NF (1957) Going Home

  ‘Billy and Mubaiwa! who gave you two permission to talk to that visitor?’ a tall, robust gaol warder dreaded by all the prisoners exclaimed. ‘All I know is that this gentleman had permission to talk to Hatichke. Come with me and I’ll show you how to keep the regulations,’ he said. Billy and Mubaiwa, after receiving some strokes, were taken to a ward to polish the floors. ‘By five o’clock I want to see my own shadow here.’ The warder left them there.

  ‘These fellows as well as yourself deserve this punishment, Hatichke,’ Munhira said scornfully. ‘I have no compassion for people who are mischievous,’ Munhira said. ‘When are you supposed to come out?’ he asked. ‘I hope to be out by Saturday this week. But one never knows because there are several regulations to observe here. I understand my friends will remain here because they were found smoking two days ago,’ Hatichke said, shedding tears. ‘Well, goodbye. I’ll see you on Saturday when you come out.’ ‘I really need good food at home on Saturday, Munhira,’ Hatichke sobbed. Munhira left.

  ‘Good heavens! I nearly landed into a mess! Now how shall I explain this to Hatichke’s parents? I was certainly an accomplice in this mischievous operation. It was just by sheer luck that the travellers failed to identify me,’ Munhira murmured to himself, hurrying away from the Magistrates’ Court. ‘Although I have no money on me now, I must get home, right to Hatichke’s parents as soon as possible before false rumours spread to them. I know they will not believe my story. However, that cannot be helped. It is human nature to disbelieve true stories,’ he said to himself.

  As he trotted talking to himself a Policeman on duty gazed at him. ‘You have all the qualities of a habitual criminal, my dear boy!’ the Policeman said in a rough voice. ‘I beg your pardon! Are you addressing me, Sir?’ he asked frightfully. ‘Let’s have a look at your Registration Certificate or Town Pass, please,’ the Police demanded. After searching through his pockets Munhira retorted: ‘It appears I have left it at the Police Camp where I was working as a scavenger. I have just been discharged and I am hurrying home to explain that my comrade had landed into trouble,’ Munhira said shivering. ‘Whom do you think will believe that story?’ the Police was getting impatient. ‘You need a foolish Policeman to believe it and not me,’ he said in a mockery. ‘Please, Sir, take my word for it,’ Munhira said. ‘You are lucky because I am hurrying to go off duty. I would have taken you there to get at the bottom of the story. However, do go and get your papers now. Next time if I meet you without them you will certainly be in serious trouble,’ the Police warned. Munhira pretended to return to the Police Camp but when the Police was out of sight he took a sudden turn homewards. He ran as fast as his thin, long legs could carry him, falling headlong thrice within a distance of five miles and lo! there was another Policeman checking passes of loafers. ‘I must change direction and walk home through the forest,’ he said. From this point onwards he travelled through thick forests until he arrived. On his arrival Hatichke’s parents came to find out what was happening with their son who never visited them for a long time. ‘How is your friend, Hatichke?’ the mother asked. ‘He is very well, indeed, except that he landed into trouble two days ago for impersonating the Police,’ Munhira explained. ‘He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without option of a fine. Fortunately three months were suspended for two years on condition he behaved well,’ he said. ‘But were you not working together?’ she asked. ‘We were but he has been so mischievous during the past years that this is his third time to be imprisoned, ma’am,’ Munhira said in reply. ‘Hatichke was never mischievous from childhood. You must have been the cause of all these troubles. I shall hate you more than I hate the devil, you swine!’ Hatichke’s father joined in. ‘Look, my dear friend! my son was not your son’s keeper. You either ask him nicely or do not ask him at all.’ Munhira’s father was annoyed by the last dirty remark. ‘Get out of my house immediately before I change my mind, you fools!’ he mocked. ‘Since when has your son been a well-behaved man? Out you go this very minute or else I shall make use of this sharp axe,’ Munhira’s father remarked. ‘We will meet again at a beer drink,’ Hatichke’s father warned.

