Going Home - Doris May Lessing [111]
A trip down one of the mineshafts. I have been down goldmines before, but since I know nothing about the techniques of mining, I regarded this rather as a joy-ride than a contribution to information. Besides, it was the mineshaft the Queen Mother was taken down, presumably the one reserved for visitors.
My guide said that an American journalist he had taken down wrote an article about the enslaved workers who were chained to their jobs underground. ‘So ignorant he didn’t even know a safety-chain when he saw one.’ I said I would make a point of not falling into the same error.
Whereupon he said: ‘I spend half my time taking journalists around, and none of you ever has a good word to say for us. So I suppose you won’t either.’
‘Well, not many,’ I said.
‘Oh well,’ he said, with a sort of stolid intention to endure the whips and arrows of unfair criticism, ‘we all do our best, you know; we all do our best.’
An evening with a man not employed by the company. He told me that because of the enormously high price of copper, still unnaturally high although it has recently dropped a little, the copper bonus raises European wages to more than twice what is normal. Shop-keepers raise their prices to suit; but Government employees and independent men are left behind and comparatively badly off. A mine employee (white) pays £3 a month rent, and can earn as much as £200 a month. He says: ‘Most people have nothing to spend their money on but drink or saving for the next holiday or buying new cars.’
It seems there is considerable ill will between the mine people and the others.
A trade-union official spent most of his time during our interview slanging my friend Simon Zukas, whom he referred to as a stateless Lithuanian agitator. Simon has lived in Northern Rhodesia nearly all his life, but due to the intricacies of the citizenship laws is not technically a citizen. Therefore he was deported, after helping to organize the Congress. I was not surprised that every time I mentioned his name, which I did as often as possible to see the reaction, people became abusive, but I must say I was surprised at the level of abuse. Nothing short of hanging, it seems, is good enough for Simon. Incidentally the man who called him stateless was an immigrant into Rhodesia of three years’ standing, and became positively hysterical at Simon’s inability to understand local problems.
Whenever I mentioned Simon, people were at great pains to say how badly Congress had treated him; so insistent were they that I became suspicious, scenting another version of ‘Africans are so ungrateful’. Having been told a dozen times that Congress had been so mean as only to raise £4 for Simon’s defence, when he was deported for helping them, I made a point of seeking out the man who had been treasurer at that time.
I found him very bitter over this rumour. ‘Congress raised £1,000 for Simon, and spent £661 of that sum in ways that seemed useful, mostly on appeal expenses. It was a complicated trial, and it wasn’t easy all the time to see what was the right thing to do. For one thing Simon was being held at Livingstone, which is a long way from Lusaka. Mr Nkumbula was there anyway for the trial. What did people expect us to do? Send the entire Committee to Livingstone? No, these rumours were deliberately spread around so that other white men who might help us would think we treated Simon badly.’
I spoke to several Congress people about this business, and they all spoke angrily about this malicious attempt to smear them over their treatment of Simon.
‘People are always ready to believe bad things of us Africans. Even progressive people believe that business of us raising £4 for Simon. The rumour started because the Luansha branch of the General Workers’ Union raised £4. The Press seized on that figure and did not mention the real figure at all.’
Time was running out fast.