NF (1957) Going Home Read online

  The third time I stayed in Umtali was just after the beginning of the war. Most of the young men of the country were being trained there; and the town was crammed with them and their wives. In the daytime we pushed our babies up and down Main Street in their prams, and bargained in Shingadia’s; and at night there were enormous wild parties in the hotels. Umtali for the first and, perhaps, the only time in its life was no longer Sleepy Hollow; and my memories of the other two times I had stayed there, disintegrated under the pressure of that wild, sad, angry six weeks of war.

  But on that day, two months ago, when I saw the little town with its streets of flame trees, in the basin among the mountains, it was its wartime guise that seemed improbable and remote, and it was impossible to remember it full of drunken soldiery and excited, apprehensive wives.

  Here I began the business of collecting facts: two of the people I met in Umtali were high in the administration for Native Education, and enthusiastic about Partnership. In the Union of South Africa, they said, opportunities for higher education were diminishing; the Nationalists had said education must fit Africans for their status as inferior beings. But in the Federation things were different. First I must remember, and write truthfully afterwards, that what education the Africans would get was exactly the same as white children got, and that they could work knowing that at the end of their labours there might be a place for them at the university, that the Government secondary schools now being built were as fine as any built for white children.

  There is a five-year plan for African education. At the moment about 60 per cent of African children get some kind of an education, but mostly this means three or four years in a kraal school under a teacher with six or eight years’ schooling. Last year, 1955, 5,000 Africans completed Standard VI—that is, what white children are expected to pass at the age of twelve.

  The five-year plan will train teachers, some 4,000 of them, so that in the village schools 75 per cent will have teacher-training certificates and so that the children will pass Standard III—that is, five years of schooling.

  I was instructed in the importance of this plan, this advance made possible by Federation and the new spirit, for some hours, and I became infected with optimism. In fact, I must confess that for about two weeks I was carried away by Partnership, partly because I wanted so much to believe in it, but mostly because the people who were selling it to me were so convinced by it themselves.

  An ironical thing has happened: people who have been known for years as wild revolutionaries, dangerous citizens, are now sucked into Partnership. These two men in Umtali I remember being spoken of as Communists and rebels fifteen years ago; of course they were nothing of the sort; but old-fashioned liberalism in this part of the world is indistinguishable in the minds of the white voters from the extreme forms of sedition. And people who have felt themselves in a minority for so long, people called every kind of Kaffir-lover—how can they not see themselves as crusaders in some kind of a New Deal?

  It was not until three weeks later that I saw this education plan in perspective, instructed by another member of Native Education thus: that this trumpeted figure of £12,500,000 to be spent over the five years is only £2,500,000 more than would have been spent in any case. That in presenting this plan to the outside world, the Government speaks of £12,500,000, while in soothing the resentful white people, they stress the £2,500,000. Because the white people resent spending money on African education, the poll-tax has been raised from £1 to £2 a head. This is felt to be unfair by the Africans, since white children are educated free.

  Most of the education is still in the hands of the missionaries—without the missionaries there would have been no education at all until just recently—who charge small fees; whereas Government schools are free. So Africans try to send their children to relatives in the town, which is difficult, because the towns are so overcrowded. An African family often spends as much as £8 a year on getting a child educated, in addition to this increase in poll-tax, and the village schools are built by the parents themselves.

  In short, it is a hardship and a sacrifice to get an African child educated; yet the white people are bitter because of money spent on African education; for it is taken for granted by white citizenry that all the wealth of the country is created by them and that whatever is ‘done’ for the Africans is a favour on their part.

  It was on that first afternoon in Umtali that the note was struck which was sounded so often afterwards, and in so many keys, that I soon recognized it as the theme of Partnership.

  The man who is running a Teacher Training College, the first in the country, who devotes fifteen devoted and enthusiastic hours a day to it, said: ‘I supervise all the meals myself, I see that things are done properly, European food and proper china and cutlery, not the usual tin plates and maize porridge. But I hope to God the white people don’t get to know about this.’

  The architects of Partnership, which in essence is a last-ditch attempt to stave off an explosion of African bitterness, which is a policy of intelligent self-interest, lie awake at nights not because of the Africans, but because the white voters might suddenly put the brake on.

  As I write (July 9th) I see that a ‘Voice of the People Committee’ has been formed in Salisbury, because they feel African advancement is being pushed forward too rapidly. ‘We support African advancement at the right pace. But it is useless and dangerous to try to achieve in 60 or 100 years the level of advancement which it took the people of Britain 1,000 years to reach. It is our view that most people of this country think the same.’

  This is the authentic voice of white settlerdom. But what the people of the country—that is, the Africans—think about matters like the doubled poll-tax or segregation at the university is that if the only way they can get education is to humour the spirit of white supremacy, then humour it they will. It is as if a mad dog lay sleeping, which both the Africans and the intelligent among the white people watch fearfully, thinking, ‘Perhaps it might die in its sleep!’

