NF (1957) Going Home (11 page)

All this put me into an uncomfortable frame of mind. Of course, as a Communist one is used to living as if one were plastered all over with labels that have nothing to do with what one thinks or feels; but I have never felt this so strongly as on this last trip home. For the backwardness of these countries is such that the sort of work a Communist does in them (as, for example, the work the South African Communist Party did before it was banned) is exactly the same sort of work a liberal or a progressive churchman does. It is a fight for basic human rights. If I were not a Communist I would be doing exactly the same kind of thing.

It is another parallel between white-settler countries and the United States, which gets into such a state of hysteria about its small Communist Party, and destroys its own civil liberties in the determination to destroy Communism. What sort of a precarious state can Central Africa be in that it gets so excited at the prospect of having one Communist inside its borders for seven weeks? And what—with the worst intentions in the world, and of course I had them—could I do in seven weeks?

But now that I was under high though invisible patronage, officials that had been stuffy and suspicious now became guardedly helpful; and I set out on a round of interviewing and inspection. I spent most of my time doing this for some weeks; but what soon became evident was not the diversity or variety of what was said, but how a single thread ran through what seemed at first to be complicated.

For all these officials said the same things. It is a commonplace that a certain political epoch will feed the same words and phrases into the minds of people who are probably convinced they have thought them up for themselves; but it is a remarkable experience to see this commonplace take flesh.

When I left home the slogans and catchwords were different. Then, everyone was saying that the natives must be advanced slowly; the time was not ripe; you cannot civilize barbarians in under a thousand years. These are the things the majority of white citizens are still saying; but since the recent events in
Kenya, which were like a burglar alarm in a rich house, the intelligent whites are frightened and they are all with one voice, but in a variety of phrases, saying: ‘We must create a small privileged class of Africans to cushion white supremacy.’ It is what Huggins has been saying for years; now it is official policy.

And once having grasped this basic policy, all the contradictions and anomalies fall into place.

Ten years ago the Africans who protested against being described as barbarians with barbaric needs were called agitators and troublemakers; now it is the Africans who demand political rights
for all Africans as distinct from rights for a privileged minority
who can expect to be deported, threatened, imprisoned.

In all these interviews there were two interviews—one during which the phrases of the policy were offered to me; and an unofficial interview which I was asked not to quote. But what was said off the record was always the same: ‘We have a small, a very small chance of avoiding a racial flare-up, of making Partnership work. If African nationalism does not become unmanageable, if the spirit of white settlerdom does not revolt against Mr Todd and his enthusiasts, then perhaps we may avoid what is happening in the Union, what has happened in Kenya. We must create a middleclass of Africans quickly.’

And so with the white trade-union leaders, who, having accepted a policy whereby Africans are workers by law, and thus able to join multi-racial trade unions, so that African trade unionism may be controlled and directed—these men are frightened that the mass of the white trade unionists may flare into hostility, refusing to accept Africans as fellow-workers, even in their own self-interest.

The chief block to African advancement in Central Africa, as in the Union of South Africa, is organized white labour. A white artisan is a white man first and a worker second. The proud traditions of the British Labour Movement suffer a strange transformation in Africa. There are no more colour-conscious people than the white artisans; yet, if reproached with their attitude towards the Africans, they reply: ‘All we say is that any job must be paid at the same rates.’ Which sounds fair enough. But an African labourer, in 1956, in Southern
Rhodesia, earns about £3 or £4 a month, plus food and housing which cost the employer about £2 10s. a month. A white artisan can earn £70 or £80 a month. On the Copper Belt the comparable figures are: African workers £6 to £10 a month, white workers £150 to £200 a month. Impossible for an employer to pay an African ‘white’ rates, for it would cut at the root of the colour structure. Therefore the white trade-union demand for equal pay preserves skilled work for white workers. In Southern Rhodesia it is impossible for an African to do skilled work, except in the building industry; and then only outside limits within which it is saved for white artisans. In June the Government enforced a law saying that any African employed by a building firm within these territorial limits must be paid the same rates as white workers: the opposition came from the African building workers—immediately, rather than pay the same wages, employers began sacking their African workmen.

And so there is the anomalous position where the chief support for abolishing or modifying the industrial colour bar comes from the industrialists: even if wages were three or four times as high as they are now, it would be much cheaper to employ African labour than white labour. A slow battle goes on between the Government (expressing the needs of the industrialists) and the white workers, who are being forced, step by step, to release certain categories of less skilled work to Africans. A category of work is ‘released’ when there are enough Africans skilled enough to take over all that class of work within a particular industry. For it is degrading for the white worker to work alongside an African. Recently, on the Copper Belt, the copper companies forced the white mineworkers’ union to release twenty-four categories of semi-skilled work. Next week the white workers came out on strike: the employers had put on three African pipe-fitters when there were still white pipe-fitters on the job. This was an insult to white labour. The strike succeeded; the companies have agreed to keep these categories ‘white’ until they can be taken over entirely by Africans—no mixing of the colours on the job.

And yet on the Copper Belt I was told by a mine official: ‘And after all that fuss, on such and such a mine Africans are
actually doing pipe-fitting, and the white workers are saying nothing. One never knows when they are going to lose their tempers and strike.’

There is no place where it is easier to see that colour-feeling is basically money-feeling than here, in spite of all the rationales of racialism. On the building sites one can watch white artisans and black artisans working together: the black men mix the cement and the mortar, lift the bricks and carry them to the white men, who fit the bricks into place on the wall. The black men will be earning a tiny fraction of what the white men earn. And on the Rhokana mine, I saw a great furnace being opened to let the molten waste flow out: five black men on the crowbar, and one white man, working together. The white man would strike if they were paid the same, while they still worked together.

