NF (1957) Going Home

by Doris Lessing

  I got my permit for two hours, which I treasure as a souvenir of Partnership.

  I flew down to Johannesburg trying to recapture the mood I went south in, in the past, the many times I entered the Union. For me going south was going to the big cities, for I was locked in Southern Rhodesia for years, wanting all the time to know something bigger, to know Europe. For years it was impossible to leave, and so going to the Union was a small form of escape. Johannesburg was then the big city to me; and Cape Town meant the sea, for living land-locked in the highveld I used to hunger for the sea so that it became a mania. That moment when, after five days in the slow, hot, dusty train I smelt the sea at last, and a blue stretch of water and the masts and funnels and hulls of ships appeared between the factories at water-level on the Cape Flats—that moment was always an explosion of relief after a long stretch of tension and nostalgia. I used to travel towards South Africa like someone being allowed, briefly, out of prison.

  Although this time I was not sure whether I would be allowed in, it is hard to believe one can be kept out of a country that has meant so much to one as South Africa has to me; and in any case that frontier at the Limpopo has not seemed to me important, since it is at the Zambezi that the frontier between segregation and the Protectorates has always been; and so when I saw the great mine-dumps of the Reef, I thought that soon I would be seeing my friends, whom I have not seen for a long time, since they are mostly not allowed out, being either former Communists or people ‘named’ as Communists.

  The atmosphere in the Jan Smuts airport immediately warned me; every person in it is a member of the Special Branch of the police, down to the girl selling cigarettes, and one feels the tight, suspicious watchfulness of the place at once. We sat waiting in the outside room while the plane-lists were checked against the blacklists of the police. Then my name was called first, and I went into the room next door, and I knew I was already on the way out. There were two tables in the immigration room, one with a pleasant young man behind it, who dealt fast and politely with respectable people and one manned by the worst type of Afrikaner official—and there is no worse type of official: rude, overbearing, boorishly sarcastic.

  Since they already had my name from the plane-list, he went through my immigration form and my passport as a matter of form, though the fact that I was born in Persia caused him particular annoyance: the first time I went into the Union in 1937 I was taken off the train while the immigration officials telephoned Pretoria for a ruling as to whether I was an Asiatic or not: the movements of people from Asia are strictly controlled in Southern Africa, and had I been one I would not have been allowed in without special forms, if at all.

  Finally this man went off to telephone Pretoria again, and I sat and waited, watching men in plain clothes emerge from various strategic points. It must cost the Union Government a great deal of money to keep so many policemen on hand for those comparatively rare occasions when they have to throw somebody out.

  Finally I was told I was a prohibited immigrant and must go back on the same plane I came in on. I said to the man who told me this, a tall, thin, worried-looking individual, obviously embarrassed by the situation, that it would be better if the Union published a list of their prohibited immigrants so that we would not waste money, whereupon he said that ‘this sort of thing happens in other countries, doesn’t it?’—by which he meant to say that since movement in and out of Communist countries is controlled his Government is entitled to do the same, an argument one does not have to travel to South Africa to hear.

  Meanwhile, the first official, grinning with spiteful delight at having caught out another enemy of the State, was nudging me on towards the plane, and thus, escorted by a posse of plain-clothes men, I was put back on the plane, and instructed to sit by myself and away from the window. Presumably this last was in case I might jump through it, or throw a bomb through it—I don’t know, but it annoyed me.

  I was, in fact, very upset. Particularly as, not being a romantic about politics and thinking, as so many people apparently do, ‘the greater the oppression the sooner the day of liberation,’ I believe that the present regime in South Africa will last a very long time. It will be a long time before I can go back. It is a State which is designed on every level to prevent the Africans from rebelling, to keep them as helots; it is a completely logical and very efficient system—that is, it is politically efficient, for apartheid will keep the country poor and backward and will slowly corrupt it. Apartheid means, inevitably, isolation from the rest of the world. It means that the white people, increasingly soft with that self-pity which I have already mentioned, and which is the most remarkable symptom of ‘white civilization’ on the defensive, will become more and more brutal and warped.

  I have asked several people recently, liberals from South Africa, if they thought there was any chance of the Nationalists being thrown out. None by parliamentary means, they said. Or by an effective revolt from the Africans? No—the State is too efficient. Then it will all go on indefinitely? No; it will collapse under the burden of its corruption. How do you define corruption here? For one thing, crime—the figures for violent crime are staggering, higher than anywhere in the world. Everyone is afraid all the time. There are no standards in public life; everything is bribery and chicanery. The white youth are by definition corrupt, drinking, drugging, interested in nothing but pleasure.

  All this is bad but does not necessarily destroy a State.

  It can’t go on; it simply can’t go on like this, they say.

  Personally I think it can go on. The forecast I agree with is this: the value the Union has to the power centre of the world—America—is that it now produces uranium in large quantities. Also gold. Provided uranium and gold continue to come out of South Africa, the Nationalists will be free to do as they like. South Africa will become poorer, more backward, intellectually and morally corrupt, a place of sporadic race riots, violence, crime, prisons, internment camps, fear. I believe that we tend to think in terms of dramatic alternatives: ‘The Africans will revolt.’ ‘Liberal opinion will throw the Nationalists out.’ But a country can just as well dwindle into decay and stagnation.

