NF (1957) Going Home (10 page)

‘But what is worse than anything, what hurts most is that even in prison there is colour discrimination. Even there. The white prisoners are in one place with good food, and they aren’t treated roughly. When I found that even in prison we were treated according to colour then I really understood injustice.’

The other matter we discussed was how the Portuguese administrator just over the border takes money from Southern Rhodesian farmers to press-gang Africans for work on the farms.

Before I left Umtali I was finally instructed thus:

‘I would have no time for any journalist who did not make a point of the two following facts: (1) The system consists of
vicious circles: for instance, that the Africans are poor, and therefore their education is poor, and therefore they are poor. (2) Those countries in Africa which are most poor are those without a white administration: Bechuanaland, for instance, is miserably poor. In this country every man, woman and child (white) is taxed £10 a year for African education. For God’s sake don’t tell them so, or they’ll go up in smoke. Of course you can say that it is the labour of the Africans that provides the money and that sort of thing, but suppose the white population of this country doubled, it would double the number of people who have to pay £10 a year.’

I transcribe this direct from my notes, without altering a word of it, because the man who said it is known as a Socialist, and it is an example of how a colour-bar society pressures economic thinking into strange, strange shapes.

Back in Salisbury again. A gathering of people, members of the new interracial society, who are very advanced because they invite Africans and Indians and coloured people to their homes.

One interracialist was very angry because the Government is importing Greeks and Italians, ‘wops and dagoes, the scum of the earth,’ into the country, instead of advancing the Africans, the people of the land.

‘I don’t mind being considered the equal of an educated African, but I object to any dregs from Europe being my equal simply because they have white skins.’

This is an interesting and typical example of the phenomenon of Displacement. In a country where people are always conscious of other people’s colour or kind, hatred and prejudice are never restricted to coloured people only: you may be sure that a person has passionate views about the dirty Japanese as
against the decent Chinese, or vice versa, or the fine, clean Northern European peoples like the Germans, as against the loathsome French and Italians, and so on. And of course there is anti-Semitism; or a complicated anti-anti-Semitism, thus: The Jews are all right; the Indians are the Jews of Africa.

The business of inviting Africans to dinner, which was begun by members of the interracial society, leads to infinite and intricate argument. Later, when I started interviewing people on what I hoped would be economic policies, this question of inviting Africans to dinner never failed to arise; and I was astonished at the ingenuity of the reasons for disapproving of it. They ranged from the uncompromising, old-fashioned ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a black man,’ with its variations and refinements, such as ‘I don’t mind if my daughter wants to make a fool of herself, but I’m not having my grandchildren going to segregated schools,’ to ‘It’s not fair to invite a minority of Africans just because they are educated, it’s hard on the others,’ or ‘I don’t mind eating with Africans but I’m not having them use my lavatory,’ or ‘They don’t want to be invited, it embarrasses them,’ or ‘If I invite Africans, it’s not fair on my servants, they wouldn’t like it,’ or ‘It’s artificial to invite Africans to a meal when you can’t take them to a show afterwards,’ or ‘The Africans who get invited to dinner are the political Africans, the Government show-pieces they keep to impress foreign visitors with, and not because of what they are as people, and I don’t invite white people to my house on the basis of their politics,’ or ‘It’s nothing but a red-herring, this business of inviting Africans socially, what they want is higher wages and not social condescension.’

There are infinite variations on this theme; in short, it is not possible simply and naturally to invite Africans or people of colour to visit.

I heard a story of a white woman who invited an African teacher to drinks and a meal. As it is illegal for Africans to drink European liquor—a law which intelligent people simply ignore if Africans are guests—she served him with ginger-beer, while her white guests drank ordinary liquor; then she sent him to the kitchen to take his meal with her cookboy while her other guests ate with her. She was overcome by her
progressiveness and deeply hurt when the teacher refused her next invitation—he was ungrateful, she felt.

Wanting to visit an old friend of mine in Harari, the African township near Salisbury, I had to apply for permission to the Native Department, and was told: ‘We do not encourage visiting between white and black; besides, there is a lot of immorality going on, there oughtn’t to be, but there is. If you want to meet natives socially why don’t you get them invited to a white house and then there is no problem.’ And finally, when I insisted on meeting my friends in their own house: ‘If you wanted to hold a meeting, we’d give you a permit for the whole day.’ This rather surprised me, until the obliging official hastened to explain: ‘We always have our men at the meetings so that we know what is going on, but social visits are discouraged, they lead to all sorts of complications.’

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 Central 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.