Shikasta (54 page)

Our agents all said they expected that it would be found
that the two Spaniards had been killed in the darkness, but it was not so.

That was the first normal night. At midnight, they all crowded around the mess tents, finding what food they could. The contingent of whites asked the guards to leave them – and this made a good impression. The two Spaniards had joined them, and it seems that shortly some sort of informal seminar was in progress, on affairs in the South American continent, with the Spaniards and the two Sherbans prominent. The old white was also popular. In fact, for every night of that month, from midnight until four and the start of the morning session, they all, particularly George Sherban, were to be seen everywhere, each the focus of attentive groups. Seminars. Study groups. Classes. These words were used by all our agents. The old white was sought after because I gather the youth were curious to hear about the last days of ‘British democracy' and the Labour Party – ancient history to them. Also they saw him as a figure redeemed by his willingness to confess his crimes to the People's Tribunal, and to offer the last days of his life to the Service of the Workers.

At four a.m., when the amphitheatre filled, the whites were again escorted to their place opposite the Chinese delegation, but when there, they consulted briefly, asked the guards to leave them, and then dispersed themselves to sit at random among the others. This gesture caused some people, Agent Tsi Kwang, for instance, indignation, as it appeared to her an insult to the Correct Judgement of the Masses. But on the whole, it was well received. The high point of ill-feeling, and the possibility of assault and worse, was in fact passing. Soon the whites mingled freely, but still withdrew to their own tents to rest. And it was not long before even this was dropped.

That day there was a switch in emphasis, much to the annoyance or disappointment of all our agents, who were hoping that ‘something concrete' would result from the previous night's crisis of feeling. They expected, it is clear, an acceleration or culmination of bad feeling.

But racially the temperature was lowered, because there followed a series of ‘witnesses' testifying to the effects of military preparations, the arms build-up, submarine warfare potential and actual, the fleets patrolling the oceans, and above all, the instruments policing the skies whose very existence threatens whole continents with sudden death at any time.

The evening session was taken up by a series of recitals, or accounts, which sounded like laments, because of the necessarily slow, emphasized, simplified words, of the progress of war – the First World War, a European war, and the way its savagery impacted on non-European races made to fight in it, or forced to give up raw materials; colonies ‘lost', or exchanged, or freshly conquered; colonies used as battlegrounds for conflicts not their own. The Second World War, engulfing nearly all the world, its appalling devastations, again fought mainly between the white races, but using the other races where they could, or needed to, and the savage culmination when the Europeans dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then the Korean War, and its total barbarity, its illogic, its destructiveness, its strengthening of the United States – and its corruption of the States. The French in Vietnam. The United States in Vietnam. Africa and its attempts to free itself from Europe. If this is to be an attempt at actuality, then I must report that at this point there were certain veiled references which could be taken as a criticism, of us, as well as of the Soviet Union, in Africa.

This litany, or requiem, or lament, on the subject of war took three days. Meanwhile, the moonlight strengthened. The evening sessions were monitored by a brilliant, almost full, moon that dimmed the torches, and dwarfed the arena and its antagonists.

By the fifth day a routine had been established. And a self-imposed discipline: all could see its necessity.

This mostly concerned alcohol. There had been some unfortunate incidents. Again the suggestion was made that it should not be brought into the camp. Meanwhile, the locals
were in throngs around the camp day and night, only too ready to sell or barter alcohol, and even a little food. Already the young people had begun to leave the camp immediately after ‘breakfast' (as the agents complained, the meals were becoming ‘invisible') and made their way to the sea, some miles away. There they drank wine, ate what food they could cadge or grab, and began to catch fish and cook it there on the shore – knowing of course full well that fish from that sea was not safe food. They swam, rested, made love – and were back by five o'clock. If this had not happened, the camp would have been even more intolerable. It was already extremely uncomfortable, mostly from shortage of water, smelly, dirty, and besieged more and more by the curious villagers, who never took their eyes off these visitors of theirs, nor stopped trying to squeeze onto the tiers for what they clearly saw as free entertainment.

George Sherban seemed not to sleep. He stayed in the camp, for the most part, always available to whoever wished to talk to him. He was often with the old white. His brother Benjamin was much occupied with looking after his contingent of children, who were becoming wild, undisciplined – and liable to turn at any moment into the children's gang of the type we are unfortunately only too familiar with. The energies of many of the delegates, male and female, were devoted to restraining these children.

On the fifth night, there was a brief but heavy shower of rain. The dust was laid, the air cooled, the seats in the amphitheatre washed, the tension eased. The opportunity was taken to fill in the latrine pits, and to dig others. This improved things a little.

After the sessions spent on war, there succeeded four days on Africa. The ‘witnesses' came from every part of Africa. The days of their testimony again sharply changed the atmosphere. How may I put it? Variegated in type and aspect as they were, nevertheless, all together, they presented a picture of such liveliness and exuberance, such strength, such uncompromising virility, such warlike self-sufficiency – of course it must be remembered that in some parts of that
continent governments have been in power which strike some of us as less than suitable, and which have discouraged those parts of the population they disapprove of to the point where only the more martial seem to survive. However that may be – and of course, I am only putting together a picture as it appears to our agents – these nearly hundred delegates seemed to impress upon everyone their difference from the rest. One point, for instance: with rather more to complain about from the white man even than other continents, they were concerned to express opinions about the intervention of others, not all white. I will return to particularities:

The first ‘witness' was a fine young woman comrade from Zimbabwe.

