NF (1957) Going Home (23 page)

All this wild and noble country will be under water in a few wet seasons. This will be the biggest man-made lake in the world, 200 miles long, with a shore line of over 800 miles.

I said it was sad to think of that wonderful country vanishing under water; but my guide said if it is cruel to break an egg, it is nice to eat the omelette. He was not thinking about the Africans who live in that valley; but I asked him if he had heard that there was any trouble about moving the Africans; and he said the Native Commissioners were handling it.

Later that day another engineer said with a sort of good-humoured amusement: ‘They say that the natives of the valley don’t believe that the waters will come over their villages. They think it’s a trick to steal their land from them. It’s the Congressmen who work them up. But they’ll believe it soon enough when the water does start to rise.’

Our Frenchman was more interested in the immediate problems: very proud of the radio station on this mountain. No telephone lines were laid yet, so the radio linked with Chirundu, and through Chirundu to the big centres north and south. And all the supplies came through by lorry from Karoi, 125 miles away, or by aeroplane. As we sat on the mountain the planes were climbing and descending over the new air-strip, which in a couple of years will have gone under the lake. People were flown in and out for holiday week-ends; and all the officials and experts came in by air.

Paul Hogarth having finished his drawings, we descended the mountain and went up to the mess on a hill for lunch. The mess was an attractive little building, mosquito-gauzed, full of refrigerators and amenities. The lunch was the best sort of meal one can have in these parts, quantities of admirable cold meats and salads: this is a meat-eating country and rapid adjustment is needed after life in England, on finding the table loaded with pounds of meat at every meal, a steak covering a big plate,
chops coming in half-dozens, refrigerators crammed with sirloins the size of boot-racks.

The people having lunch were mostly women and children, who had already moved in after their men. The children would have to be taught by correspondence course for some months yet; and the women would have to rely on each other for entertainment, with the men working so hard; for it was made clear that the people who came to work on Kariba were not clock-watchers and chair-sitters. They were there because they wanted something worth while to do, and to get out of the city and to be free and unconfined by civilization. Some of the men who had come first to the site, when there were only a handful working on it, had already left: with all these people being flown in, all these civilized amenities, and the women and the children, it was getting too tame for them.

Soon, everything would be tidied up and in order. There were two townships, one European and one African, being built up on twin hills, out of the reach of tsetse fly and mosquitoes; the roads would be good; schools would be built, and a fine hospital. It would be a centre, almost a city and was expected to stand for ten years, until the scheme was completed.

And at the end of ten years, what would happen to the two model townships on the twin hills? Why, then, if the industrialists had any sense, they would move their businesses up here, near to the source of power. Why shouldn’t Kariba become a real city, like a Copper Belt town?

But later, when I recounted this conversation to a businessman from Johannesburg, he said, not without malice: ‘Malvern and Welensky are mad—clean off their heads. They’re spending every penny of the credit of the country on Kariba, and when it’s finished they’re going to have enough power to run a continent on, and no industries to run—or hardly any industries. Kariba’s a project for a heavily industrialized country, and they aren’t going to get the investment in industry because everyone knows the whole show might explode in race-war at any minute.’

And, from a politician in Northern Rhodesia: ‘The reason why Lord Malvern’s stuck out for his Kariba is because his
fancy has been tickled by the fact that the lake will be the biggest man-made lake in the world. At last it’s a monument big enough to retire on—like Rhodes and Rhodesia.’

But such carping remarks would not go down well at Kariba itself, which is infected, if any place is, by a pioneering, obstacle-crashing, rip-roaring atmosphere of achievement.

After lunch we descended to the verge of the Zambezi, where a hippopotamus stood shoulder-deep in the shallows, very enviably, for it was steamy and hot, 86 degrees in the shade. But apparently this is considered cool in these parts, for the temperature only a few weeks back was in the hundreds.

