pride: too big a project, they say, for two hundred thousand people—yes, of course it is an imaginative and bold step; but how can a handful of white people find £113,000,000?

  This is the first big Federal project, a symbol of the success of Federation, a big dam on the Zambezi, 200 miles below the Victoria Falls. Before leaving Britain I had promised to find out as much as I could about the Africans who are working on it, and those who are being moved from the flood areas.

  The Federal Hydro-Electric Board very kindly gave me permission to go up and see what was going on; and therefore, in our borrowed car, Mr Paul Hogarth and I set off one afternoon; for he wanted to make drawings on the dam site.

  The road up north is the one I had driven over a thousand times as a child; it was the road into the city, and I was afraid it might be changed. For the first 20 miles out of Salisbury it has become a fine, wide highway; but after that there are strips and corrugations and dust-drifts; and I was able to think myself back into those interminable journeys in and out of town; for my father hated driving fast, and in any case our cars were always very old and could not do more than about thirty miles an hour.

  Strips are a Southern Rhodesian invention; instead of surfacing a whole road, a double line of strips of tarmac are laid, just wide enough for the wheels. They are efficient if kept in order; if not they become sharply-edged pitted ledges swirling with sand. It was pleasant to drive over the familiar route, watching the stations go by—Mount Hampden; Darwendale, with its chrome mountain—the one over which the sun rose through my window at home—and its soil glittering with fallen chrome fragments; and then on to Maryland and Trelawney, which are sandveld, the earth of a beautiful pale, crusty gold. And next there was Banket, which was the station we used. Impossible to give any idea how much the station meant to us farmers who lived so far from town. The little clutch of corrugated iron-roofed buildings, a couple of stores, the garage, the post office, the station-master’s house—this was our town, and going to the station was always an event.

  All the way from Salisbury I was telling myself that now I would be firm, and turn off from Banket up past the police station, and along that red-dust road between the trees that once was a railway track leading to a big gold-mine that has long since fallen into the status of a small-working operation. ‘Yes,’ I said, turning the car sharply over the glittering hot railway lines, ‘now I must certainly go and see how the hill where the house used to be rises empty and bush-covered from the mealie-fields.’ But I did not go.

  We drove through Banket fast. There is a new hotel there, built just where at one time the mealie sacks used to be laid out waiting for the train to take them to Salisbury and the markets. The sacks were of a new, strong, golden-brown stuff, with a double line of bright blue down them, smelling strongly of ink from the farmers’ brand-marks. They were stacked up on each other 10 feet high, with dirt lanes between; so the children in for the afternoon from the farms used to play on them, jumping perilously from one barricade to another. The sacks were hot and smooth; and sitting on them the hard, small grains inside gave to one’s weight like shifting sand. The smell was of sun-heated red dust, and ink, and jute and fresh, sweet mealies. The sacks were laid at either end of the rows in such a way that they made a bulging staircase; and if one sat on the top and let oneself go, one slid very fast and, bumping over the sacks, landed with a thud in the soft, warm dust.

  But now there is a large, modern hotel. Because this is the main road north, along which cars come up all the way from the Cape, through to Northern Rhodesia, and so to Kenya, and ultimately, if they wish, to Egypt, there are hotels building all along it. This is the road from Cape to Cairo: but it is still a rough and primitive road; and thus, for me at least, enjoyable to drive over. Sinoia is twenty miles up the railway line from Banket; and that is no longer a station merely, but a small town. I remember sitting in the car waiting for my father when he had to drive there to get a spare part for the car, or for the farm machinery, or to take a labourer into the Native Hospital. It used to be just a station, a few buildings, the iron roofs glittering with heat, the earth rocking with heat-waves. Sinoia is extremely hot; all my memories of it are of that truly withering heat. But on this evening we drove through it fast, past another fine new hotel, and along to Karoi. I had not before driven farther than Sinoia, for me it was the end of the stations; and beyond that there was the Zambezi escarpment.

  The road became sharply worse, badly potholed and swirling with dust. The plan was to drive until the tur
n-off to the Kariba Gorge, and then find some hotel to stay the night. I was imagining the little hotels, lines of rooms built side by side under a low roof off a verandah, whose existence depended on the bar, which was what Banket hotel used to be like. The children of the district would stand on the verandah and watch the Government officials and the commercial travellers and the insurance men, in their correct town clothes, standing at the bar drinking with the farmers in their khaki and their bush-shirts.

  The road was twisting, swerving up and down; the air was full of reddish dust as the sun went down, so that as the car turned at a bend a blaze of red, glinting with particles of light, blinded us and made the car rock. That grass known as redtop, a soft, feathery, reddish-pink grass, was growing everywhere; and the sun swung over it, so that it was like soft flames springing up, or the sweep of a veld-fire with the wind behind it, when sun-thinned flames lap forward over unconsumed stems. The autumn green of the trees was gilded and burnished with the low sunlight. Once a small buck sprang across the road, and its coat was heated to a warm, reddish-brown. The tree-trunks flashed up dark, showing red wakes of the rose-red grass behind; and the sun-heat slid fast up their solid heaviness, roughening the bark so that it held pockets of red glow.

  Just before the sun sank, and a red blaze shot up the clear blue of the sky, the light was coming flickering through the tree-trunks and laying black bars over coloured dust; and, turning a corner, the glow was so intense it burned out the softness of small foliage up tall grass stems. The grass on a turn of the road was ten feet high, still stiff with sap; and each stem glittered a pale, clear red, like a forest of fine tinted wires; and the tree-trunks behind showed black and still against the flare of red, the roughness of bark swallowed in substance of shadow. Fine perpendicular grass stems; straight rising trunks, and, above, the flat-layered branches of the bushveld, black with glowing edges—a springing upwards of a myriad sharp lines, backed with soaring trunks; and, above, the blocking horizontal masses of the branches.