Going Home - Doris May Lessing [71]
They are very poor. A matriculated teacher is paid £20 a month; a teacher with the Cambridge School Certificate, plus teacher training, gets £14 a month.
Many male teachers leave their work because they can earn more money in other jobs.
But for the women there is no alternative, unless they want to look after children at a few shillings a month, or to be trained again as nurses. A woman teacher, with a teacher-training certificate gets about £8 a month.
Many of these teachers pay out of their small wages for the education of a younger brother and sister. For instance, a girl on the staff here pays £20 a year for her sister to be trained as a teacher.
Two things were particularly discussed. One, the uses and abuses of correspondence courses, which are immensely popular. It costs £12 cash, or 14 guineas in instalments, to take the junior certificate and £25 for matriculation. This is a great deal of money to find out of ordinary wages of £4, £5, £6 a month. Many begin the courses and find they cannot keep up the instalments. But in spite of these difficulties a great number of people manage to pass the examinations. Three Africans in Southern Rhodesia have got university degrees by correspondence course.
But while these courses help a number to get an education who could not otherwise do so, there are some unscrupulous firms, operating particularly from the Union, which batten on the ignorance of Africans about legal matters. For instance, there are many cases where people who had only filled in the form asking for a propaganda booklet have been sued by the firms for the full costs of the course. Some, terrified, paid the money; others were rescued by wordly-wise friends.
The other thing discussed—and I was to hear it talked of many times—was the problem of the African who wants to take secondary education and can find no place in the schools. At immense cost and sacrifice an African will get his Standard VI certificate and then find there is nothing he can do but become an unskilled labourer.
‘The argument is,’ said Mr Partridge, ‘that a white child must have at least primary education even if he ends up by being a farm assistant or a ganger, and what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But the Africans do not see it in this way. For them, education is the path to a better life, or otherwise it is wasted.’
I heard this point put in various ways: for instance, about the kind of books that are popular in libraries. On the Copper Belt there is an attractive library attached to one of the mines. The official who showed me over it said that novels, plays or poetry were never taken off the shelves, while biographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and do-it-yourself books could not be supplied in big enough quantities.
‘The African,’ said this man with disapproval, ‘is not interested in knowledge for its own sake, but only in knowledge that will pass an examination or get him a bigger wage.’
The novels in this library were mostly forgotten Victorian fiction; not a sign of that now considerable body of novels written in the last decade about modern Africa. I suppose it is not realistic to expect it, since all these novels are without exception a protest against the system. But while the authorities do not provide these novels in libraries—one official said he would not ‘waste money in future on novels’—I noticed that all the Africans I met had read at least Cry the Beloved Country. So when what few African libraries there are cease to provide a home for rejects from the white libraries, fiction might become more popular.
The plays in this particular library were the complete works of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and J. M. Barrie. They had, said my guide, in the voice of one who says ‘I told you so!’ never been taken out.
Mr Partridge, however, an intelligent and practical man, does not talk this sort of nonsense; and his mission is a friendly and hopeful place where white people and black people like each other.
And the country around it is beautiful;