A Ripple From the Storm (26 page)

Mr Thompson said: ‘I’m responsible to the people who elected me, and I know that not one of them would agree to white people agitating in the Locations.’

Mrs Van said smoothly that obviously it would be better to have very responsible people addressing this meeting, and she urged Mr McFarline to be one of them.

Mr McFarline said hastily that there was a Select Committee that afternoon. Mr Thompson was booked for the same committee. Five other Parliamentary members were returning to their constituencies that afternoon. There would therefore be only one member of Parliament at the meeting, Jack Dobie. Who, with a small smile, inquired of his fellows whether they would be happy to have their views represented to the Africans by himself.

Mr McFarline said grimly that if Jack Dobie committed the Party to anything at all, he’d be in trouble with his colleagues.

To which Jack retorted that he would speak in his personal capacity with pleasure, because he had no intention of putting forward his dear colleagues’ views on the Native Question – they would stick in his throat.

At which Mr Thompson said that obviously the important thing was to make sure the press did not hear a word about what was going forward, because if it got into the newspapers they would all lose their seats.

Mrs Van agreeing to this, the Parliamentary members left in a body, leaving Jack, Johnny, Jasmine, Martha and the du ?reez.

Mrs Van then instructed these people as to how they were to conduct themselves that afternoon. Mr Playfair and Jack should be on the platform with herself and Mr Matushi – Mr Matushi had been sitting quietly all this time, watching Mr McFarline and his group with a suspicious and watchful smile – while Marie and Piet and Martha and Jasmine should be responsible for a table for the sale of literature.

The literature was stacked ready. Mrs Van, welfare worker for so many years, had had printed at her own expense several useful pamphlets: How to Keep Your Baby Clean. How to Feed Your Family. Kill those Flies! Three others expressed Mrs Van’s other and perhaps deeper self: African Woman, you are not a Slave! How to Conduct a Meeting Properly. The Principles of Trade Unionism.

Mrs Van, still seated behind her table, offered the four communists a smile which was both sprightly and firm, and said: ‘Yes, I know you’d rather be selling something about the Red Army, but please restrain yourselves for just one afternoon.’

Jasmine and Martha returned towards the Grill, talking about the meeting. For one thing, neither of them had been inside the Location before; for another, they were confused about whether they ought, as revolutionaries, to be selling pamphlets of such a domestic character. But Jasmine settled this problem by saying: ‘In the early days of the Russian Revolution the comrades were out in the backward areas liquidating illiteracy and teaching hygiene, so it must be all right, mustn’t it?’

Anton was waiting for them. Maisie and Andrew were there too. The three had been drinking wine and were already festive, and Martha and Jasmine had to remind themselves that this was after all a wedding lunch. A big meal had been ordered. Martha ate loyally, watching herself become gay in proportion as her sense of unease deepened. She made jokes and chattered, carrying on a dialogue with herself at the same time. But if Anton had not arranged something special, wouldn’t I have been hurt? I would have thought him unimaginative? So why do I hate this so much? Yesterday he said, and I liked the way he said it, But, Matty, you must not think I would ever be unreasonable. This is not a marriage that would have taken place had it not been for the special circumstances, so we will both be reasonable … but I wish we could have done like Marjorie and Colin, and Andrew and Maisie – they got married and told us about it afterwards. But I simply can’t stand Anton when he’s trying to be gay, and doing the right thing …

This miserable inner current took its own way throughout the long meal in the small hot overladen dining-room which was full of businessmen concluding deals over lunch.

Towards its end Maisie asked Martha if she were sure she had to be at the meeting – ‘surely they could do without you for once?’ And Martha, while she knew quite well it would make no difference at all whether she were there or not, insisted that she was expected and must go. Again she felt Jasmine’s comprehending inspection of her.

They separated on the pavement, Anton kissing Martha before them all, with an awkward jocularity quite foreign to him.

