—
ratatata — ratatata — ratatata
...
Doesn’t sound familiar!
Have we changed the route again?
—
ratatata — ratatata — ratatata
...
 You have noticed it, ladies and
gentlemen, rebuilding has finished. We
are rolling again through Africa —
however, not on the original TAZARA-line.
On our timeline we have reached the year
1891 … Look there, on that hill!
Horses are busy to pull two-wheeled carts
to the top …
13  ... Major
Johnson and I were driving in a cart some
distance ahead of the waggon, and, when
we arrived at the summit of a small hill,
we stopped and waited for Mr Rhodes and
Dr Jameson. I was so struck with the
beauty of the country there that I
decided to choose the site of the farms,
which Mr Venter and I were to have in
Mashonaland, at the foot of that hill. Mr
Rhodes soon guessed my thoughts, for when
he came up to our cart he said to me,
before I had spoken a word, —
‘Don’t tell me anything De
Waal, and I shall tell you why you’ve
stopped the cart and waited for me!’
‘Well, why?’ I asked.
‘Because you wish to tell me that
you have here chosen for Venter and for
yourself the site of your farms.’
‘Precisely,’ I replied, ‘You
have guessed well.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve
just been speaking to my friends in the
waggon about the grandeur of the place,
and I told them that I was sure you would
not pass it by without desiring a slice
of it.‘
Mr Rhodes then requests Mr Duncan, the
Surveyor-General of Mashonaland, who was
with us just then, to measure out two
farms there, one for Mr Venter and one
for myself. I am sure the landed property
in that part of the country will soon
become valuable, especially when the
railways runs — as it soon will
— between Beira and Salisbury.
Perhaps, someone would like to
get an idea what Messrs. De Waal and
Venter did or not did for Mr. Rhodes in
order to receive such broad-minded gifts?
20 Well, the
gentlemen represented in the
Cape-parliament the Bond-Movement of the
Afrikaaners, that is of the Boers, and
were as such rather useful to Prime
Minister Rhodes‘ interests.
Mr. De Waal’s prediction was right,
of course, the appreciation of his farm
would take place. He knew about plans to
construct the Beira-Corridor through
Portuguese East Africa, Rhodesia’s
connection to the sea … on which, by
the way, we are rolling at the moment,
however in reverse direction.
We have just passed the little town of
Rusape continuing towards Harare as
Salisbury was called after independence.
Our TAZARA-Express rolls in place of the
regular night-train from the Easter
border-town of Mutare, formerly known as
Umtali, to the capital.
And every mile brings us forward on our
timeline as well.
Pay attention to a little country-hotel
which will soon appear on the left side.
Between it and the railway-line there is
a road, bound by a row of gum-trees
… Once they appear we shall have
reached a night sometime between 1943 and
1944 — and at that hotel of Mashopi
/ Macheke our next VIP is waiting.
14 We went out
on the verandah. Across the road stood
gum-trees, their leaves glistening with
moonlight. A train stood hissing out
steam and water on the rails. Ted said in
a low passionate voice: ‘Paul, you’re
the best argument I’ve ever known
for shooting the entire upper-class to be
rid of the lot of you.’ I instantly
agreed …
Don’t worry, ladies and
gentlemen, we are not going to deal with
a female terrorist, but with a woman
whose works were connected with the
political left of the Fifties of last
century, then with the second wave of
feminist movement from the Sixties
onwards, but especially with her African
homeland.
We welcome the great Dame of British
literature, Mrs. Doris Lessing, whose
GOLDEN NOTEBOOK made this little hotel
out there famous.
„Now, then, well — I did not
take on the troublesome effort of another
RETURN TO AFRICA in order to chew your
candies. You know what happened this
afternoon out there? I almost did not
recognize the little thing of a hotel;
and as someone told the present owner, a
not much interested black small-timer,
that his tumbledown shanty was in reality
the original scenario of a
world-bestseller — you know what his
first reaction was? He wanted us to pay
for the photographs we already had taken!
