NF (1957) Going Home

  Almost at once, restlessness had set in again; and she had come up here with five other girls just to see.

  ‘And besides,’ said Eileen, ‘some of these men here earn more than £200 a month. You don’t catch me working after I am married.’

  While she was telling me all this, she was dressing, and I lay on the bed and listened.

  The indolence of heat emphasized her characteristic lassitude, and it took her over an hour to dress. Finally she stood before the looking-glass, in a tight dress with pink flowers all over it, pink beads, pink sash. A little girl’s dress. And the fat, timid face was that of a fifteen-year-old. She went out saying she must get a breath of fresh air; and ten minutes later I saw her on the verandah with a glass of whisky, half-full, a cigarette, and a young copper miner. There is a shortage of women on the Copper Belt.

  This hotel may aim to offer other amenities, but it is a drinking hotel above all. I imagined that Southern Rhodesia was talented for drinking; but I had seen nothing till I went to the Copper Belt.

  Around the corner from the hotel is a bar. Outside the bar are rows of cars. At sundown, the families come driving in; the men leave wives and children in the cars and go into the bar. From time to time they come out with a drink for the wife and a lemonade for the children, and then go back into the bar. And so they all spend the evening, until the bar closes.

  As for me, I went back into the bedroom and studied the newspapers.

  At that time the African National Congress had imposed a boycott on shops that had used unfair trade practices.

  At that particular moment, in the early part of May, the boycott had been called off on the Copper Belt, but was still in effect in Broken Hill. The newspapers were full of it.

  The boycott movement is more than an effort to force equal dealings in shops between black and white. It is also a trial of strength for Congress. Here is a news item from that time:

  ‘A warning to the Government that the African National Congress has already a Government within the Congress that will one day rule Northern Rhodesia was given at a meeting here today. The Congress warned the Government that they wanted no interference on boycotts. Resolutions passed at the meeting included: (1) A protest against the District Commissioner and the District Officer asking for identification certificates in the compound area and fining those without them. (2) The boycott would end when the person who was imprisoned for nine months on charges arising from the boycott was released. (3) The reasons for the boycott were the imposition of Federation, equal representation when the Northern Rhodesian constitution is changed, shop prices are too high in comparison with African wages, and Indians have monopolized African trade so that Africans could not start their own businesses.’

  And: ‘When the Indians in Broken Hill say that Congressman have threatened customers there is no truth in it. The African National Congress believes in non-co-operation, but without violence. If there have been threats, they have not been by Congressmen. We are not barbarians. To end the boycott is simple: prices must be reduced, and colour discrimination completely abolished by the Government. We are not worried about the Colonial Secretary’s refusal to see Mr Nkumbula…and we shall never see him. All the African beer-halls must be abolished; we want to enter the European bars. The anti-boycott movement will never end the boycott simply by calling us foolish…’

  From the Northern News of April 30th: ‘Alex Masala, chairman of the Broken Hill Branch of the African National Congress, was jailed for 9 months here on Friday by Mr Colin Cunningham on a charge of unlawful assembly…’

  From Northern News of June 12th: ‘In the Livingstone Magistrates’ Court today, Amon Lungu, vice-secretary of the Libuyu Branch of the African Congress, was sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment with hard labour on counts arising from speeches he had made at a meeting of Africans at Maramba Market on June 2nd. Lungu was guilty of threatening damage to property for having said: “If you people feel as I do in my heart we should go down and break down the police camp.”’

  Northern News, June 12th: ‘Two Africans were today sentenced by Mr W. H. Hannah in the Magistrates’ Court here to 9 months’ imprisonment with hard labour on charges arising out of the boycott of European-owned stores in the African township. The Africans…both mine employees, were convicted of the theft of a threepenny candle and resisting arrest. On the first count they were sentenced to 6 months’ imprisonment each, and on the second count, 3 months’ each.’

  June 16th: ‘…At Kitwe, a 25-year-old African, Nondo Mbuwa, was sentenced to six months’ hard labour for stealing 1s. 6d. worth of meat from another African when trying to enforce the shops boycott.’

  June 1st: ‘A plea for greater consideration for Africans who have proved themselves was made by Mr John Roberts at a public meeting here. He said: “There is quite a fair percentage of Africans who have stabilized themselves and who are well known to the provincial administration and the Government. They should no longer be required to carry the multifarious papers and passes which are at present required. They deserve exemption.”’

  May 26th: ‘Fort Jameson. The Governor, Sir Arthur Benson, warned Paramount and Senior Chiefs at an indaba here yesterday to ignore people who urged them to resist the activities of Government departments. “They are your enemies who want to take away your power,” he told them.’

  June 5th: ‘Mufulira. Between twenty and thirty cars were stoned by a crowd of Africans near Mufulira yesterday evening following an accident involving an African and a car driven by a European. The stoning occurred after the car overturned and struck the African. There was no trouble immediately, but later a crowd of Africans threw stones at passing cars and at a lorry which was carrying an African football team.’

