NF (1957) Going Home (16 page)

‘And do they?’

‘They say, Ah, ah, ah,
baas
!—as if I were cheating them. I say to them, very well then, go. But if you stay, you work. £2 a month for your work. That’s a contract. And please…’ And with this he turned to me, ‘please do not tell me that £2 a month is not enough. They have good brick huts. I give each of them a plot of land for their wives, because they like to have their women kept out of mischief. I give them proper rations. And I pay a teacher for their kids. All the kids on this place go to school, and they go to school properly all day, Government inspected, not this hole and corner business that goes on on the big farms. What do you want me to do? Well, go on, tell me. I know it all stinks. I know it. It’s all a bloody mess. But is it my fault that the poor damned savages aren’t £10-a-week skilled workers with semi-detached houses, filling in their football coupons, all nice and tidy like Britain? Well, is it?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. But tell me, what do you think is going to come out of all this?’

‘I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that unless the Almighty steps in and takes a hand there isn’t any solution to anything. The whites are as bad as the blacks. It is a case of the blind leading the blind.’

About two years ago I was visited in London by an old friend from Salisbury, who told me it was time I came back home to see how things had changed, how out of date and unfair my books were since Partnership and Federation. ‘Natives are doing very well now,’ he said. ‘In towns they have to be paid £4 a month, and the employers have to pay for the accommodation. Everything is being done for the natives and nothing for the Europeans. And they aren’t grateful.’

I felt bad about this. The reason that I felt bad was that this man had had the advantage of four years’ solid Socialist education in our Left Club; and it was hard to admit that this wasn’t enough to insulate him against becoming so rich. For his story is a familiar one: a refugee, he arrived on the shores of Africa before the last war with not much more than the clothes he stood up in. Now he owns shops, farms and enterprises of one sort or another in large quantities.

In Salisbury he at once demanded that I should go out to his
place, or one of his places, to see how well the natives were being treated these days. I was naturally anxious to do so.

On a fine afternoon, then, we drove out to the grading-sheds, 30 miles through the beautiful green countryside of an African autumn, for the grass still stood high and green, undimmed by the dry season, and the skies were high and fresh. There are two Africas, and I do not know which I love the best: the green, lush, bright country when the sap is running and the earth is wet; or the dry, brown-gold wastes of the drought, when the sky closes down, hazy and smoke-dimmed, and the sun is copper-coloured and distorted. Hard to imagine, on an afternoon in April that in two months, this expanse of green and soft-coloured earth will have been beaten by the sun into the colours of metal; and how every lungful of breath will taste of veld-fires.

All the way out we talked about Partnership and gratitude and how unjust journalists are to Federation.

The grading-shed was familiar to me, a great, high barracks of a place, sultry and rancorous, with the strong breath of tobacco.

It was five in the afternoon: the men had left their work, but the women and the children were just finishing theirs of tying the tobacco into bundles.

They sat in two lines on the brick floor. The women sat on one side, some with their babies tied on their backs, some with small children playing beside them. On the other side were the children, aged from six years to about twelve years, boys and girls.

My host said that as this enterprise was some distance from town, too far for these workers to travel in and out, they lived here in a compound he had built for them. There were about 160 men, some with their wives and children. The men earned £2 10s. a month, which with overtime came to about £3 10s. a month. The women earned from 15s. to £2 a month. The children earned 15s. to £1 a month.

They worked from six in the morning until twelve; and from one until four or five.

‘And I am not unreasonable,’ he said, ‘for I let the women
go off at eleven to cook the porridge for their men and the children.’

The air, in spite of the ventilators, was oppressive, and I could not have borne it for long; but my host said one gets used to it. The women and children were coughing all the time.

‘And in addition to this, I give them rations and accommodation.’

‘And what rations do you give them?’

‘The rations laid down by the Government.’

I quote, then, from a handbook printed by the Government designed to attract settlers to the Federation, and it is called:
A New Life in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland
.

This is from the section on how one should feed one’s servants:

As these workers were not domestic servants, slices of bread and jam and tea or coffee remaining from the table would not be available; and what they actually lived on, it seemed, was mostly mealie-meal.

Then we took a walk around the accommodation.

There were three of us, my host, one of his farm managers and myself. On a couple of acres of soil were crowded a hundred or so tiny mud huts, roughly thatched. The floor was
of damp earth, with blankets lying directly on it, cooking pots stacked up beside them, bits of clothing hanging from nails. In one hut there was a bed made of strips of cowhide laced on unbarked tree-trunks stuck direct in the mud floor and a very small deal table but no chairs. My host said: ‘Look, you see they are doing themselves well.’ Among and around the huts were planted mealies; and chickens wandered in and out of the hut doors. The huts were very small and so low that a full-grown person could not stand upright in them.

A broken-down motor car was settling into its parts among the mealies. ‘You see—they are getting rich—they have motor cars these days.’

I have seen many bad compounds, but never one as bad as this; and when my host said: ‘They are picturesque, aren’t they?’ I said I didn’t think they were picturesque.

Whereupon he said that this was the first time he had actually taken a look at this compound; and if one had farm managers one expected them to take the responsibility; one had to see to everything oneself these days, or nothing was done. But perhaps some brick huts would be built here—yes, it was time there were some brick huts.

The farm manager looked a little quizzical at this, but said nothing.