And then I returned to my proper business of looking at housing and collecting figures. I had read speeches by African politicians that the labourers at Kariba had been dying like flies and working in very bad conditions. I was shown the site where an African hut-camp had been, and was told things had been so bad there that the welfare people had insisted the whole place must be bulldozed down. So they must have been bad. But I do not believe that the Africans were dying like flies. Time and again, speaking to Africans, I hear the terrible: ‘The Europeans want to kill us all off, they won’t feel happy and safe until we are all dead.’ But my personal belief is that no one African will be allowed unnecessarily to die as long as there is such a shortage of labour; they will be treated in such a way as to preserve health and working efficiency—no worse, and no better.

The temporary housing for Africans looked like that I have already described—adequate, inhuman, barrack-like. Showers one for fifty men, latrines one for twenty, three single men to a hut, twenty to a dormitory. The new township on the hill, which will hold eight thousand Africans, will be on the same lines.

I interviewed at random one worker, of whom Paul had made a drawing. His name was Jeremiah; and he came from Portuguese East Africa, near Beira. He was a Shangaan, and had been three months working in Southern Rhodesia at £3 a month. In Portuguese territory he had been earning £5 a month. Why, then, had he come to Southern Rhodesia? He wanted to travel, he said. He had never been to school, was
illiterate, did not know how old he was. He had a wife in his village at home, but no children.

My guide asked him: ‘Which white men are kinder, those in Portuguese East Africa, or those in Southern Rhodesia?’—which was how my query, which nation he preferred working for, translated into kitchen Kaffir. To which he replied: ‘All white men are nice.’

But he hated being questioned and wanted to get away.

I said, ‘Well, we’ve got the facts, but we don’t know what he feels.’

At which the official said: ‘These types don’t know what they feel. Only the educated ones do, and they’re embittered.’

This official, when asked what he thought of Partnership, said: ‘Huggins is a Kaffir-lover. He doesn’t care about the white people, only the natives. I prefer the South African system.’

Again, much complaint about prostitutes. Most women here are not wives, but camp-followers: the welfare man’s term for them. There are about three dozen; and they earn as much as £60 to £90 a month.

‘We allow the prostitutes because if you have wives around there’s so much trouble with the single men always fighting with the husbands. We see that the prostitutes don’t live here; they live in neighbouring villages.’

The compound manager said: ‘Everyone applying for married quarters here is going to have to produce a marriage certificate; we’re not going to have these temporary wives here. And there isn’t a Native Commissioner here to marry people quickly—the nearest Native Commissioner is in Miami. No, we aren’t going to forbid wives, but we aren’t going to encourage them either.’

I asked if convict labour was being used; he said he had never heard of convict labour—in the tones of a man well-used to unjust accusations. I pointed out that the new aerodrome near Salisbury is being built almost entirely by convict labour and that I had repeatedly heard rumours of convict labour being used on Kariba. But he heatedly denied it.

He was proud of the social amenities for his Africans—football and hockey, a cowboy film once a week, and regular lectures on hygiene. There is a choir which is popular, tribal
dancing (which is not—‘perhaps because there are so many different tribes here’), and a jazz-band. There would be primary schooling for all the African children, but no secondary schooling. All Africans are vaccinated on arrival and made to take quinine regularly. Domestic servants are examined regularly for venereal disease, but not the ordinary labourers.

The Africans working here, like those everywhere else, will be virtually the property of the company which employs them, housed, fed and regulated by the employers, under Government inspection.

Lastly we went to the site itself, where the dam is being built. As we approached, a crocodile drove straight up-stream in the middle of the river, like a speedboat, away from the noise of the construction. Between high wooded banks, cables were slung over the water; a suspension bridge, half-finished, jutted across the stream; piles stood in the river-bed; and on the bank we stood on, a road was being built: gangs of Africans under European supervision.

I went down the deep tunnel which drove to water-level where the tunnel was under construction to take the main flow of the water when the dam itself was building; it was like going down a mine, damp and hot, with the electric lights shining dimly along earth roof, and the great cables unrolling downwards.

Then it was time to leave, for we wanted to get back to Salisbury that night.

