Going Home - Doris May Lessing [63]
‘No, I would say it is easy to understand. But should we not consider, too, that Act which is called the Subversive Activities Act, and that Act which is cited as the Public Order Act? For these Acts are indeed a yoke around our necks.’
‘Ah, truly, it is time the hearts of the Europeans changed towards us.’
‘It is time they turned their hearts towards good will and understanding between the races, yes, my friend, I agree with you.’
These novels all had the same plot; it is the story of an African who comes from his village in the Reserve into the white man’s town, and—I make a point of this for the benefit of reviewers, one of whom complained of a novel that ‘it had the South African plot’—this is the story of the African in modern Africa. If art, then, is to have any relation to life, stories about contemporary Africa are likely to be based somehow on this plot. And is it not, after all, one of the world’s ten—or is it twelve?—basic plots?
Another thing I was taught by these novels. It was to be suspicious of that warning which all white writers from colourbar countries get from their white progressive friends. ‘Do not attempt,’ this admonition goes, ‘to write about Africans, for no white person can understand the African soul.’
For a long time I paid heed to this, until it occurred to me that it might well be another type of Displacement; another way of shifting colour-bar emotions on to an apparently harmless point.
For when I read these novels, I saw that there was nothing of the mysterious African soul in them at all. They could all have been written of Britain in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It was all there, the warmth, and the space, and the humour; the religious and moral earnestness, with many warnings against that solace of the oppressed and poverty-stricken, the Demon Drink.
But the most extraordinary thing about these novels was that I saw, suddenly, my home town Salisbury, that peaceful, cushioned, pretty, boring little town, from the underside. Here it was, a wild, police-ridden, precarious, dangerous place, lit most luridly by fires of crimes and alcohol and drugs, beguiled by wicked women and evil men, among whom the good people of the town lived from one moment of hard-won security to the next. These novels were all picaresque. Tom Jones might have been the hero of any one of them; Joseph Andrews might be met round any corner. Moll Flanders would have found herself perfectly at home; and Fagin’s gang of bad lots could swap one set of narrow streets for another with nothing to astonish them but the sunlight.
In the African Weekly there is a serial story about two young men called Hatichke and Munhira. Hatichke is a rogue, and Munhira tries to keep him out of trouble and prison. The author, someone called ‘Nhaudzimere’, is in the great tradition of English moral writing; that is, he writes of wickedness so entertainingly that it sounds much more interesting than virtue.
Here, by permission of the editor of the African Weekly, are two instalments of this tale (not continuous)—one where Hatichke goes to prison; and one where Munhira goes home to his village, where he tells Hatichke’s parents of their son’s misfortunes:
Hatichke, Billy and Mubaiwa found life in the Prison Reserve unbearable. They were used to white-collar jobs, good food and suitable sleeping accommodation. Here the position was just the opposite and contrary to their expectation. Above all, after the first two days of admission they had gone through solitary confinement and had spare diet for three days. On Saturday they received three strokes with the cane each.
Munhira was anxious, in fact very anxious, to meet Hatichke. After obtaining the necessary documents to visit the Prison Reserve, Munhira met Hatichke there on Sunday afternoon. ‘Now, Hatichke! how much money did you make by your grand scheme?’ Munhira asked. ‘It was not my idea, Munhira. It was Billy’s idea and I must say life in jail is intolerably bad,’ Hatichke said. ‘But what did you