Going Home - Doris May Lessing [116]
January 6, 1957
Eleven Years Later
Always salutary to read over something written years ago. Particularly something written in emotion—that was 1956, a climactic year for everybody. I was far too heated by the end of that trip; but being chased around by the CID and then forbidden entry to the country you were bred in, does arouse emotions the reasonable mind finds an impediment. Hundreds of people are now Prohibited Immigrants into the southern part of Africa: anyone who has been critical, is critical, or even might be critical. Of course: dictatorships can’t stand critics. And the attitude of mind which says ‘of course’ ‘if you do this that will follow’ is much more useful to judgement than indignation. The trouble is, to understand a place like Rhodesia, like the Republic, it is no good looking coolly from outside. You have to experience the paranoia, the adolescent sentimentality, the neurosis. Experience—then a retreat into a cool look from outside. Most politicians and journalists do their judging from outside only. And most of the people on the spot are lost in a violent emotionalism.
Federation has dissolved: it was unworkable, as certain people foresaw. But it would not have been agreed to by this country (the Labour Party) if the politicians concerned had understood the force of the Northern Rhodesian and Nyasaland Africans’ feeling of betrayal. They had made an agreement with Queen Victoria, as free men, that they would continue as free men. Admittedly the administrations of the Colonial Office were not exactly what had been envisaged by them when their spokesmen treated with the Great White Queen, but to force them into Federation against their will was the final confirmation of cynical betrayal and the breaking of a solemn promise. No modern politician thinks in terms of promises, betrayals—in terms of honour. Federation outraged a sense of honour not admitted as anything but a quaint—and, at best, touching—anachronism. But it was this force which broke up Federation. The nationalist movements of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia and Malawi) were fed, fuelled, powered by this feeling of having been betrayed, sold out.
No one can remember now what ‘Partnership’ was. It was the product of a sense of panic in Rhodesia because of what was happening in the Republic, which coldly and honestly told the world what its regime was—a machine to maintain white supremacy. Rhodesia’s regime was similar, but that country has never been able to see the truth about its own nature. The Rhodesians at that time liked to think of themselves as ‘British’, meaning good, kind, decent, civilized, and not ‘Afrikaans’, which meant crude, backward, bad. But they are quite prepared to consider the Afrikaners as brothers now that the heat is on, just as the British in South Africa voted for the Afrikaners when their position as whites was threatened.
One could afford to be amused by ‘Partnership’ now as then, if it were not that so many people were taken in by it, and if the way of thinking that made it possible to be taken in by it were not as strong as ever in this country. When I came out of Rhodesia on this trip I tried to sell articles to newspapers about the unreality of Federation and of Partnership. But only the Statesman and Tribune were interested—all the others, including pillars of liberalism now full of moral indignation about the regimes in the Republic and Rhodesia, were enthusiastically selling