  I do not believe that South Africa can save itself; it is in a deadlock. But it could be saved by economic pressure from outside: it might be forced into sanity if progressive opinion abroad took forcible action. Even so, I think the Nationalists would prefer to become backveld peasant farmers in complete isolation from the rest of the world, rather than give up their dream of racial purity.

  To understand the Nationalists, one must read a history of Paul Kruger. Having once absorbed the essential fact that this shrewd, grasping, bigoted peasant is their national type or ideal, one should read Harry Bloom’s The Incident which is an absolutely accurate description of the miserable racial conflict which goes on in the Union now. Then one should have a good enough idea of the sick, suffering flesh which clothes the bones of the country—uranium, gold, diamonds.

  And it is such a beautiful country—beautiful, and potentially so rich.

  Well, so I went back to Salisbury and consoled myself with the thought that there was, after all, plenty to see in Central Africa, plenty to do in the short time I had.

  Almost immediately I was rather deviously summoned for an interview by a man in a high position. Unfortunately I cannot describe this ironical and interesting encounter, for I promised I would not; but the essence of the thing was that I was only in Southern Rhodesia at all because of the personal intervention of this high personage and that if I crossed the Zambezi to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland I could expect to be deported at once.

  This upset me a good deal. To be refused entry into a country one knows and loves is bad enough, but to be told one is on sufferance in a country one has lived in nearly all one’s life is very painful.

  I am, of course, considered so undesirable in these parts because I am a Communist. But I would not, very likely, be a Communist if I had not lived for twenty-five years in Cen
tral Africa. I can easily see why people who have lived all their lives in Britain do not easily take to Communism. Nor do I think they are likely to do so until Communism has proved itself to be as genuinely democratic as it has been claiming to be. I believe that in a decade the Communist countries of the world will be freer, more democratic (in the political, as well as the economic sense of these words) than the Western World, which is rapidly becoming less free, less democratic. If I did not think this I would not remain a Communist. Too many people have been prepared to die for liberty and freedom in the last five hundred years for these words to become mere symbols of an outdated economic system.

  For if the first need of a human being is for three square meals a day and a roof over his head—and it is the most sickening hypocrisy to believe anything else—then the second need is the freedom to say what he thinks. Sometimes it is the first need, more important than food or a roof.

  But if one has been brought up in one of those outposts of British democracy, a British colony, it is no education for believing in the middle way, compromise and the rest of the phrases which still have emotional force in Britain—and in no other country in the world.

  In short, whatever I am, I have been made so by Central Africa, but this is not the way political police anywhere in the world are likely to reason; and during the next few days I was very impressed by the efficiency of the CID. As I have already said, this is a country where one always knows everything that goes on, because of the smallness of the white population; and I was being continually informed by friends that the CID had made this or that inquiry, or had said this or that. Not, one would have thought, that they needed to make inquiries, since they seem to have the most detailed information about everything I have done or said since I left home.

  All this put me into an uncomfortable frame of mind. Of course, as a Communist one is used to living as if one were plastered all over with labels that have nothing to do with what one thinks or feels; but I have never felt this so strongly as on this last trip home. For the backwardness of these countries is such that the sort of work a Communist does in them (as, for example, the work the South African Communist Party did before it was banned) is exactly the same sort of work a liberal or a progressive churchman does. It is a fight for basic human rights. If I were not a Communist I would be doing exactly the same kind of thing.

  It is another parallel between white-settler countries and the United States, which gets into such a state of hysteria about its small Communist Party, and destroys its own civil liberties in the determination to destroy Communism. What sort of a precarious state can Central Africa be in that it gets so excited at the prospect of having one Communist inside its borders for seven weeks? And what—with the worst intentions in the world, and of course I had them—could I do in seven weeks?

  But now that I was under high though invisible patronage, officials that had been stuffy and suspicious now became guardedly helpful; and I set out on a round of interviewing and inspection. I spent most of my time doing this for some weeks; but what soon became evident was not the diversity or variety of what was said, but how a single thread ran through what seemed at first to be complicated.

  For all these officials said the same things. It is a commonplace that a certain political epoch will feed the same words and phrases into the minds of people who are probably convinced they have thought them up for themselves; but it is a remarkable experience to see this commonplace take flesh.

  When I left home the slogans and catchwords were different. Then, everyone was saying that the natives must be advanced slowly; the time was not ripe; you cannot civilize barbarians in under a thousand years. These are the things the majority of white citizens are still saying; but since the recent events in Kenya, which were like a burglar alarm in a rich house, the intelligent whites are frightened and they are all with one voice, but in a variety of phrases, saying: ‘We must create a small privileged class of Africans to cushion white supremacy.’ It is what Huggins has been saying for years; now it is official policy.

  And once having grasped this basic policy, all the contradictions and anomalies fall into place.