Again Martha and Jasmine hurried away together, this time towards Jasmine’s car, in which the pamphlets had been stacked by Mrs Van’s office boy. Martha felt guilty: she should have gone with Anton. Jasmine was saying nothing. Martha, as she got into the car, burst out in the falsely jocular voice that reminded her of Anton’s a few moments ago: ‘I think the whole institution of marriage should be abolished,’ Jasmine, determined to protect Martha against herself, said quickly: ‘Anton certainly did us all well.’ She examined Martha’s set face, and said apologetically: ‘You know, Matty, I read something just lately: when the middle-class rebel, they become bohemians. When the working-class first break out, it’s important they do everything just right.’

Martha understood that Jasmine was referring to them both, and she wanted to laugh at the idea of this demure and sensible girl thinking of herself as bohemian. So the root of Anton’s dogged determination to be correct in his behaviour was his working-class origin? In that case, she was being a snob. But she did not believe it, and said so to Jasmine, who insisted that ‘it was a well-known fact’, and continued to speak of the dangers of bohemianism lying in wait for them both all the way to the Location. The entrance to the place was marked by the fact that the good road gave way to rutted areas of red dust. The car bumped and hooted its way through masses of shouting, laughing, gesticulating Africans with their bicycles.

The hall, a dusty little barn, with a clump of dust-filled trees beside it, was marked out for the afternoon’s event by five sleek cars that stood beside it. Jasmine’s made the sixth.

The benches of the hall were crammed with men in the threadbare patched clothes of decent poverty, and they sat in silence, watching the platform, where Mrs Van presided. A woman who did not care about clothes, she was wearing a formal afternoon dress which normally she would have lifted down from her wardrobe for a garden party or to open a bazaar with a feeling of irritation that such conventions had to be heeded, but which she had chosen today to show she intended to do honour to an occasion. Beside her sat Johnny Lindsay in shirt-sleeves, his fine craggy face alternately giving encouragement to the Africans and tender approval to Mrs Van. Jack Dobie, representing Parliament, sat on her other side, his small and vigorous body held in readiness, his head cocked sideways, as if he were listening to something off-stage which heralded a humorous disaster.

The literature table was by the door. None of the Africans came to buy. There were no women in the audience at all, so the sellers stacked the welfare pamphlets, How to Keep Your Baby Clean, etc., to one side.

When Mrs Van stood up to speak the men in the hall rose in one movement and began a rhythmic clapping, and would not stop until she pressed them back on to their benches with a Canute-like gesture. She then proceeded to make some sensible and cautionary remarks in the spirit of the informal meeting which had taken place in her office that morning. This was not a meeting of the Social Democratic Party, commonly referred to as the Labour Party, the platform was in no sense to be considered representative of the Party, they were all individuals and speaking as such. The listening men leaned forward, frowning, their brows puckering. And before Mrs Van had come to the end of her speech, Mr Matushi was on his feet, saying passionately that every man present was a signed and paid-up member of the Labour Party – he corrected himself to say: Social Democratic Party, and the white people present were all members of the Executive, and he was speaking for every man present in welcoming the Social Democratic Party to the first political meeting ever to be held in the Location. It was at this point that the Location Superintendent, who had been standing like a sentinel at the door, his face grim with disapproval, left the Hall, obviously on his way to telephone to someone in authority.

Now Johnny Lindsay stood up, and in the face of storms of applause which drowned every word he said, tried to insist that they were all individuals.

The audience were on their feet again, a dozen men trying to out-shout each other. Mrs Van nodded at one of them, who cried out, his face working: ‘Now at last we know that there are some Europeans whose hearts are turned in kindness towards us, now we know that we have friends among the Europeans.’ There was a roar of grateful approval, and the three people on the platform nodded at each other, wryly, but delighted, relinquishing from that moment on all attempts to stem the flood.

Now a man who had been sitting by himself at the end of a row stood up. It was Elias Phiri, who demanded to know, and with great command of bland language, if this was or was not officially a Social Democratic Party meeting, and if the audience was or was not to take what the platform said as official policy. He noted that Mr Dobie was present, and he, as everyone knew, was a member of Parliament: he was looking forward very much to hearing Mr Dobie speak. He sat down in silence; all the Africans in the Hall were looking at this, their apparent spokesman, with something like apprehension. There was a noise in the Hall like a hiss – the sharp involuntary intake of breath. Slowly the eyes turned to Jack Dobie who was on his feet.

