MAPSTL

It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Going House, an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted individual since of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news since of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, nonetheless, that fifty years ago the extremely structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.

Fifty years on Doris Lessing’s Going Property an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is much more successful, indeed a lot more powerful due to the fact of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a significant slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers had been rich – indeed she records that many had been abjectly poor – what they had and sought to preserve was an elevated status relative to the black population. She describes white artisans as white first and artisans second. Though trade unions actively sought equal pay for equal work, they never campaigned for any kind of parity for black workers. On the contrary, they demanded the maintenance of racially differentiated pay rates. How’s that for the spirit of socialist internationalism and brotherhood! (I accept there is a misplaced word there…). In reality Doris Lessing records that it was the fairly liberal capitalist enterprises that demanded more black labour, their motive of course arising from cost savings, not philanthropy. So trade unions spent a lot of their time making certain that firms hired their quota of higher paid, white labour.

Even in the 1950s, she remarks on the likelihood that many Africans had been already better educated than their white counterparts. White youth shunned education as unnecessary, even though Africans saw it as a feasible salvation. She notes that the people who treated the African population the worst were recent immigrants from Europe, especially those from Britain, who tended to be less educated themselves and drawn from the ranks of the politically reactionary. Such folks, apparently, had been equally critical of immigrants from southern Europe, and expected Spaniards and Greeks to work for African wages, not the white wages that they themselves demanded.

The scenario in Rhodesia, clearly, had to change. Not only was such crass discrimination unsustainable, it was also comic, as are all racially posited class systems. While the South Africans over the border created honorary whites of the Japanese they increasingly had to do enterprise with, the Rhodesians went by means of their own equally idiotic contortions. An example of such nonsense is quoted by Doris Lessing when she remarks that there was a privileged group of Africans who had been granted the right not to carry passes with them at all times, as long as they carried a pass to record their exemption.

But it is also worth remembering that Doris Lessing, herself, was a banned person, unable to travel to specific places and very a lot under the watchful eyes of the authorities. In Going Home she observes a society that had to collapse under the weight of its unsustainable contradictions. The reality that this took more than twenty years after the book was written was nothing much less than a crime, and probably contributed to the subsequent and equally lamentable reaction.

Doris Lessing records seeing a British film towards the end of her travels. She describes it as a “cosy small drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of African farmers in their massive cars”. Fifty years on, Britain is possibly cosy and provincial, and the snobberies are still rife. But now it is not Rhodesia where these reactionaries look down on individuals of other races overpay and under-educated themselves. It is not in Africa where corporations would dearly love to employ less expensive labour, imported if require be. Rhodesia’s white privilege of the 1950s was obviously absurd. But there are some parallels with economic and class relations in the Britain of today and, like all good books, Doris Lessing’s Going Residence may possibly even add prescience to its qualities.