Going Home - Doris May Lessing [89]
This is the voice of the Congresses.
The men who lead the Congresses are intelligent politicians who understand the modern world. The whites see them as raving seditionaries. Behind these men are a massed, embittered population. This is the same situation as in Kenya before the outbreak: the national movement was suppressed, because it demanded a share in government. Behind it was Mau Mau.
Behind the Congresses in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is Mau Mau, perhaps half a step behind.
The motion behind Mau Mau was a very natural desire for revenge for humiliation, for being made slaves in their own country.
In arguing with Africans who support Mau Mau—for at the bottom of every African heart is a profound natural sympathy with Mau Mau—I have been saying: ‘I have every sympathy with Mau Mau; it is the fault of the white idiots in Kenya that this bitter war began. But I think it was a mistake to fight knowing that you could not win, that you were bound to be destroyed, your people made captive, your leaders hanged, everyone humiliated and discouraged.’
To which the reply is: ‘You destroyed our national organization, you took from us every hope of sharing in the government of our country—so what did you expect us to do? We fought with what means we could. We showed at least that we were not cowards and slaves. And the fact that we could fight at all put heart into Africans all over Africa.’
That we comes from Africans who are not Kenyans, as well as those who are, from Africans who identify themselves as completely with the black side in Kenya as that white South African announcer identified himself instinctively and completely with the Kenyan white settlers.
The voice of the national Congresses is the most powerful factor in Central Africa now: it will determine what happens there; it is the bitter, desperate, proud, angry voice of a people betrayed to the gods of money and expediency.
I re-read the preface to John Bull’s Other Island. Here is Bernard Shaw on the ‘Curse of Nationalism’:
It is hardly possible for an Englishman to understand all that this implies. A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else, and is forced to place himself, to the exclusion of all better company, in the hands of quacks who profess to treat or cure cancer…English rule is such an intolerable abomination that no other subject can reach the people. Nationalism stands between Ireland and the rest of the world…a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation…There is indeed no greater curse to a nation than a nationalist movement which is only the agonizing symptom of a suppressed natural function. Conquered nations lose their place in the world’s march because they can do nothing to strive to get rid of their nationalist movements by recovering their national liberty…
I intended to try to get up north, even though I was told I would be forbidden. So I waited a week, delaying my plans, to see that statesman who, I had been told, intended to prevent me. I interviewed him as a journalist and did not ask his permission to go north, which I could not do, in any case, since I had promised my informant not to say a word of what he had told me. But I said that I was going, to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and waited for him to forbid me. He said nothing, rather grimly, admittedly, but he said not a word. So I made plans to go to Northern Rhodesia.
An interview with Lord Malvern, Prime Minister of the Federation. He used to be my mother’s doctor, when he still practised as one; and I had often heard him speak at meetings when I was a child. He is an old man now, sitting behind a big desk under a portrait of Cecil John Rhodes in a long room where