NF (1957) Going Home

by Doris Lessing

  The more sensible of the leaders know this, know their position is untenable. Therefore, the difference between what these trade unionists said to me privately, and what they could say publicly, was greater than in any other group of people I interviewed.

  ‘Our white kids,’ said one, ‘they leave school the minute they legally can, and all they are interested in is the pictures and sport and their girl-friends. In the meantime, these natives are killing themselves to get educated. Well, our white kids have got to pull their socks up or they’ve had it.’ But that is not what they can afford to say to their union members.

  In Northern Rhodesia, however, there was an interesting reversal of what was said for publication and what off the record. An official of the white mine workers’ union, of whom the rumour goes that he is an ardent Afrikaner Nationalist and a supporter of apartheid, spent three-quarters of an hour putting himself across to me as an old-fashioned liberal interested only in African advancement. It was a most impressive performance; and if I had not previously read his evidence to various commissions and committees, where his voice was the traditional voice of white trade unionism, I might easily have been convinced by him. But the point is that on the Copper Belt there is a vigorous and well-organized African trade union, and he cannot afford to be quoted as an opponent of African advancement. So here the public voice is a liberal coo, mixed with execrations against the machinations of the capitalists who want only to exploit the poor Africans; and the private voice is savagely reactionary.

  It was during this interview that the door into his office opened, and an African appeared, saying: ‘Baas, I want work.’ Whereupon the official shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Get out of here, go on, get out.’ At which point, recollecting the presence of the enemy, he hastened to assure me that had a white man entered that door he would have spoken to him in exactly the same tone of voice.

  The evening before this interview I spent talking to another of the union officials, who spoke of the Africans in a way in which most white citizens are becoming too self-conscious to speak: filthy, dirty, ignorant, savage, immoral—it was a stream of abuse. The point is that this man was not a South African—for there are thousands of Afrikaners now on the Copper Belt, forming a solid block of white reaction—but an Englishman. He was one of those who became officers during the war and was unable to return to artisan status when it ended; therefore he very logically emigrated to the Rhodesias where he could be a baas.

  Time and again it was said to me, either jubilantly or with regret: ‘If you want to see the natives badly treated, then you should see the people just out from Britain: they are worse then anyone, much worse than the old Rhodesians.’ And: ‘We thought that a big influx of immigrants from Britain would strengthen liberal opinion, but not a bit of it.’

  In Bulawayo I met a group of young women who had left £7 a week typing jobs in London and were now earning £60, £70, £80 a month. In the accents of the more refined women’s magazines, they were complacently exchanging the phrases I have been hearing all my life: ‘These Kaffirs are so backward.’ ‘In Britain they don’t understand our problems.’ ‘It has taken us two thousand years to become civilized…’ and so on.

  Another kind of immigrant: a white man, newly arrived in Southern Rhodesia, full of indignation at the colour bar, goes to the Matopos to Rhodes’s grave. He finds two African watchmen on guard.

  He says reproachfully: ‘How can you allow yourself to guard the grave of the man who enslaved you, who tricked your ancestors out of their land?’

  A guard interrupts him: ‘Mind, baas! You are treading on the grave.’

  While the post-war immigrants are not a sympathetic lot, there is no more touching group of people than the white workers who left Britain during the hungry and unemployed ‘thirties. In Africa they found, for the first time in their lives, a good standard of living and some sort of security. They were white men. They were baases. At immense cost, often borrowing the money to do it, they left their own country with their wives and families. They had to conform, if they did not have the money to leave again. Some couldn’t stand it, and left. They were the best or the luckiest. Some said they would leave when they had saved the money. But when that time came, if it ever did—for if wages are high then so are the standard and cost of living—well, it is a beautiful climate, and in Britain one does not have servants. So they stayed and conformed. And in order to drown their consciences, for they are after all products of the British Labour Movement with its traditions of brotherhood between man and man, they adopt the shabby phrases which justify the colour bar and shout them louder than anyone else.

  And the big industrialists, who are all liberals to a man—for to hear them talk one would imagine that the copper mines, gold mines and industries are there solely for the philanthropic purpose of uplifting the African, and it takes quite an effort of will to remember the millions of pounds that flow out to overseas investors—these liberal industrialists never cease to complain about the reactionary white trade unions. Yet the privileged white worker was the deliberate creation of earlier industrialists; and it is a policy which has boomeranged, for there he stands, blocking the path to cheap black labour.

