Going Home - Doris May Lessing [125]
LONDON, March, 1982
Afterword
When I was writing this book and the postscripts that I added almost in desperation to try and keep up with events, I don’t think anyone believed there would be a black government in Zimbabwe so soon—in 1980. This was partly because the national movements developed later in Southern Rhodesia than in Northern Rhodesia and Malawi, and partly because of South Africa. When I became ‘politically conscious’—as the phrase then was—Africa stood four-square and dominant to the south, a bastion of everything bad and brutal. This was before the Nationalists came to power in 1949: they did not invent the repressive structure of the South African state, but built on foundations laid down by Smuts and others. From the time I became aware of anything, it was South Africa that had to be understood first of all. And the people (not many in those days) who studied the facts and not the rhetorics of South Africa repeated: ‘It is such a cruel and ugly state that it has to collapse. It cannot possibly go on.’ Well, it did go on—and on—and on, until a great many people were hypnotised by its success. It was believed that a tyranny bolstered by an efficient secret police and modern armies had to be invulnerable. Besides there were other exemplars: Spain, that also went on and on, and Portugal, and of course the Soviet Union, and the Colonels in Greece. Tyranny seemed to succeed. This was why it was hard to believe that the white regime in Southern Rhodesia must fall, and so soon. I remember as late as the mid-seventies being asked, Did I think the white government would be overthrown, and replying, No, look at South Africa, where apartheid ruled. I was wrong.
This book ends roughly at the time when I discovered I was a Prohibited Immigrant. This condition did not end until the coming of Robert Mugabe’s government in 1980. I returned to Zimbabwe in 1982, when it was still war-shocked, and then again, and again—and finally this year, 1992, four visits in all.
The story of these visits is told in African Laughter, Four Visits to Zimbabwe. It is a tale not without its ironies.
LONDON, October, 1992
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements and thanks to the Editor of the African Weekly, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, for permission to quote letters and features from his newspaper.
About the Author
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life of the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a “civilized” Edwardian life among “savages,” but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.
Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, then installed Doris in a convent school, where the nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, from which she soon dropped out. She was thirteen, and it was the end of her formal education.
But like other women writers from southern Africa who did not graduate from high school, such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of