Going Home - Doris May Lessing [47]
5
For two weeks I had been meeting Partners, Useful Rebels, Interracialists and supporters of the new anti-colour-bar society, Capricorn. I had attended a Capricorn meeting addressed by Colonel Stirling and Laurens van der Post and seen something that would have been impossible eight years ago: a white audience applauding a black man. In 1943 a few members of the Labour Party held a meeting in a Native Township where such matters as the Passes Act and the Destocking Act were discussed. This meeting caused such a furore among the citizenry, such a flood of newspaper leaders, angry letters signed ‘Pro Patria’ and anonymous letters that ultimately it led to the breaking up of the Labour Party. A decade ago the Labour Party split on the issue of whether there should be an African Branch of the party. Now, in 1956, I heard five hundred applauding speeches about racial harmony; and all the political parties court African membership. Day and night I had been besieged by people who wished me to report that Partnership was an honest policy—people who believed, or rather wished to believe, that it is.
I never did believe it to be true that one has to live in a country to understand what is happening in it. I believe it even less now. One cannot be brought up the daughter of a white settler with impunity; and it is hard to withstand the persuasions of old friends whom one not only likes but respects.
In short, I was on the verge of succumbing to the blandishments of what must be the most effective public relations officers in the world, both official and self-appointed, when I met an old African friend to whom I confessed my state of mind.
He listened with the sardonic good humour with which Africans meet the involuted defences and rationalizations of their white allies, and told me to go off and have another look at the Land Apportionment Act.
He also said that having worked in the Union as well as in Southern Rhodesia he infinitely preferred the Union; and so did most of the Africans he knew who had the opportunity to compare them. ‘Apartheid’, he said, was an honest word, exactly describing the segregation patterns of the Union and also of Southern Rhodesia. ‘Partnership’ was a typical bit of British hypocrisy. There was nothing he disliked more, he said, than the British liberal, having his cake and eating it; give him the Nationalists every time—they said what they thought and meant. They were honest opponents.
This upset me. I had not suspected that the ghost of a perverted patriotism still lurked among the meshes of the stern pattern of my Socialism; I did not like to think of British Africa being worse than Nationalist South Africa.
But I exorcized the ghost, and set myself to ask all the Africans I met, who knew South Africa, which they preferred. They all said that within the segregation patterns, which were identical, there were much better amenities for Africans in the south: they could shop, for instance, being served on equal terms with the whites. The colour bar was much less rigid. There were hotels and restaurants on a civilized level—only a few, but better than nothing, and there was nothing in Southern Rhodesia.
So I restored myself by a couple of evenings with the Land Apportionment and other Acts.
Briefly, then: Southern Rhodesia has modelled itself on the Union: a law passed down south is always passed within a year or so in Southern Rhodesia, under a different name. The Land Apportionment Act is the basis of Southern Rhodesia policy, as the Group Areas Act is in the Union. In both countries land is parcelled out into areas called Native and European. In Southern Rhodesia only 46 per cent of the land still remains to the Africans. (Whereas in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland about 5 per cent has been taken from them.) Since Partnership, this basic segregation has been hardened, not relaxed. Thousands of Africans have been forcibly moved off ‘European’ land, where they had been living for generations, into Reserves.
Here I quote from that revealing document, the Report