She was received with the closest attention, and in silence – not with the hissing groan that so often is mentioned by our informants. This was the first indication of the change of mood, and because of the current situation in Africa, one of wars, civil wars, economic chaos. What she said sounded like ancient history, which, since her starting point was the conquest of Matabeleland and Mashonaland by Rhodes and his lackeys that took place not much more than a hundred years ago – a fact that she lost no time in reminding them of – was amazing in itself. Our Agent Tsi Kwang, for instance, was moved to remark that it made her think.

Her indictment, obviously considered an exemplary one, perhaps because it could be contained within such a short time span, a century being but a moment compared to the stretches of centuries – not to mention the millennia – which some delegates found it no hardship to encompass, was given from four a.m. on the sixth day until eight a.m. – but she was supported during the last hour by a white witness, a lawyer, whose standing by her, calling at her indication up into the early morning sky all kinds of facts and figures, had a bizarre and even, to some impatient ones, risible effect.

The cutting edge of her indictment was not the expected one: that the white barbarians had conquered by arms a defenceless and hospitable people who did not expect
treachery and guile, but on the contrary offered their country freely and willingly to these tricksters – only to find themselves butchered, massacred, and then enslaved. The point that concerned her was this one; and the fact that it would have been better made in more modest surroundings conducive to such moderate reflections, should not prevent us from actually considering it in more modest surroundings.

In this vast territory, the whites had been given ‘self-government' by the home country Britain in 1924, except, that is, for two aspects. One was Defence – which did not concern her. But the other was ‘Native Affairs', and this was reserved by the British government on the specific and expressed ground that they, the British nation, had the responsibility to protect the conquered native populations, to see that their rights were not infringed, that they were not to suffer hardship as a result of their ‘tutelage' by the whites. For it goes without saying that the whites saw their rule as educational and benevolent. (I inscribe this second word with reluctance, with the reliance on your understanding, and the reflection that one word may have to stand for a variety of shades of circumstance.) From the very moment the white conquerors were given ‘self-government' they took away the black people's lands, rights, freedoms and made slaves and servants of them in every way, using every device of force and intimidation, contempt, trickery. But never did Britain protest. Never, not once. She did not raise her voice, even though throughout this entire period of ill-treatment by the white minority, the black peoples were expecting to be rescued by their ‘protecting' government overseas, and believed that this rescue did not occur only because their white friends overseas could not really know of their situation. Not that they desisted from sending every kind of representation to the Queen and to Parliament as well, and through every sort of intermediary. But why did not one British governor ever notice what was happening and protest and report to his home government that the main clause in this famous agreement giving self-government to the whites was not being honoured? Why did not help ever arrive to the
enslaved and betrayed people of the then Southern Rhodesia? It was because of a very simple fact. Because the government in Britain, the people of Britain, did not
remember
, had not thought it important enough to take in, the key fact that self-government had been given to the white minority on condition the blacks were not ill-treated, and that they had the obligation to step in. And they had been able to forget, simply not to take notice, because of their inherent and inbred contempt for peoples other than themselves. Worse was to come. When Africa began stirring in her chains (a phrase which gave particular pleasure to Agent Tsi Kwang), when a small section of ‘liberal' whites began to protest in Britain about the treatment of the betrayed blacks, even they did not seem to know that all this time the government of Britain had the legal right to step in at any time in pursuance of duty. They did not seem to have absorbed the fact that during a period of several decades when the blacks had everything taken from them,
Britain had had the legal and moral responsibility
to step in and forcibly stop the whites from doing as they liked. And more, when the blacks began fighting back under the rule of the infamous Smith and his cohorts, and the British government was at last forced into some attitudes of responsibility, even then no one seemed able to remember that the culpable one was not Smith, nor even his predecessors, but Britain herself, who had betrayed the blacks for whom she was supposed to act as guardian against the whites. For Britain it was who had connived at, allowed, and by passive indifference, encouraged the whites to do exactly as they wished. And when the last stages of that tragic struggle were going on, the British government throughout, talked, acted, and seemed even to believe, that the whites of Rhodesia were responsible for the situation and not itself, as if something quite odd and unknown were happening, a great surprise, the grabbing of rights and land from the blacks – something that had had nothing to do with the British government. And all this led to one of the most absurd, contemptible sequences in late British colonial history – that Rhodesia could have been in
the forefront of the news, day and night for years, the cause of the blacks so belatedly espoused by a thousand kind hearts, commented on ceaselessly by a thousand professionals, but not once during this time was the point made that Britain had been responsible for the situation in the first place.

‘And how was this possible, this extraordinary state of affairs?'

‘I will tell you,' called up this young soldier into the morning sunshine above the amphitheatre. ‘It was because the British people and their government could not see us, they always had a blind spot for us, we blacks did not count. If we were dogs and cats they would have seen us but we were black people. In the War of Liberation these philanthropists cried out when a white person got killed, but if fifty black people got killed, and even if they were children, they did not notice it. We were always nonpeople to them. Why should they care about broken promises?'

I describe this in more detail than perhaps is necessary for you who have always taken such an interest in Africa and who indeed as a young man spent two years in Mozambique with the Resistance Forces. I describe it because it has caused me to reflect on the extraordinary persistence of certain phenomena in a given geographical area. (I rely on our old friendship, hoping you will excuse a slackness of thought or of phraseology or perhaps even an apparent irrelevance to the true and real issues of the Liberation of the People, but it is nearly four in the morning, and outside H.Q. I can hear the sounds of our patrolling soldiers,
our own,
as it happens – but who can rely on the permanence of anything in these stirring times.)