NF (1957) Going Home

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Authors: Doris Lessing
Tags: Non Fiction. Nobel Prize Winner
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since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.
    Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; drivingin a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen—driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British .
    Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.
    That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.
    What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man for all that, because in this country there is no class feeling, only money feeling.’
    Again, just as America is permeated with the values and attributes of the two groups of people supposedly non-assimilable—the Negroes and the Jews—so the white people here who think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, but the qualities they ascribe to the Africans are inevitably absorbing those qualities.
    It is a society without roots—is that why it has no resistance to Americanism? Or is being rootless in itself American?
    The myths of this society are not European. They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman homemaking in lonely and primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents; the simple and brave savage defeated after gallant fighting on both sides; the childlike and lovable servant; the devoted welfare-worker spending his or her life uplifting backward peoples.
    Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa.
    On that first morning I went shopping to try to get the feel and atmosphere of the place.
    First into a vegetable shop. Shopping has certainly changed: now the counters are refrigerated, self-service shops everywhere, and above all Coca-Cola has moved in. The Coca-Cola sign is on every second building, from the high new blocks of offices and flats to the scruffy little store in the Native Reserve.
    In the vegetable shop were three white people and two Africans. Two of the white people were serving behind the counter; then two African men, with shopping baskets. Then me. I waited my turn behind the two Africans to see what would happen. The woman behind the counter eyed the

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