Colour Shades
By HARRY FRANKLIN
HE road had been long and dusty, running for hundreds of miles through Africa, zigiagging through mountains part of the way. On such roads there is little habitation, and every hundred miles or so - there are Rest Houses for travellers. The'Rest Houses are made of poles and clay, with thatched roofs. There is • a dining-room-cum-lounge with a little verandah, and separate little round huts with two beds in each. The buildings are rough, but cool under the thatch, and clean. The beds are comfortable, and there are two cheerful native servants, one of them with a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, who minister to the traveller's needs.
They are pleasant enough places for tired men, and my com- panion and I were glad to stop at one after eight hours' driving in the glare and heat of the sun. We sat on the little open verandah discussing the events of the day, my friend with a title over his knees, as the African in charge of. the Rest House had asked him to shoot the local crows, which had been carrying off his young chickens. It was necessary for the safety of any villagers who might be wandering unseen in the bush that 'the crows should settle on rising ground in front of us before they could be shot, and they were being rather stubborn about this. On such occasions there is a sense of great peace—unless, of course, one is a crow.
T.
During the day we had left the car, and climbed across a range of hills, to visit an old African peasant whose name was Chimembe, a remarkable man in many ways. He had eighteen children, and had kept to the same wife ever since he married her fifty years ago—a custom which is becoming unfashionable among the Bantu as amongst other races—and he was a first- rate farmer as only one African in a thousand is. Instead of the tired patch of mealie land and the scruffy mounds of cassava, Chimembe's few acres, cleverly irrigated, evenly fertilised with compost and refreshed by annual crop-rotation: were a model small holding. The purpose of my visit was to photograph and note Chiniembe's work, and so by words and pictures lead others to follow his example. My friend the native Commissioner brought Chimembe seeds and cuttings, encouragement and praise.
The old man was delighted to see us and to show us round. He greeted us by kneeling on the ground and clapping his hands in slow rhythm, the customary greeting for chiefs. Every time we spoke to him he bobbed a little at the knees. As we left he gave us a basket Of fruit and vegetables ; we, having nothing particularly pleasant with us, could only give him money. I suppose critics of " colonialism " would have had us read the old peasant a lecture on the equality of all men. We should have stopped him from kneeling in customary greeting to the " Bwanas." We should have refused his basket, explaining that his need was greater than ours. Chimembe 'would have been bewildered and hurt if we had done any of these things. That they never occurred to us, and that Chimembe's behaviour was reminiscent of feudal times, was not attributable to any lordling tendencies in ourselves, nor to any ignoble servility in Chimembe, whose actions reflected the natural and happy relationship between black and white in the rural areas remote from towns.
African politics, nationalism—Chimembe, and the great mass of his fellow-villagers, know nothing of any of them, and are' a great deal happier for that. Such was the tenor of our talk on the Rest House verandah, until a vanette drove up, scatter- ing the crows that we had now forgotten, and disturbing much more. The vanette was driven by a coloured man, a young and handsome Eurafrican. With him was his attractive wife, much lighter in colour than her husband, and two toddling children.
They drove to the bedroom but next to ours and got out of the car. The African servant ran over from his kitchen, and we heard him tell the visitors politely that they could not stay there ; the quarters for coloured people were away over on the other side, just off the clearing. The coloured man—let us call him Smith—did not look pleased, and was clearly even less pleased after he had been across the clearing, inspected his quarters and reported to his wife, who was getting more and more annoyed herself.
My friend and I looked at each other and wondered what to do. Here was a problem that should have been no problem, a silly little problem perhaps, but still a problem. The African servants had grossly neglected the Rest House quarters for. " coloureds." The surroundings had become overgrown with long grass, the doors of the 'huts had fallen in, the chickens had made full use of the huts and the mattresses were filthy with their droppings. The quarters were undoubtedly not fit for human occupation.
We could have told the African servants to admit the couple to the European quarters, and they would have been admitted.
Had we done so we might have caused this coloured family more distress than they - were already experiencing. Nothing can arouse a nasty scene so easily as a " colour question." The Rest House often filled 'up as the night wore on, and other European travellers might have evicted the couple, righteously and with the greatest unpleasantness.
We approached Smith and explained this to him. He was polite, though just a little sullen, and clearly suppressing a bitter sense of injustice. He and his wife and children would go on, driving through the night, tired though they were. We offered to get the Africans to clean up the quarters, and to put in clean mattresses from spares kept for the European huts. They then 'decided to stay, and we saw them made as comfortable as possible before returning to the verandah of the European dining- room.
I suppose we both felt rather ashamed. Perhaps we should have welcomed the Smiths to the European quarters, regardless of authority and custom, and been prepared for a stand-up fight to keep them there. We consoled ourselves on this point a little too much by thinking of the embarrassment this would have caused the Smiths. The more we talked the more we felt some of the bitterness and frustration that all " coloureds " in Africa carry in their hearts. For the segregation of Indians and Africans at Rest Houses there may be something to be said ; their whole way of life, the preparation of their food and many small practicalities justify it, and they themselves seem generally to prefer it. But, we reflected, for the segregation of the coloureds," for whose very creation European lust is respon- sible, whose whole way of life is European and whose in between " existence is the unhappiest of all, there is no excuse. We sent a note over to the Smiths, to join us for a drink and supper. Smith came over and explained that they had already eaten, and his wife, being very tired, had gone to bed with the children. He stayed with us for some time, talking over a few glasses of beer, and the' man was transformed. He had brought his Ridgeback pup with him, and we all happened to be particu- larly interested in the breed ; my friend, in fact, had a bitch that he wanted mated, and an arrangement was made. Smith told us all about his farm, and confirmed what we had thought before, from his car and general appearance, that he was a man of con; "siderable substance, probably far better off than we were. None of us spoke of " colour bar ' or of the contretemps of the after- noon ; our relations were as natural (though different) as they had been earlier with Chimembe. Smith went to bed contented, and so did we, and his family waved. cheerfully to us as we saw them off early in the morning. Man's humanity to man seems to be very nearly all that Africa needs to solve the colour bar, or so it' seemed to us that morning.
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