Going Home - Doris May Lessing [75]
So shortage of housing is perpetuating polygamy, or a form of polygamy.
Dr Holleman, talking about ‘spares’, suggested they were not true prostitutes. Immediate, and even shocked, disagreement from other officials: ‘If they aren’t prostitutes, what are they, then?’
‘These women are a menace,’ said one. ‘All they care about is money and a good time. They’ll leave their children with an old woman, or a relative, and go off after money.’
‘And you can always tell the “spares” in a group of women; they are well dressed, and they don’t carry their babies on their backs. And they look so damned insolent.’
I suggested that perhaps the ‘spare’ was a phenomenon of industrializing Africa; in Basil Davidson’s book, The African Awakening, he described how the women of the cities in the Congo refuse marriage because they do so much better by themselves. And people familiar with the big cities of the Union say the same thing.
‘There is no solution to this,’ said an official, ‘until we can house all the workers with their families. Until we can give the African a normal family life, we’ll have prostitutes.’
‘But supposing,’ asked one, ‘the African woman prefers not to marry even then?’
Here is a quotation from a letter by an African to the African Weekly; he begins by saying he has travelled widely in Northern Rhodesian towns, mines and villages, and says that ‘prostitution is the gravest thing facing our community today’. He ends: ‘The most dangerous side of this practice is its impact on family life. Some of the prostitutes I have met do not want to hear any word about marriage. To them marriage is the end of a profit-making career; it removes their freedom to go wherever they like. Now, knowing as we do that successful married life is the basis of any good society and the foundation of a God-fearing nation, we cannot be satisfied that they take such a poor view of married life. We cannot do without it, neither should our women be permitted to frown on it like that.’
It was generally concluded that adequate housing would solve this problem.
In short, the conversation ended on a familiar note: we all knew there is no hope of housing all the people who are coming into the towns on anything like a decent level; yet, if they are not housed properly, then the claims of Partnership will be proved false; it is intolerable that Partnership might fail; therefore better evade the issue. And so a sort of chivalry stops one, when with these earnest and sincere Partners, from pointing out these obvious facts; one begins to feel it would be in positive bad taste to say: ‘Yes, but look at the economics of the thing.’
Report on Native Affairs, 1954: ‘The presence of squatters in Municipal Areas and their peri-urban precincts is a persistent problem, the only satisfactory solution for which is the provision of adequate housing. Local authorities have been handicapped in this work by lack of finance, and Government failure to obtain overseas the amount of capital required to launch a full programme to provide housing for Natives was a bitter disappointment to municipalities and other authorities.’
Italics mine. To avoid taxing the big companies, and so that the privileged whites should not have to put their hands in their pockets, the Government goes hat in hand overseas, asking for money for native housing, education, and the Land Husbandry Act, as if the natives were a kind of responsibility for the international conscience.
‘Do you want Partnership to succeed? Yes? Then give us the money. And if you don’t give us the money, this proves you don’t understand our problems, and if Partnership fails it is your fault, not ours.’
A Government official from Northern Rhodesia said about Mr Todd’s trip to America to raise money: ‘Well, these Americans are not such fools after all. They know quite well what’s going on. Why should they fork out money, when they know that white farms are hundreds or thousands of acres big, and an African farm at best is a couple