Just past the turn-off on the main road, there is a little grass kiosk in the bush at the roadside, with a sign on it: ‘Drink Coca-Cola.’ Paul wanted to make a drawing of this evidence of the Coca-Cola revolution; so we stopped the car. He went off to draw, while a crowd of fascinated African children collected, and the Kaffir-fowls scratched about; and I sat in the car and drank Coca-Cola. Suddenly a big car came up along the road the way we had come very fast and stopped with a screaming of brakes, just behind our car. The man in it immediately got out; but he did not buy Coca-Cola. He stood for a moment, looking at the number-plate on our car; then remained standing on the road, looking suspiciously at Paul, who was sitting on his stool drawing, and suspiciously at me.

This went on for some minutes. I took another look at him and thought I knew his face. Then I understood it was not the face I recognized, but the expression on it. What was it? Of course! This was the look of those Afrikaner special branch police in the Jan Smuts airport, while they were shepherding me on to the plane like a pack of dogs herding one sheep.

But what could the CID be doing here?

Making sure that I did not, after my warning, take this route up into Northern Rhodesia? Making sure that I was not making seditious speeches to the group of black children, the chickens and the mongrel dogs and the salesman at the kiosk and his friends who were now gathering around from a nearby village to watch the process of drawing?

But there was no doubt it was the CID. I think Governments should employ mercenaries for this sort of work; true believers are a bad policy; for there are countries where one can pick out the political police streets away by their look of disgusted and irritated hatred. This man walked up and down the road for half an hour, looking at Paul, looking at me, as if he would like to wring both our necks if only there was a law to permit it. When Paul had showed his drawing to the Africans, who liked it very much, and stacked his drawing things back in the boot of the car, and we had got into our car, the man got into his car. We drove off, but he remained sitting in his car looking after us, and did not follow us again, though we were driving slowly now, on purpose so that he should catch us up. So he must have turned back to whatever post he operated from.

Since I might not get up North, and I wanted to write about the trends in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, I made arrangements to meet representatives of the two Congresses. For to know what the Government, or white settlers’ organizations, think about events it is only necessary to read the papers.

These arrangements were made carefully, since Congress representatives are not exactly liked by the Government; and for the same reason I shall not use the names of people or places.
^*

I wanted to find out two things. What was the attitude of National Congresses to the rapid industrial development going on in the Federation, and which must increase the wealth of this backward and undeveloped area. Secondly, how did they now view Federation?

For, one evening in a pleasant house, a group of white progressives—a word which is rather more elastic in this part of the world than it is in Britain—had worked out an admirably logical thesis which went like this: That since it was unlikely the Africans would be given self-government in the next decade and it seemed they were not in a position to take it forcibly; since the most striking, the most basic fact about the Federal area is its poverty, and schemes like Kariba and other big projects will ultimately raise the standard of living of everybody; would it not be better if the African Congresses supported economic development, at the same time using their great strength to demand a steadily increasing share in control of government? For the phrases and slogans of Partnership offer a verbal basis to fight on: to put the flesh of reality on these words would be to create a real democracy.

In short, to make the architects of Partnership fulfil their promises.

This is a very brief summary of the conclusions come to after an argument that went on for some hours, with great heat, based on a wealth of knowledge and information and experience, between various sorts of Socialist, ranging from classic Marxist, through Fabian, to old-fashioned liberal.

There was nothing wrong with our methods of reasoning, which were, however, only possible because, being white, we had not been subjected every hour of our lives to the humiliations of the colour bar.

For when I met these Congressmen, in small, shabby, out-of-the-way rooms, in an atmosphere of secrecy and oppression, those very sane and sensible arguments seemed silly, or at least irrelevant.

I have known many Nationalists, but never any as bitter as these.

I hate nationalism; but I hate even more that soft-mindedness which deplores the colour bar and ideas of white supremacy,
hopes they will soften and diminish, and behaves as if they have vanished already—that hypocrisy which acknowledges the ugliness of white-settler what-I-have-I-hold, and yet will not acknowledge the justice of the black nationalism which is its inevitable consequence.

Political emotion, that emotion which drives masses of people into action, is never reasoned and rational. The leaders of a movement may be thoughtful men; their followers are not.

The emotions of ‘white-civilization’ are not rational; nor are the emotions of nationalism.

