Going Home - Doris May Lessing [1]
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