Going Home. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 have never left Britain or proliferate into eccentrics or rogue elephants. Africa is full of colourful characters, adventurers, criminals, petty tyrants or solitaries. But I don’t think it can be said we have not seen them before – or read about them.

      I think it is the Afrikaner who is the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. He is a tragic figure. The Africans are not tragic – they have the future before them; they are a suppressed people who will soon free themselves as Colonial people are freeing themselves everywhere in the world. The British are not tragic, they are too flexible. I think most of the British in Africa will be back in Britain inside twenty years. But the Afrikaners are as indigenous as the Africans. And since they insist their survival as a nation depends on white domination what possible future can they have? Yet they are not a corrupted people, as the Germans were corrupted by the Nazis – Afrikaner nationalism is not a falling-off from a high peak of national cultural achievement. The Afrikaners have remained unaltered while the world has changed, and that is their tragedy. Their history as a people has been a long, courageous battle for independence and freedom; yet they do not understand other people’s desire for freedom: that is their paradox.

      They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black–white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid. But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the segregation created by Smuts, the Afrikaner who became a spokesman for the British Empire, and his British-dominated United Party. Passes, segregation, farm-prisons, pick-up vans and the industrial colour bar were not introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalists: the system was created by the white people, Afrikaner and British together, and financed by British and American capital. But the Afrikaner has been made the villain of the scene; Smuts was called a great statesman, but Strydom is hissed in the streets when he comes to Britain.

      And so the drive towards national isolation and self-sufficiency which is the basis of Afrikaner nationalism is strengthened.

      Sooner or later it will be the Afrikaner and the African who will face each other as opponents in the southern tip of the continent. And they are very alike. I have yet to meet an African who does not say that he prefers the Afrikaner as a man to the British. ‘The Afrikaner calls me a Kaffir, he says what he thinks, but he is more humane, he treats me better.’ I have heard that very often.

      And inevitably the two people are becoming fast mixed in blood – if one may use that convenient word – in spite of all the laws and the bars and the barriers. There is no sadder or more bizarre sight than to see a group of ‘white South Africans’, each with the marks of mixed descent strong in face and hair and body-build, arguing about the necessity of preserving racial purity.

      On an aeroplane in Northern Rhodesia I sat next to a young Afrikaner flying back home. He was immediately recognizable as one, first because of his open, simple face, and next because the marks of mixed parentage were on his hair and his facial structure.

      We got into conversation.

      ‘I am sad today,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know what to do. I’ve just been up to the Copper Belt, and that’s the place for me, man, you can earn money there, not the Kaffir’s wages you get back home now. But if I go to the Copper Belt, man, my heart will break.’

      ‘But why?’

      ‘Because of my pigeons. They’re my little sisters. How can I take my fifty pigeons all the way to the Copper Belt? They will be sad there. I’d have to sell them. I wouldn’t like to do that. I’d feel sad all the time.’

      ‘Perhaps you’d get over it? And you could buy some more pigeons?’

      ‘How can you say that? That’s not right. No, man, the way I feel now, I’ll have to stay at home, even if I don’t like it.’

      I noticed he had broken his thumb.

      ‘Yes, and that’s another thing. I got that last year. On the job I’m a policeman. A man was beating up a Kaffir. He had no right to do that. The Kaffir hadn’t done anything. So I broke my thumb on him. People shouldn’t go hitting Kaffirs when they haven’t done anything. Well, the next thing was I broke it again. You know how you have to beat up Kaffirs when you arrest them: they don’t tell the truth if you don’t give them a good hiding. But now I keep thinking about my thumb, and I can’t do my work properly. You can’t do the job without your fists. No, I’ll have to get another job. Besides, the police is no good.’

      ‘You don’t like the work?’

      ‘Hell, man, it’s not the work. But things are bad now. I know you’ll think I’m saying this because you’re English and I’m trying to make up to you. But it’s God’s truth, I like the English. There’s an Englishman in the office, and he’s fair, and I like him. He treats everyone the same. But our men there, man, but you can’t trust them! They tell you to do something, and then it goes wrong, and then it’s your fault. They don’t stand by you. And they tell on each other all the time. But the Englishman’s going. He’s going back to England, he says. And so I’ll leave, too. I’m not staying where things aren’t fair. Don’t think I mean anything about South Africa; it’s God’s country. Why don’t you come and see it?’

      This being after I was proscribed, I said his Government would not let me in and why.

      He looked at me long and earnestly. ‘Never seen a commie before,’ he said.

      ‘There used to be plenty in South Africa before it was illegal.’

      ‘Never heard of that. Well, look then, tell me, what is it about?’

      ‘In South Africa, what is important now is that we are against racial inequality.’

      His face fell; СКАЧАТЬ