  African Weekly, May 23rd: ‘Sir, none of the people in the Federation knows the harsh and cruel manner in which Africans from the Federation, particularly Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, are repatriated from the Union. They are all arrested, even on the streets, bundled into a lorry with little ventilation, and driven to Bulawayo, at times even without the knowledge of their wives in a South African location. This is not the right way to treat people, the more so when it is realized that the South Africans who come to the Federation are not sent back in that manner. I appeal to African Federal MPs to bring this matter up in Parliament with a view to effecting an improvement in repatriation methods.’

  Northern News, May 27th: ‘About thirty African women today tried to enter the delicatessen at Kitwe in what seemed to be a demand for service equal to that given to Europeans, but were refused entry…’

  June 16th: ‘Mufulira. A warning that if car stonings continued the Legislature might have to consider increasing sentences was given in the Magistrates’ Court here today by Mr A. R. W. Porter when he sentenced seven Africans to 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour for riotous assembly. The charges followed a stoning incident about three miles from Mufulira…Seven Africans pleaded guilty; two others pleaded not guilty. Mr J. H. Daniels, prosecuting, said that after a report of a collision between an African cyclist and a car near Mufulira, police found a crowd of about twenty Africans had gathered. By the time an ambulance took away the injured cyclist the crowd had grown to fifty. An African was arrested because he was making the crowd aggressive. When he was put into the police truck, stones and sand were thrown at the police and the vehicle…’

  June 20th: ‘Kitwe. For threatening violence during the boycott Masonda Bwalya, a 45-year-old contractor’s policeman, was sentenced to 3 months’ hard labour by Mr W. H. Hannah in the Kitwe Magistrates’ Court today…’

  June 18th: ‘Lusaka. “I can see nothing that will stop us from achieving Dominion status in the near future,” Sir Roy Welensky said today…’ (Sir Roy is Deputy Prime Minister of the Federation, in the line of succession from Lord Malvern.*) ‘“There are small people with small minds in all countries, but I must admit I find it difficult to follow their thinking when I look at the assets, both human and mineral, that this vast
Federation possesses. I just cannot understand people who doubt that we will succeed in building a great State here. I do not believe that the people of the Federation will be misled by the doubting Thomases who lack the courage to grasp the great opportunity that destiny is offering us to provide an example of how people of different races and culture can combine to work for the common good of their land…” Speaking of his travels in America, Sir Roy said that having seen the problem of colour in other lands he could say that in the Federation there was less racial tension.’

  June 19th: ‘At 4 A.M. today three members of the African Congress were arrested at their homes here, and later appeared at the Magistrates’ Court. They were charged under Section 358, sub-section 4, of the Penal Code with unlawfully conspiring together to injure European traders in their trade by counselling, exhorting or inducing Africans in Mufulira to withhold their custom from stores…’

  June 11th: Headline: 50,000 leave the Federation in five years. ‘Nearly 50,000 Europeans have left the Federation in the past five years, a fifth of the country’s present white population. This is more than half the total number of immigrants in the same period…’

  After having read this sort of news for an hour or so, I went to dinner in the hotel dining-room, where a young man with the typically aggressive-suspicious face came up to where I was sitting in a corner, carrying in his hand a full glass of whisky which he held tipped towards me, saying: ‘You’re that Kaffir-lover. Well, you know what I’m going to do with this?’ The whisky being on the verge of landing in my face, I said hastily: ‘Well, I think you’d better drink it.’ For a moment his hand trembled, then he set down his glass, stood looking at it, and sat himself down beside it. ‘Listen,’ said he, poking his chin forward and up, and narrowing his eyes in a glare. ‘Do you know what I’d like to do with people like you? Do you know?’ After he had told me, we discussed for about half an hour whether or not we would allow our female relations to marry black men, while he kept remarking in the voice of a betrayed child: ‘But the Government’s doing everything for the blacks and nothing for us.’

  Eventually I said I had some work to do, and left him brooding over his fifth whisky in the corner of the dining-room.

  Lights were out in the bedroom. Eileen from her bed said that she thought her Mom was right, the Copper Belt was too tough for her.

  I suggested that perhaps what it needed were some nice, refined girls to raise its tone and standard, but she said very seriously, ‘But I’d have to live in this hotel, because there isn’t anywhere to live and you’d have to have a lot of girls to refine this hotel.’ Besides, she said, she was used to living at home with Mom making her clothes for her. She was used to being respected, she said. I took this opportunity to ask her what she thought about Federation. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. So I asked her if she thought relations between black and white were getting better or worse. ‘The munts are getting awfully cheeky,’ she said.

  With this, we went to sleep, and were awakened in the morning by an African putting tea down beside our beds, or rather, slamming down the tray between us, and striding out again with a crash of the door. Eileen got out of bed, went to the door in her night-dress, half-shut it, leaned the upper portion of herself through the space, and yelled: ‘Here, boy, clean the bath.’

  But he did not reappear.

  ‘I am not used,’ said Eileen, ‘to cleaning the bath for myself: if my Mom knew, she wouldn’t like it. But the munts up here they do as they like: it’s because of the Parliament.’

