NF (1957) Going Home (25 page)
Having got the roofs and walls and floors ready—and the beauty of the thing would be that we could make our houses exactly to our own fancy, even colouring the foam mixture bright original colours, then one would need only to stick them together with a sort of glue. Mr McCarran-Longman was working on the glue now. It was quite good enough as it was, but scientists are never satisfied with less than the best. Another two weeks would see him through. He had the test-tubes on his washstand in the hotel; but the proprietor was getting unpleasant, and the sooner we all bought our bit of ground the better, so that he could build a little shed to do the research in.
So far, Mr McCarran-Longman had only found Bob Wharton and two other families interested, all people desperate to have homes of their own; but none of them had any capital at all.
I was fascinated by the thing, but it was a dilettante’s interest. Having spent so much of my life moving from one place to the next, I had a natural inclination to schemes of this kind.
And besides, whereas it might be said that Mr McCarran-Longman was obviously a spiv, that is not altogether true.
Each country has its own type of rogue. Britain, for instance, has the spiv, and one has only to write the word to see him standing there. It was about this time that I got a letter from a
friend in Britain saying: ‘We have a new word. Spiv. I bet you don’t guess what it is.’
I guessed it must be either a sort of meat-mixture, like Spam, or a detergent, but as soon as I heard about spivs, I asked my husband if he thought Mr McCarran-Longman was a spiv.
He said: ‘No. Because a spiv is someone who consciously deludes his victims. But this man believes in every word he says.’
‘Conscious or unconscious,’ I said, ‘I think a great many people are going to be very unhappy because of this man.’
‘But,’ said he, ‘you will not be unhappier, because by now you have learned to take my advice. And you are being very bad for him, because you listen when he talks. You must not. And I shall tell Bob he must not. Yes.’
With this, he went across the iron bridge and knocked on Bob’s door, and seeing that the living-room was so full of people, children and illness and the noise from the radio that one could not think in it, he invited Bob over for a drink.
For several hours he explained to Bob why he should not put any trust in Mr McCarran-Longman.
Bob listened, rather suspicious, as if he thought that he was being done out of something. It was this that made us worried for the first time about Bob, because he was not a suspicious person.
Then he said: ‘Why shouldn’t a man make bricks this way? Look what scientists do. They can do anything. So why shouldn’t McCarran-Longman have invented something important?’
Then, his ears closed against everything that we said, he remarked finally that in any case nothing could be done until the ground was bought. After that evening he did not come near us for some days; he only nodded, rather stiff, from over the bridge.
We heard that he and another family and Mr McCarran-Longman had raised between them £500, borrowing it between them here and there. They were going to the big firms, who lend big sums of money, asking for £10,000 on the £500. All these firms wanted was some security. And there was not the
vestige of security in the lives of the Whartons, the Strickmans, or, for that matter, Mr McCarran-Longman.
Weeks went by, and we hardly saw the Whartons. The elder daughter came back from her holiday, 14 years old now, and her horizons widened by the sea, and badly wanting some space to spread her soul in; and as a relief she took to dropping over to see me of an evening, and she talked steadily about her father, who was crackers, she said, and her mother, who couldn’t manage her servant, and the baby—she couldn’t do her homework because the baby’s things were everywhere. Not once did she mention that sick boy who sat in the middle of the family draining the life out of them. Her mother, she said, was learning shorthand in the evenings at the Polytechnic, between eight and ten, so she must stay in with the children. When we asked about Mr McCarran-Longman, she said: ‘He’s gone to see some friends in Portuguese East who will lend him the money for the project.’ When she called it a project we could see that she believed in it, even though she had called her father crazy. She brought out the word delicately, with a respect for it.
And then nothing happened. Nothing. Mr McCarran-Longman did not come. But it was nothing sudden. It was not a question of saying: ‘If Mr McCarran-Longman does not come back by the end of the month it means we have been made fools of.’ For he had gone off, telling them reasonably that since none of them could raise enough money for the project, he would have to tap resources elsewhere, and that would naturally take some time. He even wrote a letter from Beira, saying he had great hopes of a certain man he had met.
