Going Home - Doris May Lessing [40]
And so with the white trade-union leaders, who, having accepted a policy whereby Africans are workers by law, and thus able to join multi-racial trade unions, so that African trade unionism may be controlled and directed—these men are frightened that the mass of the white trade unionists may flare into hostility, refusing to accept Africans as fellow-workers, even in their own self-interest.
The chief block to African advancement in Central Africa, as in the Union of South Africa, is organized white labour. A white artisan is a white man first and a worker second. The proud traditions of the British Labour Movement suffer a strange transformation in Africa. There are no more colour-conscious people than the white artisans; yet, if reproached with their attitude towards the Africans, they reply: ‘All we say is that any job must be paid at the same rates.’ Which sounds fair enough. But an African labourer, in 1956, in Southern Rhodesia, earns about £3 or £4 a month, plus food and housing which cost the employer about £2 10s. a month. A white artisan can earn £70 or £80 a month. On the Copper Belt the comparable figures are: African workers £6 to £10 a month, white workers £150 to £200 a month. Impossible for an employer to pay an African ‘white’ rates, for it would cut at the root of the colour structure. Therefore the white trade-union demand for equal pay preserves skilled work for white workers. In Southern Rhodesia it is impossible for an African to do skilled work, except in the building industry; and then only outside limits within which it is saved for white artisans. In June the Government enforced a law saying that any African employed by a building firm within these territorial limits must be paid the same rates as white workers: the opposition came from the African building workers—immediately, rather than pay the same wages, employers began sacking their African workmen.
And so there is the anomalous position where the chief support for abolishing or modifying the industrial colour bar comes from the industrialists: even if wages were three or four times as high as they are now, it would be much cheaper to employ African labour than white labour. A slow battle goes on between the Government (expressing the needs of the industrialists) and the white workers, who are being forced, step by step, to release certain categories of less skilled work to Africans. A category of work is ‘released’ when there are enough Africans skilled enough to take over all that class of work within a particular industry. For it is degrading for the white worker to work alongside an African. Recently, on the Copper Belt, the copper companies forced the white mineworkers’ union to release twenty-four categories of semi-skilled work. Next week the white workers came out on strike: the employers had put on three African pipe-fitters when there were still white pipe-fitters on the job. This was an insult to white labour. The strike succeeded; the companies have agreed to keep these categories ‘white’ until they can be taken over entirely by Africans—no mixing of the colours on the job.
And yet on the Copper Belt I was told by a mine official: ‘And after all that fuss, on such and such a mine Africans are actually doing pipe-fitting, and the white workers are saying nothing. One never knows when they are going to lose their tempers and strike.’
There is no place where it is easier to see that colour-feeling is basically money-feeling than here, in spite of all the rationales of racialism. On the building sites one can watch white artisans and black artisans working together: the black men mix the cement and the mortar, lift the bricks and carry them to the white men, who fit the bricks into place on the wall. The black men will be earning a tiny fraction of what the