Going Home - Doris May Lessing [110]
A silence. I put out the lights and get into bed.
Eileen lights another cigarette. ‘If my Mom knew I was smoking,’ she says, with the most dignified melancholy in her heavy voice, ‘if she knew, she would say the Copper Belt is ruining me.’
‘You should leave it,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but first I must tell Johnnie I am too good for him.’
A visit to a scheme for recovering young hooligans from a future of crime. The mines do not employ children under 18. Gangs of boys who could not get into school were roaming the townships making mischief. The company supplied a piece of land, and employed an enthusiastic man who teaches these boys agriculture and carpentry and arranges extra classes for them.
Admirable. As usual one feels it would be churlish to say, well, if there were enough schools there would be no need for all this philanthropy.
There is nothing more moving, or more exasperating in the Federation than these devoted, enthusiastic people who sweat their lives out on pittances and idealism to save the Africans from the worst effects of a savage exploitation. Just as the motives behind Federation have perverted all the good things one believes most in, have made suspect the phrases of goodwill, so that one can scarcely talk about interracialism, or equality, or advance, since these words have been poisoned by dishonesty; so, too, the honest idealism of people who are sickened by the condition of the Africans and who spend their lives trying to help them is made cheap by the cynicism that makes use of these emotions. Let’s have the figures again: Profits annually: £50,000,000. More than half to overseas shareholders. And a £5,000,000 African wage bill. Yet not one of these mine officials talks as if the copper mines were anything else but a philanthropic device for improving the lot of the Africans.
On the Rhokana mine one of the show-pieces is a building where an enthusiastic man teaches the Africans to make bricks, literally, out of straw. It seems that the management some time back had the idea of providing a place where the employees could learn carpentry. But the man they chose to run it had ideas more far-reaching than this. He said that the Africans must make use of their ingenuity to provide for themselves out of what materials lie to hand. Thus, any man or woman who comes to the building asking if he can make a bed, or a cupboard, is taught not only how to do this, but how to use bits of packing case, wood thrown away by the mine, or discarded furniture from the white man’s house. In that building ingenuity has become a passion. Sandals are fashioned out of tyres; baskets and brooms and brushes out of wild grasses; jugs and plates from copper waste; furniture from almost anything one can think of; clothes out of trade rejects; and tools out of scraps of waste mine machinery.
It is one of the most interesting places on the Copper Belt. Its manager devotes his life to it.
And why should the African workers on this fabulously rich mine have to spend their time learning to make the necessities for their living out of the waste from white civilization?
But one asks this question afterwards, not at the time, because of one’s deep respect for the man whose motives are goodness of heart and compassion for suffering.
In the newspaper it says that the Rhodesian Selection Trust is making a gift of £3,000,000 for African development. Everyone, it seems, is deeply moved by this generosity.
An interview with a Welfare Officer at which I am told that all the children are now going to school. I am naturally very impressed by this. Afterwards discover from the figures of the Minister of Education that either this