Jack began by saying that he was a supporter of African advancement … but a man leaped up to shout: ‘Advancement, Mr Dobie? You mean equality – we have for many years read your brave speeches, Mr Dobie. You have spoken for us, you have spoken for our equality.’

Jack Dobie, head cocked on one side, smiling dryly, hesitated very slightly, and then remarked into the still attentiveness of the waiting audience that he was an old socialist, he came from a place in Scotland famed for its militancy and its socialist traditions, he came from the Clyde, and as a socialist he stood for the brotherhood of man … it was at this point that the audience finally swept up like a flame into passionate unity with the platform, who abandoned any attempt to keep the words and sentences measured by any thought of electors, white citizens or newspapers.

One after another men rose from the body of the Hall, keen, fervent, desperately earnest men, holding small pieces of paper in their hands which they never looked at, since the flood of their anger or their hope fed words into their mouths which kept the audience laughing, clapping, groaning approval. One after another they demanded justice, freedom, brotherhood, kindness, understanding; they aired all the injustices that hurt them – phrased formally in the words of blue-books or white papers – the question of education for their children, the Pass laws, the fact that they had no vote, that their cattle were being killed in the Reserves – but every one of these bricks in the building of their servitude served as a stepping-stone to impassioned oratory. The platform answered questions, made small corrections of fact, sat smiling, and the four communists sat by the literature table, watching and listening, caught up in the hunger, the unity and the brotherhood that beat through the Hall like drums, and feeling that at last they were coming somewhere near the source of their need for service.

And it was not long before the division between the platform and the literature sellers broke: one of the men in the Hall demanded why it was that the white workers – ‘for they work with their hands, they are workers, they call themselves workers’ – did not support the Africans, their fellow-workers, in their fight for their right to skilled work. Mrs Van nodded at Piet, Executive Committee member for the building trades, who leaped up on his great clumsy legs on to the platform and spoke for half an hour on the principles of trade unionism. There was a point, too, when Mrs Van interrupted a lean, bent, spectacled teacher who was demanding education – ‘for if we are children, as the Europeans say we are, then as children we demand education as a right so that we may grow to men’ – to say: ‘Men
and
women, sir, may I point out that there is not a woman here this afternoon? And why not? Are your wives fit for cooking and bearing your children but not to stand side by side with you in your struggle?’

The audience seemed abashed, but rather in deference to Mrs Van’s qualities than to the force of her arguments. Whereupon Mrs Van invited Marie du Preez, in her capacity as secretary for a women’s organization, and therefore an expert on the subject, to address the audience on women’s advancement. Marie met a sideways grin from her husband with a dignified lift of her head, and went soberly to the platform. She, like Mrs Van, had put on an afternoon dress to do honour to the Africans, and, as she stood facing the audience, broad-faced, rather flushed, her capable body draped in flowered silk, her feet restless in high shoes which were hurting her (she had kicked them off under the literature sales table), she looked the image of a white ‘missus’ long used to handling servants. This question of women’s rights,’ she began, in a reasonable voice, ‘is a complicated one …’At which Piet, sitting between Martha and Jasmine, both of whom told him he should be ashamed, said loudly, while maintaining a husbandly grin: ‘You’re telling me.’ Marie stopped in the middle of a sentence, glaring at him. She put her hands on her hips, her body took on an Amazon’s pose, she allowed her eyes to return, slowly, to the audience, after a slow, diminishing inspection of her husband, and began: ‘The whole lot of you ought to be damned well ashamed of yourselves. Men! If there’s one thing that teaches me there’s no such thing as colour it is that men are men, black and white. You can’t tell me! There you sit, sixty of you, every man jack of you with a little woman at home running after you like great boobies with your food and your comforts, and out
you
come, lords and masters, to sit talking, making decisions, and when you get back home you’ll say: Is the supper ready!’