African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  But of our three Post Office spies Harry was the one whose career, for a while at least, was the most rewarding for humanist idealists.

  He was a silent, desperately shy schoolboy who came to a public meeting and fell madly in love for a week or so with the speaker, a girl giving her first public speech and as shy as he was. His father had died and his mother, as the psychiatrists and welfare workers would say, was ‘inadequate’. That is to say, she was not good at being a widow, and was frail in health. What little energy she had went into earning enough money for her and two younger sons to live on. She nagged at Harry for not having ambition, and for not studying for the examinations which would take him up the ladder into the next grade in the Post Office—and for wasting time with the reds. He longed to be of use. For three years he devoted all his spare time to organization on the Left, putting up exhibitions, hiring halls and rooms, decorating ballrooms for fund-raising dances, getting advertisements for our socialist magazine—circulation two thousand, and laying it out and selling it. He argued principle with town councillors: ‘But it’s not fair not to let us have the hall, this is a democratic country isn’t it?’—and spent at least three nights a week discussing world affairs in smoke-filled rooms.

  At the time we would have dismissed as beyond redemption anyone who suggested it, but I daresay now that the main function of those gatherings was social. Southern Rhodesia was never exactly a hospitable country for those interested in anything but sport and the sundowner, and the fifty or so people who came to the meetings were all, whether in the Forces, or refugees from Europe, or simply Rhodesians, souls in need of congenial company. And they were friendly occasions, those meetings, sometimes going on till dawn.

  A girl none of us had seen before came to a public meeting. She saw Harry, a handsome confident, loquacious, energetic, efficient young man. Everyone relied on him.

  She fell in love, took him home, and her father, recognizing one of the world’s born organizers, made him manager in his hardware shop.

  Which leaves the third, Dick. Now there are some people who should not be allowed anywhere near meetings, debates, or similar intellect-fermenting agencies. He came to two meetings. Harry brought him, describing him as ‘keen’. It was Harry who was keen. Dick sat on the floor on a cushion. Wild bohemian ways, these, for well-brought up young whites. His forehead puckered like a puppy’s while he tried to follow wild unRhodesian thought. He, like Tom, was a neat, well-set-up youth. Perhaps the Post Office, or at least in Rhodesia, is an institution that attracts the well-ordered? I remember he reminded me of a boiled sweet, bland sugar with a chemical tang. Or perhaps he was like a bulldog, all sleek latent ferocity, with its little bulging eyes, its little snarl. Like Tom, he was one for extracting exact information. ‘I take it you people believe that human nature can be changed?’

  At the second meeting he attended, he sat and listened as before. At the end he enquired whether we thought socialism was a good thing in this country where there was the white man’s burden to consider.

  He did not come to another meeting. Harry said that he had found us seditious and unRhodesian. Also insincere. We asked Harry to go and ask Dick why he thought we were insincere, and to come back and tell us. It turned out that Dick wanted to know why The Left Club did not take over the government of the country and run it, if we thought the place ill run. But we forgot Dick, particularly as Harry, at the zenith of his efficiency and general usefulness, was drifting off with his future wife to become a hardware store manager. And by then Tom was lost to us.

  Suddenly we heard that The Party for Democracy, Liberty, and Freedom’ was about to hold a preliminary mass meeting. One of us was delegated to go along and find out what was happening. This turned out to be me.

  The public meeting was in a sideroom off a ballroom in one of the town’s three hotels. It was furnished with a sideboard to hold the extra supplies of beer and sausage rolls and peanuts consumed so plentifully during the weekly dances, a palm in a pot so tall the top fronds were being pressed down by the ceiling, and a dozen stiff dining-room chairs ranged one by one along the walls. There were eleven men and women in the room, including Dick. Unable to understand immediately why this gathering struck me as so different from the ones in which I spent so much of my time, I then saw it was because there were elderly people present. Our gatherings loved only the young.

  Dick was wearing his best suit in dark grey flannel. It was a very hot evening. His face was scarlet with endeavour and covered with sweat, which he kept sweeping off his forehead with impatient fingers. He was reading an impassioned document in tone rather like the Communist Manifesto, which began: ‘Fellow Citizens of Rhodesia! Sincere Men and Women! This is the Time for Action! Arise and look about you and enter into your Inheritance! Put the forces of International Capital to flight.’

  He was standing in front of one of the chairs, his well-brushed little head bent over his notes, which were handwritten and in places hard to read, so that these inflammatory sentiments were being stammered and stumbled out, while he kept correcting himself, wiping off sweat, and then stopping with an appealing circular glance around the room at the others. Towards him were lifted ten earnest faces, as if at a saviour or a party leader.

  The programme of this nascent Party was simple. It was to ‘take over by democratic means but as fast as possible’ all the land and the industry of the country ‘but to cause as little inconvenience as possible’ and ‘as soon as it was feasible’ to institute a régime of true equality and fairness in this ‘land of Cecil Rhodes’.