Talking to these Nationalists—Nationalists for that matter from any part of ‘white’ Africa—I find that there are two nightmares or fantasies which haunt them.

One I have already mentioned: ‘The whites want to kill us all off, they won’t be happy till we are all dead.’

Yet manifestly a dead African is a bad African—that is, unless he rebels; since a dead African is not able to do the dirty work of the country.

The other is: ‘They are going to bring in hundreds of thousands of white people from Europe and swamp us, and take our land.’

Ever since I can remember, the white settlers have been agitating for mass white immigration, so as to strengthen them against the Africans. This heart-cry is perennial; it is never absent from sundowner talk or newspaper column. But there never has been mass white immigration. Nor can there be. Having reached, since the war, a figure of twenty thousand a year, the Government has had to peg the figure there, because the existing facilities are so over-strained they can’t feed more people: not only the black men’s towns, but the white, are short of schools and hospitals, let alone housing. And that figure of twenty thousand is itself a defeat, for at last the Government has given up the dream of ‘sound Nordic stock’—meaning Britishers, Germans and other Northern Europeans, the arguments in favour of which are the same as those used by Hitler and Goebbels—to import quantities of Italians and Greeks, peoples who, to the average white settler, seem not far removed from the Africans. These people are already undermining ‘white supremacy’ since they are a cheerful and happy-
go-lucky lot, who do not take easily to the neurotic rigidities of white settlerdom.

And a great many of the recent immigrants promptly left again. According to figures recently published, fifty thousand white people have left the Federation in the last five years. Why? Because accommodation is hard to find; because everything is overcrowded; because it is a boring and provincial life; because if you are not prepared to talk about the colour bar there is nothing else to talk about; and because the place is as insecure and explosive as South Africa, which is also losing its white citizens in large numbers.

In short, these two powerful fantasies, of being killed off by the whites, and of mass white immigration, are absolute nonsense, economic and political nonsense. Yet they are all-powerful and likely to remain so.

The arguments of the Congress people are very simple, the same whether one listens to a Nyasaland man or a Northern Rhodesian. We were free men, we Africans of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. We made voluntary treaties with your Queen Victoria, and became British-protected persons. We opposed Federation with Southern Rhodesia; yet your Government forced it on us. We have been tricked and betrayed by the British Government; and now we are in the same position as our brothers in Southern Rhodesia, who were physically conquered by force of arms. Yes, now we know that the whites of the Federation will force on us
apartheid
, the South African system. Why, we already have
apartheid
, although they call it Partnership. It creeps north from Southern Rhodesia already; already they begin to enforce pass laws here, and to take away more and more of our land. No, we shall have nothing to do with any Federal Government project. No, we do not understand this argument you use, that economic development will benefit the Africans—when has development benefited us? On the contrary, it is the whites who gain, who always gain, and everything that is good is taken away from us. No; when you speak like that, you speak as a white person; you are against us. The simplest child in the village knows that Federation made a dupe of him. But he will not understand what you call tactics. Tactics are immoral. For an African, a
thing is good or it is bad. Federation is bad, and we will have nothing to do with it. We will fight to get Nyasaland out of the Federation if we can. And besides, even if it were true that we would earn more money if factories and industries came to the Federation, we would have lost our freedom, we would be slaves. No. We know only one thing, that the white people want our land. They will take our land, as they have in Southern Rhodesia. How can we support Kariba when thousands of our people are being moved off their good, rich, fertile land, where they have lived for generations, to bad distant soil, which has never been theirs and which does not know them and their ancestors? No, no. We will not listen. Now we know only one thing—we are black men. You are white. Therefore you are our enemy. No, no, no.

This is the voice of the Congresses.

The men who lead the Congresses are intelligent politicians who understand the modern world. The whites see them as raving seditionaries. Behind these men are a massed, embittered population. This is the same situation as in Kenya before the outbreak: the national movement was suppressed, because it demanded a share in government. Behind it was Mau Mau.

Behind the Congresses in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is Mau Mau, perhaps half a step behind.

The motion behind Mau Mau was a very natural desire for revenge for humiliation, for being made slaves in their own country.

