NF (1957) Going Home

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider’s egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling flocks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.

Here is where the sun regulates living in a twelve-hour cycle. Here the sun is a creature of the same stuff as oneself; powerful and angry, but at least responsive, and no mere dispenser of pale candlepower.

When I was first in England I was disturbed all the time in my deepest sense of probability because the sun went down at four in the middle of an active afternoon, filling a cold, damp, remote sky with false pathos. Or, at eleven in the morning, instead of blazing down direct, a hand’s-span from centre, it would appear on a slant and in the wrong place, at eight o’clock position, a swollen, misshapen, watery ghost of a thing peering behind chimney-pots. The sun in England should be feminine, as it is in Germany.

During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now. Recently I found some pages I wrote then: it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year; endless miles
of heavy, damp, dead building on a dead, sour earth, inhabited by pale, misshapen, sunless creatures under a low sky of grey vapour.

Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home. Now London is to me the pleasantest of cities, full of the most friendly and companionable people. But that year of horrible estrangement from everything around me was real enough. It was because, bred in Africa, I needed to be in direct physical touch with what I saw; I needed the cycle of hot, strong light, of full, strong dark.

One does not look at London, but at a pretty house, a glimpse of trees over rooftops, the remains of an old street, a single block of flats. The eye learns to reject the intolerable burden of the repetition of commercialization. It is the variegated light of London which creates it; at night, the mauvish wet illumination of the city sky; or the pattern of black shadow-leaves on a wall; or, when the sun emerges, the instant gaiety of a pavement.

On that morning over Africa I learned that I had turned myself inwards, had become a curtain-drawer, a fire-hugger, the inhabitant of a cocoon. Easy enough to turn outwards again: I felt I had never left at all. This was my air, my landscape, and above all, my sun.

Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But—a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that the love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps.

On this trip home a man with whom I had been arguing bitterly about politics said to me suddenly: Where did I come from? I said Lomagundi. He knew it well, he said. He liked the highveld, he remarked, defensively. For the highveld is reaches of pale, dry grass, studded with small, dry, stunted trees—wide, empty, barren country. I said yes, and the Kalahari, too. Yes, he said; and the Karroo. The Kalahari and the Karroo are stages nearer desert of the highveld, full of bitter shrubs, cacti,
lizards and hot stones. They are enormous, with a scarifying, barren beauty. They, too, are almost empty.

For a moment we shared the understanding of people who have been made by the same landscape.

But I am not sure whether this passion for emptiness, for space, only has meaning in relation to Europe. Africa is scattered all over with white men who push out and away from cities and people, to remote farms and outposts, seeking solitude. But perhaps all they need is to leave the seethe and the burden of Europe behind.

I remember an old prospector came to our farm one evening when I was a child. He had spent all his life wandering around Africa. He said he had just gone home to England for a holiday of six months; but left at the end of a week. Too many people, he said; a tame little country, catching trains and keeping to time-tables. He had learned his lesson; he would never leave the highveld again. ‘People,’ he said, shouting at himself—for he was certainly arguing against his own conscience—‘people are mad, wanting to change Africa. Why don’t they leave it alone? A man can breathe here, he can be himself. And,’ he went on, getting angrier and angrier, ‘when we’ve filled Africa up, what then? The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it—millions of people all crowded together, fighting and struggling, but behind them, somewhere, enormous, empty places. I tell you what I think,’ he said, ‘when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.’

That’s what he said. I remember every word, for he made a great impression on me.

Next morning he went away, and we heard he had gone up over the Zambezi escarpment into the bush with his bearer. On the verge of one of the hills overlooking the river he built a hut and thatched it, and settled to live there, entirely alone. But he got black-water fever, and the news travelled back, as news does in these parts, and at last reached his wife in the city, who—a bush-widow these many years—got herself a lorry and went off after him until she reached the end of the road, and then inquired of some passing Africans who took her to the hill
where her husband was. Between one bout of fever and another, he sat on a candle-box under a tree, an old man of fifty or so, looking at the gorges of the river and at the hills. Africans from a neighbouring village had set water and some meat by him, and were waiting at a little distance in the shade of a tree. He was very ill.

‘And now,’ said she, ‘enough of this nonsense: it’s time you came back and let me look after you.’

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I want to die alone.’

‘But there’s no need to die. You’ll get better in hospital.’

A look of revulsion came over his face, which she understood too well. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you myself.’

He turned his face from her, and looked out and down to the river. And so she went to examine the inside of the mud hut which had nothing in it but a case of whisky and a roll of bedding and some quinine and a rifle; and then went over to the young men, who got to their feet as she approached.

