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By Root 901 0

inviting Africans to dinner never failed to arise; and I was astonished at the ingenuity of the reasons for disapproving of it. They ranged from the uncompromising, old-fashioned ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a black man,’ with its variations and refinements, such as ‘I don’t mind if my daughter wants to make a fool of herself, but I’m not having my grandchildren going to segregated schools,’ to ‘It’s not fair to invite a minority of Africans just because they are educated, it’s hard on the others,’ or ‘I don’t mind eating with Africans but I’m not having them use my lavatory,’ or ‘They don’t want to be invited, it embarrasses them,’ or ‘If I invite Africans, it’s not fair on my servants, they wouldn’t like it,’ or ‘It’s artificial to invite Africans to a meal when you can’t take them to a show afterwards,’ or ‘The Africans who get invited to dinner are the political Africans, the Government show-pieces they keep to impress foreign visitors with, and not because of what they are as people, and I don’t invite white people to my house on the basis of their politics,’ or ‘It’s nothing but a red-herring, this business of inviting Africans socially, what they want is higher wages and not social condescension.’

There are infinite variations on this theme; in short, it is not possible simply and naturally to invite Africans or people of colour to visit.

I heard a story of a white woman who invited an African teacher to drinks and a meal. As it is illegal for Africans to drink European liquor—a law which intelligent people simply ignore if Africans are guests—she served him with ginger-beer, while her white guests drank ordinary liquor; then she sent him to the kitchen to take his meal with her cookboy while her other guests ate with her. She was overcome by her progressiveness and deeply hurt when the teacher refused her next invitation—he was ungrateful, she felt.

Wanting to visit an old friend of mine in Harari, the African township near Salisbury, I had to apply for permission to the Native Department, and was told: ‘We do not encourage visiting between white and black; besides, there is a lot of immorality going on, there oughtn’t to be, but there is. If you want to meet natives socially why don’t you get them invited to a white house and then there is no problem.’ And finally, when I insisted on meeting my friends in their own house: ‘If you wanted to hold a meeting, we’d give you a permit for the whole day.’ This rather surprised me, until the obliging official hastened to explain: ‘We always have our men at the meetings so that we know what is going on, but social visits are discouraged, they lead to all sorts of complications.’

I got my permit for two hours, which I treasure as a souvenir of Partnership.

I flew down to Johannesburg trying to recapture the mood I went south in, in the past, the many times I entered the Union. For me going south was going to the big cities, for I was locked in Southern Rhodesia for years, wanting all the time to know something bigger, to know Europe. For years it was impossible to leave, and so going to the Union was a small form of escape. Johannesburg was then the big city to me; and Cape Town meant the sea, for living land-locked in the highveld I used to hunger for the sea so that it became a mania. That moment when, after five days in the slow, hot, dusty train I smelt the sea at last, and a blue stretch of water and the masts and funnels and hulls of ships appeared between the factories at water-level on the Cape Flats—that moment was always an explosion of relief after a long stretch of tension and nostalgia. I used to travel towards South Africa like someone being allowed, briefly, out of prison.

Although this time I was not sure whether I would be allowed in, it is hard to believe one can be kept out of a country that has meant so much to one as South Africa has to me; and in any case that frontier at the Limpopo has not seemed to me important, since it is at the Zambezi that the frontier between segregation and the Protectorates has always been; and so when I saw the