Going Home - Doris May Lessing [22]
My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.
But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.
Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.
That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.
Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen—driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.
Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.
That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.
What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man