And then the silence set in, and Bob Wharton did not even nod over the gulf, and Mrs Wharton pretended not to see her neighbours: her face was stiff, proud, angry.
Twice we were awakened early after midnight, hearing Bob Wharton, drunk, coming up the narrow stairway, arguing with someone he could not see. And then one morning he was found lying at the foot of the stairs, dead, where he had fallen down in the dark.
And now the Wharton family fell to pieces. The sick boy had to go to an institution at last; and the elder girl, the one who
came to see us, was a salesgirl at the stores, though she had set her heart on going to university, and she lived in an institution that provided cheap accommodation for girls without proper homes. And Mrs Wharton moved into one room with the baby and the second child, the boy of twelve. She earned their living doing shorthand and typing.
Much later Mr McCarran-Longman did come back. And he had done very well for himself. He had sold a patent for a child’s toy. One took a whole lot of fancy little shapes, fishes, dolls, flowers, birds, and poured water into them, and into the water one sprinked chemical; and the stuff set solid and could be turned out. He made quite a lot of money out of it in the end. And so he was proved finally not to be a spiv, but a man of enterprise.
A Nyasaland congressman came to see me, very bitter about Federation.
We got on to the subject of the regiment of his people serving in the war in Malaya. He said: ‘This is a terrible thing. They make us into slaves, and then they take our young men for their war in Malaya. They say we are fighting Communist terrorists. I don’t know anything about Communism. I don’t care about it. But they call
us
agitators and terrorists. We know that the people want only to have their own country back. Why should we fight them?’
I said: ‘Why do the young men go to fight?’
He said: ‘There are no industries in our country. If our young men want to earn money they must go to other countries. Ours is a very poor country. Our average income is £3 10s. a year. That is, for us Africans. And the recruiters come around to the villages, and the young men are excited at the idea of the uniform, and the pay is very high: it can be £15 a month. And
it is a way of travelling and seeing another country. And they are made a great fuss of, with bands playing, and speeches on the wireless.’
I asked him: ‘When they come home, what do they say?’
‘They don’t like it. They say: “What are we doing fighting those people for the white man? They are people with dark skins like our own.”’
I said: ‘You are a person involved in politics. Perhaps the young men who said that to you weren’t ordinary people, but political people, friends of yours?’
He said: ‘No, no, that is not true. They were ordinary young men, village boys. They had had time to think. When they come back they have all sorts of attentions paid them; they are asked to make speeches over the air, they are great heroes. But then they are back in the villages, and they start thinking.’
A great many Nyasaland Africans work in Southern Rhodesia. Dickson, the man who worked for me, came from Nyasaland.
I have often wondered what happened to him. He left us very suddenly at the time of the big strike in 1947.
This was the first strike in Southern Rhodesia. It began in Bulawayo and spread fast to all the towns. It was well organized and well disciplined. The most remarkable feature of this strike was this: that because, as always happens on these occasions, the white people got very angry, and armed themselves, so that bands of self-appointed custodians of order were roaming the streets armed to the teeth, looking for Africans to beat up and punish, the Government ordered all the Africans in the cities to get back into their locations and stay there. Troops and police saw that they stayed there. It was as if, in a big strike in Britain; the Government kept the strikers forcibly in their homes and prevented them from working. Because the Government’s first fear was that the white defence committees and guardians of white civilization would start racial battles in the streets. It is safe to say that probably most of the Africans in the country knew nothing about strikes, had possibly never heard the word before. Many were reluctant to leave work; they did not understand what was happening. But because they were forcibly locked into their townships for several days, with
nothing to do but listen to the speeches of the strike leaders, they were all given a useful political education.
Dickson Mujani, our servant, was one of those who did not want to leave his work.
But he went, and he was away for five days. Then the strike was over, and the Africans coming back to work said that the Government spokesman had promised them all a minimum wage of £4 a month. At that time the average was £1 a month.