In front of the compound, between it and the grading-shed, were a big water-tank and a water-tap, which was the sole supply for all these people; and the women and the children were standing in the mud puddles around the tap waiting for their turn to draw water.

The whole place smelt bad and wet; it smelt of heavy, damp vegetation, of chicken droppings, of souring porridge. There were no latrines or showers in the compound.

I asked the boss-boy privately if there was any one thing that the people of the compound wanted more than another, and he replied with simplicity: ‘Higher wages.’ So I said, ‘Yes, but apart from that?’ He said: ‘We want the doctor to come, because our children cough all the time.’

In the meantime my host was urging me to go and see how the children were being educated. For he was paying a teacher £6 a month so that the children could be taught.

In a corner of the grading-shed was the class. About twenty children sat on the floor among piled bales of tobacco. They were of all ages, girls and boys, in their ragged pants and shirts, their ragged dresses—barefoot, of course. They were the children we had already seen working. The teacher, a cheerful and enthusiastic pedagogue, was repeating the syllables of the Shona language again and again, while the children chanted them after him. He wrote the syllables on the blackboard, which was the top of a packing-case, with a bit of chalk. The children had pebbles for the purposes of counting, and bits of torn schoolbooks lay about. They had to pay for their own books.

There was a single yellowish electric-light bulb glowing down from the rafters of the shed.

It was a very cheerful class; both teacher and scholars were proud to have visitors, and the little hands were shooting up in answer to every question: ‘Yes, teacher,’ ‘Me, teacher,’ ‘Please, teacher.’

It seems that these children go to class every afternoon at four or five o’clock after their day’s work for a couple of hours’ education; but my host said it was a pity I could not see them at week-ends, when they are at their best, for they do marching and games under the teacher.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘you must not say that nothing is being done for the children, because all the tobacco farmers have schools on their farms now.’

I tried to get the figures later from one of the publicity men for child labour, but was unable to do so. It appears there are no figures. Child labour is extensively used on the farms; and in the towns children work as house servants. But it is expected that within five years all the children in the towns will get some sort of education.

I also asked the publicity man if there was any sort of control of these private compounds; he said there was regular inspection, and the conditions were ‘pretty good’ these days.

When I paid a visit to my own district, Lomagundi, some weeks after this, I was on another tobacco farm, and asked how many children were employed. My hostess did not know; she thought sixty or seventy children. ‘But these days all the
tobacco farmers provide schools. You can’t get the children to come and work at all unless you pay a teacher for them. And you have to pay at least £6 a month for a teacher. On some farms the children don’t work in the afternoons at all. They work in the mornings and go to school in the afternoons.’

We were driving through the compound as we talked; it was of brick huts, but a squalid, broken-down place, and everywhere were ragged, barefoot children with the pot-bellies of malnutrition.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘They look happy enough, don’t they?’

My host of the grading-shed was also convinced of the happiness of his natives; but he did say that they were an unsatisfactory lot, very unstable, because they went off at the end of the season back to their kraals, and they never came back, although he offered a £2 bonus to any who would. He always had to recruit his natives afresh every season.

After the visit to the class, we went off to have supper in the farm manager’s house. It all made me feel as if nothing had changed and nothing ever could: the big, bare brick room, with the stars shining more brilliantly through the window than the light inside the room; the soft, hot air coming in; and the talk, which was, of course, about the colour problem.

But we had to hurry the meal, because there was to be a film show for the natives, and they didn’t like it to be late, since they had to get up at five in the morning.

At eight o’clock, then, we were back in the big grading-shed. We, the white people, sat on chairs beside the projector, and the women and the children sat forward, on the floor under the screen which had been erected; and the men stood on either side, leaning on tobacco bales or against the tobacco racks.

The farm managers were whooping up an atmosphere, shouting ‘Su-pair!’ For we were to show films of Superman, which it seems are popular with the Africans.

The lights went down; and the film began. It was about some wicked men in a skyscraper office in America somewhere, plotting against Superman. The villain appeared to be some sort of Beetle; but as Superman himself was, in his human guise, an undercover man inside the Beetle gang, the whole thing was very confusing to me; and the only person whose role
was quite unambiguous was the beautiful blonde’s. There was a big fight at the top of the skyscraper, where Superman was throttling people and banging them like limp sacks against the walls; and at this point the audience was growling and roaring with excitement. The only points in the film where this audience showed unmistakable appreciation were when Superman was beating up someone.

There was a ramp from the top of the skyscraper to the street; and the blonde, who had passed out from stress and strain at the wheel of an immense car, was whizzing around and down this ramp, while Superman fled down the sky after her. He caught her at the bottom just before the car crashed into a wall, and then the lights went up.

The two white managers got up from their chairs and began clowning and throwing themselves around, shouting ‘Su-pair! Su-pair!’ while a few of the Africans laughed and played up, shouting back ‘Su-pair!’ Most looked embarrassed and sullen, however. All the time the reel was being wound back, the two white men were diving head first over bales, staggering around shaking their hands together over their heads, or, pointing their joined hands upwards, made as if to fly off upwards, like Superman.

To cries of ‘Su-pair!’ the lights went out; and we were now in the bowels of a mountain, where Superman was plotting against the Beetle for some good and noble end, but what this end would be was never made clear. At the end of this reel, the Beetle had thrown a switch which dissolved the mountain into lava; and Superman was wading waist-deep through red-hot lava thousands of feet under the mountain.