13 Macheke is
so vivid in my memory because of the War.
Now I believe we were all mad, all over
the world, whether actually in the
fighting or not. Perhaps the world cannot
murder on such a scale without going mad?
Is this a consoling thought? Is it true?
Is mutual murder the natural state of
humankind? For us, then, this so terrible
war was of course the War that would end
all wars, for everyone at last would see
how terrible war was. (Just like my
parents and the First World War.) All of
us believed, as an article of faith, in a
peaceful future world …
I was in my mid-twenties, part of a
group. Then such groups had to be
political. By definition we were in the
right about everything, destined to
change the world and everyone in it, and
our opponents were either misguided, or
mostly wicked.
We were all in love or not in love but
wished we were, or wished that he or she
was in love with us; or we had been
disastrously in love, leading to
regretted marriages (but luckily divorce
was nothing these days), and because many
of the group were pilots in training they
were always being whisked off to
dangerous parts where they could get
killed, and many were.
Partings were frequent and painful, but
borne because of the state of elation we
all lived in, and because we all drank
too much. Alcohol, sex and politics:
endemic intoxications possessed us.
Exhausted with our lives in the big city,
Salisbury, we took ourselves down to
Macheke at weekends, not every weekend,
but often, whole groups of us, in the
cars we owned or borrowed …
I do remember a good deal of what I
really felt at Macheke. Why are those
impressions so strong, from that time?
After all, the War went on for a long
time, years of it. I lived in different
places, with different people. I was
different people. Between the efficient
young housewife of my first marriage, and
the rackety ‘revolutionary’ of
1943, ‘44, ‘45 there seems
little connection. Even less between
those two and the young woman who —
still always in crowds of people who
changed, came from everywhere in the
world, were always on the move — was
developing the habit of privacy, writing
when she could, increasingly thinking her
own thoughts, increasingly self-critical.
And yet we all know what the connection
was: it is the sense of self, always the
same — and that is the consoling,
the steadying thing, that whether you are
two and a half, or twenty, or sixty-nine,
the sense of yourself, who you are, is
the same. The same in a small child‘s
body, the sexual girl, or the old woman
…
Mrs. Lessing, you should know
that every spoken word on this rolling
stage is being scribbled down. All
possible sources are being exhausted,
original quotes are flying around our
ears. Somebody, for example, seems to
have explored what could be found on the
Internet about your books …
 and we got this rather
voluminous analysis by Huihua Li, a
lecturer at the Institute for Foreign
Languages in Zhejiang, China, titled
„The Function of Dreams and Film
Sequences in Doris Lessing’s ‚The
Golden Notebook‘ …
14 I say to
these students who have to spend a year,
two years, writing theses about one book:
‘There is only one way to read,
which is to browse in libraries and
bookshops, picking up books that attract
you, reading only those, dropping them
when they bore you, skipping the parts
that drag — and never, never reading
anything because you feel you ought, or
because it is part of a trend or a
movement …
Remember that for all the books we have
in print, are as many that have never
reached print, have never been written
down — even now, in this age of
compulsive reverence for the written
word, history, even social ethic, are
taught by means of stories, and the
people who have been conditioned into
thinking only in terms of what is written
— and unfortunately nearly all the
products of our educational system can do
no more than this — are missing what
is before their eyes.
For instance, the real history of Africa
is still in the custody of black
storytellers and wise men, black
historians, medicine men: it is a verbal
history, still kept safe from the white
man. Everywhere, if you keep your mind
open, you will find the truth in words
not written down. So never let the
printed page be your master.
You are getting our controller
in trouble, Mrs. Lessing; he is
treasuring very much the documented word.
We believe, he is not quite sure whether
he is going to write a book himself, but
then he does not know whether it will be
fiction or non-fiction …
14 We read to
find out what is going on. One novel in
five hundred or a thousand has the
quality of a novel should have to make it
a novel — the quality of philosophy.