  It is a phenomenon which never ceases to fascinate and puzzle me, this unreasoning spirit of self-destruction that is seen at its clearest in white-settler countries. How is it that a tiny handful of white people, surrounded by a mass of black people who could overwhelm them if they wanted—how is it that they persist in a policy that led to the massacres of Kenya, to the slow, bitter stalemate of racial antagonism in the Union?

  I remember hearing Lord Malvern, then Dr Huggins, addressing a farmers’ meeting in Lomagundi when I was a little girl. He said that the white people must create a class of privileged blacks to act as a bulwark against revolt. They shouted at him: ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ And ‘Get back to the operating table.’ And ‘Kaffir-lover!’

  What Partnership is actually doing is to give a few privileges, raising the standards of a minority of Africans above their fellows, without altering the basic structure of segregation, which is identical with that of the Union, in the slightest. And even this is regarded by the white people as ‘going too fast’.

  Another conversation in Umtali: we sat on a hilltop from which we looked down over Portuguese territory, and discussed the brutal nature of the Portuguese Government.

  There is an agreement between the Governments of the two territories, British and Portuguese, by which the police of either country may cross the borders to regain Africans who have escaped one way or the other.

  ‘My cookboy,’ said my hostess, ‘crossed the mountains into Portuguese East, the police went after him, and found him in a Portuguese prison. He had got up to something he shouldn’t. The prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs with wire. To feed them the police emptied buckets of mealie porridge on to the ground inside the prison gates, and the prisoners had to go down on their hands and knees with their hands still tied and eat it off the earth like dogs with their mouths. They are savages, these Portuguese. Can you believe anybody would treat human beings like that? You’d think that after living nex
t to us, next to British territory for so long, they’d have learned to behave decently. After all, I think we treat our natives nicely.’

  I transcribe here a conversation I had later with Dixon Konkola, President of the African TUC of Northern Rhodesia, President of the African Railway Workers’ Union of the Federation. Dixon was describing what he had experienced in prison when he was arrested during the campaign against Federation. While he talked, I made notes: the result was published in the Tribune, to which thanks are due for permission to reprint this.

  ‘What were you charged with?’

  ‘They arrested me so as to get me out of the way during the campaign.’

  ‘Yes, but what was the reason?’

  ‘Because I was telling my people the truth about Federation.’

  ‘Yes, but they must have made a charge?’

  ‘They call it breaking the peace. Yes, I believe that time it was inciting to breaking the peace. They arrested me and took me to the train at night. They wanted me out of Broken Hill away from the people who knew me. They put me on carefully so no one would know. I was handcuffed. I was put on to the top bunk and I lay there for seven hours of the journey with my hands hitched up to the rope that goes across the top of the compartment. It was cold because it was winter and I only had shorts on. In the early morning a white woman came down the passage and saw me up there and she was sorry for me and wanted to give me some tea, but was told that it was not permitted to give tea to prisoners.

  ‘I was in the general prison doing tailoring. It was not hard work, but for the men doing work outside it was very hard. But I would not eat because they gave us nothing but hard lumps of cold porridge and black beans. So they put me into the punishment cell. I was alone. I had one blanket and only shorts on. Sometimes they threw buckets of cold water on to the floor where I was because I was being punished. I was there some days, then I went back to the general prison. After a few days there were protests among the prisoners about the food, and I was told, “We know who is making the trouble. You are a trouble-maker. If you don’t stop you won’t ever leave here alive.”

  ‘I said: “If I die here my people will know who killed me, they will say you killed me.” Then the District Commissioner came to see me. He is the official charged to watch prisons; but he is also a judge in his own courts. He asked what I was complaining about. I said we worked from six until one, and then the food was lumps of cold porridge and black vegetables, and then from two until six or seven, and more cold porridge and sometimes that thick prison cocoa. I said we had only one blanket and we were crowded in our cells. I went on protesting so they put me in solitary confinement. I was two weeks in the general prison and about four months in solitary. I had nothing to do and I asked for something to read and they gave me the Bible. I read that and said it was not enough, and they gave me a book by a priest who was in Russia during the Revolution describing all the horrors he had seen. But the worst was that my cell was next to the cell where they hang people. They hanged six people while I was there. Usually they take all the prisoners away from that part of the prison when they hang someone, but they left me there to frighten me.

  ‘The first time I was awake all night, it was so terrible. That man came in singing, he was singing hymns right until the moment that he dropped. He had a big sad voice. When they hang someone there are two African warders, and a District Commissioner and a doctor and the Superintendent and a priest. The Roman Catholics are always there. There is a hole in the corner of the cell where they hang the man up and then they let him drop and they all run away. I heard their feet clattering as they all ran away down the passage because they didn’t want to stay. But I was next door listening. Half an hour later they came back to make sure he was dead. When you hear a man being hanged—it’s not something I can tell. I kept thinking, that is a man’s life ending, that is a life ending. I could never sleep in that place.

  ‘I did not serve my full sentence in spite of their threats.

