Going Home - Doris May Lessing [78]
‘But the terrible thing is,’ said the Superintendent, ‘that when they do get their certificates, after such a battle, what then? They seem to think the certificate will be a passport to a white-collar job or higher education. I don’t know which is more heart-breaking—to have to turn them away when they come asking for a place in class or afterwards, when I have to say I can’t find better work for them or a place in secondary school.’
After the night-school, a session in the milk-bar. Juke-box, Coca-Cola, the white boys and girls in jeans and crew-cuts, shouting and yelling and playing the fool. Our friend the teacher looks at them for some time and remarks: ‘I loathe Americanization. This place is getting more American by the day. And as for these white kids, they give me the creeps. Morons, most of them. And then I think of my poor Africans eating their hearts out for an education and they can’t get it.’
This man says at length, and passionately, how he can’t stand white-settler civilization another minute. He is going to Britain. Yes, definitely, he is leaving, he can’t stand it. What’s the use of fighting this set-up? Ten years he’s been in it now, first South Africa, but he left there thinking the Federation would be better, and now Partnership is the last straw—most of the whites think Partnership is just a bad joke, and so it is. All his energy is spent fighting over details, a few extra shillings here, a slight relaxation of a law there—never anything fundamental.
Then he tells how one of his African staff, a teacher, knows Shakespeare by heart, is a natural actor. ‘What hope is there for him? Unless he leaves his own people and goes to Britain, he can’t even see a play, let alone act in one. When the Reps, put on their last show, I begged them, I pleaded, to let some of my Africans come—they said they didn’t mind, it was the audience they had to soft-soap. You’ll never find anyone who minds—it’s always the other fellow who’s the villain. No, I’m getting out.’
Five minutes later he was back on his passion—African education.
I said, ‘You know quite well you’re not leaving, and if you did, you’d be back again in six months. You’d pine for Africa.’
‘I’d pine for the Africans,’ he said. ‘They’re a wonderful lot. But of course I wouldn’t come back. What for? What good can a handful of us do?’ And then he grinned and said: ‘Of course you are quite right. I did leave once, and I came back again.’
Next evening, another night-school—this one a voluntary effort, the teachers giving one night a week of their time for the love of it.
In the Standard VI class I asked the first half-dozen pupils how they managed:
Up at five, with some bread to eat before leaving to walk five miles to the textile factory. They earned £1 2s. 6d. a week. Working hours, seven to five, with a half-hour break when they ate bread and drank tea. They went straight to evening classes from work, three hours every night. They lived in the brick lines, half a dozen to a room. It would take them three or four years to get the junior certificate.
I asked one what he would do then. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Do you want to be a teacher?’
‘No, teachers don’t get enough money.’
This class asked me to address them. I was in a dilemma. I could not speak my mind about the set-up without getting the people who ran the night-school into trouble.
But remembering how the Africans have to live under a continual pressure of contempt and insult from the white people, how they are always being called backward and ignorant and stupid, I said that the most exciting thing I had seen on my visit was how the Africans are fighting for an education; and how wonderful it was to see people who had to do hard physical labour all day working for hours every night, for the sake of knowledge. I said they were a richly endowed and talented people; and that, just as Africa is a wealthy continent with its wealth scarcely tapped, so, too, the African people are