I find that I read with the same kind of
curiosity most novels, and a book of
reportage. Most novels, if they are
successful at all, are original in the
sense that they report the existence of
an area of society, a type of person, not
yet admitted to the general literate
consciousness. The novel has become a
function of the fragmented society, the
fragmented consciousness. Human beings
are so divided, are becoming more and
more divided, and more subdivided in
themselves, reflecting the world, that
they reach out desperately, not knowing
they do it, for information about other
groups inside their own country, let
alone about groups in other countries. It
is a blind grasping out for their own
wholeness, and the novel-report is a
means towards it.
Mrs. Lessing, soon we shall
arrive at Marondera and on our timeline
the year 1982. That was the year when you
returned to your homeland for the first
time since that period when it was still
called Marondellas … You met there
your brother …
13 For the
thirty years, almost, since we met —
briefly — in 1956, we had kept in
touch, with letters, at long intervals,
giving facts. Sometimes he wrote me a
polemic, but in fatherly style, thus:
‘If communists like you and McLeod
think you can get away with it then I am
afraid I have to tell you that our Affs
are sensible people, and know which side
their bread is buttered.’ This was
just two months before the end of the War
and the election of Robert Mugabe. (Ian
McLeod was a Tory Minister.)
From his point of view my very existence
was an embarrassment, and for him to
write at all must have been difficult.
After all, the community he belonged to
did not have much good to say about me
(to put it mildly). It was hard for me to
write him.
Then researchers turned up to interview
him, as the brother of the author, and
this way he learned that there were
people who thought well of me …
My parents thought of themselves as
modern people, and kept abreast of ideas
and new writers. The books on our shelves
on the farm, all classics, were only part
of it. My mother had progressive ideas
about education, admired Ruskin,
Montessori. My father might quote Shaw
and Wells in an argument. The battering
life gave them on the farm shook off that
layer of culture. What came to the farm
through the 1930s were newspapers from
England, Stephen King Hall’s
Newsletter. It was politics that absorbed
them, and that was because of the First
World War and its aftermath, which caused
both of them anguish and anger, since
everything in England was being
mismanaged, and what they believed in
betrayed. The books on the bookshelves
remained unread, except by me. They
subscribed to book clubs, but the
packages of books that arrived on
maildays were nearly all memoirs and
histories of the War.
My brother did not read, as a boy, and
later spent his life among people who did
not read. This was partly because some
books have ideas in them, and most of the
whites in the Southern Rhodesian lager
could not afford to consider ideas that
might upset their idea of themselves as
the noble and misunderstood defenders of
civilization. Later, he took to reading
the violent and semi-pornographic books
you find in airports. He told me that
when waiting for a flight to leave, he
had been surprised to see so many books.
He liked Harold Robbins and particularly
Wilbur Smith. When he came to visit me in
London I asked him, ‘Harry, why don’t
you ever read any good books?’
— because of my difficulty in seeing
him as a successor to my parents. But he
raised a puzzled face — it was
genuinely puzzled, and he did not
understand the question — and asked,
‚Good books? What do you mean?‘
…
You are doing it again, Mrs.
Lessing, troubling our controller. It had
been his intention to hand over, so to
speak, from you just to Wilbur Smith
…
„Oh, I understand this perfectly!
How would I know that some of his writing
is glorifying violence and is
half-pornographic? Do you think I am
buying at airports my own books?“
Well, if we would have known
that this is the case, of course we would
have arranged a meeting with your writing
colleague on this rolling stage …
Okay, he is not a candidate for the
Nobel-Award, but lack of popularity can’t
be the reason, also not lack of
meticulous research …
Born in 1933 in Central Africa, graduate
of the Rhodes University of Grahamstown,
since 1964 fulltime-writer, translated
into twenty-six languages …
„No one who travels through Africa
can ignore industrious Wilbur Smith
… And, since I am stuck with
railway-fans it seems clear to me which
one of his more than thirty novels your
controller may have had on his mind.“
|
