Going Home - Doris May Lessing [97]
Twice we were awakened early after midnight, hearing Bob Wharton, drunk, coming up the narrow stairway, arguing with someone he could not see. And then one morning he was found lying at the foot of the stairs, dead, where he had fallen down in the dark.
And now the Wharton family fell to pieces. The sick boy had to go to an institution at last; and the elder girl, the one who came to see us, was a salesgirl at the stores, though she had set her heart on going to university, and she lived in an institution that provided cheap accommodation for girls without proper homes. And Mrs Wharton moved into one room with the baby and the second child, the boy of twelve. She earned their living doing shorthand and typing.
Much later Mr McCarran-Longman did come back. And he had done very well for himself. He had sold a patent for a child’s toy. One took a whole lot of fancy little shapes, fishes, dolls, flowers, birds, and poured water into them, and into the water one sprinked chemical; and the stuff set solid and could be turned out. He made quite a lot of money out of it in the end. And so he was proved finally not to be a spiv, but a man of enterprise.
12
A Nyasaland congressman came to see me, very bitter about Federation.
We got on to the subject of the regiment of his people serving in the war in Malaya. He said: ‘This is a terrible thing. They make us into slaves, and then they take our young men for their war in Malaya. They say we are fighting Communist terrorists. I don’t know anything about Communism. I don’t care about it. But they call us agitators and terrorists. We know that the people want only to have their own country back. Why should we fight them?’
I said: ‘Why do the young men go to fight?’
He said: ‘There are no industries in our country. If our young men want to earn money they must go to other countries. Ours is a very poor country. Our average income is £3 10s. a year. That is, for us Africans. And the recruiters come around to the villages, and the young men are excited at the idea of the uniform, and the pay is very high: it can be £15 a month. And it is a way of travelling and seeing another country. And they are made a great fuss of, with bands playing, and speeches on the wireless.’
I asked him: ‘When they come home, what do they say?’
‘They don’t like it. They say: “What are we doing fighting those people for the white man? They are people with dark skins like our own.”’
I said: ‘You are a person involved in politics. Perhaps the young men who said that to you weren’t ordinary people, but political people, friends of yours?’
He said: ‘No, no, that is not true. They were ordinary young men, village boys. They had had time to think. When they come back they have all sorts of attentions paid them; they are asked to make speeches over the air, they are great heroes. But then they are back in the villages, and they start thinking.’
A great many Nyasaland Africans work in Southern Rhodesia. Dickson, the man who worked for me, came from Nyasaland.
I have often wondered what happened to him. He left us very suddenly at the time of the big strike in 1947.
This was the first strike in Southern Rhodesia. It began in Bulawayo and spread fast to all the towns. It was well organized and well disciplined. The most remarkable feature of this strike was this: that because, as always happens on these occasions, the white people got very angry, and armed themselves, so that bands of self-appointed custodians of order were roaming the streets armed to the teeth, looking for Africans to beat up and punish, the Government ordered all the Africans in the cities to get back into their locations and stay there. Troops and police saw that they stayed there. It was as if, in a big strike in Britain; the Government kept the strikers forcibly in their homes and prevented them from working. Because the Government’s first fear was that the white defence committees and guardians of white