Going Home - Doris May Lessing [86]
I asked if convict labour was being used; he said he had never heard of convict labour—in the tones of a man well-used to unjust accusations. I pointed out that the new aerodrome near Salisbury is being built almost entirely by convict labour and that I had repeatedly heard rumours of convict labour being used on Kariba. But he heatedly denied it.
He was proud of the social amenities for his Africans—football and hockey, a cowboy film once a week, and regular lectures on hygiene. There is a choir which is popular, tribal dancing (which is not—‘perhaps because there are so many different tribes here’), and a jazz-band. There would be primary schooling for all the African children, but no secondary schooling. All Africans are vaccinated on arrival and made to take quinine regularly. Domestic servants are examined regularly for venereal disease, but not the ordinary labourers.
The Africans working here, like those everywhere else, will be virtually the property of the company which employs them, housed, fed and regulated by the employers, under Government inspection.
Lastly we went to the site itself, where the dam is being built. As we approached, a crocodile drove straight up-stream in the middle of the river, like a speedboat, away from the noise of the construction. Between high wooded banks, cables were slung over the water; a suspension bridge, half-finished, jutted across the stream; piles stood in the river-bed; and on the bank we stood on, a road was being built: gangs of Africans under European supervision.
I went down the deep tunnel which drove to water-level where the tunnel was under construction to take the main flow of the water when the dam itself was building; it was like going down a mine, damp and hot, with the electric lights shining dimly along earth roof, and the great cables unrolling downwards.
Then it was time to leave, for we wanted to get back to Salisbury that night.
Just past the turn-off on the main road, there is a little grass kiosk in the bush at the roadside, with a sign on it: ‘Drink Coca-Cola.’ Paul wanted to make a drawing of this evidence of the Coca-Cola revolution; so we stopped the car. He went off to draw, while a crowd of fascinated African children collected, and the Kaffir-fowls scratched about; and I sat in the car and drank Coca-Cola. Suddenly a big car came up along the road the way we had come very fast and stopped with a screaming of brakes, just behind our car. The man in it immediately got out; but he did not buy Coca-Cola. He stood for a moment, looking at the number-plate on our car; then remained standing on the road, looking suspiciously at Paul, who was sitting on his stool drawing, and suspiciously at me.
This went on for some minutes. I took another look at him and thought I knew his face. Then I understood it was not the face I recognized, but the expression on it. What was it? Of course! This was the look of those Afrikaner special branch police in the Jan Smuts airport, while they were shepherding me on to the plane like a pack of dogs herding one sheep.
But what could the CID be doing here?
Making sure that I did not, after my warning, take this route up into Northern Rhodesia? Making sure that I was not making seditious speeches to the group of black children, the chickens and the mongrel dogs and the salesman at the kiosk and his friends who were now gathering around from a nearby village to watch the process of drawing?
But there was no doubt it was the CID. I think Governments should employ mercenaries for this sort of work; true believers are a bad policy; for there are countries where one can pick out the political police streets away by their look of disgusted and irritated hatred. This man walked up and down the road for half an hour, looking at Paul, looking at me, as if he would like to wring both our necks if only there was a law to permit it. When Paul had showed his drawing to the Africans,