Read This Was the Old Chief's Country Online
Authors: Doris Lessing
This Was the Old Chief's Country
MODERN CLASSIC
DORIS LESSING
This Was the
Old Chief's Country
Collected African Stories
Volume One
Preface for the 1964 Collection
Preface for the 1973 Collection
The De Wets come to Kloof Grange
A Home for the Highland Cattle
This first volume of Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories was published in hardcover by Michael Joseph in 1973. Apart from âA Home for the Highland Cattle', âEldorado' and âThe Antheap' which appeared in
Five
(Michael Joseph, 1953), and âEvents in the Skies' which was first published in
Granta
in 1987, all the other stories in this volume appeared in the first collection entitled
This Was the Old Chief's Country
(Michael Joseph, 1951). All these stories including five of those in
The Sun Between Their Feet,
the second volume of Collected African Stories, appeared in
African Stories
(Michael Joseph, 1964).
These stories have also appeared previously in paperback in the following editions: âThe Old Chief Mshlanga', âA Sunrise on the Veld' and âNo Witchcraft for Sale' have appeared in
The Black Madonna
; the short novels âA Home for the Highland Cattle', âEldorado' and âThe Antheap' are also published in
Five
; the rest of the stories in this volume appear in
Winter in July
.
Most of these stories come from two earlier collections:
This Was the Old Chief's Country
, and
Five.
The first has been out of print for some time. Some of its stories are among my favourites, and I am happy to have them around again.
The stories an author likes are not necessarily those chosen by other people. This happens to every writer. Because I was brought up in Southern Africa (Southern Rhodesia) a part of my work has been set there, and the salience of the colour clash has made it inevitable that those aspects which reflect âthe colour problem' should have overshadowed the rest. When my first novel,
The Grass is Singing
, came out, there were few novels about Africa. That book, and my second,
This Was the Old Chief's Country,
were described by reviewers as about the colour problem ⦠which is not how I see, or saw, them. But then, a decade ago, manifestations of race prejudice in Africa, terribly familiar to those of us who had to live with them, were still a surprise, apparently, to Britain. Or, to put it as cynically as some people feel it, indignation about the colour bar in Africa had not yet become part of the furniture of the progressive conscience. If people had been prepared to listen, two decades earlier, to the small, but shrill-enough, voices crying out for the world's attention, perhaps the present suffering in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia could have been prevented. Britain, who is responsible, became conscious of her responsibility too late; and now the tragedy must play itself slowly out. Meanwhile there are dozens of novels, stories, plays about what one happy reviewer called âthe colour bore'.
Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages â being at the centre of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to
wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting. There are other things in living besides injustice, even for the victims of it. I know an African short-story writer whose gift is for satirical comedy, and he says that he has to remind himself, when he sits down to write, that âas a human being he has the right to laugh'. Not only have white sympathizers criticized him for âmaking comedy out of oppression', his compatriots do too. Yet I am sure that one day out of Africa will come a great comic novel to make the angels laugh, pressed as miraculously from the bitter savageries of the atrophy as was
Dead Souls.
And while the cruelties of the white man towards the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.
I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.
My favourites in
This
Was
the Old Chief's Country
are not necessarily those that have been most translated, which are
Little Tembi
,
The Old Chief Mshlanga
, and
No Witchcraft for Sale. A Sunrise on the Veld
, for instance, and
Winter in July
are both larger stories than the directly social ones.
These stories have in common that they are set in Africa, but that is all they have in common. For one thing, while the
Old Chief
was a collection of real short stories,
Five
is five long stories, almost short novels. A most enjoyable form this, to write, the long story, although of course there is no way of getting them printed out of book form. There is space in them to take one's time, to think aloud, to follow, for a paragraph or
two, on a side-trail â none of which is possible in a real short story.
I hope these stories will be read with as much pleasure as I had in ⦠but I mean it. I enjoy writing short stories very much, although fewer and fewer magazines print them, and for every twenty novel readers there is one who likes short stories.