  He was intoxicated by the emanations of admiration from his audience. Burning, passionate faces like these (alas, and I saw how far away we had sunk away from fervour) were no longer to be seen at our Left Club meetings, which long ago had sailed away on the agreeable tides of debate and intellectual speculation.

  The faces belonged to a man of fifty or so, rather grey and beaten, who described himself as a teacher ‘planning the total reform of the entire educational system’; a woman of middle age, a widow, badly dressed and smoking incessantly, who looked as if she had long since gone beyond what she was strong enough to bear from life; an old man with an angelic pink face fringed with white tufts who said he was named after Keir Hardie; three schoolboys, the son of the widow and his two friends; the woman attendant from the ladies’ cloakroom who had unlocked this room to set out the chairs and then had stayed out of interest, since it was her afternoon off; two aircraftsmen from the R.A.F.; Dick the convenor; and a beautiful young woman no one had ever seen before who, as soon as Dick had finished his manifesto, stood up to make a plea for vegetarianism. She was ruled out of order. ‘We have to get power first, and then we’ll simply do what the majority wants.’ As for me, I was set apart from them by my lack of fervour, and by Dick’s hostility.

  This was in the middle of the Second World War, whose aim it was to defeat the hordes of National Socialism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was thirty years old. It was more than a hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution, and rather more than that after the American Revolution which overthrew the tyrannies of Britain. The Independence of India would shortly be celebrated. It was twenty years after the death of Lenin. Trotsky still lived.

  One of the schoolboys, a friend of the widow’s son, put up his hand to say timidly, instantly to be shut up, that ‘he believed there might be books which we could read about socialism and that sort of thing.’

  Indeed there are,’ said the namesake of Keir Hardie, nodding his white locks, *but we needn’t follow the writ that runs in other old countries, when we have got a brand new one here.’

  (It must be explained that the whites of Rhodesia, then as now, are always referring to ‘this new country’.)

  ‘As for books,’ said Dick, eyeing me with all the scornful self-command he had acquired since leaving his cushion weeks before on the floor of our living-room, ‘books don’t seem to do some people any good, so why do we need them? It is al
l perfectly simple. It isn’t right for a few people to own all the wealth of a country. It isn’t fair. It should be shared out among everybody, equally, and then that would be a democracy.’

  ‘Well obviously,’ said the beautiful girl.

  ‘Ah yes,’ sighed the poor tired woman, emphatically crushing out her cigarette and lighting a new one.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if I just moved that palm a little,’ said the cloakroom attendant, ‘it does seem to be a little in your way perhaps.’ But Dick did not let her show her agreement in this way.

  ‘Never mind about the palm,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’

  And this was the point when someone asked: ‘Excuse me, but where do the Natives come in?’ (In those days, the black inhabitants of Rhodesia were referred to as the Natives.)

  This was felt to be in extremely bad taste.

  ‘I don’t really think that is applicable,’ said Dick hotly. ‘I simply don’t see the point of bringing it up at all—unless it is to make trouble.’

  ‘They do live here,’ said one of the R.A.F.

  ‘Well I must withdraw altogether if there’s any likelihood of us getting mixed up with kaffir trouble,’ said the widow.

  ‘You can be assured that there will be nothing of that,’ said Dick, firmly in control, in the saddle, leader of all, after only half an hour of standing up in front of his mass meeting.

  ‘I don’t see that,’ said the beautiful girl. ‘I simply don’t see that at all! We must have a policy for the Natives.’

  Even twelve people in one small room, whether starting a mass Party or not, meant twelve different, defined, passionately held viewpoints. The meeting at last had to be postponed for a week to allow those who had not had a chance to air their views to have their say. I attended this second meeting. There were fifteen people present. The two R.A.F. were not there, but there were six white trade unionists from the railways who, hearing of the new party, had come to get a resolution passed. ‘In the opinion of this meeting, the Native is being advanced too fast towards civilization and in his own interests the pace should be slowed.’

  This resolution was always being passed in those days, on every possible occasion. It probably still is.

  But the nine from the week before were already able to form a solid block against this influx of alien thought—not as champions of the Natives, of course not, but because it was necessary to attend to first things first. ‘We have to take over the country first, by democratic methods. That won’t take long, because it is obvious our programme is only fair, and after that we can decide what to do about the Natives.’ The six railway workers then left, leaving the nine from last week, who proceeded to form their Party for Democracy Liberty and Freedom. A steering committee of three was appointed to draft a constitution.

  And that was the last anyone ever heard of it, except for one cyclostyled pamphlet which was called ‘Capitalism is Unfair! Let’s Join Together to Abolish It! This Means You!’

  The war was over. Intellectual ferments of this sort occurred no more. Employees of the Post Office, all once again good citizens properly employed in sport and similar endeavours, no longer told the citizens in what ways they were censored and when.

