‘For that matter, I don’t like being, given feathers with tar on them.’
‘Oh, you don’t?’—he was suddenly a small boy; it occurred to me that the things he was saying had the ritual quality of small boys’ insults in a quarrel. Then, in a burst: ‘I said I’d do it and I have. I have and that’s all.’
With which he got up, hesitated, and went to the door. At the door, he swung sharp around, and marched back between the crowded café tables. Then he said in a half-angry, half-appealing way, a call to my better nature as it were: ‘Hell, man, have some sense, man. You don’t want to put all these ideas into these munts’ heads, do you? You’ve lived here, it’s not that you don’t know. What do you want to put ideas into their heads for?’ He waited a minute, and then muttered, blue eyes wandering uneasily around: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t get it.’ Then he went out again, smartly marching as before, without looking back.
An invitation by Bulawayo’s courteous and liberal Dr Ashton, to hear Dr Holleman, an anthropologist attached to his department, lecture to a group of African welfare workers.
Dr Holleman lived for some time in a Mashona village, and has written a book about these people. He is particularly interested in how industrialization is affecting tribal patterns.
The room was in the Native Administration offices, and had about thirty African welfare workers in it, and three of the white officials.
Dr Holleman spoke well and clearly, and not at all in the patronizing way that is so common to white officials. He might have been delivering a lecture to a group of fellow-anthropologists.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, and ‘In other words, gentlemen,’ and I could see how the listening Africans liked his politeness.
But it was very cerebral. ‘The theme of my lecture, gentlemen, is the community. The African community. And the basis of community, which is the tribe.’
And with this he drew on the blackboard a circle—the tribe. ‘And the unit of the tribe is the kinship group.’
And with that he divided his circle into neat portions—the kinship groups.
‘And what gives the feeling of homogeneity in the village is the way these units are shaped.’
The Africans were listening very intently, and I was, too; for it was difficult for me to see the tribe as a circle and the kinship groups as segments of it.
Dr Holleman was explaining how these units were broken into and scattered by the young men going into the towns to work.
‘Gentlemen, nothing stays the same; everything changes; if you disturb one part of a cultural pattern, then every part of it changes. And so all your tribal patterns are changing, not only from the natural movement that is inevitable with time, but because of the single fact that the men are no longer part of the fabric of the tribe. You know that, of course, better than I do. But what I want to explain particularly today is how these changes have affected the lives of your women, and the role your women are playing—in the tribes, and also in the towns, when they follow their husbands into the towns.’
And now the lecturer broke off to explain how very wrong it is when people say—which so often they do—that African women are exploited and badly treated by their men. Newspaper men, officials, and all sorts of ignorant people, said Dr Holleman, are always complaining about the poor tribal women. And nothing could be farther from the truth.
The tribal woman is a person of consequence, with property rights and authority. And even this question of lobola, which is interpreted through European eyes as payment for a woman, is in fact proof of an opposite truth: lobola is a complicated and dignified ritual, and above all it expresses the value of the woman, and is a guarantee of her good treatment in the new family.
In the tribe, said Dr Holleman, the woman is weakest in her roles as mother and wife; strongest and most powerful as sister, paternal aunt, mother-in-law. As a sister, for instance, she will give her cattle to her brother, so that he may get himself a wife. As aunt to her brother’s children, if he dies then it is she who is responsible for them, she who is in place of the father. As mother-in-law, the mother of her sons’ wives, since the power of fertility passes from mother to daughter, she must be placated, respected, cherished.
And now this powerful woman, secure in her place in the fabric of the tribe, with all her responsibilities and duties well marked out for her, and understood by everybody—this woman comes into town, and she is nothing. She is nothing. She is only a wife, only a mother. All her other roles have gone. She sits at home, under the wing of her husband, and no wonder she is restless and bad-tempered.
(At this point there was a stir of agreement among the listening men.)
And her husband is restless and dissatisfied and bad-tempered.
‘But the fabric of the tribe is broken, gentlemen, the fabric of the community is destroyed; and it is you who must rebuild it. It is your task, gentlemen, to create the new feeling of cohesion. I don’t know how. By clubs, perhaps? Somehow you must find a way. Otherwise you cannot keep your feeling as a people.’
And now, said Dr Holleman, he wanted to discuss the question of ‘spares’. ‘Spares’ is the word among Africans for those women in the towns who did not marry, who lived with a man for a time before moving on to another. ‘And how critical you men are,’ said Dr Holleman, ‘of these women! How insulting! And whose fault is it that these women exist? Why, it is your fault, gentlemen. If they did not minister to your convenience, then they would not be with us in so great a number.’
And he went on to say that among the ‘spares’ were to be found the most independent and fearless of the women; and from them they, the welfare workers, should take the best for teaching the others. It was no use, he said, criticizing these women and offering them nothing better. ‘Give them responsibility! Give them trust! And set them to uplifting the level of the other, more passive women. It is for you to do this, for you to help them…’
Dr Holleman spoke on these lines for over an hour; and when he had finished, there were questions. A man whose voice was like a deep swarm of bees asked about some point of tribal law; and another spoke very crisply about the insolence of the ‘spares’.