  Not, I should imagine, for long: I was told that when the representatives of the World Bank were out reporting on the investment possibilities of Federation, their chief doubt was the shortage of African labour. In a decade, they said, industrialization would be hamstrung for lack of labour, because the industrial colour bar keeps Africans unskilled and inefficient, because it keeps wages down and restricts the internal market and perpetuates poverty, disease, and early death. So far the private investor has not shown much interest in the Federation; it is the public funds which make Kariba and other enterprises possible. Federation considers its future depends on a strong flow of investment—therefore I think the gap between black and white worker will very rapidly narrow. It is already narrowing. Already people are saying that in such and such a factory the white apprentices have been talked into accepting a coloured apprentice; there is a place where an African is working on the same bench with white men; and—most significantly—in such and such a factory all the work is done by Africans. And then, inevitably, with the small grimace of a naughty schoolboy: ‘Luckily the whites don’t realize what is going on, or…’

  Oh, these naughty schoolboys, these pleasant amateurs of politics! They are pushed into public life simply because there are so few people available for it. At this moment there are four or five political parties forming to oppose Garfield Todd’s men. Looked at from outside, their policies are virtually indistinguishable; they all rest, just like the Federal Party and Mr Todd’s party, on segregation and the Land Apportionment Act. It is the spirit of white settlerdom, still uncertain and wavering, blowing up to form an opposition to even the modified interracialism that exists. But the real difficulty is shortage of men. A party may form, collect half a dozen members, and disintegrate because of the defection of one. This is a place where a man’s personality may still count far more than the policy he is supposed to be standing for. Here a man may become a politician scarcely knowing himself how it has happened.

  In Central Africa men are not carefully groomed for seats in Parliament, as they are in Britain; they do not serve long apprenticeships on committees and sub-committees. The farmer who speaks more often than most at the farmers’ meetings, the businessman who is vocal about some grievance, the man who is in the habit of writing indignant letters to the newspapers—they will find themselves sucked into the legislative assemblies by the sheer force of the general shortage of ability and public experience.

  These enthusiastic amateurs, flushed with surprise and success, each with his grievance or hobby which brought him here to sit in the councils of the state, find almost at once that the spirit of the time is welding them all into a body with a single soul. The needs of this time being to give the Africans just enough to keep them quiet, they all become Paternalists.


  The Paternalist says that the Africans must be given a square deal; they must have fair play; they must look forward to a place in the sun. The Paternalist, however, does not intend to abolish the Land Apportionment Act or end segregation: such ideas have most likely never entered his head. He wishes there were more money to spend on clinics and hospitals and schools for Africans; the fact that he wishes it makes him feel warm and virtuous; but he does not mean to go so far as to tax the white voters who put him into power so that there should be more public money. The Paternalist will do everything in the world for the Africans short of losing his seat or giving the Africans an equal vote with the white men.

  Similar to the kind-hearted Paternalists are the Useful Rebels, public figures in the politics of Central Africa. One, whom I met in Lusaka, is a man known to the white citizens as a Communist; he is, however, a Minister of Government. A very dangerous man, this—he mixes socially with Africans.

  We had a conversation; he was explaining to me how wicked Communism was because it did not respect the liberty of the individual. I agreed that I hated as much as he did the massacres and atrocities that have occurred under Communism; but I thought there was a certain incongruity between his belief in liberty and the fact that the administration of which he is a member imprisons Africans by the dozen for being Congress members. I pointed out that Mr Konkola, President of the TUC, had just done time for some political offence. I said that the two Congress leaders, Mr Nkumbula and Mr Kaunda, had recently done spells of hard labour for simply being in possession of seditious literature. Whereupon he exclaimed—and this is the immediately recognizable voice of the Useful Rebel—‘If I had been here it wouldn’t have happened. I was away. When I came back I said how could they be so short-sighted as to imprison these men; it makes such a bad impression.’

  Note that the Useful Rebel does not consider himself part of government; he disapproves utterly of it, although he has probably been of it for years. He consents to work with it because he thinks that by doing so he keeps a bad reactionary out. Thus, at every crisis, when he has to do something against his conscience, he never resigns because he thinks: ‘No, I must stay, I am at least a Progressive.’

  In the meantime he modifies a law slightly here, puts in an oar there, uses his influence somewhere else; but he is never responsible for the wicked things his Government does. And as for the Government, he is a feather in their cap; because if such a well-known Progressive consents to work with them, they can’t be so bad, after all.

  The Useful Rebel always plays another role, which is that of the Respectable Patron. In any particularly repressive society there are always half a dozen small organizations of people who are an angry minority of critics, but who have to adjust their criticism just this side of the line which will lose them their jobs or get them deported. The Useful Rebel is on the committee or is chairman of these societies. He is necessary, because they have to be respectable. To his Government reactionary friends he says, half-laughing, but showing his integrity: ‘No, no, they have some very good people, you are wrong. I think they should be supported.’ A pause. ‘Besides, one should keep an eye on them in case the hotheads take over.’ Whenever the society wants to go too far, to pass a forthright resolution, or write a letter to the newspaper which is strongly worded, the Respectable Patron threatens to resign. Now the society is in a difficult position: if their Patron resigns, it means they will be branded in the eyes of the citizens as dangerous and irresponsible. On the other hand, if they continue to give in to their Patron’s threats of resignation, then there might just as well not be a society; it is a society without teeth.