In Southern Rhodesia the white artisans say that Africans are incapable of doing skilled work, as a moral justification for keeping them out; but in Northern Rhodesia, where white labour is concentrated on the Copper Belt, the Industrial Colour Bar is confined to minework. There Africans have done skilled building, plumbing, surveying and clerical work for decades.

The white trade-union case is self-contradictory: if the black man is so obviously inferior, why create so many barriers to keep him out? In reply, the white trade union uses the classic language of British trade unionism: the capitalists will exploit the African by paying him less than the rate for the job unless we keep up standards.

The leaders of the white trade unions in Southern Rhodesia are in exactly the same dilemma as the more intelligent of the white politicians: they will not remain in their jobs unless they are voted back into them by white votes; but the majority of their following consider them ‘soft’ towards the Africans. And it is a fact that many of the white artisans are right to be afraid. Many of them are poor human material; not only are their standards of skill very low, but they are degraded by their attitude towards the Africans, who are, after all, their fellow workers. Faced with competition from Africans who are avid for education and new skills, with all the irresistible energy of
a suppressed people, they know they will go to the wall unless they are protected: white trade-union policy is in essence to protect that section of the white workers who intend to rely not on their skills or their industry or their education, but on the colour of their skins for their standard of living.

The more sensible of the leaders know this, know their position is untenable. Therefore, the difference between what these trade unionists said to me privately, and what they could say publicly, was greater than in any other group of people I interviewed.

‘Our white kids,’ said one, ‘they leave school the minute they legally can, and all they are interested in is the pictures and sport and their girl-friends. In the meantime, these natives are killing themselves to get educated. Well, our white kids have got to pull their socks up or they’ve had it.’ But that is not what they can afford to say to their union members.

In Northern Rhodesia, however, there was an interesting reversal of what was said for publication and what off the record. An official of the white mine workers’ union, of whom the rumour goes that he is an ardent Afrikaner Nationalist and a supporter of
apartheid
, spent three-quarters of an hour putting himself across to me as an old-fashioned liberal interested only in African advancement. It was a most impressive performance; and if I had not previously read his evidence to various commissions and committees, where his voice was the traditional voice of white trade unionism, I might easily have been convinced by him. But the point is that on the Copper Belt there is a vigorous and well-organized African trade union, and he cannot afford to be quoted as an opponent of African advancement. So here the public voice is a liberal coo, mixed with execrations against the machinations of the capitalists who want only to exploit the poor Africans; and the private voice is savagely reactionary.

It was during this interview that the door into his office opened, and an African appeared, saying: ‘Baas, I want work.’ Whereupon the official shouted at the top of his voice: ‘Get out of here, go on, get
out
.’ At which point, recollecting the presence of the enemy, he hastened to assure me that had a
white man entered that door he would have spoken to him in exactly the same tone of voice.

The evening before this interview I spent talking to another of the union officials, who spoke of the Africans in a way in which most white citizens are becoming too self-conscious to speak: filthy, dirty, ignorant, savage, immoral—it was a stream of abuse. The point is that this man was not a South African—for there are thousands of Afrikaners now on the Copper Belt, forming a solid block of white reaction—but an Englishman. He was one of those who became officers during the war and was unable to return to artisan status when it ended; therefore he very logically emigrated to the Rhodesias where he could be a baas.

Time and again it was said to me, either jubilantly or with regret: ‘If you want to see the natives badly treated, then you should see the people just out from Britain: they are worse then anyone, much worse than the old Rhodesians.’ And: ‘We thought that a big influx of immigrants from Britain would strengthen liberal opinion, but not a bit of it.’

In Bulawayo I met a group of young women who had left £7 a week typing jobs in London and were now earning £60, £70, £80 a month. In the accents of the more refined women’s magazines, they were complacently exchanging the phrases I have been hearing all my life: ‘These Kaffirs are so backward.’ ‘In Britain they don’t understand our problems.’ ‘It has taken
us
two thousand years to become civilized…’ and so on.

Another kind of immigrant: a white man, newly arrived in Southern Rhodesia, full of indignation at the colour bar, goes to the Matopos to Rhodes’s grave. He finds two African watchmen on guard.

He says reproachfully: ‘How can you allow yourself to guard the grave of the man who enslaved you, who tricked your ancestors out of their land?’

A guard interrupts him: ‘Mind, baas! You are treading on the grave.’

While the post-war immigrants are not a sympathetic lot, there is no more touching group of people than the white workers
who left Britain during the hungry and unemployed ‘thirties. In Africa they found, for the first time in their lives, a good standard of living and some sort of security. They were white men. They were baases. At immense cost, often borrowing the money to do it, they left their own country with their wives and families. They had to conform, if they did not have the money to leave again. Some couldn’t stand it, and left. They were the best or the luckiest. Some said they would leave when they had saved the money. But when that time came, if it ever did—for if wages are high then so are the standard and cost of living—well, it is a beautiful climate, and in Britain one does not have servants. So they stayed and conformed. And in order to drown their consciences, for they are after all products of the British Labour Movement with its traditions of brotherhood between man and man, they adopt the shabby phrases which justify the colour bar and shout them louder than anyone else.

And the big industrialists, who are all liberals to a man—for to hear them talk one would imagine that the copper mines, gold mines and industries are there solely for the philanthropic purpose of uplifting the African, and it takes quite an effort of will to remember the millions of pounds that flow out to overseas investors—these liberal industrialists never cease to complain about the reactionary white trade unions. Yet the privileged white worker was the deliberate creation of earlier industrialists; and it is a policy which has boomeranged, for there he stands, blocking the path to cheap black labour.