NF (1957) Going Home (21 page)

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 out 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.

One man told me he was buying his house: £15 down, and the rest over thirty years. But the lease is only for forty years, so he is bitter because he will own his home for only ten years. ‘It is because they are afraid the white people will want to spread over where our townships are, so they won’t give us freehold unless we live miles away, and then we can’t afford the transport.’

And: ‘Here in Bulawayo the pass laws are administered leniently. It makes a great difference to us, not always worrying if we have forgotten one of our passes.’

This conversation concluded with: ‘Our wages are geared to the old idea of us Africans—mealie-meal porridge and a loincloth. But we are trying to live decently. It is impossible on our wages to live on the European pattern, so we do as best we can, half-way between the two.’

An evening at an adult night-school.

All classes are catered for up to Standard VI, with provision
for leather-work and carpentry. The demand is such that the higher classes are all doubled—people have to be turned away.

Standing in the hall of this school, three young men were waiting to speak to the Superintendent, asking for a place in class. They went disconsolately away—no room until next term, possibly not till next year.

The Superintendent said: ‘No class is in demand that does not show immediate results in the form of a certificate that might lead to higher wages; there is no interest in books that are not required for the syllabus or are related to an examination.’

In the first classroom we entered, the teacher was writing on the board: ‘Increased poll-tax is good for Africans.’

Most of these young men—there are very few women—work all day in the town and come here for two or three hours a night.

‘But the terrible thing is,’ said the Superintendent, ‘that when they do get their certificates, after such a battle, what then? They seem to think the certificate will be a passport to a white-collar job or higher education. I don’t know which is more heart-breaking—to have to turn them away when they come asking for a place in class or afterwards, when I have to say I can’t find better work for them or a place in secondary school.’

After the night-school, a session in the milk-bar. Juke-box, Coca-Cola, the white boys and girls in jeans and crew-cuts, shouting and yelling and playing the fool. Our friend the teacher looks at them for some time and remarks: ‘I loathe Americanization. This place is getting more American by the day. And as for these white kids, they give me the creeps. Morons, most of them. And then I think of my poor Africans eating their hearts out for an education and they can’t get it.’

This man says at length, and passionately, how he can’t stand white-settler civilization another minute. He is going to Britain. Yes, definitely, he is leaving, he can’t stand it. What’s the use of fighting this set-up? Ten years he’s been in it now, first South Africa, but he left there thinking the Federation would be better, and now Partnership is the last straw—most of the whites think Partnership is just a bad joke, and so it is. All his
energy is spent fighting over details, a few extra shillings here, a slight relaxation of a law there—never anything fundamental.

Then he tells how one of his African staff, a teacher, knows Shakespeare by heart, is a natural actor. ‘What hope is there for him? Unless he leaves his own people and goes to Britain, he can’t even see a play, let alone act in one. When the Reps, put on their last show, I begged them, I pleaded, to let some of my Africans come—they said
they
didn’t mind, it was the audience they had to soft-soap. You’ll never find anyone who minds—it’s always the other fellow who’s the villain. No, I’m getting out.’

Five minutes later he was back on his passion—African education.

I said, ‘You know quite well you’re not leaving, and if you did, you’d be back again in six months. You’d pine for Africa.’

‘I’d pine for the Africans,’ he said. ‘They’re a wonderful lot. But of course I wouldn’t come back. What for? What good can a handful of us do?’ And then he grinned and said: ‘Of course you are quite right. I did leave once, and I came back again.’

Next evening, another night-school—this one a voluntary effort, the teachers giving one night a week of their time for the love of it.

In the Standard VI class I asked the first half-dozen pupils how they managed:

Up at five, with some bread to eat before leaving to walk five miles to the textile factory. They earned £1 2s. 6d. a week. Working hours, seven to five, with a half-hour break when they ate bread and drank tea. They went straight to evening classes from work, three hours every night. They lived in the brick lines, half a dozen to a room. It would take them three or four years to get the junior certificate.

I asked one what he would do then. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Do you want to be a teacher?’

‘No, teachers don’t get enough money.’

This class asked me to address them. I was in a dilemma. I could not speak my mind about the set-up without getting the people who ran the night-school into trouble.

But remembering how the Africans have to live under a continual pressure of contempt and insult from the white
people, how they are always being called backward and ignorant and stupid, I said that the most exciting thing I had seen on my visit was how the Africans are fighting for an education; and how wonderful it was to see people who had to do hard physical labour all day working for hours every night, for the sake of knowledge. I said they were a richly endowed and talented people; and that, just as Africa is a wealthy continent with its wealth scarcely tapped, so, too, the African people are like a giant who does not yet know he is a giant.

Then they asked questions.

‘In Britain, where there must also be many different tribes, do the tribes quarrel among themselves; or have they learned to get on well together; and is there a colour bar?’

I said that in Britain there was colour-prejudice among the ignorant and poorly-educated people, but there was no colour bar as it is known in Central Africa.

Whereupon I was asked how it was possible that the great white man could be poorly educated and ignorant?

I said that in Britain there were large numbers of poor and ignorant people, though not nearly as poor as the people in Africa, and these did all the hard work of the country, just as the Africans did here.

What did I think of Partnership?

I said I thought Prime Minister Todd and his men were quite sincere about Partnership. This was received in non-committal silence.

Why was it that when white people came out from Britain, first they were indignant about the colour bar and the treatment of the Africans, and then they very fast became just as rude and cruel as the old Rhodesians?

I said there were two reasons. One was that any white person who really fought against the colour bar was not popular among his own kind; and someone who had just emigrated from his own country to a new life here had great pressure put on him to conform. And besides, among any people, and no doubt that went for the Africans, too, there was never more than a minority who rebelled against a Government or a system.

This was received in silence; I think a dissenting one.

I said that the most important reason was that a number of
the people who came out from Britain were not necessarily the best; and when they suddenly found themselves in the position of baases, able to push other people around, it went to their heads—I had been going to say that no doubt a certain number of Africans, if given the chance, would like to push other Africans around, a trend which was already very evident; but I was not allowed to get so far, for a stamping roar of approval went up, and what I was saying got drowned in the noise.

Then one of the teachers recited a piece from the American Declaration of Independence, and another came out and acted for us the old father in
Cry the Beloved Country
, mourning for his son:

We all listened in complete silence; and it was like being in church, too grave an occasion for applause.

And afterwards we, the white people, went to another juke-boxed, Coca-Cola’d milk bar, full of white youth who had just come out of the cinema, and the Africans went back to their brick rabbit-holes.

Standing in the dust outside a long row of brick rooms, looking in: table and chairs raised to the ceiling on ropes, two narrow iron bedsteads crammed in, covering all the floor-space, and about a dozen people sitting on the beds. Four young men,
who were legally living in the room; four young women, their ‘spares’ a visiting preacher; four old wives, jolly and fat; and a sampling of small children. They were singing a syncopated hymn-tune to mouth-organs and banjoes.