Going Home - Doris May Lessing [121]
I remember, thinking of Kenyatta, a man called Montague Slater, now dead, who wrote a book called The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta. Montague was a quiet, doggedly humorous man, a Communist, and the difficulties of writing that book at all in the suspicious violent atmosphere of Britain during and just after the Mau Mau Rebellion he described to his friends—humorously and doggedly. That trial, the farcical brutality of it, is how ‘British Justice’ has been experienced by many Africans, and how they think of it. But we forget nasty lapses like that trial when we have returned to our senses again. I sometimes wonder how Montague Slater would now regard the metamorphosis of the villain Kenyatta into a trusted statesman. Humorously I suppose. We owe more than we ever admit to these quiet and patient fighters in the background, who change atmospheres and attitudes in small but important ways.
When I wrote Going Home, I was a Communist—that is, I was holding a party card. I am not one now. The trouble is, being an ‘ex-Communist’ is just as much of a false position as being a Communist. But I’ve long since understood that what it was like being a Communist in a certain time and place can be understood by no one who was not. Which is why I am so glad I was one, had the experience. And I’m grateful to the Communists for what they taught me: particularly about power, the realities of political power. It is no accident that the only group of people who knew that Federation was dangerous nonsense, that Partnership was a bad joke, were Socialists of various kinds.
With the opposition in South Africa defeated, the filth being piled on its memory by very efficient propagandists, I want to pay tribute to the Communists and Socialists there who fought so well and bravely. (No, I am not saying that all the people who fought the Nationalists were Communists and Socialists.) But when the historians come to write the story of the fight against the Nationalists, the Communists will come out very well. They can be faulted on mistaken judgements about the Soviet Union, and on their analysis of the ‘class struggle’ in Africa, but not on common sense about the colour struggle, nor on courage, nor on humanity. When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the colour bar in their lives. Very few other people did—not the Labour Party, except for a few individuals—not the ‘liberals’, the word means something different there than it does here—and not the members of the churches. No one. But when you joined the Communists you met, for the first time, people of other races, and on equal terms. It was for this reason the Communist party had influence: not because of its theories.
There are no Communists now in South Africa. When the fighting lawyer Bram Fischer was sentenced for life he said he was a Communist. That was brave of him, because it made it so much easier for him to be blackened, denigrated, forgotten. He is now in Pretoria jail, the ugliest prison in a country full of them. It is where they keep people who are sentenced to death. He could easily have denied that he was a Communist. He knew quite well what it would mean, not only there, but here, saying ‘Yes, I am a Communist.’ But he said it. It was the end of an epoch, the sentencing and silencing of Bram Fischer. He was, and is, the most extraordinarily brave man. And the time will come when South Africa will be proud to have bred him.
I can write something now that I couldn’t when I wrote Going Home. I was on that trip just after the Twentieth Congress. Water under bridges, it seems, because last week I said to a young man