But Dickson did not return. A week passed. Then, late one evening, long after the hour when Africans are legally forbidden the streets, Dickson came creeping up the narrow iron staircase that came to the back door of our flat. He looked ill and frightened. His polished black skin had a harsh, greyish look, and his eyes darted this way and that with a roll of frightened white eyeball.
He had under his arm a parcel of dirty, tattered paper.
First we made him eat. Then we tried to find out what had happened. But it was difficult; he was at first too frightened to tell us. He kept begging us to take the papers, because ‘they’ would kill him if they knew he had the papers. Who were
they
? When we had got the story more or less straight, we put him to sleep on a bed in the kitchen. He did not want to sleep. He said he must get away quickly before ‘they’ got him. We said there was nothing to fear, and in the morning we would take his story to the proper authorities and get justice done, if possible. But in the morning he had gone, vanished. And we never saw him again.
The story he had told us was not about himself but about his father. This was the story:
Long ago, he had forgotten how long, Samson Mujani came from Nyasaland south to find work. He was a young man then, with a wife and child in his village. In the big city he found work on the railways, at the station. He swept the platform, and ran errands for the white bosses, and was a messenger boy. He earned a few shillings each month, and he lived in the location. It was still called the location then. At first it was all frightening and difficult, after the peaceful green village he had known. He did not understand the money, he did not understand at all the customs of the white men, and he was puzzled and unhappy because of their rudeness and rough ways. After a while, he
learned how to live, keeping quiet, dodging trouble and the police, keeping a smiling face always for his masters. The green village he had come from seemed a long way off, another world. He thought often of his wife and child, but the women in this town were not as he would wish his own wife to be, so he did not send for her. He took up with one of the women of the town and lived with her in a shack made of iron and brick on the borders of the location where the ground dipped toward the river. She bore him a child, and then another. It was at the birth of the second child that she died. It was then he sent a message to his wife, and after many months she came south, walking with some relatives who looked after her. She brought their own child, and so there was a family of three children in the little shack.
The years went past, and the town grew so that now instead of trains once or twice a week, they came every day, and then several times a day. Samson was a well-known figure of the station. White people who used the trains a great deal grew to know him, and used to give him bits of money, and call him by his name. His own people knew him, too, and when they found it hard to understand the business of buying tickets for a train, and the times of the trains, he would be called in to interpret. By now he was earning about 20s. a month, and it was hard to live with all the children, five of them now, so his wife went to work as a nanny at one of the white houses.
She was a good woman, strict with her children, and with her own behaviour in this city.
And now the elder children were growing up, and Samson thought hardly at all of the green village in the mountains. It was as if he had lived all his life here. But once, feeling tired and sometimes dizzy, and sometimes with pains in him, he went home with his wife, and the younger children, this time on the big lorries that go to and fro over the long distance. He found the village hard now; he had grown away from it. He loved it, and he didn’t love it. His wife would have stayed, but he fretted, and returned to the big city. His wife came with him. But he was growing to be an old man. He did not know how old he was, but it was harder to do the work, carrying messages around the offices on a bicycle, and the sweeping, and sometimes the moving of the luggage. And then there was a change in the way of work, for the union of the white men who worked on the railway was always very careful of what work the black men did. There was a reorganization, and work like Samson’s, which was neither one thing nor another, must be named and ordered. It was at this time that he changed from sweeping and running messages on the platforms, to becoming an assistant of one of the white men who tended the big engines. He might oil certain parts of the
engine while the man watched him, or he might take tools and do small repairs under inspection. This was easier work for him, now that his back was stiffening. Also he had better hours. He was a real railway worker. And then the war came, and again it was as if the town had been fed with new life. It began to spread in all directions, and the trains were in and out all day, carrying troops wearing different coloured uniforms. That easy-going pace of the life along the platforms that he remembered was gone. Often he did not know the faces of the white men who drove and tended the trains. And only the older men in the offices of the station remembered him as a young man, the youth from Nyasaland.
