Going Home - Doris May Lessing [39]
In short, whatever I am, I have been made so by Central Africa, but this is not the way political police anywhere in the world are likely to reason; and during the next few days I was very impressed by the efficiency of the CID. As I have already said, this is a country where one always knows everything that goes on, because of the smallness of the white population; and I was being continually informed by friends that the CID had made this or that inquiry, or had said this or that. Not, one would have thought, that they needed to make inquiries, since they seem to have the most detailed information about everything I have done or said since I left home.
All this put me into an uncomfortable frame of mind. Of course, as a Communist one is used to living as if one were plastered all over with labels that have nothing to do with what one thinks or feels; but I have never felt this so strongly as on this last trip home. For the backwardness of these countries is such that the sort of work a Communist does in them (as, for example, the work the South African Communist Party did before it was banned) is exactly the same sort of work a liberal or a progressive churchman does. It is a fight for basic human rights. If I were not a Communist I would be doing exactly the same kind of thing.
It is another parallel between white-settler countries and the United States, which gets into such a state of hysteria about its small Communist Party, and destroys its own civil liberties in the determination to destroy Communism. What sort of a precarious state can Central Africa be in that it gets so excited at the prospect of having one Communist inside its borders for seven weeks? And what—with the worst intentions in the world, and of course I had them—could I do in seven weeks?
But now that I was under high though invisible patronage, officials that had been stuffy and suspicious now became guardedly helpful; and I set out on a round of interviewing and inspection. I spent most of my time doing this for some weeks; but what soon became evident was not the diversity or variety of what was said, but how a single thread ran through what seemed at first to be complicated.
For all these officials said the same things. It is a commonplace that a certain political epoch will feed the same words and phrases into the minds of people who are probably convinced they have thought them up for themselves; but it is a remarkable experience to see this commonplace take flesh.
When I left home the slogans and catchwords were different. Then, everyone was saying that the natives must be advanced slowly; the time was not ripe; you cannot civilize barbarians in under a thousand years. These are the things the majority of white citizens are still saying; but since the recent events in Kenya, which were like a burglar alarm in a rich house, the intelligent whites are frightened and they are all with one voice, but in a variety of phrases, saying: ‘We must create a small privileged class of Africans to cushion white supremacy.’ It is what Huggins has been saying for years; now it is official policy.
And once having grasped this basic policy, all the contradictions and anomalies fall into place.
Ten years ago the Africans who protested against being described as barbarians with barbaric needs were called agitators and troublemakers; now it is the Africans who demand political rights for all Africans as distinct from rights for a privileged minority who can expect to be deported, threatened, imprisoned.
In all these interviews there were two interviews—one during which the phrases of the policy were offered to me; and an unofficial interview which I was asked not to quote. But what was said off the record was always the same: ‘We have a small, a very small chance of avoiding a racial flare-up, of making Partnership work.