In arguing with Africans who support Mau Mau—for at the bottom of every African heart is a profound natural sympathy with Mau Mau—I have been saying: ‘I have every sympathy with Mau Mau; it is the fault of the white idiots in Kenya that this bitter war began. But I think it was a mistake to fight knowing that you could not win, that you were bound to be destroyed, your people made captive, your leaders hanged, everyone humiliated and discouraged.’

To which the reply is: ‘You destroyed our national organization, you took from us every hope of sharing in the government of our country—so what did you expect us to do? We fought with what means we could. We showed at least that we
were not cowards and slaves. And the fact that we could fight at all put heart into Africans all over Africa.’

That
we
comes from Africans who are not Kenyans, as well as those who are, from Africans who identify themselves as completely with the black side in Kenya as that white South African announcer identified himself instinctively and completely with the Kenyan white settlers.

The voice of the national Congresses is the most powerful factor in Central Africa now: it will determine what happens there; it is the bitter, desperate, proud, angry voice of a people betrayed to the gods of money and expediency.

I re-read the preface to
John Bull’s Other Island
. Here is Bernard Shaw on the ‘Curse of Nationalism’:

I intended to try to get up north, even though I was told I would be forbidden. So I waited a week, delaying my plans, to see that statesman who, I had been told, intended to prevent me. I interviewed him as a journalist and did not ask his permission to go north, which I could not do, in any case, since I had promised my informant not to say a word of what he had told me. But I said that I was going, to Northern Rhodesia and
Nyasaland, and waited for him to forbid me. He said nothing, rather grimly, admittedly, but he said not a word. So I made plans to go to Northern Rhodesia.

An interview with Lord Malvern, Prime Minister of the Federation. He used to be my mother’s doctor, when he still practised as one; and I had often heard him speak at meetings when I was a child. He is an old man now, sitting behind a big desk under a portrait of Cecil John Rhodes in a long room where you walk towards him, seeing him black and rather hunched against the strong light from the windows behind.

Most of this interview, like all the other interviews, was off the record; for he complained that people were such fools they always misunderstood him. It is no secret, I think, that Lord Malvern or Dr Huggins has never had much respect for other people’s intelligence; and this tendency has been strengthened because he has always been the most quick-minded, lively, sharp-tongued of the politicians in a country that is naturally short of able politicians. Now he gives the impression of being tired, no less asperous and impatient, a brooding and rather lonely figure.

He said he thought Federation was successful, though suffering from growing pains. When I suggested that perhaps the opposition and political feeling it had created among the Africans might ultimately wreck it, he said impatiently that I must not get the impression that the Congresses had any influence; they were just a few noisy agitators.

He said he understood I had Left Wing views. I said yes, strong Left Wing views, to which he replied that he believed in making haste slowly and the middle way.

He understood I wrote; what did I write about? This is a question which always annoys a writer; but I said that for the purposes of this discussion I wrote against the colour bar. To which he said: ‘Well, that’s all right. Of course you know there’s hardly any colour bar left in Southern Rhodesia.’

I asked him if he did not think, since he had got the public to swallow an interracial university, something that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, he could have pushed it through another stage and made it truly interracial and non-
segregated. He said, no; it was touch and go as it was; and if those fools in England didn’t shut up, they’d defeat his purpose, scare off the whites and make a black university. ‘As it is they won’t send their daughters—not at the beginning.’

I said I knew one or two families who were sending their daughters, but he said impatiently: ‘I know these people. It’s no good rushing them. All this business of principle, of right and wrong—how can there be right and wrong in politics? You do what you can as you can.’

I said: ‘All you people seem much more scared of white public opinion than you are of African opinion.’

He said, very quickly: ‘No.’

‘You’re the first who hasn’t put it like that, just as plainly.’

‘There is no such thing as African public opinion. They’re not educated enough to have an opinion. We have to steer a middle road and hope the two extremes won’t start shouting. The thing is to make a beginning. After all, nothing’s static. In ten years’ time, when people have got used to the idea of a multi-racial university, we can go a step farther. I have no colour feeling myself—I wasn’t brought up in this country. But you have to recognize it exists.’