Going Home - Doris May Lessing [77]
They look the same from city to city; because cheese-paring, mass-produced housing projects cannot produce much diversity of pattern; and often it is the same big firms which build them in several towns at once. They are unimaginably depressing and inhuman, and in five years they will be slums.
They are usually built a good way out from the white city, so that the people use bicycles to get to and from work, or walk the distance; sometimes there are bus services, but they are expensive.
In the old townships hostels are being built for single workers. I saw one in Bulawayo: a room has in it bunks in tiers; the men’s possessions are in bundles on shelves, or in a sort of iron-cage affair which can be locked, beside each bunk. The rooms are big, bare, empty places, like a barracks. All the bicycles are kept in the sleeping-room for fear of theft.
Outside the old locations and the new townships are squatters’ camps, for people who cannot get accommodation at all; and here houses are made of any material to hand—packing cases, beaten-out petrol and paraffin tins, bits of wood and sacking and cardboard. In Lusaka, for instance, which is a comparatively small town, there are twenty thousand people living in squatters’ camps.
Bulawayo, it is estimated, has about a hundred thousand Africans living in it.
A group of Africans I interviewed said as follows:
The majority of men live in the single rooms. Many live sixteen to a room. The charge of £1 a month is paid by the employer. In such a room there will be one wood stove with two cooking spaces—the men line up to do their bit of cooking on it.
They get up at 5.30 and walk to work 5 or 6 miles, buying a piece of bread or sixpence worth of bones for soup on the way.
Buses cost 7d. a trip—that is, over a shilling a day, which cannot be afforded by people earning £3 or £4 a month. About 10 per cent have bicycles.
At midday there is an hour’s break; they cook their soup on fires supplied by the employers, or eat the bread.
They walk back at five o’clock, cook their first good meal of the day at sundown.
At the native eating-houses meals can be bought: for 6d., maize porridge and two pieces of meat with soup liquor; for 1s., a proper meal with green vegetables and a sweet. But most use the eating-houses only on special occasions.
One man told me he was buying his house: £15 down, and the rest over thirty years. But the lease is only for forty years, so he is bitter because he will own his home for only ten years. ‘It is because they are afraid the white people will want to spread over where our townships are, so they won’t give us freehold unless we live miles away, and then we can’t afford the transport.’
And: ‘Here in Bulawayo the pass laws are administered leniently. It makes a great difference to us, not always worrying if we have forgotten one of our passes.’
This conversation concluded with: ‘Our wages are geared to the old idea of us Africans—mealie-meal porridge and a loincloth. But we are trying to live decently. It is impossible on our wages to live on the European pattern, so we do as best we can, half-way between the two.’
An evening at an adult night-school.
All classes are catered for up to Standard VI, with provision for leather-work and carpentry. The demand is such that the higher classes are all doubled—people have to be turned away.
Standing in the hall of this school, three young men were waiting to speak to the Superintendent, asking for a place in class. They went disconsolately away—no room until next term, possibly not till next year.
The Superintendent said: ‘No class is in demand that does not show immediate results in the form of a certificate that might lead to higher wages; there is no interest in books that are not required for the syllabus or are related to an examination.’
In the first classroom we entered, the teacher was writing on the board: ‘Increased poll-tax is good for Africans.’
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