Going Home - Doris May Lessing [41]
In Southern Rhodesia the white artisans say that Africans are incapable of doing skilled work, as a moral justification for keeping them out; but in Northern Rhodesia, where white labour is concentrated on the Copper Belt, the Industrial Colour Bar is confined to minework. There Africans have done skilled building, plumbing, surveying and clerical work for decades.
The white trade-union case is self-contradictory: if the black man is so obviously inferior, why create so many barriers to keep him out? In reply, the white trade union uses the classic language of British trade unionism: the capitalists will exploit the African by paying him less than the rate for the job unless we keep up standards.
The leaders of the white trade unions in Southern Rhodesia are in exactly the same dilemma as the more intelligent of the white politicians: they will not remain in their jobs unless they are voted back into them by white votes; but the majority of their following consider them ‘soft’ towards the Africans. And it is a fact that many of the white artisans are right to be afraid. Many of them are poor human material; not only are their standards of skill very low, but they are degraded by their attitude towards the Africans, who are, after all, their fellow workers. Faced with competition from Africans who are avid for education and new skills, with all the irresistible energy of a suppressed people, they know they will go to the wall unless they are protected: white trade-union policy is in essence to protect that section of the white workers who intend to rely not on their skills or their industry or their education, but on the colour of their skins for their standard of living.
The more sensible of the leaders know this, know their position is untenable. Therefore, the difference between what these trade unionists said to me privately, and what they could say publicly, was greater than in any other group of people I interviewed.
‘Our white kids,’ said one, ‘they leave school the minute they legally can, and all they are interested in is the pictures and sport and their girl-friends. In the meantime, these natives are killing themselves to get educated. Well, our white kids have got to pull their socks up or they’ve had it.’ But that is not what they can afford to say to their union members.
In Northern Rhodesia, however, there was an interesting reversal of what was said for publication and what off the record. An official of the white mine workers’ union, of whom the rumour goes that he is an ardent Afrikaner Nationalist and a supporter of apartheid, spent three-quarters of an hour putting himself across to me as an old-fashioned liberal interested only in African advancement. It was a most impressive performance; and if I had not previously read his evidence to various commissions and committees, where his voice was the traditional voice of white trade unionism, I might easily have been convinced by him. But the point is that on the Copper Belt there is a vigorous and well-organized African trade union, and he cannot afford to be quoted as an opponent of African advancement. So here the public voice is a liberal coo, mixed with execrations against the machinations of the capitalists who want only to exploit the poor Africans; and the private voice is savagely reactionary.
It was during this interview that the door into his office opened, and an African appeared, saying: ‘Baas, I want work.’ Whereupon the official shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Get out of here, go on, get out.’ At which point, recollecting the presence of the enemy, he hastened to assure me that had a white man entered that door he would have spoken to him in exactly the same tone of voice.
The evening before this interview I spent talking to another of the union officials, who spoke of