NF (1957) Going Home Read Free Page A

Time and again one seizes on a theme, looks at it carefully, discovers that unless the writer is very careful it will merely repeat what has already been said in another context—and then, trying to isolate what is specifically African, what is true of Africa at this time, one comes slap up against that complex of emotions, the colour bar. I believe it to be true that what unifies Africa now, what makes it possible to speak of ‘Africans’ as if they were the members of one nation instead of a hundred nations, is precisely this, that white domination has given them one overriding emotion in common, which makes brothers of them all from Cape to Cairo. Yet behind this, perhaps, there is something else that is more important. Perhaps in a hundred years, looking back, they will not say: ‘It was the century when we turned the white men out of our continent and regained our freedom,’ but…I don’t know. When a people struggles for freedom the struggle itself is always so much greater and more creative than what is being fought.
    Perhaps they will say: ‘That is the century when we found we were not simply black men, but a company of peoples infinitely diverse, original, rich and varied. That is the century when we recovered the right to find out what we are.’
    But now, for the writer, it is hard, because the infinite complexity and the richness always narrow into a protest against that monstrous thing, the colour bar.
    In white Africa I do not think the Africans have yet produced types of people or forms of organization that have not been produced elsewhere. African nationalists speak the same language as congress leaders in any country; political leaders must reflect white domination as long as it remains: Generals China and Russia of the Mau Mau would not have been possible without Colonel Blimp.
    As for the British, they either live as if they have never left Britain or proliferate into eccentrics or rogue elephants. Africa is full of colourful characters, adventurers, criminals, pettytyrants or solitaries. But I don’t think it can be said we have not seen them before—or read about them.
    I think it is the Afrikaner who is the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. He is a tragic figure. The Africans are not tragic—they have the future before them; they are a suppressed people who will soon free themselves as Colonial people are freeing themselves everywhere in the world. The British are not tragic, they are too flexible. I think most of the British in Africa will be back in Britain inside twenty years. But the Afrikaners are as indigenous as the Africans. And since they insist their survival as a nation depends on white domination what possible future can they have? Yet they are not a corrupted people, as the Germans were corrupted by the Nazis—Afrikaner nationalism is not a falling-off from a high peak of national cultural achievement. The Afrikaners have remained unaltered while the world has changed, and that is their tragedy. Their history as a people has been a long, courageous battle for independence and freedom; yet they do not understand other people’s desire for freedom: that is their paradox.
    They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black-white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid . But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the