Going Home. Doris Lessing
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whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’
But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.
After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.
My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.
But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.
Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.
That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.
Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen – driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.
Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.
That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.
What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man for all that, because in this country there is no class feeling, only money feeling.’
Again, just as America is permeated with the values and attributes of the two groups of people supposedly non-assimilable – the Negroes and the Jews – so the white people here who think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, but the qualities they ascribe to the Africans are inevitably absorbing those qualities.
It is a society without roots – is that why it has no resistance to Americanism? Or is being rootless in itself American?
The myths of this society are not European. They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman homemaking in lonely and primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents; the simple and brave savage defeated after gallant fighting on both sides; the childlike and lovable servant; the devoted welfare-worker spending his or her life uplifting backward peoples.
Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa.
On that first morning I went shopping to try to get the feel and atmosphere of the place.
First into a vegetable shop. Shopping has certainly changed: now the counters are refrigerated, self-service shops everywhere, and above all Coca-Cola has moved in. The Coca-Cola sign is on every second building, from the high new blocks of offices and flats to the scruffy little store in the Native Reserve.
In the vegetable shop were three white people and two Africans. Two of the white people were serving behind the counter; then two African men, with shopping baskets. Then me. I waited my turn behind the two Africans to see what would happen. The woman behind the counter eyed the Africans coldly, and then in the cool, curt voice I know so well said: ‘Can’t you see the white missus, boy? Get to the back.’ They moved back, I moved in and was served. Another white woman came in; she was being served as I went out. The Africans patiently waited.
And for the thousandth time I tried to put myself in the place of people who are subjected to this treatment every day of their lives. But I can’t imagine it: the isolated incident, yes; but not the cumulative effect, year after year, every time an African meets a white person, the special tone of voice, the gesture of impatience, the contempt.
In the next shop, which was a bakery, a young girl in jeans, striped sweat-shirt and sandals, was greeted by a boy in sweat-shirt and jeans. ‘Hiya, Babe!’ ‘Hiya, Johnny.’ ‘See you tonight?’ ‘Ya, see you at the flicks.’ ‘Bye.’ ‘Bye.’
The main street is crammed with cars, with white women drifting along, talking, or standing in groups, talking. They wear cool, light dresses, showing brown bare arms and legs. The dresses are mostly home-made, and have that look of careful individual fit that one sees in the clothes of women in Italy and Spain.
These are the women of leisure; and, having been one of them for so long – or at least expected to play the role of one – I know that their preoccupations are in this order: the dress they are making for themselves or their daughter, the laziness of their servants, and an infinite number of personal problems. Or, as the Americans would say, Problems.
Their husbands are now busily engaged in getting on and doing well for themselves in the offices; and their children are at school. The cookboy is cooking the lunch. They will take back the car laden with groceries and liquor, dress-lengths, bargains. Then there will be a morning tea-party. Then lunch with husband and family. Then a nap. Then afternoon tea, and soon, sundowners. Then the pictures. And then, bed. And, in the words of a personal servant of a friend of mine: ‘The white man goes to bed, he makes love, twice-a-week, bump, bump, go-to-sleep.’
Though this did not occur to me until later, at the end of my trip,