African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [184]
Roll on the years, not to say decades, and this former idealist poet and I are in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Devon. Improbably, but that is another story.
He is now a fat man glistening with success. He is Minister for Internal Affairs in one of the more conspicuously unsuccessful of the former colonies.
I am particularly pleased to run into him, for only last week I was talking to the man who–now again at liberty and lecturing to the universities of America on African affairs–spent the seven years in prison. As it happened, one of these years was in a prison in the territory of this Minister: another fairly improbable story, but Africa is full of surprises.
‘Do you remember M.?’ I enquire.
‘How could I not remember that very fine comrade?’
‘Did you know he was in prison for seven years?’
‘I believe I did hear something of the kind.’
‘Did you know that for a year he was in one of your prisons?’
‘Really? Oh–I am surprised to hear that.’
‘As it happened he shared a cell for some months with——’ I mentioned the name of the current President of yet another African country.
‘President L.? Yes, I heard that he too had been in prison. In the same cell? That must have been nice for them, to be together.’
‘M. told me that the British prison he was in before Liberation was a holiday resort compared with your prison, which nearly killed him and President L.’
We stood facing each other, while the Devon spring rain darkened the windows. We were far indeed from the hot skies of Africa.
His eyes had become evasive. He sighed. He glanced at his watch but decided ancient friendship was due another minute.
‘Ah, if we knew when we were young how cruel life can be…’ And he gazed mournfully back through the mists of time at our youthful enthusiasms.
‘But,’ I persisted. ‘Your prisons. Surely you must know how terrible they are?’
His eyes hardened, almost certainly on the thought, Once a trouble-maker always a trouble-maker. Then he allowed himself to be overtaken by tears. ‘I often say to my wife, my dear, I say to her, if we had known in the dawn of our struggle what we know now–ah, life is cruel, life is a cruel cruel thing.’
‘Not as cruel as your prisons where our old friend M. and President L. nearly died.’
‘Sometimes I think there is some kind of curse that turns all our wishes into their opposites.’
‘Just a minute. You are Minister for Internal Affairs, aren’t you? Well then! You are responsible for your prisons.’
‘And suddenly you are told you are responsible for the suffering of old friends.’
‘Well, why don’t you improve the conditions in your prisons? There were days they didn’t get anything to eat at all. They didn’t even have a blanket. They…’
‘Cruel…cruel…’ and his eyes shifted over the whitewashed wall he was facing, looking for some place of consolation or comfort.
‘You are Minister for Internal Affairs.’
‘I am glad we have spoken of these things. Sometimes I think my subordinates do not tell me what they should. I am grateful to you.’ And with this he smiled, but wanly, because of the sadness we both knew ruled Life. He shook his head, gave a brief sobbing laugh, which was cut short by a glance at his watch. He hurried out of the kitchen to his car which nearly filled the country lane.
One may imagine asking Genghis Khan, ‘How do you feel about killing twenty million people?’
‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he would say indignantly. ‘I was nothing but a straw blown in the winds of history.’
POLITICS
In 1956 when I visited Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia, the 40,000 or so Tonga then