  I was not surprised, when I said to an African lady how much I liked this adventure story, that she replied: ‘I don’t see why they find room in the newspaper for a story about common urban rascals instead of printing material that would be of interest to respectable people.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘I’ve now read six novels written by Africans, and all of them very respectable men, and they all had this same atmosphere that makes the story of Hatichke and Munhira so attractive. To me, at least. It surely can’t be an accident that all the creative writing that has so far come out of the colony by Africans deals with these matters?’

  ‘They give the impression,’ she said, folding her hands before her on the band of her apron, ‘that we are not a law-abiding people.’

  ‘You have, I am afraid,’ said her husband, ‘anarchistical tendencies, otherwise you would not like these immoral stories. And besides, they put wrong ideas into the heads of the youth.’

  ‘I do not see,’ I said, ‘why it proves I am anarchistical if I prefer the light-hearted breaking of wicked and unjust laws, to suffering them in resigned patience.’

  We argued about this for some time, but came to no conclusion.

  An evening with my friends, the African schools inspector and his wife:

  HE. Of course, like all you damned journalists, all you are interested in is the towns. You are interested in what is going to happen to the urbanized African. Oh, yes, I know, but shut up a minute about your proletariat. You’ve been looking at housing schemes and night-schools. The point is that all the white people, progressives or what-nots, have got a vision of this country that is dependent on something the poor Kaffirs haven’t got.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘No, the motor-car. Take a look at the map…the road running north and south, from Beit Bridge to Chirundu, taking in Bulawayo, Gwelo, Gatooma, Hartley and Salisbury and Sinoia; the road running east to Umtali. The road from Bulawayo to Wankie. All the Herrenvolk spend their lives rushing up and down these roads in their motor-cars. But behind these roads and the white farms that lie along them there are thousands and millions of acres of sweet bloody nothing. Nothing. In other words, the Native Reserves. And do not tell me that you have seen Reserves around Salisbury and Bulawayo, that’s something different.’

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘please describe for me in your words, so that I may record them for interested readers, what the Native Reserves are like in their natural state.’

  ‘Good. I get into my lorry and I drive 200, 300 miles into the bundu. I don’t need to ask when the Reserves begin, because they begin at that point where the roads become of interest to my insurance company. They aren’t roads, they are dust-tracks. Then I see a double row of thatched mud huts stringing out a mile, or two or three miles, with some miserable patches of mealies and pumpkins and rapoka around them.’

  ‘Why a string of mud huts and not a cluster, as is natural to a village?’

  ‘For two reasons. First to save fencing; the cattle are supposed to graze on one side of the huts, and the crops are grown on the other. But secondly, because it is more easy to keep people in order if they live strung out, nicely arranged, two by two.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘the Reserve near Salisbury had its huts in natural groups.’

