Going Home - Doris May Lessing [52]
This official, a pleasant young man obviously very enthusiastic about his work, said: ‘It will take three thousand years for them to get civilized.’ And then: ‘We must create a middleclass with some property.’
Next day I visited a Native Purchase Area. On these, Africans may buy plots of 50 to 200 acres. It is intended that these areas, at present for what the Native Commissioner called ‘the upperclass of Native who thinks himself every bit as good as we are,’ will ultimately merge with the Reserves, when the small peasants there have consolidated themselves and weeded out the weaker, and enlarged their units of land.
I saw several houses on the Purchase Area. They were like a poor white man’s house, brick-walled, with a corrugated-iron roof, and a minimum of furniture.
In each house was the basic family and many sons, daughters and cousins of allied families. The clan pattern is breaking up very slowly into the individual family pattern.
The first house we entered was owned by a friendly fat lady, curtsying at every second step, ‘Yes, Madam; no, Madam’ obviously well used to showing off her home to visitors. She had a little orchard of citrus trees, a run of fowls, and was very house-proud.
In the next house was an old man, who said deprecatingly: ‘We are very poor people here.’ Whereupon the Native Commissioner said sharply: ‘But you are much better off than you were.’ ‘But we are very poor people,’ he insisted.
He told me he had paid £10 a year to send his son to Domboshawa Mission to be taught the trade of building, and in return his son had built him his house for nothing. ‘My son is very good to me, very good to me,’ he insisted, and showed me the photograph of his son and his new daughter-in-law who would come to live in another little house next to his, to help him with his farming.
He earned £100 gross in a good year, £80 in a bad year; grew maize, rapoka, nuts, rice. He sold his rice and maize to the neighbouring European farmers for food for their labourers.
Another homestead was half-way between the African pattern and the European. It was a scattering of half a dozen brick huts, thatched, allocated among the twelve people who lived on this farm. They grew Turkish tobacco, munga, maize. The sons were employed in town. One son ran a lorry service, and helped his parents with the proceeds.
At the back of these houses young women were pounding grain in old-fashioned mortars, or spreading grain on racks to dry.
On one plot, under a light thatched roof open at the sides, about a dozen young women were sorting tobacco. They were hired from a neighbouring Reserve at 1s. a day. Work was going on with much laughter and enjoyment, until we appeared. They obviously resented us.
Employment of Africans by Africans is new. On the Reserve I saw a work-party in progress, which is a traditional way of getting a rush of work done quickly: the host family brews beer and cooks something specially good to eat, and invites friends and relations to do the job. But wages are ousting the work-party.
On another homestead the farmer, who was single and more prosperous than the others, said that he had employed two men but they had left him. ‘They didn’t like working for another African,’ he said. ‘Although I paid them as well as a European farmer, one £2 a month and one £4 a month; and they ate the same food as I did.’
He said he ate mealie porridge, with vegetables he grew, and a fowl for special occasions.
Points made by the Native Commissioner: That all these people had savings-bank accounts. That none had beasts up to the amounts allocated—in this area they are allowed forty-nine beasts each. That all the children went to school up to Standard III—that is, five years’ schooling. That the women owned sewing machines.
Both Purchase Areas and Reserves are always under the eye of the Native Commissioner; nothing can be done without his advice and permission. Under the Native Commissioners work the agricultural demonstrators, especially trained Africans who are the backbone