Going Home - Doris May Lessing [42]
Time and again it was said to me, either jubilantly or with regret: ‘If you want to see the natives badly treated, then you should see the people just out from Britain: they are worse then anyone, much worse than the old Rhodesians.’ And: ‘We thought that a big influx of immigrants from Britain would strengthen liberal opinion, but not a bit of it.’
In Bulawayo I met a group of young women who had left £7 a week typing jobs in London and were now earning £60, £70, £80 a month. In the accents of the more refined women’s magazines, they were complacently exchanging the phrases I have been hearing all my life: ‘These Kaffirs are so backward.’ ‘In Britain they don’t understand our problems.’ ‘It has taken us two thousand years to become civilized…’ and so on.
Another kind of immigrant: a white man, newly arrived in Southern Rhodesia, full of indignation at the colour bar, goes to the Matopos to Rhodes’s grave. He finds two African watchmen on guard.
He says reproachfully: ‘How can you allow yourself to guard the grave of the man who enslaved you, who tricked your ancestors out of their land?’
A guard interrupts him: ‘Mind, baas! You are treading on the grave.’
While the post-war immigrants are not a sympathetic lot, there is no more touching group of people than the white workers who left Britain during the hungry and unemployed ‘thirties. In Africa they found, for the first time in their lives, a good standard of living and some sort of security. They were white men. They were baases. At immense cost, often borrowing the money to do it, they left their own country with their wives and families. They had to conform, if they did not have the money to leave again. Some couldn’t stand it, and left. They were the best or the luckiest. Some said they would leave when they had saved the money. But when that time came, if it ever did—for if wages are high then so are the standard and cost of living—well, it is a beautiful climate, and in Britain one does not have servants. So they stayed and conformed. And in order to drown their consciences, for they are after all products of the British Labour Movement with its traditions of brotherhood between man and man, they adopt the shabby phrases which justify the colour bar and shout them louder than anyone else.
And the big industrialists, who are all liberals to a man—for to hear them talk one would imagine that the copper mines, gold mines and industries are there solely for the philanthropic purpose of uplifting the African, and it takes quite an effort of will to remember the millions of pounds that flow out to overseas investors—these liberal industrialists never cease to complain about the reactionary white trade unions. Yet the privileged white worker was the deliberate creation of earlier industrialists; and it is a policy which has boomeranged, for there he stands, blocking the path to cheap black labour.
Not, I should imagine, for long: I was told that when the representatives of the World Bank were out reporting on the investment possibilities of Federation, their chief doubt was the shortage of African labour. In a decade, they said, industrialization would be hamstrung for lack of labour, because the industrial colour bar keeps Africans unskilled and inefficient, because it keeps wages down and restricts the internal market and perpetuates poverty, disease, and early death. So far the private investor has not shown much interest in the Federation; it is the public funds which make Kariba and other enterprises possible. Federation considers its future