Going Home - Doris May Lessing [80]
The supper of maize porridge was cooking on the fire outside—a handful of sticks in the dust, small flames, pale in the last sunshine around the big iron cooking pot.
The official said: ‘These conditions are as bad as anything in Britain during the industrial revolution. But thank God we’ve got the sun; we’ve got this magnificent climate. Imagine this squalor under an English sky.’
And, from another official, who asked me to make a point of writing about tuberculosis—how it is on the rampage, a particularly virulent form of it; and how one of the reasons why it is spreading fast from the crammed cities to the Reserves is because there aren’t enough hospital beds, so that the Africans when they are too ill to work are sent back to the villages: ‘Do you know what’s the mainstay of white supremacy? No, not the police. The sun. The only reason they get away with these dreadful conditions they make the natives live in is that the sunlight makes life tolerable.’
After I had left Bulawayo, I got a message telling me that the CID had been around interviewing the people I had seen, telling them I was a wicked and unscrupulous person, and they would get themselves into trouble if they consorted with such as me.
I know how these matters are conducted, because an African once described to me how, after he had been talking to a certain progressive churchman, the CID came around to his house.
‘So you’ve been complaining to Father X?’
‘Not complaining, no.’
‘You’ve been telling a pack of lies about your conditions?’
‘No, I would not say I have been telling lies.’
‘But you’ve been talking to Father X?’
‘There is no law against it, so far as I know.’
‘You’d better watch out. We’ve got our eyes on you. You needn’t think we don’t know what’s going on.’
8
Everybody talks about Kariba, with an odd mixture of resentment and pride: too big a project, they say, for two hundred thousand people—yes, of course it is an imaginative and bold step; but how can a handful of white people find £113,000,000?
This is the first big Federal project, a symbol of the success of Federation, a big dam on the Zambezi, 200 miles below the Victoria Falls. Before leaving Britain I had promised to find out as much as I could about the Africans who are working on it, and those who are being moved from the flood areas.
The Federal Hydro-Electric Board very kindly gave me permission to go up and see what was going on; and therefore, in our borrowed car, Mr Paul Hogarth and I set off one afternoon; for he wanted to make drawings on the dam site.
The road up north is the one I had driven over a thousand times as a child; it was the road into the city, and I was afraid it might be changed. For the first 20 miles out of Salisbury it has become a fine, wide highway; but after that there are strips and corrugations and dust-drifts; and I was able to think myself back into those interminable journeys in and out of town; for my father hated driving fast, and in any case our cars were always very old and could not do more than about thirty miles an hour.
Strips are a Southern Rhodesian invention; instead of surfacing a whole road, a double line of strips of tarmac are laid, just wide enough for the wheels. They are efficient if kept in order; if not they become sharply-edged pitted ledges swirling with sand. It was pleasant to drive over the familiar route, watching the stations go by—Mount Hampden; Darwendale, with its chrome mountain—the one over which the sun rose through my window at home—and its soil glittering with fallen chrome fragments; and then on to Maryland and Trelawney, which are sandveld, the earth of a beautiful pale, crusty gold. And next there was Banket, which was the station we used. Impossible to give any idea how much the station meant to us farmers who lived so far from town. The little clutch of corrugated iron-roofed buildings, a couple of stores, the garage, the post office, the station-master’s house—this was our town, and going to the station was always an event.
All the way from Salisbury I was telling myself