Going Home - Doris May Lessing [60]
We were driving through the compound as we talked; it was of brick huts, but a squalid, broken-down place, and everywhere were ragged, barefoot children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘They look happy enough, don’t they?’
My host of the grading-shed was also convinced of the happiness of his natives; but he did say that they were an unsatisfactory lot, very unstable, because they went off at the end of the season back to their kraals, and they never came back, although he offered a £2 bonus to any who would. He always had to recruit his natives afresh every season.
After the visit to the class, we went off to have supper in the farm manager’s house. It all made me feel as if nothing had changed and nothing ever could: the big, bare brick room, with the stars shining more brilliantly through the window than the light inside the room; the soft, hot air coming in; and the talk, which was, of course, about the colour problem.
But we had to hurry the meal, because there was to be a film show for the natives, and they didn’t like it to be late, since they had to get up at five in the morning.
At eight o’clock, then, we were back in the big grading-shed. We, the white people, sat on chairs beside the projector, and the women and the children sat forward, on the floor under the screen which had been erected; and the men stood on either side, leaning on tobacco bales or against the tobacco racks.
The farm managers were whooping up an atmosphere, shouting ‘Su-pair!’ For we were to show films of Superman, which it seems are popular with the Africans.
The lights went down; and the film began. It was about some wicked men in a skyscraper office in America somewhere, plotting against Superman. The villain appeared to be some sort of Beetle; but as Superman himself was, in his human guise, an undercover man inside the Beetle gang, the whole thing was very confusing to me; and the only person whose role was quite unambiguous was the beautiful blonde’s. There was a big fight at the top of the skyscraper, where Superman was throttling people and banging them like limp sacks against the walls; and at this point the audience was growling and roaring with excitement. The only points in the film where this audience showed unmistakable appreciation were when Superman was beating up someone.
There was a ramp from the top of the skyscraper to the street; and the blonde, who had passed out from stress and strain at the wheel of an immense car, was whizzing around and down this ramp, while Superman fled down the sky after her. He caught her at the bottom just before the car crashed into a wall, and then the lights went up.
The two white managers got up from their chairs and began clowning and throwing themselves around, shouting ‘Su-pair! Su-pair!’ while a few of the Africans laughed and played up, shouting back ‘Su-pair!’ Most looked embarrassed and sullen, however. All the time the reel was being wound back, the two white men were diving head first over bales, staggering around shaking their hands together over their heads, or, pointing their joined hands upwards, made as if to fly off upwards, like Superman.
To cries of ‘Su-pair!’ the lights went out; and we were now in the bowels of a mountain, where Superman was plotting against the Beetle for some good and noble end, but what this end would be was never made clear. At the end of this reel, the Beetle had thrown a switch which dissolved the mountain into lava; and Superman was wading waist-deep through red-hot lava thousands of feet under the mountain.
For five minutes or so the white managers clowned and postured, shouting ‘Su-pair!’ while my host explained he had these film shows every fortnight; it was expensive, of course, but he liked to do something