Going Home - Doris May Lessing [91]
A dull drum tom-toms in the brain,
Low thudding rising to a shout:
There have been years that no rain knew,
And skulls lay bleaching in the dust
That rose and clung like thickening rust
On everything that lived and grew.
Small skulls that are so pitiful,
I flesh your bones with anger, and
Inhabited you walk the sand
And watch the skies to see them fill.
Seven long years a drought can wait.
I think how with each year you cried—
You knew that hell before you died—
That rescue now would be too late.
The thick grey rocks compress you round.
The thick sky presses down like steel.
You have forgotten how to feel
Except as parched plants in parched ground.
Day after numbing day you grieve
For auguries of rain, and yet
You know that grieving you forget
How truly living people live.
Despair has taught you to rely
On memories of waterfalls
That broke from barren rocky walls,
Of bright drops squeezed from leaves half-dry.
Outside that house I walked up and down a few minutes, doing penance on behalf of the selective memory: after all, just because I don’t like to remember that year, and disapprove entirely of my state of mind at that time, it doesn’t mean to say it didn’t exist…
I am canvassed by innumerable people to support Capricorn.
Capricorn is not a political party, but a kind of ginger group. It deplores racial prejudice and makes all sorts of intelligent suggestions about breaking down the colour bar. It is admirable in a country like this that black and white people, even if only a few of them, should be able to sit around the same table at a committee meeting. It is admirable that white audiences should listen, at times, to black speakers. It is good that people should talk about harmony and understanding.
But then, so do the Partners—who have no intention of letting the African have any real share in the government of the country. Here is Lord Malvern, quoted in the Rhodesia Herald for May 19, 1956: ‘We want to indicate to the Africans that provision is made for them to have a place in the sun as things go along. But we have not the slightest intention of letting them control things until they have proved themselves and perhaps not even then. That will depend on my grandchildren.’
Lord Malvern’s recipe, and Sir Roy Welensky’s, for keeping the Africans in their place, is the weighted vote. A minority of privileged Africans will be allowed to vote, in key with the general policy of creating a malleable middleclass.
With this, Capricorn agrees. As a result of Capricorn, one finds all sorts of people sitting about and earnestly discussing the real nature of democracy. Obviously it cannot mean what it has come to mean in Europe; it does not mean ‘no taxation without representation’ or ‘one head one vote’. Not at all: only the civilized may vote. And the definitions of civilization all depend, directly or indirectly, on property qualifications. Therefore I cannot possibly support it. Not that I don’t believe that many of its supporters are quite sincere in saying that they hope, some time in the future, that the franchise will be extended to everybody. But a sop thrown out to keep hungry people quiet never becomes a satisfying meal: it becomes a minimum right; it hardens and becomes a bulwark against just those forces which are not satisfied with the sop.
The Africans in Central Africa are hungry for the vote. Democracy may be tarnished in Europe; here we may be as cynical as we please about Parliament and the vote. But in Africa the vote has become the symbol of equality in the system the white man has imposed upon the black man. It has become a symbol of human dignity.
People concerned with human dignity, people who care that others may respect themselves—such people must support democracy, must support the principle of the universal franchise in Central Africa. When the African there asks for the vote, he is asking for more than it has ever meant in Europe. There no person has been refused