Some writers I know stopped writing short stories because, as they say, âthere is no market for them'. Others like myself, the addicts, go on, and I suspect would go on even if there really wasn't any home for them but a private drawer.
The first clutch of short stories I wrote was called
This
Was
the Old Chief's Country.
Those stories, with three long ones from a collection called
Five
, make up Volume One of this new collection, which is again called
This Was the Old Chief's Country.
It is a title which is accommodating: after all, it can be said of all white-dominated Africa that it was â and indeed still is â the Old Chief's Country. So all the stories I write of a certain kind, I think of as belonging under that heading: tales about white people, sometimes about black people, living in a landscape that not so very long ago was settled by black tribes, living in complex societies that the white people are only just beginning to study, let alone understand. Truly to understand, we have to lose the arrogance that is the white man's burden, to stop feeling superior, and this is only just beginning to happen now.
In the last decade or two, all over the world, the aggressive, thrusting, technical societies that killed, or starved out, or infected with disease, or allowed to die out from ignorance and lack of imagination the tribal societies they supplanted, have started to understand their responsibility for what has been lost. Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the United States, Brazil, Africa â it is always the same story. The white men came, saw, coveted, conquered. The children and grandchildren of these invaders condemn their parents, wish they could repudiate their own history. But that is not so easy.
I am not able to write about what has been lost, which was and still is recorded orally. As a writer that is my biggest regret, as it is of all the white writers from Africa I have known. The tribal life that was broken seems now to have had more real dignity, more responsibility for what is important in people â their self-respect,
more tolerance of individuality, than our way of living has. The breakup of that society, the time of chaos that followed it, is as dramatic a story as any; but if you are a white writer, it is a story that you are told by others.
All the stories here are set in a society which is more short-lived than most: white-dominated Africa cannot last very long.
But looking around the world now, there isn't a way of living anywhere that doesn't change and dissolve like clouds as you watch.
Doris Lessing
January 1972
They were good, the years of ranging the bush over her father's farm which, like every white farm, was largely unused, broken only occasionally by small patches of cultivation. In between, nothing but trees, the long sparse grass, thorn and cactus and gully, grass and outcrop and thorn. And a jutting piece of rock which had been thrust up from the warm soil of Africa unimaginable eras of time ago, washed into hollows and whorls by sun and wind that had travelled so many thousands of miles of space and bush, would hold the weight of a small girl whose eyes were sightless for anything but a pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle â a small girl singing: âOut flew the web and floated wide, the mirror cracked from side to side â¦'
Pushing her way through the green aisles of the mealie stalks, the leaves arching like cathedrals veined with sunlight far overhead, with the packed red earth underfoot, a fine lace of red-starred witchweed would summon up a black bent figure croaking premonitions: the Northern witch, bred of cold Northern forests, would stand before her among the mealie fields, and it was the mealie fields that faded and fled, leaving her among the gnarled roots of an oak, snow falling thick and soft and white, the woodcutter's fire glowing red welcome through crowding tree trunks.
A white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape, a gaunt and violent landscape, might be supposed to accept it as her own, to take the msasa trees and the thorn trees as familiars, to feel her blood running free and responsive to the swing of the seasons.
This child could not see a msasa tree, or the thorn, for what they were. Her books held tales of alien fairies, her rivers ran slow and peaceful, and she knew the shape of the leaves of an
ash or an oak, the names of the little creatures that lived in English streams, when the words âthe veld' meant strangeness, though she could remember nothing else.
Because of this, for many years, it was the veld that seemed unreal; the sun was a foreign sun, and the wind spoke a strange language.
The black people on the farm were as remote as the trees and the rocks. They were an amorphous black mass, mingling and thinning and massing like tadpoles, faceless, who existed merely to serve, to say âYes, Baas,' take their money and go. They changed season by season, moving from one farm to the next, according to their outlandish needs, which one did not have to understand, coming from perhaps hundreds of miles North or East, passing on after a few months â where? Perhaps even as far away as the fabled gold mines of Johannesburg, where the pay was so much better than the few shillings a month and the double handful of mealie meal twice a day which they earned in that part of Africa.