  ‘Quite so. The Government has decided this martial arrangement of huts is bad, partly because it depresses the poor natives to live so, and because, now we have the Native Land Husbandry Act, we are going to have a fine, healthy individuality, and competitive individualism is much more effective than policing. But—there is no money in the Reserves. And there isn’t likely to be, and so for a long time things will go on as they are. If you fly over the country, what do you see? You can pick out a Native Reserve because instead of miles of empty bush, which is a white farm, there is a long line of single huts, with close-packed strips of
cultivation beside it, not an inch of soil wasted. And please remember that the vast majority of natives live like this. It is the minority who are in the towns. So I come to the first of the long line of miserable huts, and out swarm a million ragged children, shouting and laughing and pleased to death to see me, shouting, “Sir, Sir, let us show the way to the school.” They perch all over the car like tick-birds on an elephant. We drive over the ruts at the edge of the cultivated land because there isn’t a road, passing half a dozen nice churches. Because a life and death struggle goes on all the time between the different churches about who is to convert who. Sometimes one cuts another’s throat; so there’s only a couple of churches, and sometimes they live side by side in happy harmony, only bickering a little, five, six, seven of them, competing for the souls of the heathen. And then we come to the school, which is a shack of some sort, mostly built by the parents of the children, in the intervals of their other work, which is to keep body and soul together. Sometimes the kids are sitting on the mud floor, and sometimes they are sitting on the benches; sometimes they have a blackboard, and sometimes they haven’t. And there they all are, happy as anything, being educated by a Standard IV teacher. And in all the Reserve there is no telephone, there is nothing. Neither telephone, nor radio, nor electric light, nor running water, nor books, nor newspapers. Nothing, nothing. They might as well be on the moon. There is a choice of churches, and mealie-porridge to eat, and a whole lot of visiting Government officials like myself telling them they must become civilized. So I inspect the school, very efficient and uplifting, and I leave that Reserve accompanied by a million happy kids, waving and shouting good-bye. So I drive to the next Reserve in a very bad temper, where another batch of a million kids swarm around shouting, “Hello, Sir; good morning, Sir!” ’

  ‘Now, dear,’ says his wife, ‘you aren’t being positive.’

  ‘Well, I don’t feel positive. I’d like to shake the lot of them. What right have they got to be so bloody happy living like that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want them to be miserable, surely?’

  ‘No. Yes, I would. No. But what gets me is now they are getting educated they are going to be miserable and full of complexes like us. When I walk into a room full of teachers I can pick out all the Standard Sixes because they look so damned serious and full of responsibility. And when I say to them, all formal and inspiring: “What do you want to do with your lives?” up shoot their hands and they say, “Please, Sir, we will devote our lives to uplifting our people.” And they all look as miserable as a lot of wet cats.’

  ‘But, dear, you aren’t being consistent.’

  ‘Why should I be consistent? But look at us—we make me sick! But those bloody little kids are as happy as anything. They have a whale of a time, being backward and miserable.’

  ‘That isn’t a progressive way of thinking at all, dear.’

  ‘Provided I act progressively I don’t see it matters how I think. Aren’t I educating and civilizing the African? Lord, am I not. But I’d like to spit.’

  ‘The reason why we white people aren’t happy is because we suffer from a guilty conscience.’

  ‘Guilty conscience my foot! They never think about the poor Kaffirs. They only think about the colour bar and Partnership and all that. That’s different. The more civilized people get, the unhappier they are. Are you happy? No, God knows you are not. Am I happy? No. Is Doris here happy? Well, if she is she has no right to be. Do we know anyone who is happy?’

  ‘Well, dear, we are learning to be happy on a higher level.’

  ‘Is that it? Well, in that case, you have my best wishes.’

  Father Huddlestone has just begun his campaign in Britain: someone told me today that in the Stock Exchange news on the South African radio it said: ‘Kaffirs are down two points, due to the activity of certain clerics in Britain.’

  Long conversation about politics, or rather the colour bar, with a man who was described to me as ‘another of you blasted Communists’. An Englishman who has lived in South Africa most of his life, he has been in Southern Rhodesia five years.

  ‘Communism,’ he said, ‘is ruining Britain.’ He meant the Labour Party.

  Then he said: ‘I wish all you blasted people would shut up. You and Father Huddlestone and the rest of you. You’ll only frighten off the whites who are taking Todd and his Partnership quite quietly at the moment. It’ll be your fault if they get cold feet and clamp down.’

  (Similarly, Lord Malvern blamed the Reverend Michael Scott for the bloodshed in Nyasaland when there was rioting over Federation: the deaths, he said, were on Michael Scott’s head.)

  ‘Of course I have no colour feeling myself. I don’t mind any man educated to my level coming to my house. In the Club they call me a Red. But I wouldn’t ask the plumber’s mate to dinner in England, and I wouldn’t here, white or black.’

