Going Home - Doris May Lessing [103]
What they are saying, in effect, is this: ‘If the price of entering the modern world, civilization as it is defined in Europe, of becoming industrialized, is to lose what small vestiges of liberty we still retain, then we prefer to remain what you call backward.’
The symbol of this choice is the Colonial Office.
‘As long as we can keep Colonial Office control here, it will save us from being handed over body and soul to the white settlers.’
And so, in Southern Rhodesia, officials argue bitterly: ‘We are advancing the Africans much faster than the Colonial Office because under our administration they are going to have no choice but to enter industrialism, to leave tribalism behind.’ And they really feel aggrieved about it because they cannot see the Africans as a people, as a people with its own soul.
This is one of the cases, I think, where liberty has become more important to a people than more money, better living conditions.
The Copper Belt is owned by two big companies, Anglo-American and the Rhodesian Selection Trust. The ramifications of the finance are involved; but, broadly speaking, Anglo-American is South African, that is, British capital; and the Rhodesian Selection Trust is American. That, at least, is how they are spoken of by the citizens of Northern Rhodesia, and a great deal of interesting gossip goes on about the rivalries between the two, their different methods of handling labour, and how Anglo-American is conservative by temperament, while the Selection Trust is more flexible and go-ahead. But after two weeks in Northern Rhodesia I had formed an image in my mind of these two copper giants facing each other with an angry scowl, left hands secretly linked, while they shadow-boxed with their right.
The rate of exploitation in Northern Rhodesia is higher than in any other Colonial territory.
The annual profits from the copper mines have reached £50,000,000, of which more than half leaves the country for external shareholders. The annual wage bill for the Africans is less than £5,000,000.
I was going to Kitwe-Nkana, under the aegis of Anglo-American. With their representative in Salisbury, a most courteous and helpful man, I had had the by now familiar interview, during which I had been able to agree, with every sincerity, that the industrialists were against the industrial colour bar and for African advancement, and that the white trade unions were in comparison reactionary.
I therefore took the plane north to Ndola.
Ndola is a small-scale Bulawayo or Salisbury, and I had no wish to stay there; but I wanted to find the friend of a friend who lived there, a man who spends his time investigating African conditions of living, and who could give me the sort of information I wanted. For in a town in Southern Rhodesia twenty-four hours with a couple of anthropologists investigating urban Africans had taught me more than interviews with several dozen officials. (Incidentally this couple had asked permission to do a survey on the effects of the colour bar on the lives of the white people; this caused great offence—they were instructed to stick to the Africans.)
But I could not find the man I wanted. The address given me by the bank turned out to be an empty house, and I pursued various false scents without result. The time was not wasted, because my African taxi-driver, having heard I was a journalist from Britain, talked without inhibition or a moment’s pause about what he thought about Federation, Partnership, white supremacy and so on. Nothing new; but I had, after all, chosen his taxi at random. Again I was struck by the comparative independence of the northern people; no Southern Rhodesian African would ever express himself to a stranger with such confidence.
There being no train, plain, or coach to Kitwe-Nkana, I went by taxi, harangued all the way by my driver. An expensive business; 50 miles so far as I can remember.
Kitwe-Nkana has one hotel, at which I found a bed