‘Now, look after the baas nicely,’ she said.

‘Yes, Nkosikaas,’ they said.

She walked away down along the Kaffir paths several miles to the road, climbed back into the lorry and drove back to town. And when he died, which was several days later, the people of the village buried him and sang their mourning songs over him.

That was the story as we heard it from a group of young men travelling through our farm on their way to find work in the gold mines of the Rand.

It seems to me that this story of the man who preferred to die alone rather than return to the cities of his own people expresses what is best in the older type of white men who have come to Africa. He did not come to take what he could get from the country. This man loved Africa for its own sake, and for what is best in it: its emptiness, its promise. It is still uncreated.

Yet it is only when one flies over Africa that one can see it, as such solitary people do, as the empty continent. The figures are eloquent enough—that is, if one possesses the kind of mind that makes figures live. In Central Africa there are seven million Africans and two hundred thousand white people. It
sounds quite a lot of people from one point of view, if one tries to imagine the word
million
in terms of a crowd of people. And if one has lived in a city there, one remembers the pressure of people. Yet it seems seven million people are nothing, not enough—this enormous area could hold hundreds of millions.

But now, steadily flying south for hour after hour, one sees forest, mountain and lake; river and gorge and swamp; and the great reaches of the flat, tree-belted grassland. The yellow flanks of Africa lie beneath the moving insect-like plane, black-maned with forest, twitching in the heat. A magnificent country, with all its riches in the future. Because it is so empty we can dream. We can dream of cities and a civilization more beautiful than anything that has been seen in the world before.

It was over Kenya that a subtle change of atmosphere announced we were now in white Africa. Two Africans sitting by themselves had a self-contained and watchful look. Perhaps they were reflecting on the implications of the fact that this being a South African plane the covers on the seats they used would have to be specially sterilized before re-use.

Until now the men making announcements over the loudspeaker had had the anonymous voices of officialdom. Now there was a new voice, unmistakably South African, stubbornly national. Jaunty and facetious, with the defensiveness of the Colonial who considers an attempt at efficiency as nothing but snobbishness, it began: ‘Well, ladies and gents, here I am; sorry about it, but I’m not a BBC announcer, but I’ll do my best. If you look down on your right now you’ll see the Aberdare Forest. You’ll understand why it took so long to bash the Mau Mau. See that thick bit over there? That’s where we got a whole bunch of them. Starved ’em out. Took six weeks.’ This man was not from Kenya, but he was white; and the problems of white Kenya were his, and—so he took for granted—ours too. He went on, swallowing his words, the ends of his sentences, most of the time inaudible. Once he clearly enunciated a whole series of sentences just to show that he could if he chose. ‘Down there is Masai country. Of course, I don’t know anything about the Masai, but they tell me the Masai are warriors. Or used to be. They like drinking blood and milk.
They seem to like it. Or so I’m told. Of course, I don’t know anything about these things.’ Click, as the machine switched off, and we descended at Nairobi.

Nairobi airport is interesting for two things. One is that it is infested with cats of all shapes, colours and sizes. I have not seen so many cats since one year when my mother got into a mood where she could not bear to see a kitten drowned, so that very soon we had forty cats who almost drove us out of the house before we could bring ourselves to lay violent hands on them.

The other is that the lavatories are marked ‘European Type’ and ‘Non-European Type’. The word
type
, I suppose, is meant to convey to the critical foreign visitor that Non-Europeans prefer their own amenities. It was my first indication of how defensive the colour bar has become. Also, to what irrational extremes it will take itself under pressure. When I left no one thought ill of themselves for defending white civilization in whatever ways were suggested by pure instinct.

The two Africans sat in the restaurant at a table by themselves. The social colour bar is being relaxed here slightly. (The other day I asked an African from Kenya what he thought was the most important result of the war in Kenya; he replied grimly: ‘In some hotels they serve us with food and drink now.’)

It was at this point that I noticed the old attitudes asserting themselves in me again. If one went to sit at the same table, it would be something of a demonstration. Perhaps they would prefer not to be drawn attention to in the electric atmosphere of Kenya? Or perhaps…yes, I was certainly back home.

One of the reasons why I wanted to return was because so many people had asked me how it was I had been brought up in a colour-bar country and yet had no feeling about colour. I had decided that a lucky series of psychological chances must have made me immune. But it was surely impossible that I should be entirely unlike other people brought up in the same way. Therefore I was watching my every attitude and response all the time I was in Africa. For a time, the unconsciousness of a person’s colour one has in England persisted. Then the miserable business began again. Shaking hands becomes an issue. The 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.

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