  Ten years ago the Africans who protested against being described as barbarians with barbaric needs were called agitators and troublemakers; now it is the Africans who demand political rights for all Africans as distinct from rights for a privileged minority who can expect to be deported, threatened, imprisoned.

  In all these interviews there were two interviews—one during which the phrases of the policy were offered to me; and an unofficial interview which I was asked not to quote. But what was said off the record was always the same: ‘We have a small, a very small chance of avoiding a racial flare-up, of making Partnership work. If African nationalism does not become unmanageable, if the spirit of white settlerdom does not revolt against Mr Todd and his enthusiasts, then perhaps we may avoid what is happening in the Union, what has happened in Kenya. We must create a middleclass of Africans quickly.’

  And so with the white trade-union leaders, who, having accepted a policy whereby Africans are workers by law, and thus able to join multi-racial trade unions, so that African trade unionism may be controlled and directed—these men are frightened that the mass of the white trade unionists may flare into hostility, refusing to accept Africans as fellow-workers, even in their own self-interest.

  The chief block to African advancement in Central Africa, as in the Union of South Africa, is organized white labour. A white artisan is a white man first and a worker second. The proud traditions of the British Labour Movement suffer a strange transformation in Africa. There are no more colour-conscious people than the white artisans; yet, if reproached with their attitude towards the Africans, they reply: ‘All we say is that any job must be paid at the same rates.’ Which sounds fair enough. But an African labourer, in 1956, in Southern Rhodesia, earns about £3 or £4 a month, plus food and housing which cost the employer about £2 10s. a month. A white artisan can earn £70 or £80 a month. On the Copper Belt the comparable figures are: African workers £6 to £10 a month, white workers £150 to £200 a month. Impossible for an employer to pay an African ‘white’ rates, for it would cut at the root of the colour structure. Therefore the white trade-union demand for equal pay preserves skilled work for white workers. In Southern Rhodesia it is impossible for an African to do skilled work, except in the building industry; and then only outside limits within which it is saved for white artisans. In June the Government enforced a law saying that any African employed by a building firm within these territorial limits must be paid the same rates as white workers: the opposition came from the African building workers—immediately, rather than pay the same wages, employers began sacking their African workmen.

  And so there is the anomalous position where the chief support for abolishing or modifying the industrial colour bar comes from the industrialists: even if wages were three or four times as high as they are now, it would be much cheaper to employ African labour than white labour. A slow battle goes on between the Government (expressing the needs of the industrialists) and the white workers, who are being forced, step by step, to release certain categories of less skilled work to Africans. A category of work is ‘released’ when there are enough Africans skilled enough to take over all that class of work within a particular industry. For it is degrading for the white worker to work alongside an African. Recently, on the Copper Belt, the copper companies forced the white mineworkers’ union to release twenty-four categories of semi-skilled work. Next week the white workers came out on strike: the employers had put on three African pipe-fitters when there were still white pipe-fitters on the job. This was an insult to white labour. The strike succeeded; the companies have agreed to keep these categories ‘white’ until they can be taken over entirely by Africans—no mixing of the colours on the job.

  And yet on the Copper Belt I was told by a mine official: ‘And after all that fuss, on such and such a mine Africans are actually doing pipe
-fitting, and the white workers are saying nothing. One never knows when they are going to lose their tempers and strike.’

  There is no place where it is easier to see that colour-feeling is basically money-feeling than here, in spite of all the rationales of racialism. On the building sites one can watch white artisans and black artisans working together: the black men mix the cement and the mortar, lift the bricks and carry them to the white men, who fit the bricks into place on the wall. The black men will be earning a tiny fraction of what the white men earn. And on the Rhokana mine, I saw a great furnace being opened to let the molten waste flow out: five black men on the crowbar, and one white man, working together. The white man would strike if they were paid the same, while they still worked together.

  In Southern Rhodesia the white artisans say that Africans are incapable of doing skilled work, as a moral justification for keeping them out; but in Northern Rhodesia, where white labour is concentrated on the Copper Belt, the Industrial Colour Bar is confined to minework. There Africans have done skilled building, plumbing, surveying and clerical work for decades.

  The white trade-union case is self-contradictory: if the black man is so obviously inferior, why create so many barriers to keep him out? In reply, the white trade union uses the classic language of British trade unionism: the capitalists will exploit the African by paying him less than the rate for the job unless we keep up standards.

  The leaders of the white trade unions in Southern Rhodesia are in exactly the same dilemma as the more intelligent of the white politicians: they will not remain in their jobs unless they are voted back into them by white votes; but the majority of their following consider them ‘soft’ towards the Africans. And it is a fact that many of the white artisans are right to be afraid. Many of them are poor human material; not only are their standards of skill very low, but they are degraded by their attitude towards the Africans, who are, after all, their fellow workers. Faced with competition from Africans who are avid for education and new skills, with all the irresistible energy of a suppressed people, they know they will go to the wall unless they are protected: white trade-union policy is in essence to protect that section of the white workers who intend to rely not on their skills or their industry or their education, but on the colour of their skins for their standard of living.