Going Home by Doris May Lessing

Author:Doris May Lessing
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780586025789
Publisher: Grafton
Published: 1968-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

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.

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