Going Home - Doris May Lessing [66]
‘But,’ I said, ‘the Reserve near Salisbury had its huts in natural groups.’
‘Quite so. The Government has decided this martial arrangement of huts is bad, partly because it depresses the poor natives to live so, and because, now we have the Native Land Husbandry Act, we are going to have a fine, healthy individuality, and competitive individualism is much more effective than policing. But—there is no money in the Reserves. And there isn’t likely to be, and so for a long time things will go on as they are. If you fly over the country, what do you see? You can pick out a Native Reserve because instead of miles of empty bush, which is a white farm, there is a long line of single huts, with close-packed strips of cultivation beside it, not an inch of soil wasted. And please remember that the vast majority of natives live like this. It is the minority who are in the towns. So I come to the first of the long line of miserable huts, and out swarm a million ragged children, shouting and laughing and pleased to death to see me, shouting, “Sir, Sir, let us show the way to the school.” They perch all over the car like tick-birds on an elephant. We drive over the ruts at the edge of the cultivated land because there isn’t a road, passing half a dozen nice churches. Because a life and death struggle goes on all the time between the different churches about who is to convert who. Sometimes one cuts another’s throat; so there’s only a couple of churches, and sometimes they live side by side in happy harmony, only bickering a little, five, six, seven of them, competing for the souls of the heathen. And then we come to the school, which is a shack of some sort, mostly built by the parents of the children, in the intervals of their other work, which is to keep body and soul together. Sometimes the kids are sitting on the mud floor, and sometimes they are sitting on the benches; sometimes they have a blackboard, and sometimes they haven’t. And there they all are, happy as anything, being educated by a Standard IV teacher. And in all the Reserve there is no telephone, there is nothing. Neither telephone, nor radio, nor electric light, nor running water, nor books, nor newspapers. Nothing, nothing. They might as well be on the moon. There is a choice of churches, and mealie-porridge to eat, and a whole lot of visiting Government officials like myself telling them they must become civilized. So I inspect the school, very efficient and uplifting, and I leave that Reserve accompanied by a million happy kids, waving and shouting good-bye. So I drive to the next Reserve in a very bad temper, where another batch of a million kids swarm around shouting, “Hello, Sir; good morning, Sir!” ’
‘Now, dear,’ says his wife, ‘you aren’t being positive.’
‘Well, I don’t feel positive. I’d like to shake the lot of them. What right have they got to be so bloody happy living like that?’
‘You wouldn’t want them to be miserable, surely?’
‘No. Yes, I would. No. But what gets me is now they are getting educated they are going to be miserable and full of complexes like us. When I walk into a room full of teachers I can pick out all the Standard Sixes because they look so damned serious and full of responsibility. And when I say to them, all formal and inspiring: “What do you want to do with your lives?” up shoot their hands and they say, “Please, Sir, we will devote our lives to uplifting our people.” And they all look as miserable as a lot of wet cats.’
‘But, dear, you aren’t being consistent.’
‘Why should I be consistent? But look at us—we make me sick! But those bloody little kids are as happy as anything. They have a whale of a time, being backward and miserable.’
‘That isn’t a progressive way of thinking at all, dear.’
‘Provided I act progressively I don’t see it matters how I think. Aren’t I educating and civilizing the