Going Home - Doris May Lessing [107]
Northern News, May 27th: ‘About thirty African women today tried to enter the delicatessen at Kitwe in what seemed to be a demand for service equal to that given to Europeans, but were refused entry…’
June 16th: ‘Mufulira. A warning that if car stonings continued the Legislature might have to consider increasing sentences was given in the Magistrates’ Court here today by Mr A. R. W. Porter when he sentenced seven Africans to 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour for riotous assembly. The charges followed a stoning incident about three miles from Mufulira…Seven Africans pleaded guilty; two others pleaded not guilty. Mr J. H. Daniels, prosecuting, said that after a report of a collision between an African cyclist and a car near Mufulira, police found a crowd of about twenty Africans had gathered. By the time an ambulance took away the injured cyclist the crowd had grown to fifty. An African was arrested because he was making the crowd aggressive. When he was put into the police truck, stones and sand were thrown at the police and the vehicle…’
June 20th: ‘Kitwe. For threatening violence during the boycott Masonda Bwalya, a 45-year-old contractor’s policeman, was sentenced to 3 months’ hard labour by Mr W. H. Hannah in the Kitwe Magistrates’ Court today…’
June 18th: ‘Lusaka. “I can see nothing that will stop us from achieving Dominion status in the near future,” Sir Roy Welensky said today…’ (Sir Roy is Deputy Prime Minister of the Federation, in the line of succession from Lord Malvern.*) ‘“There are small people with small minds in all countries, but I must admit I find it difficult to follow their thinking when I look at the assets, both human and mineral, that this vast Federation possesses. I just cannot understand people who doubt that we will succeed in building a great State here. I do not believe that the people of the Federation will be misled by the doubting Thomases who lack the courage to grasp the great opportunity that destiny is offering us to provide an example of how people of different races and culture can combine to work for the common good of their land…” Speaking of his travels in America, Sir Roy said that having seen the problem of colour in other lands he could say that in the Federation there was less racial tension.’
June 19th: ‘At 4 A.M. today three members of the African Congress were arrested at their homes here, and later appeared at the Magistrates’ Court. They were charged under Section 358, sub-section 4, of the Penal Code with unlawfully conspiring together to injure European traders in their trade by counselling, exhorting or inducing Africans in Mufulira to withhold their custom from stores…’
June 11th: Headline: 50,000 leave the Federation in five years. ‘Nearly 50,000 Europeans have left the Federation in the past five years, a fifth of the country’s present white population. This is more than half the total number of immigrants in the same period…’
After having read this sort of news for an hour or so, I went to dinner in the hotel dining-room, where a young man with the typically aggressive-suspicious face came up to where I was sitting in a corner, carrying in his hand a full glass of whisky which he held tipped towards me, saying: ‘You’re that Kaffir-lover. Well, you know what I’m going to do with this?’ The whisky being on the verge of landing in my face, I said hastily: ‘Well, I think you’d better drink it.’ For a moment his hand trembled, then he set down his glass, stood looking at it, and sat himself down beside it. ‘Listen,’ said he, poking his chin forward and up, and narrowing his eyes in a glare. ‘Do you know what I’d like to do with people like you? Do you know?’ After he had told me, we discussed for about half an hour whether or not we would allow our female relations to marry black men, while he kept remarking in the voice of a betrayed child: ‘But the Government’s doing everything for the blacks and nothing for us.’
Eventually I said I had some work to do, and left him brooding over his fifth whisky in the corner of the dining-room.
Lights were out in the