African Laughter Read Free Page A

realities. You cannot be forbidden the land you grew up in, so says the web of sensations, memories, experience, that binds you to that landscape. In 1956 I was invited to go to the Prime Minister’s office. This was Garfield Todd. Striding about an office he clearly felt confined him, a rugged and handsome man in style rather like Abraham Lincoln, he said, ‘I have stretched my hand over you, my child.’ He was then ten years older than I was. I attributed his proprietorial’ style to the fact he had been a missionary, and did not really hear what he was saying: he was welcoming me to Southern Rhodesia because he knew I could give Federation a good write-up. ‘I have let you in…’ I said I could not approve of Federation. We argued energetically and with good feeling for a couple of hours. Later I asked to interview Lord Malvern who, as Doctor Huggins, had been the family doctor, and told him I wanted to visit Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, then full of riots, dissidents, social disorder, and other manifestations of imminent Independence. He said, ‘Oh you do, do you!’ During the course of arguments much less good-natured than those with Garfield Todd, he said, ‘I wasn’t going to have you upsetting our natives.’ I still did not hear what was being said. Finally he said I could go to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland for two weeks. ‘I don’t suppose you can do much harm in that time.’ It goes without saying this flattered me: people who see themselves as recorders and observers are always surprised to be seen as doers and movers.(These long-ago events are of interest now only when I try to come to terms with the irrationality of my reactions.) I came back to London and then began to think there was something here I could be seeing. That I had been Prohibited in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, countries where I had never been, did not affect me, but I could not ‘take in’ the fact that I could be Prohibited in the country I had been brought up in. At last I asked a lawyer to come with me to Southern Rhodesia House where an official, peevish with what he clearly felt was a false position, said, ‘Oh drat it, you have forced my hand.’ In this way was I finally informed that I was a Prohibited Immigrant. Prime Minister Huggins had ruled long ago, when I left home to come home, that I must not be allowed to upset his natives. *
    As the convention was, I was proud to be Prohibited. Since then it has become clear that countries with the levels of purity of motive high enough to match our idea of ourselves as world citizens are not many.
    I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia, for if its climate was perfection, probably the finest in the world, and its landscape magnificent, it was provincial and tedious. I wanted to live in London. What this Prohibition amounted to was that I would be prevented from visiting relatives and friends. They, however, might visit London. These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self. I dreamed the same dream, night after night. I was in the bush, or in Salisbury, but I was there illegally, without papers. ‘My’ people, that is, the whites, with whom after all I had grown up, were coming to escort me out of the country, while to ‘my’ people, the blacks, amiable multitudes, I was invisible. This went on for months. To most people at some point it comes home that inside our skins we are notmade of a uniform and evenly distributed substance, like a cake-mix or mashed potato, or even sadza, but rather accommodate several mutually unfriendly entities. It took me much longer to ask myself the real question: what effect on our behaviour, our decisions, may these subterranean enemies have? That lake of tears, did it slop about, or seep, or leak, secretly making moist what I thought I kept