Going Home. Doris Lessing
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natural ebb and flow of feeling between two people is checked because what they do is not the expression of whether they like each other or not, but deliberately and consciously considered to express: ‘We are people on different sides of the colour barrier who choose to defy this society.’ And, of course, this will go on until the day comes when self-consciousness can wither away naturally. In the meantime, the eyes of people of a different colour can meet over those formal collective hands, in a sort of sardonic appreciation of the comedies of the situation.
But what I did find was that while I am immune to colour feeling as such, I was sensitive to social pressures. Could it be that many people who imagine they have colour prejudice are merely suffering from fear of the Joneses? I dare say this is not an original thought, but it came as a shock to me.
In the Tropical Diseases Hospital in London, where I was last year for a few weeks, a middle-aged white woman was being treated in the same room. When she found there were dark-skinned doctors and patients, she suffered something not far off a nervous collapse. She got no sympathy at all from either nurses or her fellow patients about her dislike of being treated the same way as black people, so she became stiffly but suspiciously silent: bedclothes pulled up to her chin, like a shield, watching everyone around her as if they were enemies. And every bit of china she used, every fork or knife or spoon, was minutely examined for cracks or scratches. The presence of coloured people meant germs: germs live in cracks. Her worry about these utensils became an obsession. Before a meal, after she had sent back cups, plates, cutlery, several times to be changed, she would then wash each piece in the basin in strong disinfectant. Unable to express her dislike of coloured people through the colour bar, she fell back on the china. This is the real colour prejudice; it is a neurosis, and people who suffer from it should be pitied as one pities the mentally ill. But there is a deep gulf between this and being frightened of what the neighbours will say.
In writing this I am conscious of a feeling of fatigue and sterility, which is what I have to fight against as soon as I set foot in white Africa. For a long time I believed this was the result of being in a minority among one’s own kind, which means one has to guard against being on the defensive, which means one has to test everything one says and does against general standards of right or wrong that are contradicted all the time, in every way, by what goes on around one.
But I no longer believe this to be true. What I feel is a kind of boredom, an irritation, by all these colour attitudes and prejudices. There is no psychological quirk or justification or rationalization that is new or even interesting. What is terrible is the boring and repetitive nature of ‘white civilization’.
As soon as one sets foot in a white settler country, one becomes part of a mass disease; everything is seen through the colour bar.
‘The patient must get worse before he can get better.’ And I know this is a light phrase for human suffering and what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in frustration. I do not have to be told or made to feel what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in humiliation and frustration. I know it all.
But in thinking of the future rather than the bitter present, I believe I am one with the Africans themselves, who show their superiority to colour bars by their joyfulness, their good humour and their delight in living. People who imagine the ghettos of white-dominated countries to be dreary and miserable places know nothing about the nature of the African people.
Worse than the colour bars, which are more dangerous and demoralizing to the white people than to the black, for they live within a slowly narrowing and suffocating cage, like so many little white mice on a treadmill – worse than this is the fact that the Africans are being channelled into industrialization in such a way that what is good in European civilization cannot reach them. They are allowed to know only what is bad and silly. That is why I am so impatient that they should wrench themselves free before they have lost touch with their own rich heritage, before they have become exhausted by exploitation.
I long for the moment when the Africans can free themselves and can express themselves in new forms, new ways of living; they are an original and vital people simply because they have been forced to take the jump from tribalism to industrial living in one generation.
And yet – the stale patterns of white domination still exist. So because I was brought up in it I have a responsibility. And does that mean I must go on writing about it?
I have notebooks full of stories, plots, anecdotes, which at one time or another I was impelled to write. But the impulse died in a yawn. Even if I wrote them well – what then? It is always the colour bar; one cannot write truthfully about Africa without describing it. And if one has been at great pains to choose a theme which is more general, people are so struck by the enormity and ugliness of the colour prejudices which must be shown in it that what one has tried to say gets lost.
When I am asked to recommend novels which will describe white-settler Africa most accurately to those who don’t know it, I always suggest a re-reading of those parts of Anna Karenina about the landowners and the peasants – simply because colour feeling doesn’t arise in it.
For the interminable discussions and soul-searchings about ‘the peasant’ are paralleled by the endless talk about ‘the native’. What was said in pre-revolutionary Russia about the peasant is word for word what is said about the Africans – lazy, irresponsible, shiftless, superstitious, and so on.
And in the person of Levin one finds the decent worried white liberal who is drawn by the reserves of strength, the deep humanity of the African, but yet does not trust him to govern himself. Levin, in Africa, is always dreaming of going native, of escaping from the complexities of modern civilization which he sees as fundamentally evil. He philosophizes; goes on long trips into the bush with his African servant to whom he feels himself closer than to any other human being and to whom he tells everything; half-believes in God; knows that all governments are bad; and plans one day to buy a crater in the Belgian Congo or an uninhabited island in the Pacific where at last he can live the natural life.
All this has nothing to do with colour.
I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described in Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know. An enormous, under-populated, under-developed, unformed country, still agricultural in feeling and resisting industrialization.
For a novelist based in Africa it is discouraging that so much of what develops there is a repetition of the European nineteenth century. Time and again one seizes on a theme, looks at it carefully, discovers that unless the writer is very careful it will merely repeat what has already been said in another context – and then, trying to isolate what is specifically African, what is true of Africa at this time, one comes slap up against that complex of emotions, the colour bar. I believe it to be true that what unifies Africa now, what makes it possible to speak of ‘Africans’ as if they were the members of one nation instead of a hundred nations, is precisely this, that white domination has given them one overriding emotion in common, which makes brothers of them all from Cape to Cairo. Yet behind this, perhaps, there is something else that is more important. Perhaps in a hundred years, looking back, they will not say: ‘It was the century when we turned the white men out of our continent and regained our freedom,’ but … I don’t know. When a people struggles for freedom the struggle itself is always so much greater and more creative than what is being fought.
Perhaps they will say: ‘That is the century when we found we were not simply black men, but a company of peoples infinitely diverse, original, rich and varied. That is the century when we recovered the right to find out what we are.’
But now, for the writer, it is hard, because the infinite complexity and the richness always narrow into a protest against that monstrous thing, the colour bar.
In white Africa I do not think the Africans have yet produced types of people or forms of organization that have not been produced elsewhere. African nationalists speak the same language as congress leaders in any country; political leaders must reflect white domination as long as it remains: Generals China and Russia of the Mau Mau would not have been possible without Colonel Blimp.
As for the British, they either live as if they