African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [24]
‘There you are,’ I said.
But he went off into The Monologue. By then I had understood the whites were in a state of shock, just as if there had been an accident, or a disaster. I was irritated with myself for not seeing earlier what could have been foreseen before even leaving London.
After supper we argued: of course I should have known better. He got a bit tight and talked about the innate inferiority of the blacks. I was to discover this happens often with whites when they get drunk. Not all of them, though; and it is interesting to try and guess which old Rhodie will start spouting racialism when they have had a drink or two, for they might just as well reveal admiration of a wistful Rousseau-like kind: ‘They are much better people than we are, you know.’ But some whites define themselves by insisting on the inferiority of the blacks. What deep insecurity, what inadequacy, does this insistence on other people’s inferiority conceal? (In 1991 I sat in a London restaurant with black Zimbabweans who talked to Indian waiters with the same cold insulting dislike once used by the worst of the whites to the blacks.) I said he talked as if the whites of Southern Rhodesia were all remarkable and valuable, but many were poor material from any point of view. When they were good they were very very good, skilful, adaptable, full of expertise, but the rest were limited, unintelligent, with that kind of complacency that can only go with stupidity. They would not easily get jobs anywhere else and the blacks were only too lucky to have got rid of them. Harry was hurt. He was bitter, accusing; could not believe I had said these things or could think them.
Next morning, friends dropped in from Banket, among them an old woman I had known when we were children. There is a convention among adults that because they are friends, their children must be too. This girl and I were sent off to play together when our parents visited each other. At once we began to play Do You Remember, the game so useful when other conversation is difficult. I remembered that on hot days we were put into a tin bath under a big mulberry tree and cold water poured over us. Snakes love mulberry trees, and we kept looking up into the innocent branches for a stealthy slithering green coil, a flickering tongue. We were both teased ‘unmercifully’, as was then prescribed, because we were plump. We both played up to what the adults wanted, squealing and splashing water about. She did not remember this. What she knew was that we were sent off into the fields to collect ‘witch grass’, the witchweed or fireweed the farmers don’t like. We were paid pocket money, a few pence for each bundle. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said, and she was affronted, insulted. ‘But whenever I think of you, you are standing in the mealies holding a big bundle of witchgrass.’ She turned away from me and went to sit at the table on the verandah. In denying her this memory, part of herself, a ‘nice’ memory, chosen from others to enable her to think pleasantly about an unsatisfactory childhood friend, I only deepened what she already felt about this deceiving, treacherous and above all unfair time that was taking everything away from her. She and her brother, my brother and a couple of neighbours sat drinking tea and then beer, while they recited versions of The Monologue. I sat a little away from them, and read one of the novels by African writers I had bought only two days ago. There I sat, apart, reading, just as I had as a child…they sat together, leaning a little forwards, their shoulders hunched and defensive, sometimes sending me accusing glances from inside their little lager. Their voices were miserable, full of betrayal, sorrow, incomprehension.
When they went off, Harry asked what was I reading, and I told him about the good African writers. Had he ever thought of reading them? He had never heard of them. If he did read them, then perhaps he would understand better how the Africans were thinking? He said he understood quite well what they were thinking, and he couldn’t say he liked