  ‘For political people like me it’s bad enough, but what about those who are there always? I keep thinking about the people I saw in prison. There was a man there who got in when he was a young boy and he may be there all his life. He was an animal after all that time. And I saw an old man let out after many years, and he didn’t know what to do or where to go. They let the relatives come, but relatives forget you if you are in so long. The old man stood outside the gate frightened of everything he saw. I often think of him. And the women—that’s even worse, how the women get when they are a long time in prison. And the prison is so crowded, so many people in a cell. Terrible things happen. I am embarrassed to tell you because you are a woman.

  ‘But what is worse than anything, what hurts most is that even in prison there is colour discrimination. Even there. The white prisoners are in one place with good food, and they aren’t treated roughly. When I found that even in prison we were treated according to colour then I really understood injustice.’

  The other matter we discussed was how the Portuguese administrator just over the border takes money from Southern Rhodesian farmers to press-gang Africans for work on the farms.

  Before I left Umtali I was finally instructed thus:

  ‘I would have no time for any journalist who did not make a point of the two following facts: (1) The system consists of vicious circles: for instance, that the Africans are poor, and therefore their education is poor, and therefore they are poor. (2) Those countries in Africa which are most poor are those without a white administration: Bechuanaland, for instance, is miserably poor. In this country every man, woman and child (white) is taxed £10 a year for African education. For God’s sake don’t tell them so, or they’ll go up in smoke. Of course you can say that it is the labour of the Africans that provides the money and that sort of thing, but suppose the white population of this country doubled, it would double the number of people who have to pay £10 a year.’

  I transcribe this direct from my notes, without altering a word of it, because the man who said it is known as a Socialist, and it is an example of how a colour-bar society pressures economic thinking into strange, strange shapes.

  4

  Back in Salisbury again. A gathering of people, members of the new interracial society, who are very advanced because they invite Africans and Indians and coloured people to their homes.

  One interracialist was very angry because the Government is importing Greeks and Italians, ‘wops and dagoes, the scum of the earth,’ into the country, instead of advancing the Africans, the people of the land.

  ‘I don’t mind being considered the equal of an educated African, but I object to any dregs from Europe being my equal simply because they have white skins.’

  This is an interesting and typical example of the phenomenon of Displacement. In a country where people are always conscious of other people’s colour or kind, hatred and prejudice are never restricted to coloured people only: you may be sure that a person has passionate views about the dirty Japanese as against the decent Chinese, or vice versa, or the fine, clean Northern European peoples like the Germans, as against the loathsome French and Italians, and so on. And of course there is anti-Semitism; or a complicated anti-anti-Semitism, thus: The Jews are all right; the Indians are the Jews of Africa.

  The business of inviting Africans to dinner, which was begun by members of the interracial society, leads to infinite and intricate argument. Later, when I started interviewing people on what I hoped would be economic policies, this question of inviting Africans to dinner never failed to arise; and I was astonished at the ingenuity of the reasons for disapproving of it. They ranged from the uncompromising, old-fashioned ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a black man,’ with its variations and refinements, such as ‘I don’t mind if my daughter wants to make a fool of herself, but I’m not having my grandchildren going to segregated schools,’ to ‘It’s not fair to invite a minority of Africans just because they are educated, it’s hard on the others,’ or ‘I don’t m
ind eating with Africans but I’m not having them use my lavatory,’ or ‘They don’t want to be invited, it embarrasses them,’ or ‘If I invite Africans, it’s not fair on my servants, they wouldn’t like it,’ or ‘It’s artificial to invite Africans to a meal when you can’t take them to a show afterwards,’ or ‘The Africans who get invited to dinner are the political Africans, the Government show-pieces they keep to impress foreign visitors with, and not because of what they are as people, and I don’t invite white people to my house on the basis of their politics,’ or ‘It’s nothing but a red-herring, this business of inviting Africans socially, what they want is higher wages and not social condescension.’

  There are infinite variations on this theme; in short, it is not possible simply and naturally to invite Africans or people of colour to visit.

  I heard a story of a white woman who invited an African teacher to drinks and a meal. As it is illegal for Africans to drink European liquor—a law which intelligent people simply ignore if Africans are guests—she served him with ginger-beer, while her white guests drank ordinary liquor; then she sent him to the kitchen to take his meal with her cookboy while her other guests ate with her. She was overcome by her progressiveness and deeply hurt when the teacher refused her next invitation—he was ungrateful, she felt.

  Wanting to visit an old friend of mine in Harari, the African township near Salisbury, I had to apply for permission to the Native Department, and was told: ‘We do not encourage visiting between white and black; besides, there is a lot of immorality going on, there oughtn’t to be, but there is. If you want to meet natives socially why don’t you get them invited to a white house and then there is no problem.’ And finally, when I insisted on meeting my friends in their own house: ‘If you wanted to hold a meeting, we’d give you a permit for the whole day.’ This rather surprised me, until the obliging official hastened to explain: ‘We always have our men at the meetings so that we know what is going on, but social visits are discouraged, they lead to all sorts of complications.’