  In this situation the Patron always wins, and the society either becomes so respectable it has no force at all; or it simply dwindles and dies.

  A classic example of this is what happened in an interracial club recently. When the interracial club was started it was considered very advanced and dangerous, but now it is tolerated by the white citizens as perhaps rather eccentric.

  People in Britain are shocked because the new University in Salisbury will be segregated. But even more shocking is that, unique among the universities of the world, there is provision that the Government of the day, through the Minister of the Interior, can dismiss any African student at any time without giving reasons for doing so. This provision is expressly and openly for the purpose of getting rid of any agitators that the University might inadvertently produce.

  The interracial society wished to pass a resolution against this law; but a Useful Rebel, in his other role of Respectable Patron, said no; the time was not ripe. Of course it was a shocking outrage against liberty and freedom, but if the society pressed on with this resolution, it would get into disrepute with the white citizens which it wished to educate into liberalism. Therefore it was his regrettable duty to resign if the resolution was passed. So the resolution was not passed.

  I have known now a good many Useful Rebels. The end of such a man—that is, if he does not by some political development which makes him particularly useful become Prime Minister—is always a sad one. For the white citizens he remains that Red, that Socialist, that extremist; and when a scapegoat is needed, there he is, ready to be cast out. And cast out he is—if he does not have the sense to resign in good time—bitterly conscious of ingratitude, and rightly so, for without him white supremacy would never last half so long.

  As for the Africans, of whom he, of course, considers himself the spokesman—he is the spokesman of African advancement as distinct from African independence—the Africans will have no more of him, and say aloud what they have been thinking for so long, that he is the most disgusting hypocrite and a much more dangerous enemy than a forthright opponent like Mr Strydom.

  Luckily, however, he is able to retire into private life. I have never known a Useful Rebel who did not have some job to go back to, or a private income. It is not a role that can be played out without a cushion of some kind. And therefore the bitterness of the ingratitude of mankind is at least suffered in some sort of comfort.

  Here is a ‘profile’ which appeared in the newspaper The African Weekly, June 6, 1956, published in Salisbury for Africans. Every week there is a feature called ‘Prominent Central Africans’, dealing with some African who has distinguished himself. I think this one is particularly interesting, not only because of the story it tells, but because it illustrates the theme of the Useful Rebel in another way. The Federal Party mentioned in this piece, being that which stands for the forcible imposition of Federation against the wishes of the Africans, is boycotted by all but a few of the Africans:

  A boy who was appointed prefect at a new school a week after his entry and was made senior prefect after another week, and then boasted to his class-mates, ‘I shall become great,’ has literally become great. He is Isaac Samuriwo.

  Starting life as a poor herd-boy who tended calves on a European farm, and who could boast of nothing but ‘royal’ blood which flowed in his veins, he has risen to become one of Central Africa’s most successful African businessmen. Instead of the herds of European cattle he tended as a youngster, he now runs a fleet of buses (three, including one just sold), he is a cartage contractor (with five lorries, three of them new), a building contractor (believed to be the only African operating in the heart of Salisbury), a greengrocer and provision merchant (with wholesale vegetable trade) and general dealer. On top of it all, he is president of the Southern Rhodesia African Association, first president of the Southern Rhodesia African Chamber of Commerce, president of the Southern Rhodesia African Transport Contractors’ Association, etc.

  Isaac Henzi Samuriwo, son of Chief Samuriwo, was born in October 1913 in his father’s kraal in what is now known as the Chihota Reserve, Marandellas District.

  His mother, Nvowa Nhora Tshekede, daughter of a brother of Chief Siwundula, now living in the Que Que District, was one of Chief Samuriwo’s twenty-six wives.

  There were eleven children in Isaac’s house, of whom seven were girls. Is
aac was the sixth-born.

  Isaac first went to school in 1928, attending his kraal school (Samuriwo School). After passing Sub-B he left to work on a European farm. He tended calves for a Mr ‘Folera’ in the Enkeldoorn District. Folera was nicknamed ‘Gandakanda’ by his African employees ‘because he was harsh and cruel and beat his workers’. Isaac stayed on the job for five months and progressed from tending calves to leading oxen, ‘despite the beatings’.

  He returned home, stayed a few months, then went to work in a tobacco barn at a place called Chamboko in Wedza. Here he was joined by two of his half-brothers, both older than himself. But they could not endure the treatment the European farmer meted out to them and they ran away. Isaac stood it for eight months, then returned home to resume his schooling.

  After passing Standard I he went to Domboshawa Government School. With him went his elder brother, Chiyangwa. Being sons of a Chief, they were given attendants to accompany them to school, as was then customary. Isaac’s attendant was his cousin named Shadrack Kariwo. Chiyangwa failed the entrance-examination and had to return home. Isaac and Shadrack passed and were admitted.