  ‘Which Parliament?’

  ‘That Parliament in London. They have no respect, because those people in London always stand up for them.’

  A couple of days spent interviewing various types of mine official. They were all concerned to make me accept three facts. First, that since I was a Southern Rhodesian, I could never expect to understand Northern Rhodesian, problems. I must admit I had not expected this. At last, getting a bit exasperated, I asked one man: ‘Supposing that at the end of a week here I professed myself a partisan of Federation and of making haste slowly. Would you then say I had been here long enough to understand your problems?’ To which he replied, with perfect seriousness, as it were encouraging me onwards in a comradely way towards unanimity with common sense: ‘Quite a lot of our immigrants get the right idea straight away.’

  The second point was that housing for African workers was better than anywhere else in the Federation. Which is quite true. The conclusion a lot of people draw from this fact is that what Central Africa needs is more big companies, so rich that they can afford to spend a few hundred thousand extra every year on building roads in the locations and supplying electric light.

  The third point of extreme importance—that is, judged by the amount of time given to it—was the Salaried Staffs Association. The African Mineworkers’ Union, being powerful, well organized, and in fact the most influential body in Northern Rhodesia, the mine management naturally spend a great deal of time trying to weaken it in various ways.

  What, one asks, is there new to say about the fact that big capitalist companies create stooge unions when they can? One would have thought, nothing.

  Yet one suave, plump gentleman after another earnestly persuaded me that the Salaried Staffs Association was in the best interests of the African people as a whole, that the Mineworkers’ Union was generally a rough, crude and ungentlemanly organization, and that the Africans’ low level of intelligence was proved by the fact that they did not understand the Salaried Staffs Association was entirely for their own good.

  As hour succeeded hour, and one plump gentleman succeeded another in solemn exhortation, I began to ask myself: Was it that they imagined visiting journalists were so innocent as not to understand these ancient and time-honoured tactics? Was it that they imagined I was?—but obviously I was not prepared to admit this. Or perhaps—and I believe I am right—the colour bar caused them to see these commonplaces of industrial struggle as new and original?

  In order to pass the time, I worked out an imaginary scene, thus:

  PLACE—The bedroom of the mine manager.

  TIME—About three in the morning.

  The manager, a rather fat pink-and-white gentleman, in pink-striped pyjamas, is lying awake; his wife placidly asleep beside him in the twin bed.

  HE (suddenly shooting up in bed): Darling, wake up! I have an idea!

  SHE (sleepily): Would you like one of my sleeping tablets, darling?

  HE: Darling, I said I had an idea. Listen…

  SHE: Oh very well. What is it, darling?

  HE: You know that damned outfit of that scoundrel Katilungu?

  SHE: Since you never talk about anything else, darling…

  HE: But listen. I’ve thought of a way to break it.

  SHE: No! How, darling?

  HE: What do you think of this? I’m going to take all the better-paid workers and tell them they are too good to associate with that rough lot of Katilungu’s, and I shall form another union. And when Katilungu tells me that his union is representative of all the workers, I shall be able to say it isn’t. All I have to do is to flatter a few of the types who think they’re better than the others. What do you think?

  SHE: Darling, you’re wonderful. (She turns over and goes to sleep.)

  HE (to himself in the dark): And I only earn £5,000 a year!

  The reason why I think this dialogue is not so far-fetched is because when I interviewed a certain high official in Southern Rhodesia, he said to me: ‘Do you know how I got my Trade Union Bill through? I sat in the House afternoon after afternoon, and I looked at the faces of all those who were my opponents either to the left or to the right, and suddenly I had an idea. What do you think?’

  ‘I really can’t!’

  ‘I thought: I’ll put all my opponents on to the Select Committee, so they’ll have to take the responsibility. Good, eh?’

  And he radiated an innocent delight at his own shrewdness.

  A Colonial go
od-time evening: sundowners in the hotel, while the long yawn of the hours ahead deepens. The idea of food recedes under a tide of alcohol. We move to one bachelor flat, then, collecting people as we go, to another and then another. Eartha Kitt’s records, talk about the South of France where people will go, or dream of going, on the next leave. Talk about the colour bar. More talk about the colour bar. The musicals now running in London. The colour bar.

  The young woman journalist, aged twenty-three, who by eleven in the evening has drunk more than a bottle of whisky, without apparent ill-effects, suddenly becomes very confidential about her own private view of the colour bar, which, it seems, is not the official one, but unfortunately is so thick-tongued one cannot understand what she is saying. She goes home, dignified by an immense private sorrow which is incommunicable, supported on either side by a young man.

  Whereupon the survivors tell how old so and so has just broken the record between here and Salisbury, at the cost of a cracked axle, so as to fit in a week-end party; and how somebody else took a horse into the ballroom at the big official dance in L.

  Never have I been anywhere where the feeling of boredom, of boredom crystallized into activity and alcohol for salvation’s sake, is so strong as in the little mining towns of Northern Rhodesia. Never, that is, since my adolescence in Salisbury, which, from the dusty distances of the Copper Belt, seems like an oasis of civilization.