But what I was thinking about was how once I heard a violent feminist lecturing a group of English trade unionists about how the British working-man treated his wife. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘how you expect your wives not only to run after you day and night as if you were so many helpless babies; but half the time they have jobs as well, and children to bring up, and even so you don’t lift a finger to help them. Why, your wives work twice as hard as you do; there is no more exploited creature in the world,’ she concluded, ‘than the British working-class wife.’
On the faces of these African welfare workers I saw exactly the same look of stubborn resistance as I saw then on the faces of those English trade unionists.
Later, I met a group of Superintendents for the Locations and Townships of Bulawayo in another office, with Dr Holleman. The difference between the old type Native Department official and the new was clearly seen in the way they spoke of the Africans—one paternal, having no nonsense; one half-proud, half-apprehensive, the New Deal spirit.
We again discussed the women in the cities.
One official said how the men were dissatisfied with the women: always quarrelling, always visiting, always complaining. ‘If only I had time to cook for myself I wouldn’t bother with a wife.’
Another said husbands were continually coming to him asking for his support in matrimonial quarrels: ‘I say to them, it’s your job to keep your women in order, not mine.’
Because married accommodation is much better than single, men marry ‘spares’ so as to get a marriage certificate. But they do not regard them as true wives, and when they go back to their villages, abandon them.
So shortage of housing is perpetuating polygamy, or a form of polygamy.
Dr Holleman, talking about ‘spares’, suggested they were not true prostitutes. Immediate, and even shocked, disag
reement from other officials: ‘If they aren’t prostitutes, what are they, then?’
‘These women are a menace,’ said one. ‘All they care about is money and a good time. They’ll leave their children with an old woman, or a relative, and go off after money.’
‘And you can always tell the “spares” in a group of women; they are well dressed, and they don’t carry their babies on their backs. And they look so damned insolent.’
I suggested that perhaps the ‘spare’ was a phenomenon of industrializing Africa; in Basil Davidson’s book, The African Awakening, he described how the women of the cities in the Congo refuse marriage because they do so much better by themselves. And people familiar with the big cities of the Union say the same thing.
‘There is no solution to this,’ said an official, ‘until we can house all the workers with their families. Until we can give the African a normal family life, we’ll have prostitutes.’
‘But supposing,’ asked one, ‘the African woman prefers not to marry even then?’
Here is a quotation from a letter by an African to the African Weekly; he begins by saying he has travelled widely in Northern Rhodesian towns, mines and villages, and says that ‘prostitution is the gravest thing facing our community today’. He ends: ‘The most dangerous side of this practice is its impact on family life. Some of the prostitutes I have met do not want to hear any word about marriage. To them marriage is the end of a profit-making career; it removes their freedom to go wherever they like. Now, knowing as we do that successful married life is the basis of any good society and the foundation of a God-fearing nation, we cannot be satisfied that they take such a poor view of married life. We cannot do without it, neither should our women be permitted to frown on it like that.’
It was generally concluded that adequate housing would solve this problem.
In short, the conversation ended on a familiar note: we all knew there is no hope of housing all the people who are coming into the towns on anything like a decent level; yet, if they are not housed properly, then the claims of Partnership will be proved false; it is intolerable that Partnership might fail; therefore better evade the issue. And so a sort of chivalry stops one, when with these earnest and sincere Partners, from pointing out these obvious facts; one begins to feel it would be in positive bad taste to say: ‘Yes, but look at the economics of the thing.’
Report on Native Affairs, 1954: ‘The presence of squatters in Municipal Areas and their peri-urban precincts is a persistent problem, the only satisfactory solution for which is the provision of adequate housing. Local authorities have been handicapped in this work by lack of finance, and Government failure to obtain overseas the amount of capital required to launch a full programme to provide housing for Natives was a bitter disappointment to municipalities and other authorities.’
Italics mine. To avoid taxing the big companies, and so that the privileged whites should not have to put their hands in their pockets, the Government goes hat in hand overseas, asking for money for native housing, education, and the Land Husbandry Act, as if the natives were a kind of responsibility for the international conscience.
‘Do you want Partnership to succeed? Yes? Then give us the money. And if you don’t give us the money, this proves you don’t understand our problems, and if Partnership fails it is your fault, not ours.’
A Government official from Northern Rhodesia said about Mr Todd’s trip to America to raise money: ‘Well, these Americans are not such fools after all. They know quite well what’s going on. Why should they fork out money, when they know that white farms are hundreds or thousands of acres big, and an African farm at best is a couple of hundred. They think: Why don’t you give up some of your land to the Africans, and then you won’t have to ask for charity.’
And when I saw Mr Todd himself he exclaimed: ‘It’s a terrible thing! If I were trying to sell steel or Kariba or something with big profits, then I’d have no difficulty. But when I ask for money for something useful, like native housing, or agriculture, they won’t give me the money.’
