Going Home - Doris May Lessing [73]
‘For that matter, I don’t like being, given feathers with tar on them.’
‘Oh, you don’t?’—he was suddenly a small boy; it occurred to me that the things he was saying had the ritual quality of small boys’ insults in a quarrel. Then, in a burst: ‘I said I’d do it and I have. I have and that’s all.’
With which he got up, hesitated, and went to the door. At the door, he swung sharp around, and marched back between the crowded café tables. Then he said in a half-angry, half-appealing way, a call to my better nature as it were: ‘Hell, man, have some sense, man. You don’t want to put all these ideas into these munts’ heads, do you? You’ve lived here, it’s not that you don’t know. What do you want to put ideas into their heads for?’ He waited a minute, and then muttered, blue eyes wandering uneasily around: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t get it.’ Then he went out again, smartly marching as before, without looking back.
An invitation by Bulawayo’s courteous and liberal Dr Ashton, to hear Dr Holleman, an anthropologist attached to his department, lecture to a group of African welfare workers.
Dr Holleman lived for some time in a Mashona village, and has written a book about these people. He is particularly interested in how industrialization is affecting tribal patterns.
The room was in the Native Administration offices, and had about thirty African welfare workers in it, and three of the white officials.
Dr Holleman spoke well and clearly, and not at all in the patronizing way that is so common to white officials. He might have been delivering a lecture to a group of fellow-anthropologists.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, and ‘In other words, gentlemen,’ and I could see how the listening Africans liked his politeness.
But it was very cerebral. ‘The theme of my lecture, gentlemen, is the community. The African community. And the basis of community, which is the tribe.’
And with this he drew on the blackboard a circle—the tribe. ‘And the unit of the tribe is the kinship group.’
And with that he divided his circle into neat portions—the kinship groups.
‘And what gives the feeling of homogeneity in the village is the way these units are shaped.’
The Africans were listening very intently, and I was, too; for it was difficult for me to see the tribe as a circle and the kinship groups as segments of it.
Dr Holleman was explaining how these units were broken into and scattered by the young men going into the towns to work.
‘Gentlemen, nothing stays the same; everything changes; if you disturb one part of a cultural pattern, then every part of it changes. And so all your tribal patterns are changing, not only from the natural movement that is inevitable with time, but because of the single fact that the men are no longer part of the fabric of the tribe. You know that, of course, better than I do. But what I want to explain particularly today is how these changes have affected the lives of your women, and the role your women are playing—in the tribes, and also in the towns, when they follow their husbands into the towns.’
And now the lecturer broke off to explain how very wrong it is when people say—which so often they do—that African women are exploited and badly treated by their men. Newspaper men, officials, and all sorts of ignorant people, said Dr Holleman, are always complaining about the poor tribal women. And nothing could be farther from the truth.
The tribal woman is a person of consequence, with property rights and authority. And even this question of lobola, which is interpreted through European eyes as payment for a woman, is in fact proof of an opposite truth: lobola is a complicated and dignified ritual, and above all it expresses the value of the woman, and is a guarantee of her good treatment in the new family.
In the tribe, said Dr Holleman, the woman is weakest in her roles