Going Home - Doris May Lessing [84]
All this wild and noble country will be under water in a few wet seasons. This will be the biggest man-made lake in the world, 200 miles long, with a shore line of over 800 miles.
I said it was sad to think of that wonderful country vanishing under water; but my guide said if it is cruel to break an egg, it is nice to eat the omelette. He was not thinking about the Africans who live in that valley; but I asked him if he had heard that there was any trouble about moving the Africans; and he said the Native Commissioners were handling it.
Later that day another engineer said with a sort of good-humoured amusement: ‘They say that the natives of the valley don’t believe that the waters will come over their villages. They think it’s a trick to steal their land from them. It’s the Congressmen who work them up. But they’ll believe it soon enough when the water does start to rise.’
Our Frenchman was more interested in the immediate problems: very proud of the radio station on this mountain. No telephone lines were laid yet, so the radio linked with Chirundu, and through Chirundu to the big centres north and south. And all the supplies came through by lorry from Karoi, 125 miles away, or by aeroplane. As we sat on the mountain the planes were climbing and descending over the new air-strip, which in a couple of years will have gone under the lake. People were flown in and out for holiday week-ends; and all the officials and experts came in by air.
Paul Hogarth having finished his drawings, we descended the mountain and went up to the mess on a hill for lunch. The mess was an attractive little building, mosquito-gauzed, full of refrigerators and amenities. The lunch was the best sort of meal one can have in these parts, quantities of admirable cold meats and salads: this is a meat-eating country and rapid adjustment is needed after life in England, on finding the table loaded with pounds of meat at every meal, a steak covering a big plate, chops coming in half-dozens, refrigerators crammed with sirloins the size of boot-racks.
The people having lunch were mostly women and children, who had already moved in after their men. The children would have to be taught by correspondence course for some months yet; and the women would have to rely on each other for entertainment, with the men working so hard; for it was made clear that the people who came to work on Kariba were not clock-watchers and chair-sitters. They were there because they wanted something worth while to do, and to get out of the city and to be free and unconfined by civilization. Some of the men who had come first to the site, when there were only a handful working on it, had already left: with all these people being flown in, all these civilized amenities, and the women and the children, it was getting too tame for them.
Soon, everything would be tidied up and in order. There were two townships, one European and one African, being built up on twin hills, out of the reach of tsetse fly and mosquitoes; the roads would be good; schools would be built, and a fine hospital. It would be a centre, almost a city and was expected to stand for ten years, until the scheme was completed.
And at the end of ten years, what would happen to the two model townships on the twin hills? Why, then, if the industrialists had any sense, they would move their businesses up here, near to the source of power. Why shouldn’t Kariba become a real city, like a Copper Belt town?
But later, when I recounted this conversation to a businessman from Johannesburg, he said, not without malice: ‘Malvern and Welensky are mad—clean off their heads. They’re spending every penny of the credit of the country on Kariba,