Going Home - Doris May Lessing [108]
I suggested that perhaps what it needed were some nice, refined girls to raise its tone and standard, but she said very seriously, ‘But I’d have to live in this hotel, because there isn’t anywhere to live and you’d have to have a lot of girls to refine this hotel.’ Besides, she said, she was used to living at home with Mom making her clothes for her. She was used to being respected, she said. I took this opportunity to ask her what she thought about Federation. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. So I asked her if she thought relations between black and white were getting better or worse. ‘The munts are getting awfully cheeky,’ she said.
With this, we went to sleep, and were awakened in the morning by an African putting tea down beside our beds, or rather, slamming down the tray between us, and striding out again with a crash of the door. Eileen got out of bed, went to the door in her night-dress, half-shut it, leaned the upper portion of herself through the space, and yelled: ‘Here, boy, clean the bath.’
But he did not reappear.
‘I am not used,’ said Eileen, ‘to cleaning the bath for myself: if my Mom knew, she wouldn’t like it. But the munts up here they do as they like: it’s because of the Parliament.’
‘Which Parliament?’
‘That Parliament in London. They have no respect, because those people in London always stand up for them.’
A couple of days spent interviewing various types of mine official. They were all concerned to make me accept three facts. First, that since I was a Southern Rhodesian, I could never expect to understand Northern Rhodesian, problems. I must admit I had not expected this. At last, getting a bit exasperated, I asked one man: ‘Supposing that at the end of a week here I professed myself a partisan of Federation and of making haste slowly. Would you then say I had been here long enough to understand your problems?’ To which he replied, with perfect seriousness, as it were encouraging me onwards in a comradely way towards unanimity with common sense: ‘Quite a lot of our immigrants get the right idea straight away.’
The second point was that housing for African workers was better than anywhere else in the Federation. Which is quite true. The conclusion a lot of people draw from this fact is that what Central Africa needs is more big companies, so rich that they can afford to spend a few hundred thousand extra every year on building roads in the locations and supplying electric light.
The third point of extreme importance—that is, judged by the amount of time given to it—was the Salaried Staffs Association. The African Mineworkers’ Union, being powerful, well organized, and in fact the most influential body in Northern Rhodesia, the mine management naturally spend a great deal of time trying to weaken it in various ways.
What, one asks, is there new to say about the fact that big capitalist companies create stooge unions when they can? One would have thought, nothing.
Yet one suave, plump gentleman after another earnestly persuaded me that the Salaried Staffs Association was in the best interests of the African people as a whole, that the Mineworkers’ Union was generally a rough, crude and ungentlemanly organization, and that the Africans’ low level of intelligence was proved by the fact that they did not understand the Salaried Staffs Association was entirely for their own good.
As hour succeeded hour, and one plump gentleman succeeded another in solemn exhortation, I began to ask myself: Was it that they imagined visiting journalists were so innocent as not to understand these ancient and time-honoured tactics? Was it that they imagined I was?—but obviously I was not prepared to admit this. Or perhaps—and I believe I am right—the colour bar caused them to see these commonplaces of industrial struggle as new and original?
In order to pass the time, I worked out an imaginary scene, thus:
PLACE—The bedroom of the mine manager.
TIME—About three in the morning.
The manager, a rather fat pink-and-white