I was shown over Bulawayo’s African housing projects.
The same as all the other cities: the majority of the Africans living crammed in the bad old lines and shacks and shanties, and then the new model townships outside the town.
Dr Holleman was enthusiastic and hopeful about providing better beer-halls and entertainment places instead of the ugly prison-like beer-halls that now exist, which are mostly stretches of bare dust surrounded by wire, with a few wood benches in them—like chicken runs. He is a South African, and seemed to feel badly because the Union is under fire, when he says housing and welfare projects are on the same level as in the Federation, and sometimes much better.
‘Everyone pats the Federation on the back, no one has a good word for the Nationalists, but the housing for natives is much better than here.’
There are one or two model townships in each city. An African is lucky if he can find a place in a house in one of these. In some, the houses can be bought. A model township looks like a thousand dolls’ houses set out in neat rows. Sometimes they are very pretty, Highfield, in Salisbury, for instance; for someone with a marvellous sense of colour has designed the township as a whole, breaking up the regularity and uniformity of the place by painting the houses into individuality—not each house the same, but each one differently, porches, windows and doors emphasized by lime-green, yellow, magenta, ice-pink, blue-green, scarlet and cobalt, so that the township glitters on a slope against the bright blue sky.
The houses, considered as houses, are shocking.
The white people say: ‘They are better than the huts they are used to.’
But while brick and breeze-block and board may be more hygienic than mud and thatch, what matters is the space. A family in an African village does not live in one hut, but in two or three big, airy huts, with as much space as there is in a medium-sized white house. Now, in these model townships, a family must live in two handkerchief-sized rooms. Some houses, a few, have indoor lavatories and showers; but most have the lavatories at the back of the house; so that each minuscule house has its miniscule lavatory, like a sentry-box, stuck mathematically behind it.
In these townships the people live on every level, from a prim, proud suburbanity, in Victorian stuffiness, with shiny suites of furniture, antimacassars, heavy curtains, every surface covered with ornaments, through degrees where they may sleep on the floor wrapped in blankets but eat off a table; or sleep all in one big bed and eat squatting outside around a wood fire; or simply transfer their village habits straight into this urban setting, so that, looking through a doorway into the two minute rooms like large dog-kennels, at the rolled sleeping blankets, the cooking pots, the tin plates, a sack of grain or a sieve of ground-nuts, one imagines oneself standing in a village in the bush, looking into the doorway of a traditional hut.
The welfare officers busy themselves, and with the greatest faith and devotion, trying to make life palatable against odds. The women, they complain, are lazy, they don’t take an interest in gardening as they do in their villages; the children don’t get looked after properly; the people don’t take hygiene seriously; the lavatories aren’t kept clean. And: ‘A family comes into town, you see the children losing their pot-bellies, the woman learns to keep house and cook and sew—then they go off back to the villages, to the old ways and the children die or get sick, and they forget everything they ever learned from us about hygiene and vitamins.’
Sewing classes, cooking classes, child-welfare classes are run intensively in all these model townships; some welfare officers talk as if a township is a kind of vast school for the people.
They look the same from city to city; because cheese-paring, mass-produced housing projects cannot produce much diversity of pattern; and often it is the same big firms which build them in several towns at once. They are unimaginably depressing and inhuman, and in five years they will be slums.
They are usually built a good way o
ut from the white city, so that the people use bicycles to get to and from work, or walk the distance; sometimes there are bus services, but they are expensive.
In the old townships hostels are being built for single workers. I saw one in Bulawayo: a room has in it bunks in tiers; the men’s possessions are in bundles on shelves, or in a sort of iron-cage affair which can be locked, beside each bunk. The rooms are big, bare, empty places, like a barracks. All the bicycles are kept in the sleeping-room for fear of theft.
Outside the old locations and the new townships are squatters’ camps, for people who cannot get accommodation at all; and here houses are made of any material to hand—packing cases, beaten-out petrol and paraffin tins, bits of wood and sacking and cardboard. In Lusaka, for instance, which is a comparatively small town, there are twenty thousand people living in squatters’ camps.
Bulawayo, it is estimated, has about a hundred thousand Africans living in it.
A group of Africans I interviewed said as follows:
The majority of men live in the single rooms. Many live sixteen to a room. The charge of £1 a month is paid by the employer. In such a room there will be one wood stove with two cooking spaces—the men line up to do their bit of cooking on it.
They get up at 5.30 and walk to work 5 or 6 miles, buying a piece of bread or sixpence worth of bones for soup on the way.
Buses cost 7d. a trip—that is, over a shilling a day, which cannot be afforded by people earning £3 or £4 a month. About 10 per cent have bicycles.
At midday there is an hour’s break; they cook their soup on fires supplied by the employers, or eat the bread.
They walk back at five o’clock, cook their first good meal of the day at sundown.
At the native eating-houses meals can be bought: for 6d., maize porridge and two pieces of meat with soup liquor; for 1s., a proper meal with green vegetables and a sweet. But most use the eating-houses only on special occasions.