In the location, too, things were changing. Instead of huts and shacks of all kinds, there were houses being built for the Africans, and it was called the township. The Superintendent of the township, who liked those he looked after to be willing and cheerful and obedient, liked Samson, and he was given one of the good houses for men with families. It had two rooms in it, and a kitchen. They all lived in it, the mother and father, and the oldest son, Dickson, who had been born in Nyasaland and had come down with his mother, and the four younger children, all of whom were working in the houses of the white city.
But the new house cost more money than the old one, the rent was higher, and because of the war, the prices of food and clothing were rising all the time, and although everyone in the family was working, it was hard to live, harder than it had ever been.
Around him on the railway, his people were talking whenever they met of the difficulty of living. Often they would send a spokesman to the management about their wages. But the management was not in the station buildings, it was as if whenever they spoke to a white boss, he said he was not the real boss, but there was another over him…they could never get at this real boss to speak to him face to face, as had been possible—so Samson told them—in the old days.
When the strike began, although there had been so much discontent for so long, it was a surprising and troubling thing even for those who had spoken most of it. To begin with, a strike was not legal. And to one like Samson, who had spent all his life avoiding trouble, learning the taboos that hedged his life so as to respect them, to do something illegal was frightening. But there came that evening when all about him walked off from their work, saying it was a strike, and of course he went with them.
There were no blacklegs in that strike.
And the white men, that is the white men who worked on the railways as workers, wished them good luck as they went; because
although they were not on strike themselves, in their capacity as workers they were sympathetic.
That first day on strike Samson stayed at home—by himself—since everyone in the family was out at work in the city, and knew very little about what was to happen. And then, on the second day, he was not alone, for all the houseboys and cooks and messengers of the city struck, too: it was spreading. The last to come home was his wife; she stayed at home on the third day. There was little food in the location, or township, because the authorities, who were now very angry, were not bringing food in. All the Africans were in the townships of the city, and there was no food. And around the townships were cordons of police to prevent white men getting in, or Africans from getting out.
But the family stayed in their little house, and kept themselves out of trouble.
It was on the third day that a man came to Samson and said: ‘May the committee of the strike come to your house tonight to discuss matters?’
‘But why my house?’ asked Samson, deeply troubled. And then he said yes, that they would be welcome.
As the time came near he sent his sons and daughters to a neighbour’s house, and his wife went into the second room, leaving the front room free for the men who wished to talk.
When they came, they said that they moved from this house to that for their discussions, because even their talk was illegal, and they did not wish to remain always in one place, in case the police came to arrest them. Samson was old and he was respected, and his house was a good and respected house.
He received them politely and asked them to sit down, and the wife brought tea for them from the kitchen.
There were seven men, and Samson sat, saying little, while they talked. The matters which they discussed were difficult for him. Regulations and laws and prohibitions and white papers and blue papers and the reports of committees—these were what these men discussed. But at the end of all their talk was one fact only: the strike was not legal. Yet it existed. There were no Africans at work that day, none, in any place in the city, not for cooking, or for cleaning, or for digging gardens, or for looking after children, or for taking messages, or for driving cars or lorries. So what they had to say to the Government was only: ‘Look, here is this strike. Here is this thing. And now what will you do?’
They talked for a long time, and again the wife made tea and brought it in, and the lights were going out in the houses around them.
Samson would have liked to say that it was getting late, and it
would be wiser for them to go now; but he was proud they had chosen him, and so he said nothing.
Then there was a knock on the door, and through the small window they could see the shape of a policeman against the sky, and then another policeman. Four of the men in the room got up, and without a word ran out of the house by the back door into the night. For they were citizens of other countries, that is to say, they came from Nyasaland or from Northern Rhodesia, and even though they might have worked in this country all their lives, like Samson, they could be deported within a day.
When the two policemen came in there were only three men and Samson. But it could be seen that there had been more in the room. They asked to see the papers of the three men, and from these papers it could be seen that they were from this country. The three men wished Samson good night, like friends saying good night after a visit, and went out.
