Going Home - Doris May Lessing [117]
Who was saying so, apart from a handful of Communists, cranks and Socialists? No one. Why not? I’ll tell you, it was because no one was interested except those who wanted to maintain the status quo.
This raises that most extraordinary and paradoxical fact which nearly caused me to call this piece ‘The Irrational in Politics’.
There have been two powerful emotions simmering in Rhodesia ever since 1924—a white emotion and an African emotion. In 1924, Southern Rhodesia was given self-government: she became a ‘self-governing colony’, but with two entrenched clauses in the Constitution. One clause was to do with defence, and of no interest in this context. The other was that the white people of Rhodesia were being given self-government on condition that no legislation discriminated unfavourably between white and black.
The whites having achieved control, they proceeded forthwith to set up a state in every respect identical to the Union of South Africa. It was a political commonplace among those prepared to look at facts rather than submit to self-deluding phrases that any law passed in Rhodesia would have come off the Statute Book of South Africa, modified to local conditions and given another name. The basis of white domination in Southern Rhodesia was the Land Apportionment Act, which took away land from the Africans and gave it to the Europeans, and laid down where and under what conditions Africans were to live in ‘white’ areas. The Land Apportionment Act is not so much a piece of legislation as an octopus. There is no single document you can refer to. It has been growing, spreading, burgeoning for forty years; and if you made a trip to the Government Stationery Office in Salisbury to buy this Act, you’d need a cart to carry it away. The most nastily repressive bits of law are likely to read something like: ‘Subclause (f) of Clause A2(g) of paragraph 6 of the Land Apportionment Act as amended by clause 7 of the Amendment of 1945 will read “not” on line 5 instead of “will be”.’ You think I’m joking? Not at all. A temple full of lawyers would be needed to make sense of that Act—and no accident either, I assure you.
There was no law passed in Southern Rhodesia that did not, directly or indirectly, discriminate between white and black, thereby making ‘self-government’ invalid by definition. And meanwhile, was Whitehall protesting? Not at all. Never. Not at any point a cheep out of our British Parliament. It is possible that some governor exerted influence in the time-honoured way by saying to some prime minister: ‘I say, old chap, don’t you think that…’ Possible, but the results were not shown in legislation.
Meanwhile, and this is the point, the whites simmered perpetually about interference from Whitehall preventing them from civilizing the blacks as only they, the local whites, understood they should be civilized. I was brought up on this extraordinary emotion. Year after year, season after season, decade after decade, those white farmers sat round on their verandahs, talking bitterly about interference from Whitehall. The only tangible bit of interference was that a white farmer was not allowed to flog an erring labourer or servant himself (he did, of course) but should take him into the police-station to be flogged or imprisoned by a white policeman. That was all. But still the whites talked about ‘the old country’, stood to attention when ‘the King’ was played and complained about the politicians in Whitehall. Regardless of party. It was not so long ago that I had a letter from a white man