Going Home - Doris May Lessing [61]
The next instalment began without explaining how Superman had got out of the red-hot lava; but he was now rushing around some place like Texas with the blonde on a horse, while the two managers now in a perfect frenzy, were shouting ‘Su-pair!’ at every bound of the horse, and capered and pranced over the bales in the dim light, while about three hundred Africans watched the screen in silence.
After Superman, a film was shown about skiing in Switzerland. Skiers whizzed down the snowy slopes one after another, and I heard an African mutter just behind me, half in admiration, half in disgust: ‘Those Mlungu! Look at them!’ (‘Those white men! Look at them!’)
Now the film show was over, and time for the people to go back to their damp and filthy huts for the night.
They piled in silence out of the doors of the grading-shed, while the indefatigable managers yelled ‘Su-pair!’ and made a few last dives and capers among the bales.
My host asked the boss-boy if he had understood what the last film was about, for snow never falls in this part of Africa; and he replied with extreme politeness: ‘It shows how the white men slide on sticks over ice.’
We then drove back the thirty miles to Salisbury, extremely fast. Twice something dark swooped from the stars down towards the windscreen, there was a soft squashy bump, and an owl fell in a struggling mass of feathers on the roadside.
6
About this time, three weeks out, I found myself succumbing to my own private form of the colour mania.
After those endless morning tea parties, those sundowner parties where, if the talk does manage to leave ‘the native problem’ for five minutes, it languishes, the intolerable boredom of this narrow, provincial place settled on me like an illness, and I found myself back at my old post, at a back window, watching the lively social life that goes on around the native quarters and in the sanitary lanes. I went around Harari, the African township which, if squalid, is gay and noisy and vital—and I went there as a white person whose very appearance freezes the spontaneity and the gaiety.
Supposing I were given permission to live in one of the townships? I would still be a white person and very properly resented by the Africans themselves. I could never live among black people without any notice being taken of me. And besides, it is against the law. Supposing I were given permission to live on one of the Native Reserves, then…
All this is madness. Not only is it inconceivable that I should be allowed to do anything of the kind, basically it has nothing to do with colour. If I were in a white country where the people had not yet been exhausted and confined by industrialism I would still be looking out of the window and envying them. Since I seem to have ‘chosen this damned profession where you have to use your brains all the time’, naturally I feel sentimental about those who do not.
Late-night fantasies: When I was a child I used to think ‘Supposing I blacked my face, and then…’ Half-asleep I think of the German General Lettow-Vorbeck who, during the First World War in Tanganyika, blacked his face and reconnoitred as an African in the enemy lines. So it is possible. But not without its difficulties, for a woman. When I am middle-aged, then all these problems will vanish, and then…
This fantasy of blacking one’s face is not confined to white people. A novel sent to me to read by an African had an episode in it where a kindly white man, wishing to share with his black friend the experiences of nightlife in Salisbury, blacked his face and went the round of the she beens and dance-halls. He was not discovered.
This novel was very interesting to me. It had two heroes, a good white man who defied the colour bar and adopted the other hero, a black youth, as a servant or friend. When he went out in the evenings he would say to this youth: ‘And now, when you have swept the room and washed up, if you are tired you may lie down on my bed and sleep.’
The white man suffered no ill-effects among his own kind for this behaviour: he seemed