Westminster Commentary
ONE of the most infuriating of all the minor-scale nuisances in- separable from living (if you can call it living) in the middle of the twentieth century is the woman just ahead of you at the ticket- window in the Tube. Having named her destination, she is informed that the fare is, shall we say, fourpence. She then picks up a large shopping bag, from which she extracts her handbag. She -opens this and plucks forth a purse. This opened, she brings out some money (never the exact fare, I need hardly say) and pays. I have seen this happen at Jeast a hundred times in the last five years, and I can only conclude that there are large numbers of women in the London area who really believe that travel on the Underground is free, and arc astonished when they are asked to Pay for it. But what is annoying about this scene Is not the delay it occasions to the people behind her in the queue. It is not even that we miss our trains as a consequence. What makes me for one go stamping up and down the platform with rage is that although I miss the train, she catches it, having just those vital few seconds start down the stairs or into the lift. So she never knows that there are any drawbacks to her scheme at all, let alone that if the doors had closed just in front of her instead of just behind her she would have been pushed on to the live rail the minute the train pulled out of the station and left it free.
I don't want to stretch analogies too far, but I would just like to invite your attention to the similarities between that woman and Lord Malvern. A few years from now,. if something isn't done fairly quickly (and if Lord Malvern has his way—and he will—nothing will be done) there is going to be a rising in Africa beside which the Mau Mau will be recalled with something like nostalgia by those old enough to remember it. This will have nothing to do with 'land hunger,' or Communism, or the colour-bar, or NM r. Stonehouse, or the Preventive Detention Bill, or Federation. It will be, basically, because men with black skins will be sick and tired of being treated as inferiors by men with white skins, especially when, as does happen, the men with white skins are patently inferior to them. Not all white men treat black men in this fashion, of course, but the point of the thing that is coming in Africa is that white humanity, like peace, will have become indivisible. The symbolic significance of the killer's victim in Mr. Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (the murdered white man is the black men's best champion) is not accidental, and indeed the example, of Mau Mau brings this element into the realm of the factual; no distinction was then made between friendly and unfriendly white people, any more than between men, women and children.
Now when this happens, it will be far too serious a thing for any of us to say 'I told you so,' though some of us will at any rate be entitled to. But the train doors will in any case, alas, have closed behind Lord Malvern, and he will be well on his way round the Inner Circle, while we are left grinding our teeth on the platform, For he is, after all, seventy-six years old, and though in the best of health, apart from a tendency to deafness, has tempted the Psalmist for some time now; in the nature of things he cannot expect, if the up- heaval does not come within the next few years, to be there to see it. In some ways, this is a pity, just as it is a pity that the woman Who'delays the queue is not left on the platform with the rest of us. But it would, I suppose, be a very vindictive man who really wished Lord Malvern to live to see his handiwork, and that of the men who think like him, completed. Even through the layers of con- ceit and complacency in which Lord Malvern is so warmly wrapped, some sense of guilt would surely percolate.
'All Africans are liars'—in so many words— was the garnered fruit of the forty-eight years Lord Malvern is never tired of telling us he has spent, in Africa. One might reply by pointing out • the paradox that tripped Epimenides; Lord Malvern, after all, is an African, 'and therefore presumably a liar. As a matter of fact, he is a liar; so am I, so are you, and so is the Archbishop of Canterbury, if a liar is someone who does not invariably speak the truth. But of course Lord Malvern does not mean this by liar, any more than he means African when he says African. He means habitual liars, and he means Africans with black skins. To get the full flavour of this remark, try translating it into a few of the other dialects of the bigOt. 'All Jews are thieves'; 'All Germans are Nazis'; 'All Frenchmen are adulterous'; 'All Scots are mean'; 'All Spaniards have venereal disease'; 'All Arabs are cowards'; 'All Roman Catholics are hypocrites.' None of these charges is in any way less vile, or more patently false, than Lord Malvern's, and many of them can no longer do any harm. Yet I dare say that he would reject them all as atrocious and foul-mouthed slanders. But suppose one were, to characterise his own remark as an atrocious and foul-mouthed slander, which it is—and one, moreover, which not only may but actually will do incalculable harm— would he not feel aggrieved?
What is so conducive to despair about remarks of this kind (it was not, incidentally, a slip of the tongue; Lord Malvern really does think like that. Only the week before I heard him characterise Africans, en masse, as 'savages') is not their callous stupidity, nor even their falsity. It is the utter impossibility of ever getting into Lord Malvern's head any inkling of the enormity of saying things like that. (Lord Stansgate tried, and failed.) As a matter of establishable fact, all the Africans I know are a good deal more civilised than Lord Malvern; they would never dream of saying, or even thinking, that all white men are ignorant boors, even if all the white men they had ever met had behaved like Lord Malvern. But if I took them along and paraded them in front of him, he would only call them 'grand fellows' (that was another phrase he used the week before, and he could never in a million centuries see why it is in some ways even more offensive than his other remark), or say that when he said 'all Africans' he meant 'most Africans.' But you and I are not. Africans, lying or grand, and not even we can begin to persuade Lord Malvern that, as Mr. Forster observed of a man who said about Indians much the 'same things as Lord Malvern said about Africans, we have never before encountered 'anything quite so noisy, meddle- some, and self-righteous, so heartless and brain- less, so full of racial and religious "swank." ' The House of Lords, God knows, has little enough contact with reality at the best of times, and in this debate it drifted even farther away than usual (for connoisseurs of unadulterated blether I recommend the speeches of Lord Perth and Lord Hawke, among others), and I suppose we should not pay too much attention to any- thing said by anybody in a debate there. But the point I am trying to make is that although this debate took place in the House of Lords, and Lord Malvern's remark was made in the course of it, these are not important matters. What we have here is a state of mind; the state of mind of the woman at the ticket-window. (And even she, after all, does not go on and derail the train.) There will one day be, if something isn't done soon to avert it, a final struggle between black and white in Africa, and the struggle will be bloody and prolonged. Does Lord Malvern bring that day
Previous page