Then the two policemen went into the kitchen and saw Mrs Mujani sitting by her stove knitting a jersey for her daughter. She looked up and went on knitting, though it could be seen that her hands were trembling, and her knees were held together to keep them still. They left her, and went back into the other room, and Samson was straightening the chairs, like a host after his guests were gone. They stood for a moment, watching him, with their sticks in their hands, and then one saw a bundle of papers lying on the table, and he jumped forward for it.
‘And what are these papers?’ he shouted at Samson, unrolling them.
‘I do not know,’ said Samson. And then, thinking he might get his friends into trouble, he said: ‘I found them lying on the ground.’
The two policemen, both tall, strong, fine fellows, spread the papers on the table, and looked at them, and then one turned to Samson and said, ‘Do you not know these papers are forbidden?’
‘No,’ said Samson. ‘I know nothing.’
And now the two policemen came towards Samson, threatening. And the old man shrank back a little and then stood his ground. A timid man he had always been, a gentle man, a man who avoided trouble, and yet here he stood, in his own house with two big policemen standing over him. And his wife was crying in the next room. He could hear her.
‘Where did you get these papers?’ asked one of the policemen, and he hit Samson with his open hand across his head. Samson fell sideways a few steps, recovered, and said:
‘I know nothing.’
And then the other policeman, grinning, moved across and hit
Samson with his open hand on the other side of the head, so he staggered back to the first.
Now the wife was in the open door, wailing aloud.
The first policeman said: ‘We will put you in prison, my fine fellow, you damn fool, you Kaffir.’
‘What are you doing in my house?’ asked Samson, breathing hard. ‘This is my house.’
‘Your house—you say that to the police?’
And he hit Samson again, with his closed fist, on the side of the head, and as Samson reeled across the room the other policeman hit him with his closed fist.
And now there was a silence, for instead of staggering back, to be hit again, Samson stood, his face screwed up, eyes shut, then his mouth dropped and his head fell sideways, and he slumped to the ground.
The wife wailed again.
The two policemen looked at each other, hurriedly bent over Samson who was lying on the ground motionless, and then ran out of the house into the night.
When Dickson came in from his friends’, he found his mother sitting beside his father, swaying from side to side, moaning. His father was dead.
When the other sons and daughters came in, they talked over what to do.
Some said to go to the Superintendent. But the mother was frightened.
One said that policemen were not allowed to kill a man by hitting him, but another that the policemen would lie and there would be trouble.
At last one ran for the nurse at the hospital, and men came with a stretcher and carried Samson away. They said he had fallen down dead suddenly.
He was an old man, and none had eaten for two days.
On the next day the mother sat wailing in her kitchen, and the sons and daughters were with the crowds around the hall and the playing ground, listening to the talk about the strike, and to the men who were standing on boxes explaining about the strike. It was here that Dickson saw a policeman looking close at him. And the policeman came up to him through the crowd and stood by him and said: ‘Where’s your situpa?’ Dickson produced his papers, and the policeman said: ‘You’d better go home, you go to Nyasaland, before they catch you. I know you have those papers in your house.’ Dickson looked at him, and then around for help, but the people about him had melted away to give distance to the policeman. He said nothing. Then the policeman went away, swinging his stick, and Dickson slowly went home.
What is this about the papers?’ he asked his mother.
She raised her voice and wept. He said: ‘Mother, mother, it was those papers that killed him.’
She had put them in the back of the cupboard in the kitchen, and Dickson took them out and looked at them, and understood nothing. But he put them under his coat, and was going to find the men who had been there the night before, to ask why these papers had killed his father, when he saw the policeman again, walking slowly past his house, looking at him, and then he turned and walked slowly back, looking at him all the time.
And now for the first time he listened to the wailing of the old woman, who was saying that she was alone, she was alone, and she wanted to go home. She meant to Nyasaland. In Nyasaland the police did not come into people’s houses and hit them, there the police did not walk with sticks in their hands. She spoke as if she had come from there a week ago, instead of so many years. But Dickson listened, and he stood by the window and looked out and saw the policeman go past again, looking at him, fierce and threatening.