Going Home - Doris May Lessing [70]
In a courtyard in another part of the location, consisting of ten single rooms built around an unroofed, unfloored space, where the cooking and washing were done, about fifty people, men, women and children, were living. From the entrance to this court one could see, a hundred yards off across the dust, a straggling group of iron-dome shapes stuck here and there on the ground. That was where some of the municipal employees lived. A woman from the court said primly to me: ‘Do not go there, madam. Those are very poor, rough people. They are no good.’
I began to walk off towards this camp, but was stopped quickly by my guide—for I had not got official permission to enter the location on this occasion. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘are you crazy? You can’t just wander about here looking at things like that. If you stay in the car with me, it’ll be all right: if any of the superintendents see you, they’ll think you’ve got permission. But they don’t let people in to see these conditions as a rule.’
So I did not see inside the iron kettles where the poor, rough, no-good people lived.
Then I drove on down to Bulawayo. There was nothing I enjoyed more, during the whole trip, than the driving very fast over those good, empty roads, between one little town and the next. Sometimes a ploughed field, sometimes the sharp green shimmer of late mealies, but mostly empty, rolling bush, with nothing, not a single human being, in sight. Sometimes I stopped the car and left it and went off into the bush and sat in the grass under a tree for the pleasure of being alone. I had not been alone in seven years. In London one can never be alone, not even with the doors locked and the telephone off the hook. Always there is the pressure of people. But here, it seemed, I was breathing free for the first time since I left home. No one knew where I was. All around me, acres and acres of empty country. It was like being a child again, when I spent all day alone by myself in the bush.
But, alas, I was being a journalist, and had responsibilities, so I had to move on again, down towards Bulawayo.
Bulawayo is not a pretty town, like Salisbury with its gardens and trees. Salisbury is the civil service town, rather smug and dull. Bulawayo is commercial and ugly, and much more lively and enterprising. It is typical of Bulawayo that the cooling towers of the power-station rise from the middle of the town, are not pushed off to one side as they are in Salisbury. One approaches Bulawayo through factories, watching how the cooling towers lift above the town; they are pale, squat, beautiful curved shapes, lightening and darkening as the heavy smoke sifts the sunlight over them.
In Bulawayo I interviewed a great many people, but they said nothing that had not already been said in Salisbury.
A visit to the Hope Fountain Mission, a few miles outside of Bulawayo. It is a London Missionary Society place, the oldest in the country, dating from Lobengula’s time; and a house there is built on the site of one where the Rudd concession was signed.
It is run by a pleasant and humorous couple, Mr and Mrs Partridge. In their house I met some of the African teachers. We discussed Partnership, and how Mr Todd was helping the missions with generous grants of money.
The teachers told stories about the colour bar with a gentle humour entirely unbitter.
The girls said that when they went into the shops to buy, the white assistant called them ‘nanny’. ‘Here, nanny!’ or: ‘Not that counter, nanny!’ And the men