  Finally, after pursuing this line for some time, he concluded: ‘Your kind of talk makes me tired. You’ve got to have some loyalty to your own kind. My friends are Europeans.’

  I have been hearing a great deal of talk about a novel, written by Donald Leavis of Bulawayo, called Voices in Every Wind. It is described as very seditious. No one has read it, and it is not in any of the bookshops.

  At last I ask an old friend of mine who works in a public relations job if he has a copy. He says: ‘You won’t find a copy of that anywhere. The CID came to me when it came out, because I am supposed to be a literary type, and said they were going to ban it. They said it had sex in it between black and white—a rape scene. I told them not to be silly, it would only draw attention to it. They just went round the bookshops and had a word with the managers. The book disappeared from sight, as it were.’

  Later I managed to get hold of a copy of this book. It is an intelligent novel, describing what might happen in Central Africa if things went the way they did in Kenya. It has been deliberately killed by silence and the helpful co-operation of the booksellers.

  In South Africa, which is supposed to be so much less liberal than Central Africa, books like Gunther’s Inside Africa, and others equally critical of the Nationalists, sell openly and in large numbers. I have been asked why it is that the Nationalists are so tolerant about the kinds of books they allow to be sold. They will pounce on books that suggest sexual equality between black and white—their mania causes the oddest books to be confiscated: Black Beauty, for instance, until it was suggested they should read it to see what it was about. But the most critical books are on sale, provided they are not tinged with Marxism.

  Perhaps the words of a Nationalist publisher I met seven years ago in Johannesburg might suggest an answer: ‘You Kaffir-boeties can go on talking,’ he said, good-naturedly enough. ‘We’ve got the police.’

  And, from another Nationalist: ‘We don’t mind books. The Kaffirs don’t read books, they read the newspapers. And we don’t mind what the whites read.’

  In Salisbury I was told by someone trying to buy Gunther’s Inside Africa that the bookseller had only produced it from beneath the counter with great reluctance. ‘But he says horrible things about us,’ said this good lady indignantly. ‘It isn’t a nice book.’

  There is no real need for a censorship in Southern Rhodesia.

  An African trade-union leader tells me about his difficulties getting a passport in 1953 to come to Britain for a trade-union conference. First they asked him for a large deposit; then, when he had managed to raise the sum (I think £150), said they would consider the matter.

  At last they called him in and asked, ‘What route would you take?’—meaning did he intend to visit Communist countries, as he did once before. He said: ‘The same route as before—Nairobi, Cairo, Rome, London—unless the air company has changed its route.’

  ‘And are you going to visit Caux again?’ (Caux is the headquarters of Moral Rearmament.)

  ‘No, I do not plan to visit Caux this time.’

  He did not get his passport and is not hopeful of getting one.
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  About Moral Rearmament: ‘All they are interested in is getting hold of us trade-union leaders. They come to see us, night after night after night for months. They aren’t interested in ordinary people, it is the political leaders they concentrate on. Once I asked one of their men: “If Moral Rearmament is so necessary for good relations between white and black, why don’t you sign on Mr Fletcher” (Minister of Native Affairs), “then perhaps his heart will change towards us and he will repeal the Land Apportionment Act.” And another time they came and said they had been guided in a prayer during a Quiet Time that I should go to Caux again. I said: “That’s very strange, because I have just had guidance in my Quiet Time that I must not go to Caux.” So now Moral Rearmament leaves me alone.’

  This man is a Roman Catholic. Long ago he was threatened with excommunication if he went on with his trade-union activities. He told the priest: ‘Then excommunicate me. But I have God in my heart, you cannot take Him from me.’

  A party where some people who have left South Africa because they are afraid of what will happen there and are now settled in Southern Rhodesia, talk to another African whose last visit this is to Salisbury: his passport has expired and he knows he will not be given another one.

  To his ex-compatriots he says: ‘When Central Africa goes the way of the Union, where are you going to emigrate to then? Britain?’