Going Home - Doris May Lessing [37]
The atmosphere in the Jan Smuts airport immediately warned me; every person in it is a member of the Special Branch of the police, down to the girl selling cigarettes, and one feels the tight, suspicious watchfulness of the place at once. We sat waiting in the outside room while the plane-lists were checked against the blacklists of the police. Then my name was called first, and I went into the room next door, and I knew I was already on the way out. There were two tables in the immigration room, one with a pleasant young man behind it, who dealt fast and politely with respectable people and one manned by the worst type of Afrikaner official—and there is no worse type of official: rude, overbearing, boorishly sarcastic.
Since they already had my name from the plane-list, he went through my immigration form and my passport as a matter of form, though the fact that I was born in Persia caused him particular annoyance: the first time I went into the Union in 1937 I was taken off the train while the immigration officials telephoned Pretoria for a ruling as to whether I was an Asiatic or not: the movements of people from Asia are strictly controlled in Southern Africa, and had I been one I would not have been allowed in without special forms, if at all.
Finally this man went off to telephone Pretoria again, and I sat and waited, watching men in plain clothes emerge from various strategic points. It must cost the Union Government a great deal of money to keep so many policemen on hand for those comparatively rare occasions when they have to throw somebody out.
Finally I was told I was a prohibited immigrant and must go back on the same plane I came in on. I said to the man who told me this, a tall, thin, worried-looking individual, obviously embarrassed by the situation, that it would be better if the Union published a list of their prohibited immigrants so that we would not waste money, whereupon he said that ‘this sort of thing happens in other countries, doesn’t it?’—by which he meant to say that since movement in and out of Communist countries is controlled his Government is entitled to do the same, an argument one does not have to travel to South Africa to hear.
Meanwhile, the first official, grinning with spiteful delight at having caught out another enemy of the State, was nudging me on towards the plane, and thus, escorted by a posse of plain-clothes men, I was put back on the plane, and instructed to sit by myself and away from the window. Presumably this last was in case I might jump through it, or throw a bomb through it—I don’t know, but it annoyed me.
I was, in fact, very upset. Particularly as, not being a romantic about politics and thinking, as so many people apparently do, ‘the greater the oppression the sooner the day of liberation,’ I believe that the present regime in South Africa will last a very long time. It will be a long time before I can go back. It is a State which is designed on every level to prevent the Africans from rebelling, to keep them as helots; it is a completely logical and very efficient system—that is, it is politically efficient, for apartheid will keep the country poor and backward and will slowly corrupt it. Apartheid means, inevitably, isolation from the rest of the world. It means that the white people, increasingly soft with that self-pity which I have already mentioned, and which is the most remarkable symptom of ‘white civilization’ on the defensive, will become more and more brutal and warped.
I have asked several people recently, liberals from South Africa, if they thought there was any chance of the Nationalists being thrown out. None by parliamentary means, they said. Or by an effective revolt from the Africans? No—the State is too efficient. Then it will all go on indefinitely? No; it will collapse under the burden of its corruption. How do you define