Going Home - Doris May Lessing [120]
The man Vorster is bringing a new sophistication to apartheid. For instance, ‘white’ liquor is now available to Africans until recently forbidden it. Outside the bottle shops, Africans queue for the status-symbol. Alcohol has always been used on the farms—tots of brandy have been part of wages for brutalized farm workers for decades. But now alcohol has moved into the cities, enlisted by the Nationalists. And the hard edge of white supremacy has been taken off for a few privileged Africans, in small limited areas. In some of the big stores a black man or woman may be served with courtesy, called Sir and Madam. Certain Africans are highly paid to spy, inform, infiltrate. In the African townships you keep your mouth shut, no one knows who may be in the pay of the Government. The opposition has been destroyed. You can visit the lush swimming-bathed, lawned and gardened suburbs of the white cities and forget that anything exists outside them. When the journalists are asked why they keep quiet about what they know of the oppression, of the tortures in the prisons, the savagery of the machinery of apartheid they reply they would lose their jobs, and anyway, no one would believe it. They mean: the whites who pay us don’t want to believe it. Where have we heard all this before? Yes, it has become an easy cliché to say that oppressive states are Nazi. But this state is Nazi. Behind Vorster are Nazis from Germany, some who have been there, biding their time for years; some recently arrived; and the techniques now being applied in the Republic were developed under Hitler.
It is just possible that if Rhodesia could develop an efficient African movement, the Republic would benefit by its example. But the Rhodesian movement is divided, and on personal grounds, and is not likely to be of much use. But, detention camps and prisons are great educators, and perhaps now in some bush prison a leadership is developing itself—a Kaunda, a Kapepwe. If this happens, we can expect the usual campaign of denigration from all the whites, some of the bought blacks and most of the British Press.
I went to Zambia for the Independence Celebrations. When I had been there previously, the Nationalist leaders, Kaunda and the rest, were reviled by the whites; and the Africans were rioting, stoning white cars, challenging the colour bar everywhere, going to prison. The atmosphere was very ugly. It went quite without saying no white would be prepared to stay in a country run by these unscrupulous black agitators. But the Celebrations were attended by a great many white people who had forgotten their own attitudes of less than ten years before. They were admirers of Kaunda and his cabinet to a man. It cannot be said that the majority of the whites in Zambia are happy with their position—most are there only because of the money they can earn. But they are there, working and behaving more or less decently. That’s something. The really unpleasant people were the old Colonial Office officials who, having administered for years a policy which must ensure that when the Africans got self-government they would have no more than a couple of dozen educated men to run a country with, sat around, gloating openly or furtively over the inefficiencies of the new regime. They are people unable by nature to connect their own attitudes with the results of them. There were a great many like this, and not all from the old Colonial Office. And a lot of them are still there.
But—nothing succeeds like success. Consider Kenya. What could be more extraordinary than the way that evil, black-magicking demagogue Kenyatta has been transmogrified into the respected