NF (1957) Going Home Read Free

patient must get worse before he can get better.’ And I know this is a light phrase for human suffering and what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in frustration. I do not have to be told or made to feel what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in humiliation and frustration. I know it all.
    But in thinking of the future rather than the bitter present, I believe I am one with the Africans themselves, who show their superiority to colour bars by their joyfulness, their good humour and their delight in living. People who imagine the ghettos of white-dominated countries to be dreary and miserable places know nothing about the nature of the African people.
    Worse than the colour bars, which are more dangerous and demoralizing to the white people than to the black, for they live within a slowly narrowing and suffocating cage, like so many little white mice on a treadmill—worse than this is the fact that the Africans are being channelled into industrialization in such a way that what is good in European civilization cannot reach them. They are allowed to know only what is bad and silly. That is why I am so impatient that they should wrench themselves free before they have lost touch with their own rich heritage, before they have become exhausted by exploitation.
    I long for the moment when the Africans can free themselves and can express themselves in new forms, new ways of living; they are an original and vital people simply because they havebeen forced to take the jump from tribalism to industrial living in one generation.
    And yet—the stale patterns of white domination still exist. So because I was brought up in it I have a responsibility. And does that mean I must go on writing about it?
    I have notebooks full of stories, plots, anecdotes, which at one time or another I was impelled to write. But the impulse died in a yawn. Even if I wrote them well—what then? It is always the colour bar; one cannot write truthfully about Africa without describing it. And if one has been at great pains to choose a theme which is more general, people are so struck by the enormity and ugliness of the colour prejudices which must be shown in it that what one has tried to say gets lost.
    When I am asked to recommend novels which will describe white-settler Africa most accurately to those who don’t know it, I always suggest a re-reading of those parts of Anna Karenina about the landowners and the peasants—simply because colour feeling doesn’t arise in it.
    For the interminable discussions and soul-searchings about ‘the peasant’ are paralleled by the endless talk about ‘the native’. What was said in pre-revolutionary Russia about the peasant is word for word what is said about the Africans—lazy, irresponsible, shiftless, superstitious, and so on.
    And in the person of Levin one finds the decent worried white liberal who is drawn by the reserves of strength, the deep humanity of the African, but yet does not trust him to govern himself. Levin, in Africa, is always dreaming of going native, of escaping from the complexities of modern civilization which he sees as fundamentally evil. He philosophizes; goes on long trips into the bush with his African servant to whom he feels himself closer than to any other human being and to whom he tells everything; half-believes in God; knows that all governments are bad; and plans one day to buy a crater in the Belgian Congo or an uninhabited island in the Pacific where at last he can live the natural life.
    All this has nothing to do with colour.
    I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described in Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know. Anenormous, under-populated, under-developed, unformed country, still agricultural in feeling and resisting industrialization.
    For a novelist based in Africa it is discouraging that so much of what develops there is a repetition of the European nineteenth century.