Going Home - Doris May Lessing [38]
All this is bad but does not necessarily destroy a State.
It can’t go on; it simply can’t go on like this, they say.
Personally I think it can go on. The forecast I agree with is this: the value the Union has to the power centre of the world—America—is that it now produces uranium in large quantities. Also gold. Provided uranium and gold continue to come out of South Africa, the Nationalists will be free to do as they like. South Africa will become poorer, more backward, intellectually and morally corrupt, a place of sporadic race riots, violence, crime, prisons, internment camps, fear. I believe that we tend to think in terms of dramatic alternatives: ‘The Africans will revolt.’ ‘Liberal opinion will throw the Nationalists out.’ But a country can just as well dwindle into decay and stagnation.
I do not believe that South Africa can save itself; it is in a deadlock. But it could be saved by economic pressure from outside: it might be forced into sanity if progressive opinion abroad took forcible action. Even so, I think the Nationalists would prefer to become backveld peasant farmers in complete isolation from the rest of the world, rather than give up their dream of racial purity.
To understand the Nationalists, one must read a history of Paul Kruger. Having once absorbed the essential fact that this shrewd, grasping, bigoted peasant is their national type or ideal, one should read Harry Bloom’s The Incident which is an absolutely accurate description of the miserable racial conflict which goes on in the Union now. Then one should have a good enough idea of the sick, suffering flesh which clothes the bones of the country—uranium, gold, diamonds.
And it is such a beautiful country—beautiful, and potentially so rich.
Well, so I went back to Salisbury and consoled myself with the thought that there was, after all, plenty to see in Central Africa, plenty to do in the short time I had.
Almost immediately I was rather deviously summoned for an interview by a man in a high position. Unfortunately I cannot describe this ironical and interesting encounter, for I promised I would not; but the essence of the thing was that I was only in Southern Rhodesia at all because of the personal intervention of this high personage and that if I crossed the Zambezi to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland I could expect to be deported at once.
This upset me a good deal. To be refused entry into a country one knows and loves is bad enough, but to be told one is on sufferance in a country one has lived in nearly all one’s life is very painful.
I am, of course, considered so undesirable in these parts because I am a Communist. But I would not, very likely, be a Communist if I had not lived for twenty-five years in Central Africa. I can easily see why people who have lived all their lives in Britain do not easily take to Communism. Nor do I think they are likely to do so until Communism has proved itself to be as genuinely democratic as it has been claiming to be. I believe that in a decade the Communist countries of the world will be freer, more democratic (in the political, as well as the economic sense of these words) than the Western World, which is rapidly becoming less free, less democratic. If I did not think this I would not remain a Communist. Too many people have been prepared to die for liberty and freedom in the last five hundred years for these words to become mere symbols of an outdated economic system.
For if the first need of a human being is for three square meals a day and a roof over his head—and it is the most sickening hypocrisy to believe anything else—then the second need is the freedom to say what he thinks. Sometimes it is the first need, more important than food or a roof.
But if one has been brought