  Dick did not stay in the Post Office. That virus, politics, was in his veins for good. From being a spokesman for socialism for the whites, he became, as a result of gibes that he couldn’t have socialism that excluded most of the population, an exponent of the view that Natives must not be advanced too fast in their own interests, and from there he developed into a Town Councillor, and from there into a Member of Parliament. And that is what he still is, a gentleman of distinguished middle age, an indefatigable server on Parliamentary Committees and Commissions, particularly those to do with the Natives, on whom he is considered an authority.

  An elderly bulldog of the bulldog breed he is, every inch of him.

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

  Reading Group Guide

  * * *

  African Stories

  Doris Lessing

  This reading group guide for African Stories includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Long considered Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s best collection, African Stories is an homage to her twenty-five years spent in Africa and a brilliant portrait of African life, in which she explores the complexities, the agonies and joys, and the textures of life there.

  First published in 1965, and out of print since the 1990s, this collection contains much of Lessing’s most extraordinary work, brilliantly portraying a world that is vital to all of us, perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. In her preface, Lessing writes, “All these stories have in common that they are set in Africa, but that is all they have in common.” Do you agree? Are there any common themes that appear through the stories? What are they?

  2. When Gideon saves Teddy eyesight in “No Witchcraft for Sale,” he does so using a plant from the bush. Though Teddy’s parents are grateful, they recount Teddy’s recovery with “a certain amount of exasperation, because while all of them knew that in the bush of Africa are waiting valuable drugs locked in bark . . . it was impossible to ever get the truth about them from the natives themselves.” Why do you think Gideon is unwilling to show the root that he used to the “Big Doctor from the Big City”? Do you agree? Compare and contrast the way that Gideon relates to the land with the way Teddy’s parents and the doctor do.

  3. Who are the traitors referred to in the title of the story “Traitors”? What did you think of the Thompsons? Did your impression of them change throughout the story? In what ways and why?

  4. At the beginning of “Hunger,” Jabavu is called Big Mouth by the others in his village, including his mother. How did he get this nickname? Did knowing Jabavu’s nickname so early in the story color your impressions of him? In what ways? The narrator says of Jabavu, “He wants everything and nothing.” What types of things are Jabavu hungry for throughout the story? Jabavu’s desires are often at odds with one another. Is he able to resolve his conflicting impulses? How?

  5. “A Home for the Highland Cattle” begins with the statement “These days, when people emigrate, it is not so much in search of sunshine, or food, or even servants.” What are some of the reasons that the people in African Stories emigrate? When they arrive in Africa, how does the reality of their lives on the continent measure up to their expectations?

  6. The narrator of “The Nuisance” recounts how his father used to say of the Long One, “ ‘That man is a natural-born comedian. He would have been on the stage if he had been born another colour.’ ” Why does the narrator’s father think the Long One has a talent for comedy? Is the Long One able to use this talent to his advantage? Why or why not? Aside from being “on the stage,” what opportunities are denied to the Long One because of his race? Are there instances in other stories where characters are denied opportunities based on their skin color?

  7. Who is the Little Tembi of that story? After he leaves the Mc-Clusters’ property, they are relieved to “be able to forget him.” Why do you think that they would prefer not to think of Tembi? Before Tembi leaves, Jane comments to her husband, “ ‘Tembi behaves as if he had some sort of claim on us.’ ” In what ways does this behavior manifest itself? Do you think that Tembi has a claim on Jane? Explain your opinion.

  8. In “The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange” and “A Home for the Highland Cattle,” Mrs. Gale and Marina take active roles in the lives of those around them. Mrs. Gale attempts to befriend Mrs. De Wet and Marina attempts to help Charlie, her servant, marry Theresa. What were your initial impress
ions of Mrs. Gale and Marina? Were you surprised by their desire to help? Why or why not? Discuss the results of their efforts.

  9. Lessing writes, “The phrase ‘white civilisation’ was already coming to affect Marina as violently as it affects everyone else in that violent continent.” Why do you think that the phrase affects Marina so adversely? What does the phrase “white civilisation” mean to the characters in this book? Does it have a different meaning to the native population than it does to the European settlers? In what ways?

  10. In “Eldorado,” Paul asks his mother, “ ‘What’s the use of me wasting time on French and Latin and English Literature. It just doesn’t make sense in this country, you must see that.’ ” Do you agree that Paul’s studies are not useful in helping him prepare for life in Africa? What skills are useful to settlers in Africa?

  11. What did you think of George Chester in “ ‘Leopard’ George”? Discuss the way that he treats the women in his life. Do you think his excuse, “The girl came to me, of her own accord,” is a good one or that “by no fault of his own [George] was in a cruel position”? Why or why not? Why does Smoke reproach George? And why do you think it feels like disloyalty to George? Discuss the way that the men relate to each other.

  12. Discuss Julia’s relationship with Kenneth and Tom in “Winter in July.” Compare the two men. What does each offer Julia? Why do you think she choose to marry Tom? Is she correct when she tells Tom “ ‘I should have had children. . . . That’s where we went wrong, Tom. It was children we needed.’ ” Why does Julia say it?