Going Home - Doris May Lessing [2]
That was the story as we heard it from a group of young men travelling through our farm on their way to find work in the gold mines of the Rand.
It seems to me that this story of the man who preferred to die alone rather than return to the cities of his own people expresses what is best in the older type of white men who have come to Africa. He did not come to take what he could get from the country. This man loved Africa for its own sake, and for what is best in it: its emptiness, its promise. It is still uncreated.
Yet it is only when one flies over Africa that one can see it, as such solitary people do, as the empty continent. The figures are eloquent enough—that is, if one possesses the kind of mind that makes figures live. In Central Africa there are seven million Africans and two hundred thousand white people. It sounds quite a lot of people from one point of view, if one tries to imagine the word million in terms of a crowd of people. And if one has lived in a city there, one remembers the pressure of people. Yet it seems seven million people are nothing, not enough—this enormous area could hold hundreds of millions.
But now, steadily flying south for hour after hour, one sees forest, mountain and lake; river and gorge and swamp; and the great reaches of the flat, tree-belted grassland. The yellow flanks of Africa lie beneath the moving insect-like plane, black-maned with forest, twitching in the heat. A magnificent country, with all its riches in the future. Because it is so empty we can dream. We can dream of cities and a civilization more beautiful than anything that has been seen in the world before.
It was over Kenya that a subtle change of atmosphere announced we were now in white Africa. Two Africans sitting by themselves had a self-contained and watchful look. Perhaps they were reflecting on the implications of the fact that this being a South African plane the covers on the seats they used would have to be specially sterilized before re-use.
Until now the men making announcements over the loudspeaker had had the anonymous voices of officialdom. Now there was a new voice, unmistakably South African, stubbornly national. Jaunty and facetious, with the defensiveness of the Colonial who considers an attempt at efficiency as nothing but snobbishness, it began: ‘Well, ladies and gents, here I am; sorry about it, but I’m not a BBC announcer, but I’ll do my best. If you look down on your right now you’ll see the Aberdare Forest. You’ll understand why it took so long to bash the Mau Mau. See that thick bit over there? That’s where we got a whole bunch of them. Starved ’em out. Took six weeks.’ This man was not from Kenya, but he was white; and the problems of white Kenya were his, and—so he took for granted—ours too. He went on, swallowing his words, the ends of his sentences, most of the time inaudible. Once he clearly enunciated a whole series of sentences just to show that he could if he chose. ‘Down there is Masai country. Of course, I don’t know anything about the Masai, but they tell me the Masai are warriors. Or used to be. They like drinking blood and milk. They seem to like it. Or so I’m told. Of course, I don’t know anything about these things.’ Click, as the machine switched off, and we descended at Nairobi.
Nairobi airport is interesting for two things. One is that it is infested with cats of all shapes, colours and sizes. I have not seen so many cats since one year when my mother got into a mood where she could not bear to see a kitten drowned, so that very soon we had forty cats who almost drove us out of the house before we could bring ourselves to lay violent hands on them.
The other is that the lavatories are marked ‘European Type’ and ‘Non-European Type’. The word type, I suppose, is meant to convey to the critical foreign visitor that Non-Europeans prefer their own amenities. It was my