Going Home - Doris May Lessing [76]
And when I saw Mr Todd himself he exclaimed: ‘It’s a terrible thing! If I were trying to sell steel or Kariba or something with big profits, then I’d have no difficulty. But when I ask for money for something useful, like native housing, or agriculture, they won’t give me the money.’
I was shown over Bulawayo’s African housing projects.
The same as all the other cities: the majority of the Africans living crammed in the bad old lines and shacks and shanties, and then the new model townships outside the town.
Dr Holleman was enthusiastic and hopeful about providing better beer-halls and entertainment places instead of the ugly prison-like beer-halls that now exist, which are mostly stretches of bare dust surrounded by wire, with a few wood benches in them—like chicken runs. He is a South African, and seemed to feel badly because the Union is under fire, when he says housing and welfare projects are on the same level as in the Federation, and sometimes much better.
‘Everyone pats the Federation on the back, no one has a good word for the Nationalists, but the housing for natives is much better than here.’
There are one or two model townships in each city. An African is lucky if he can find a place in a house in one of these. In some, the houses can be bought. A model township looks like a thousand dolls’ houses set out in neat rows. Sometimes they are very pretty, Highfield, in Salisbury, for instance; for someone with a marvellous sense of colour has designed the township as a whole, breaking up the regularity and uniformity of the place by painting the houses into individuality—not each house the same, but each one differently, porches, windows and doors emphasized by lime-green, yellow, magenta, ice-pink, blue-green, scarlet and cobalt, so that the township glitters on a slope against the bright blue sky.
The houses, considered as houses, are shocking.
The white people say: ‘They are better than the huts they are used to.’
But while brick and breeze-block and board may be more hygienic than mud and thatch, what matters is the space. A family in an African village does not live in one hut, but in two or three big, airy huts, with as much space as there is in a medium-sized white house. Now, in these model townships, a family must live in two handkerchief-sized rooms. Some houses, a few, have indoor lavatories and showers; but most have the lavatories at the back of the house; so that each minuscule house has its miniscule lavatory, like a sentry-box, stuck mathematically behind it.
In these townships the people live on every level, from a prim, proud suburbanity, in Victorian stuffiness, with shiny suites of furniture, antimacassars, heavy curtains, every surface covered with ornaments, through degrees where they may sleep on the floor wrapped in blankets but eat off a table; or sleep all in one big bed and eat squatting outside around a wood fire; or simply transfer their village habits straight into this urban setting, so that, looking through a doorway into the two minute rooms like large dog-kennels, at the rolled sleeping blankets, the cooking pots, the tin plates, a sack of grain or a sieve of ground-nuts, one imagines oneself standing in a village in the bush, looking into the doorway of a traditional hut.
The welfare officers busy themselves, and with the greatest faith and devotion, trying to make life palatable against odds. The women, they complain, are lazy, they don’t take an interest in gardening as they do in their villages; the children don’t get looked after properly; the people don’t take hygiene seriously; the lavatories aren’t kept clean. And: ‘A family comes into town, you see the children losing their pot-bellies, the woman learns to keep house and cook and sew—then they go off back to the villages, to the old ways and the children die or get sick, and they forget everything they ever learned from us about hygiene and vitamins.’
Sewing classes, cooking classes, child-welfare