Going Home - Doris May Lessing [67]
‘The reason why we white people aren’t happy is because we suffer from a guilty conscience.’
‘Guilty conscience my foot! They never think about the poor Kaffirs. They only think about the colour bar and Partnership and all that. That’s different. The more civilized people get, the unhappier they are. Are you happy? No, God knows you are not. Am I happy? No. Is Doris here happy? Well, if she is she has no right to be. Do we know anyone who is happy?’
‘Well, dear, we are learning to be happy on a higher level.’
‘Is that it? Well, in that case, you have my best wishes.’
Father Huddlestone has just begun his campaign in Britain: someone told me today that in the Stock Exchange news on the South African radio it said: ‘Kaffirs are down two points, due to the activity of certain clerics in Britain.’
Long conversation about politics, or rather the colour bar, with a man who was described to me as ‘another of you blasted Communists’. An Englishman who has lived in South Africa most of his life, he has been in Southern Rhodesia five years.
‘Communism,’ he said, ‘is ruining Britain.’ He meant the Labour Party.
Then he said: ‘I wish all you blasted people would shut up. You and Father Huddlestone and the rest of you. You’ll only frighten off the whites who are taking Todd and his Partnership quite quietly at the moment. It’ll be your fault if they get cold feet and clamp down.’
(Similarly, Lord Malvern blamed the Reverend Michael Scott for the bloodshed in Nyasaland when there was rioting over Federation: the deaths, he said, were on Michael Scott’s head.)
‘Of course I have no colour feeling myself. I don’t mind any man educated to my level coming to my house. In the Club they call me a Red. But I wouldn’t ask the plumber’s mate to dinner in England, and I wouldn’t here, white or black.’
Finally, after pursuing this line for some time, he concluded: ‘Your kind of talk makes me tired. You’ve got to have some loyalty to your own kind. My friends are Europeans.’
I have been hearing a great deal of talk about a novel, written by Donald Leavis of Bulawayo, called Voices in Every Wind. It is described as very seditious. No one has read it, and it is not in any of the bookshops.
At last I ask an old friend of mine who works in a public relations job if he has a copy. He says: ‘You won’t find a copy of that anywhere. The CID came to me when it came out, because I am supposed to be a literary type, and said they were going to ban it. They said it had sex in it between black and white—a rape scene. I told them not to be silly, it would only draw attention to it. They just went round the bookshops and had a word with the managers. The book disappeared from sight, as it were.’
Later I managed to get hold of a copy of this book. It is an intelligent novel, describing what might happen in Central Africa if things went the way they did in Kenya. It has been deliberately killed by silence and the helpful co-operation of the booksellers.
In South Africa, which is supposed to be so much less liberal than Central Africa, books like Gunther’s Inside Africa, and others equally critical of the Nationalists, sell openly and in large numbers. I have been asked why it is that the Nationalists are so tolerant about the kinds of books they allow to be sold. They will pounce on books that suggest sexual equality between black and white—their mania causes the oddest books to be confiscated: Black Beauty, for instance, until it was suggested they should read it to see what it was about. But the most critical books are on sale, provided they are not tinged with Marxism.
Perhaps the words of a Nationalist publisher I met seven years ago in Johannesburg might suggest an answer: ‘You Kaffir-boeties can go on talking,’ he said, good-naturedly enough. ‘We’ve got the police.’
And, from another Nationalist: ‘We don’t mind books. The Kaffirs don’t read books, they read the newspapers. And we don’t mind what the whites read.’
In Salisbury I was told by someone trying to buy Gunther’s Inside Africa that